Or...
Or........
Just don't ask.
"Oh look, there's 30 people (maybe, if you're lucky) over there pretending to play in my setting FUCK THEM THEY MUST DIE RARRRRRRRR!!!!!"
Like....nobody cares about MUing, but yeah, if you ask, I'm pretty sure they're obligated to say no.
@apos said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:
@sockmonkey Deliberate obfuscation of numbers has some strong and weak points, and it is something that's existed for a long time. I've played games that didn't use any numbers at all, hiding them entirely to staff side while there was still automated systems.
Dedicated min-maxer types try REALLY hard to reverse engineer the formulas and numbers. Really, really hard. I was one of those people, and as a much younger person I ran a whole lot of tests on MMOs the embraced some numeric obfuscation to reverse engineer the numbers on mechanics so I could create optimally efficient paths. Just having a character spamming abilities thousands of times in a row, recording results and so on. Figuring that stuff out was basically a mini game.
Now in some games, like RPI type games that forbid ooc discussion, that is partly because they want to ban that behavior, of people talking oocly about mechanics in a way that would let them game the system. What happens then, of course, is that people that really, really know how to abuse systems become at a privileged position in the game with them and their friends. If the game has any competitive aspects at all they become extremely dominant, since new players don't have any way to access that knowledge with performing the same kind of exhaustive tests themselves.
So imo the way to stop min-maxing is to make strong, effective ways of designing characters be very, very, very intuitive and what someone would do anyways.
I agree with most of this.
And will go so far as to flat out say obfuscation does not work.
People will figure it out and it just leads to a massive gap between the people who have figured stuff out or have friends who figured it out and people who are less interested in that stuff or are new.
I've done the RPI circuit, I've even played MUDs with full eq systems/etc that didn't have numbers. Weapons/armor had things like "minor" or "greater" enchantments, skills went from 'not learned' to 'mastered', attributes were all words too. People figure it out and it drastically widens the gap between the competitive players and the filthy casuals.
You can have all the "don't talk about it" rules you want, people will just do it in discord (or IM services of yesteryear).
Edits :
For the record, I personally don't even mind obfuscation. I spent years playing games that did it.
But, basically, obfuscating the numbers just increases the problem of min-maxing, because some people will still know how to do it, and everybody else will have a harder time understanding things like "how big of a difference really is there between Good strength and Great strength?"
TL;DR Obfuscating does reduce min-maxing OVERALL, but it doesn't remove it, and in exchange for a reduced 'amount' of min-maxing, gives an insurmountable advantage to the people who bother figuring it out.
I say this as somebody from PK/RP corpse-looting MUDs who has played games where 1 max level char who 'understands the game' can kill and corpse loot groups of 6+ max level/skill-maxed "perma noobs" who are running around in what seems like End-Game eq, but doesn't really stack up when you dig into the numbers.
@ganymede said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:
I personally hope to have something ready by the end of the year.
/me looks at the calendar
Is there a way to make specific threads not show up on my unread list? Or can you only stop watching entire boards?
Just because you add a vampire to a werewolf pack doesn't change the fact that Werewolf is a terrible MU sphere with no core theme besides "make a pack and do stuff with them".
Werewolf is not a good MU sphere.
Werewolf has no overarching theme, nothing binding them together. Tribes are pretty meaningless. It's basically just a mechanical decision you make for your character. I've seen Clan/Covenant meetings on vampire MUs. I've never seen a "Hunters in Darkness tribal gathering" or a "New Moon wolfs only party".
Werewolf is 100% about "Packs".
Which are completely insular and have no reason to interact with anybody else.
Werewolf is the sandbox splat.
@faraday said in Charging for MU* Code?:
@tempest said in Charging for MU* Code?:
They are delivering you a product. You do not get any say at all in how they are making that product.
Yeah, that's really actually not how software development works. So best of luck to Theno and anyone else who decides to try to negotiate a software contract, a feat that even professional software dev companies struggle with daily.
Really, we're talking about contracts and shit?
"Hey Theno, here's 50$, can you set me up a base COFD game with vampire added?"
"Sure, thing, give me a week."
If Theno sucks, word will get out and nobody will ever do this again.
If you commission somebody to do something, you don't get to stand over their shoulder and nitpick every little detail of what they're doing. Which is what I imagine the specific issue would be in "paying for MU code". People in this hobby are notorious for being crazy, specifically in regards to BOUNDARIES and failing to recognize them.
They don't actually work for you. They are delivering you a product. You do not get any say at all in how they are making that product.
Strange to say, but I don't really blame Blake Bortles for that. He's a scrub, and he sucks, and they should've gotten rid of him before this season.
But he's not why we lost that game. The Jag defense just...disappeared in the 4th quarter. Big penalties, no pressure on Brady, Bouye and Ramsey getting burned.
...And all that with Gronk out of the game.
So yeah, that was all on the defense, in my book.
I stopped reading half way through the last post, but it basically applies to all MUDs I've ever touched. Especially the whole "staff refuses to talk about ANYTHING with players, obfuscates everything, hides behind IC/OOC to excuse their shitty behavior, etc".
Guys (Arm people), just for the record, I would really not waste your time defending Arm here or w/e is going on.
The market here who likes RPIs probably already knows wtf Arm is, the market who doesn't isn't going to make the switch from MUSHes to RPIs.
If you can play this game, you are some kind of sick psychotic whackjob who enjoys staring at WALLS OF COLORLESS TEXT.
OMFG GET SOME ANSI GOING, PLEASE
Spelling and grammar are obviously important. Perfection isn't needed though, a couple typo'd words are fine. But if your pose is barely readable, that's a whole different problem.
Pose length is a big one for me. 3-5 paragraphs is usually ideal. Page-scrolling stuff is fine sometimes. I've noticed that there are "species" of page-scrolling though. The sort I've encountered on anime/MCM-type games is cancer, because it's 10+ paragraphs about what a snowflake a character is and gives nothing to the scene and nothing to respond to.
I despise 1 paragraph "back and forth" scenes. I'd much rather have a ton of detail in a brief IC conversation than minimal detail in an IC conversation that drags on forever across all the stupid usual "hey how are you?" "did you see that thing on the news" etc sort of shit.
The worst thing in a MUer is being a leech. Somebody who contributes nothing to scenes. Somebody who puts all the responsibility for every scene and making things interesting on the people around them. You can give them 3 different things to react to, and their pose in turn barely gives anything back, and they ignore half of what you wrote. They don't give you anything, they just drain fun out of you for themselves.
Those people are the worst, fuck them. And they obviously are 1 paragraph-or-lessers, so I tend to avoid 1 paragraphers just to protect myself from that.
Tempo, I like 20-30 minutes between poses because I'm usually doing other shit. I'd rather spend 6 hours doing a scene with tons of time in there to work on schoolwork/etc rather than be glued to my MU client for 3 hours straight doing rapidfire back and forth. (No, I don't multiscene. Trying to be in the headspace of two characters at once fries my brain.)
Pose order is a must. I will not do 3PR. Feel free to do it yourself, but I'm bowing out of the scene. 3PR tends to result in bland back and forth with people shooting off mediocre poses just to make sure they get to be the one to react to something first/etc.
I like thought/meta posing. It adds a lot of flavor to characters and scenes and oftentimes can help lead to ideas for future scenes. There are obviously bad ways to do it. Don't use to insult people/etc.
People who hate thought posing and stick strictly to "actions", tend to bug me, because it makes scenes pretty boring. And also because it feels less like writing a story together and more like playing a game.
Also, it is perfectly possible to write 3-5 paragraphs or more, without including purple prose flowery nonsense just for the sake of fluffing up your pose. That shit is unnecessary and annoying.
Hey, if people are having fun, that's what's important.
@surreality said in CoD/W:tF 2E?:
@sunnyj I genuinely cannot envision a game of any quality whatsoever going from idea to plots in motion on grid inside a week, sorry.
I mean, you said it.
That whole convo seems pretty silly too. I mean, you're ignoring the fact that they skipped every step involved in making a MU.
They didn't make anything new.
They reopened a 10 year old game and did very little to update it.
The room you log into still talks about werewolves, last I saw. The "wiki" was just a wikidot with a cover page and character pages.
I don't want to rag on the game, but acting like they pulled off some miracle because they copy/pasted a 10 year old MU is....pretty weird and feels very MSB circle jerk-y.
It is a LOT easier for game-makers to put everything on the wiki.
Most people who want to make a MU have no idea how to do code stuff. Even stuff as simple as how to make news/help files.
The 'rah rah wikis are the worst' just seems to be born from some like "back in my day..."