Posts made by surreality

@Pyrephox said:

None of which will stop someone who isn't playing in good faith from abusing the system. But I've yet to see a system that DOES stand up to someone not playing in good faith. One of the big issues with social systems on WoD MU*s is that we let far too many people get away with playing in bad faith in this particular subsystem.

This is essentially the problem in a nutshell. There are plenty of people who have zero qualms about playing in completely bad faith.

@Derp said:

if you're at a tabletop game, it can be assumed that most of the time you are part of a team with said PC's and working toward the same, or at least similar, goals over a much shorter term than a MUSH. The only real difference between NPCs and PCs on a Mush is how often they appear on the screen, and who ends up controlling them.

This difference is an enormous one with myriad complications that would definitely need to be addressed.

@Arkandel said:

@Derp said:

@Arkandel said:

• Everyone gets a 'minimum income' just for existing. This isn't a lot (say, 1 XP/week in GMC terms) but it allows even the most casual players to buy things over time. This goes into a universally accessible pool by all characters, so newly created PCs will likely be behind but not hopelessly so.

So, like, I don't follow. It all goes into one big pool somewhere, and anybody can draw off of it? I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Example, for clarity?

It's very simple - let's say we're 30 weeks into the game. All approved characters have been given 30 'automatic' XP. That's the baseline.

• There is a Diablo 3-inspired mechanic - Paragon XP. That's a permanent resource accessible separately by your characters and works as follows:
  ** Half of all your non-automatic Beats are added to it, essentially making each acquired Beat count as 0.3 XP).
  ** All Beats gained from PrP running or participation are added into Paragon XP, essentially making plots more attractive than bar RP.

This is not bad. This I like. It would mean tracking the pools seperately, though, which could get somewhat confusing. And how would the amount of non-automatic xp affect the thing above, if at all?

So, using the same example as above, let's say you've accumulated 30 Beats on your characters through activity. You now also have 15 Paragon Beats which your alts may spend (each alt gets 15 Beats).

See the last part confuses me too. Non-staggered as in how? I mean, I like the tone of the thing in general, especially paragon xp, but i'm not sure I follow enough of your proposed implementation to be able to really provide feedback one way or another yet.

The idea is to promote activity but gradually raise the overall tone of the game. The design so far only includes the barebones of the system just to make it easy to discuss - you'd need to still have sanity checks in place such as diminishing returns and activity requirements to be eligible for automatic XP, spending delays and so on.

Yeah, that's... a bit different than what I'm looking at. I'm looking at something more along the lines of a 'shared pool' notion people can divide up as they like amongst their alts, not a uniform raise across the board that all of them get.

@Arkandel said:

I believe the above should result in a non-staggered system where dinosaurs are ahead of the curve but within reach of newer characters, where activity is rewarded but casual players are still given enough to advance, where alts are easily made and character death/retirement is resolved more smoothly, and where socialization and plot participation is incentivized.

Thoughts?

Working on something very similar to what's described for exactly those reasons.

@Groth said:

My only question is why you would want there to be alt incentives. You've designed a system where alts will always be more powerful then new characters and I have a hard time imagining how you could make a game more hostile to new/casual players then that.

And not necessarily. Players may wish to focus the majority on a single character no matter where it comes from -- or save it up to create a more realistic elder, or a vast majority of other things.

Nothing stops someone from creating a character at starting level, and frankly, I have heard many players, particularly those playing minor templates and especially purely mortal characters, that the character is where they want it to be and they don't plan to spend more XP on it without a compelling reason. Yet, they are still actively earning XP. Why NOT allow them to apply this to the creation of a new character?

It also means a more casual player can have a toe dipped in a variety of places with a low level character or two, but concentrate their XP on a higher-level one while leaving others more basic, to avoid concerns about being excluded from any higher level activity on the game.

And the best part is, they all will have earned the privilege to do those things, and the range of what those things are expands considerably, allowing the players the flexibility to decide what they want to do with their point pool.

Combine with learn times, and you avoid aggressively stupid bursts of "Tee hee I learned Firearms from zero to five overnight!" as well.

@Jeshin said:

2. We have been discussing OR and how it works as a community a lot and since Musoapbox (out of all other communities) has been the greatest contributor to message clarification and introspection. I figured if we had to have a messy muddy possibly brand damaging thread this would be the most productive place to do it.

We're weirdly... good for that.

While the tone can (and often is) pretty harsh around here, it's rarely ever for the simple sake of being harsh. Sometimes it is, but that really is pretty rare. On previous incarnations of the board it was a lot more common, but it's not typically the thrust of even the most heated arguments.

Arguments of varying degrees of civility usually happen because, in a nutshell, people give a crap and don't agree about something. I mean that's common sense, but it's pretty easy to lose sight of in the heat of things.

While it isn't necessarily fun, it's worth keeping the cause in mind. (The 'give a crap' part.) It isn't always easy to find people who do.

I was 1000% blissed 'cause I thought it had to be you and all the nope! I mean what are the odds of that?!

Want to know a super trippy thing? There was an Etienne Moreau on TR -- with the same PB, no less.

I still remember and yours.

@Jaunt said:

@surreality said:

Re: the 'customer service model' article, I... have to admit I'm in agreement with a lot of folks here.

While I don't agree with the principle 100% myself, I have zero compunction swearing in news files and vastly prefer plain and direct language especially in policy files, so I am not likely the best example. (There are concrete reasons for that, some which stem from the idea of 'too much polite and delicate wording often dances around the point and sets up a false expectation that you can treat staff like customer service personnel -- which means 'abuse at will to a lot of people -- and it's all right to do that'. Well, it's not.)

People reasonably disagree on that, however, and different things work for different folks.

There is, however, one bit of advice in there that is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. It's this bit:

Business: I am very sorry to hear that you were treated like that by Jim, and I absolutely understand why you would be frustrated. Here is how we’re going to handle the situation: I am going to comp your meal, give you a coupon for the next time you eat with us, and we’ll be discussing the issue with Jim to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future. Does that work for you?

The example of the 'explanation' behavior is fine. What's being explained? Oh, such a bad idea.

I want everyone to imagine what would happen if a staff member let an XP/spend go a day or so too long, and when a player complained about this, they were given the advance for free and a discount on their next one -- or similar.

You would have a nightmare on your hands. The chill that just crawled down your spine was dead on.

Taking a customer service approach as an administrator does not mean giving complainers free things. It means listening to their complaints, considering their intentions and motivations, letting them know that you've heard them and understand what they are saying, and then telling them what will be done in response; sometimes, what will be done in response is going to be, "Nothing, and here's why." It doesn't mean having to compromise your policies or design decisions.

It's essentially a case of 'this was a bad example to use', since extrapolating it directly does go there. It's something a newbie admin may not realize can cause a problem if they're following the guidance there more explicitly.

People do ask for things like this, too! "Bob offended me, so I want <tangible game-related thing> as an apology!" -- which can set up a supremely bad precedent if someone doesn't think it through, which isn't always the first impulse (especially of a less experienced admin) in the midst of being screamed at.

If a game is working on a pay-for-play model, "I'm sorry that happened, we can comp you a week," may be more reasonable, but that's an important distinction and doesn't factor into game play in the same fashion.

(In part, you can also chalk my noticing this example at all up to just having written files about it being unacceptable for anyone to sling abusive crap at anyone -- including staff -- under the misconception that their job is to take abuse. That isn't actually the job of a customer service rep, either, but it's what the culture has evolved to think is acceptable behavior. It's really not, not even a little.)

That said, the article and conversations referred to in regards to customer service on OR are most definitely not a prerequisite or official stance. There is no official stance. We'd be just as happy to publish an article or engage in a conversation promoting the "players are guests in my web-space" approach that @il-volpe indicated is their approach.

The 'these are independent views not representative of the site' factor is clear enough; you don't need to stress out on that point. It's pretty much the same way here.

@Thenomain said:

Remember Big Bad.

He's back, I think. At least his permabern identity appears to have resurfaced. Didn't seem to make much of a splash, either way.

Pretty refreshing, really.

Re: the 'customer service model' article, I... have to admit I'm in agreement with a lot of folks here.

While I don't agree with the principle 100% myself, I have zero compunction swearing in news files and vastly prefer plain and direct language especially in policy files, so I am not likely the best example. (There are concrete reasons for that, some which stem from the idea of 'too much polite and delicate wording often dances around the point and sets up a false expectation that you can treat staff like customer service personnel -- which means 'abuse at will to a lot of people -- and it's all right to do that'. Well, it's not.)

People reasonably disagree on that, however, and different things work for different folks.

There is, however, one bit of advice in there that is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. It's this bit:

Business: I am very sorry to hear that you were treated like that by Jim, and I absolutely understand why you would be frustrated. Here is how we’re going to handle the situation: I am going to comp your meal, give you a coupon for the next time you eat with us, and we’ll be discussing the issue with Jim to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future. Does that work for you?

The example of the 'explanation' behavior is fine. What's being explained? Oh, such a bad idea.

I want everyone to imagine what would happen if a staff member let an XP/spend go a day or so too long, and when a player complained about this, they were given the advance for free and a discount on their next one -- or similar.

You would have a nightmare on your hands. The chill that just crawled down your spine was dead on.

@BigDaddyAmin said:

@Alzie

Ehhh. I am suspicious. Don't think the majority of people are going there to drink tea and hear the shamisen.

I don't play there so I don't know about there, but considering I managed to pull off the above on Shang for two years solid, it's possible. And if it's possible on Shang, it's definitely possible on not-Shang!

@Derp I'm pretty sure we're on the same page with this one, actually.

There are essentially two arguments around the activity issue:

1. It's not faiiiiiiiiiir that I have RL and someone gets more than me just because they do more!
   ...and...
2. If you do the work, you earn the thing, and it's not fair that you don't get to have it just because someone else won't or can't put in the work.

Both have some validity -- there are genuinely reasonable considerations on both sides of that issue.

The problem is, it assumes a level of parity that doesn't exist in the samples I've seen. The 'got here first' have an enormous advantage on points in a lot of systems, whether they've done anything or not, so I am an enormous fan of promoting activity-based XP gains. I have weird-as-hell theories about this personally, but they don't really fit into the scope of the options presented here, so I'm gonna avoid that particular tangent.

I think both are useful and necessary, each for different reasons. "Has been around and stuck with it" counts -- but it shouldn't count more than "does stuff with the time they have, however much of it they have in actuality", and in a lot of setups at the moment, that seems to be the case. TR's catchup mechanic tried to resolve this, but it came with its own unique collection of crazy issues.

RfK's approach, from what I've heard of it, seemed to strongly factor activity into things, which is something I approve of pretty strongly, even if I think the staff overhead involved in their specific approach (looking for gains someone might have missed) is a little further than I'd be willing to go just in terms of time investment.

Quick edit before zooming out the door: Yes, they should work in combination. 'Been around and being active' would generally be at the top of the food chain, for reasons that seem fairly obvious to me, at least.

@Coin said:

@surreality said:

@Derp said:

There absolutely should be some clout for those that came in the door first. They've already been on grid, they've helped to shape things around them, etc. I'm against people who 'just came in the door' having the same amount of influence as someone who's been there consistently for a year. I think that's pretty fair, too.

I do and don't agree with this on one salient point: it depends what they did with that year. If they sat on their ass and did absolutely nothing, "I got here first!" should not count for jack nor shit. And plenty of people do precisely this, making a login on a game early to ensure they'll always be among the most powerful. It's... pretty crappy, really. Active newcomers should absolutely be able to match, if not overcome, the power level of someone who has done nothing but waste the time they have had.

Essentially, you want to get rid of passive XP, since that would be the best way to do that. >.>

Not entirely, no.

It just went the rest of the way to convincing me that the 'passive XP only/passive should be the primary means/activity-based XP is unfair and should not be allowed or should be stringently limited' arguments are coming from the privileged position in terms of the way most games work already, which is something I strongly doubt most of the players who make those arguments recognize.

@Arkandel said:

Yeah, I agree with @surreality that 'activity' measured in some way or other ought to be a major factor of XP distribution. Otherwise it's less useful as a carrot, since it promotes nothing but existence.

Recently, when we had been looking at some changes to XP policies at Reno, I did some lengthy breakdowns of how their system was functioning in actuality, since the XP transfer mechanic was being reconsidered.

The breakdown between 'XP earned by simply existing' vs. 'XP earned through all other sources' (this included CG xp, incentives, beats, conditions, breaking points, aspirations, and the rare MUX-wide XP gifts there) were incredibly eye opening. If I had the time to write out all the findings at the moment, I would, but they put things into a much clearer perspective for me in regard to some of the 'fairness' arguments that swing in one direction or the other.

Quick summary: among the characters who had been on the game for equal amounts of time, most of them with very high XP totals, a character that never filed for beats or plot XP or anything of the kind was 10% 'other' and 90% 'time existing'. You'd think a very active player, who frequently filed jobs -- usually more than one a week -- for running plots and fulfilling aspirations and working conditions through and facing breaking points -- would be dramatically different. Not really. That character was approximately 22.5% 'other' and 77.5% 'time existing'.

Those numbers proved out more or less all the way down the chain. The most active character the game has ever seen, with a player who had been, for well over a month or two, running one or more plot scene for others almost daily, still did not come close to hitting a 50/50 parity between the two, with 'time existing' still taking the lead over all of the player's actual effort and investment of time and energy into the game.

That basically shot the 'it's not faaaaaaaaaaaaair that people who can be more active get to earn XP for it!' attitude I have seen straight to hell with no coming back from it.

@Derp said:

There absolutely should be some clout for those that came in the door first. They've already been on grid, they've helped to shape things around them, etc. I'm against people who 'just came in the door' having the same amount of influence as someone who's been there consistently for a year. I think that's pretty fair, too.

I do and don't agree with this on one salient point: it depends what they did with that year. If they sat on their ass and did absolutely nothing, "I got here first!" should not count for jack nor shit. And plenty of people do precisely this, making a login on a game early to ensure they'll always be among the most powerful. It's... pretty crappy, really. Active newcomers should absolutely be able to match, if not overcome, the power level of someone who has done nothing but waste the time they have had.

@crayon said:

What I mean by this extrapolation of the analogy is that dedicated forums for community partners, eg. the games from the focus group, like OR does isn't something that MU Soapbox does at all. I don't think it'd really work with this site, really, so that's not a qualitative statement about this place in particular. We only do it on OR because we have, again, a focus group, and our community partners make significant contributions in the form of articles, etc. While MU Soapbox's majority certainly seem to be of a focus group, MU Soapbox as a site doesn't seem to be specifically or explicitly targeted towards a focus group, which is why the complaints about our advertising to a community where the majority aren't interested in our focus are weird to me.

OK, I see what you're saying. I think the confusion is more that we have... this forum for ads. More or less what @il-volpe said; for us, this is pretty much it. If you (or someone else) started a thread about a particular RPI in one of the other forums, it might be quiet, but it wouldn't be forbidden. Basically, we don't have the same resources available, but there's none that I can see that would be forbidden at all. It's more a factor of 'different resources' than it is 'not permitted'. If it was here, there's no reason it would not be allowed. It's not something that's here for anyone, either way.

I don't think people are necessarily getting their knickers in a twist about what resources are permitted -- I suppose some might be? But I don't think that's the crux of it. I think what @Ninjakitten mentioned in regard to the definitions, and the impression of an implied value judgment (whether one exists or not in reality) is probably more the issue.

Also, I started on the same place @il-volpe is describing, GhostwheelMOO. You could, arguably, putter around on that place for days and still have stuff to do, without ever running into another character or interacting with them. It was pretty neat. At times, though, I'd say the level of code there interfered with the roleplay to some extent. I half-remember an axe that would invisibly teleport around from player to player, then force them to attack whoever was nearest them, without them ever realizing what was going on (and it was such a powerful weapon it almost always killed them in a single shot or two at the most). So much for anything else going on in the scene, purely because someone felt like making a weird bit of code, pretty much. Ghostwheel had people respawn after a timeout period, though, so it might not be what folks are looking for, either.

Complete tangent: I suspect people have some slightly different ideas of immersive, too. For instance, it isn't a lack of OOC means of communication that makes something immersive to me; for me, the detail of the game world and how much it has going on, how much it gives me to work with, is what I'd consider immersive. There's essentially two approaches here -- one does so by removing something (the OOC element), the other provides something (more focus on developing interactive story tools). I suspect a lot of the places being discussed likely do both, but I wouldn't know.

For example, I am driving people insane with how long it takes for me to put a single grid room together, as I set up their descriptions to interact with time of day, season, weather, and so on. It's a SIMPLE code trick, but it's one that creates a directly interactive environment that people can reference as needed to enhance immersion and provide story-making tools. Similarly, we're looking at OOC-specific tools to foster roleplay, and more specifically, find the kinds of roleplay people want to find and niches to fill, which is something that would be trickier if OOC interaction was limited. The focus, I find, on a lot of MUX/MUSH games, is more in that direction. It tends to rely on how compelling the story is unto itself, and the tools provided IC and OOC within the game, to facilitate immersion, rather than relying on code to enforce it or limit communication. Both are effective, it's just a considerably different approach.

@crayon said:

@il-volpe said:

Even if you were as straight up honest about it as you claim, it's hardly courteous. You are, in essence, putting up an 18"x24" poster for a hip-hop venue on the corkboard in an indie-rock club while informing us that our club and the indie bands that we want to promote can leave a couple of those little postcard adverts in the bin by your club's door if we really want to.

I don't think that analogy works. Or if you wanted it to be more accurate, you could say, maybe, that our community has been placing postcard advertisements at the MUSoapbox venue (and offers the same in return to MUSoapbox), while allowing hip-hop groups to place full-on posters, something that the MUSoapbox venue doesn't allow at all.

I don't think this is accurate, actually; the ad may not get a lot of bites if it's for something other than a MUSH/MUX, but I haven't seen any mention of that being prohibited. Another forum isn't even a game, and that's been permitted -- along with a kickstarter for a tabletop game that's being run by a member of the community. There are threads for things that are not yet, and may never be, games posted in this area, that are just feelers or brainstorming threads for game concepts. It's quite broad, really.

I haven't seen any ads deleted or taken down or deemed 'forbidden'. That isn't to say it hasn't happened, but I haven't seen any indication of the kind of limitation you believe exists.

I think @Jeshin may need a little time, y'all. He has some RL from what he mentioned here, and call me a bleeding heart if you want, but having to go through the same not so long ago... I'm still in a world of super-mope even after a couple weeks. So maybe let's not expect a speedy response there, is all.

I think @Gingerlily has a very good point here.

The way this went -- at least initially -- is more or less how other advertisements on this board go.

I'm pretty sure if I ever get to the point where I post an ad for the project I'm working on, it's going to get bitched about/at to high heaven because it's impressively niche.

But that's kinda just because that's how things go around here. It's actually not remotely personal.

It may just be that I have staffed with @tragedyjones before, but I don't think the 'who is blowing which staffer' thing would ever, ever be permitted to be a factor on any game he was running. I just can't see it happening; he not only pays attention, he officially gives a damn.

As for the point more broadly, I don't know if the time zone thing is as much of a factor as it's being made out to be. I also don't see someone with a good idea who is capable of generating play being counted out simply because they're in the odd hours camp. After all, the odd hours camp, sometimes more than any other, needs active storytellers to keep things from stagnating for them, if they're a small group. (I know I specifically look for people who can tackle odd hours if I can find them for exactly this reason; this is a wanted niche, not a reason to discount someone.)

I wouldn't go with the model exactly as presented, either, but I have my own very freaky ideas of how to go about things.

I will say that if part of the job is creating RP for others, and you're only doing things that relate specifically to yourself and doing them through jobs and no interaction with anyone other than staff, you're... not creating RP for others. At all.

Flip the considerations around for a moment, and some of the problem becomes more clear, I think. There's a responsibility attached to the perks in this scenario. If the responsibility, for whatever reason, cannot be met, one does not qualify for the perks. Step that one up a notch: say you're hiring someone for a staff position. The responsibilities are X, Y, and Z, and the person you hire is expected to handle each in a turnaround of 3-5 days. (Random example for the time frame.) Is it 'fair' to the game when they don't log in for two weeks, and everyone's X, Y, and Z languish? Do they get to say, "Well, really, I felt like going to a movie tonight instead of doing X, and you know I can't stand Y and Z, so I've just elected not to do those." How long would that person remain staff? (Sometimes, a long time, but that's not remotely good.) If the good of the game is the goal, they shouldn't be sticking around for long, because they're not doing their job.

The examples sound like 'people without any responsibility to the game, can do whatever they want', and 'players with additional responsibilities, granted perks because of those responsibilities'. "It isn't fair they get more because they do more for others!" is... not entirely sensible. (Staff don't really get perks, other than a generalized notion of WTF is going on they can never act on in the personal fun ways, but even that tends to be fairly generalized.)

@Glitch is pretty spot on, in that if someone has an effective means of Doing Things, they should get any and all possible benefits of Actually Doing Things. Artificial caps get in the way of that, and that's not good. I'm in the 'earn it' camp all around. I don't care who someone is or what they do to earn a thing, if they earn the thing, they get the thing. "I want the same thing but I don't want to have to earn it," on the other hand... that's some entitled bullshit.

@Jaunt: I'm not talking specifically about your post, but about the many mentions of the same prior to it. That... poisons the well a bit. Maybe that will help make sense of some of it. I try to read good intentions into things and was raised with someone with a well-meaning evangelist mindset (even if it drove me bonkers at times), so I have a thicker skin on this point than a lot of folks may.

I also think your bias is potentially turning some sincere questions into 'trolling', but not knowing specifically which ones you're discussing, I'm not going to hazard a guess either way. There's definitely been some, but it tends to be pretty obvious -- though how obvious may depend on how familiar someone is with some of the personalities around these parts. Hopefully, that is clear and understandable; I'm pre-coffee as yet, gods help me.

I know I'm in the process of building a game (or three; I have no idea if they would fit the criteria for OR or not, but that doesn't really worry me either way and doesn't offend me in any way -- I'm doing it the way I think it should be done to create the specific environment I want to create, and if that happens, it's all win anyway), and had asked a few questions in the thread about a variety of things, because I was curious if your site would be a good resource for me. I tended to get the runaround more than I got answers that would have helped me make that determination, since the answers seemed to demonstrate a lack of understanding the question more than anything else. I've peeked at some of the articles, but haven't (yet) run into anything that's uniquely relevant to my situation. Granted, I don't expect that everything would be, or even most -- and that's true of any resource.

I do, however, find a lot of useful information and help here -- more than I have on previous iterations of the community forums. I'm a world-building addict, but the technical points of setting up a server, managing things on that end, and working on code, are very much my weakness. Some of the folks who have had the strongest negative reactions in this thread are the very same people who have offered me enormous help on the technical end for projects simply for the asking. To me, personally, that says a lot more about the actual quality of a person than just about anything else, and that is something that's immensely common on this particular incarnation of the forum. It is, really, a refreshing change from previous versions. While the same thing happened, it wasn't as frequent, and the broad encouragement and support here that arises around potential projects is a distinct sea change; 'that's going to suck, don't bother' was the old norm. I'm not afraid to ask 'stupid questions' about the things I need help with here, for instance, and that's not something I would have dared before.

Don't get me wrong; I can be a shrill-ass harpy if I get my panties wadded. (This is no mystery.) I make no claim to nobility here, myself. But, even so, it isn't just noble souls that create, or consume what is created. If it was so, mercy knows I wouldn't get my panties wadded so often in the first place!