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Talking about Bartle: Balancing an MMO Ecosystem - Getting a Mix of Player Types - Extra Credits

Yeah, watch this.

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@ThatOneDude, you come across to me as a lot more of an Achiever than a Socializer, with a hint of Killer. (Okay, maybe just toward me, but anyway.) I can understand why you might have troubles settling into some Mushes as there is not enough for you to do, the PvE elements not hitting you the right way. I don't have an answer, per se, but I see part of your question as partially "why aren't I having fun". It's a question I ask myself all the time.

I may be wrong in my guesswork, but that's not the important part. I continue.

But why doesn't a small game have more achievement? It has less socializing, which itself turns to less socializing (watch the video), which leads to more people sitting waiting to do something. I think BitN does a pretty good job of creating an atmosphere where anyone who wants to run events without the drawback of having to jump through hoops. In that way, BitN is extremely successful, and I think the staff was counting on this creating the popularity that would create an upward feedback spiral.

Perhaps they need more proactive explorers (e.g., writers)? An interesting thought. Anyhow.

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@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

As for secrets and such, I've seen it emulated on MUSHes too. I mentioned Nightmare LP Mud as my favorite, because it seemed to be one at the time that hid objects and descriptions. One had to read the entire desc and look at each object to see if there was more too it. A few Mu*s outside of MUDs have done this and hidden it enough so there were no visible local views or +views, but most players outside of MUDs don't tend to think to 'look' at every thing in the desc just to see if there is more too it.

Mushes used to do this all the time. TinyTIM (probably the first Mush) expanded on Mud's scant in-game building tools into more code-like features to make it easier to do. It's why I started Mush Coding. How to create puzzles. How to create interactive objects. How to have room-based commands. How to create mobs and mob spawners. (Trufax: User-created commands used to be locked exits with a coded fail, @afail. My earliest interactive loops were @trigger, @set, and @if. Who winced? You have no idea how proud I was that it worked.)

What happened was, probably, World of Darkness. The first WoD game, Vampire, came when all us casual coder kids and online gamer brats were in college. Here was this cool, edgy game where you could be the bad guy and sulk in the darkness and listen to Rage Against the Machine all night and never die and oh come on, it was the nineties, what do you expect.

Anyhow, having a simple platform where you can quickly prototype ideas meant that you could build, code, and socialize all within the same space. It just so happened the first WoD game was a Mush and not a Moo (which probably would have changed everything).

@Kestrel, I'm drawing your attention here in case you're skimming (god knows I do): Moo used an in-game editor but a more realistic, flexible language. One of the single worst things about using Mush for coding is that it can be ten times harder to do something cool in Mush than almost any other language.

It's not that Mushes can't have mobs and things, a gigantic game called Firan proved that wrong, it's that it's not worth it. I mean, we're busy implementing a codified RPG. God, the language code we used to have was pretty damn complex too. At one point, if you knew French you could pick up smaller snippets of other Romance Languages depending on how similar or dissimilar they were from French, all the way down to "I don't know what they're saying, but I know that it's kinda Greek-like" for 'Ancient Greek'.

You want secrets? Damn did we have them. It's possible. It takes time, but the most important thing as a game is will someone use it because if not, why bother? And people started complaining about it. And we killed the general WoD secrets culture. And it faded into obscurity.

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I also remember Mud School. Mush and especially Penn had the same thing. Most of it's online. Most of it's helpful. If you remember the "Free Code Room", I stole that from TinyTIM's "MushRoom" (puns and puns). Maybe it is time to stop constricting build quota.

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@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

Also @Thenomain mentioned considering changing from pages to grid wandering.

I am an Explorer. Above all else, I like finding new places, new things, new people, new ideas, new events, new new new. If I can't find it, I make it. (Coder, duh.) If I can't find it or make it, I get belligerent and sulk and sometimes I lash out. It's a problem and therefore it must be solved, and if I can't solve it then why am I there?

But I'm curious if MUSH could benefit from some of these concepts, dark grid, unfindable, interactive descriptions.

See Above: Been there done that. Right now the culture in WoD Mushes (specifically WoD Mushes even if they're running Chronicles) is to kill the OOC Drama. That doesn't mean you can't try, but I don't think that will be the tipping point to gain or lose players. I think the game's culture does that, the goal, the interactivity, the staff.

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TL;DR: Mushes have become RPG Game System Simulators where Theme is King. They can be anything, but this is what they ended up being. Most people here are WoD Mushers which also skews what we talk about to a kind of insular community, and sadly sometimes an echo-chamber. This number is changing, and at a nice pace, and I welcome the new more open world of talking about game implementation in general.

Steam to me: "All but two of the games on your wishlist are on sale."
Me to Steam: "... Goddammit."

I feel, in the end of my internal logical debate, that as long as nobody is disenfranchised by the play, then I don't care who does what. Is everyone having fun? Or at least are people having the same fun having opportunities? Then who cares.

The problem is as @Ganymede said earlier, that there are far too few people who can manage both running a game and having an even view of things, or even playing a game and having same. In staff we call them bad staffers, in players we know who shares a scene and who doesn't. One of my biggest peeve about players who are more active than I am is how well they share plot or if they are a black hole of activity.

These are the kinds of rules that I would accept would be a good baseline, but I really don't believe there is an Answer to the questions raised in the initial post.

@lordbelh said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I like stepping out of my pose order occasionally. Slip in a quickie. That sort of thing. Give a better flow to the scene. .

And if a scene is big enough, it will organically fracture. The exception being "meeting scenes", which are punishment on everyone already.

@surreality

I would know the kind of game that I want to make and make it.

I would enforce that game.

I would learn from my mistakes.

I would ask the question: Is it a compromise to change theme or setting to make it more approachable by a wider audience?

There's no wrong answer. Don't be ashamed of making a smaller game. Make the game you want to see played by the people you want to see playing it.

9. Other.

I want the grid to be as thematic and important to the setting as the room descriptions. Big. Small. It's important to me to have room objects as it is to have character objects.

@faraday said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

@Three-Eyed-Crow and @WTFE In yet another example of why I often feel like a visiting alien among these boards, I actually have extremely fond memories of Electric Soup. It was started by a very good friend of mine from B5MU days and I regarded it as a success while it lasted. And frankly, if a forum is going to die because people can't discuss things constructively without being jerks and belittling each other, I can live with that.

Part of the problem, as noted, was what was considered "not constructive" was handled with a bit of a steel fist and/or sledgehammer, making the place ironically less open than it wanted to be, than it should have been. Sure, this means that the ideology wasn't abused by creative trolls, but I felt that it was abused by the people who were there to uphold it.

I'm not saying that it was a bad place, or that your time there wasn't genuine, but I don't think it was the place that people have been saying that Soapbox should be, and I don't think Electric Soup was the place it should have been.

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@Ghost said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

Yeah, because shit goes from okay to NOT OKAY in the blink of an eye around here sometimes.

"Around here"? I've asked that question far more on games than on here, so I'm going to call Confirmation Bias -- yes, on both of us. Kudos to @Miss-Demeanor for pointing out how specifically your complaints are not hobby-specific.

In catching up from a day and a half on this thread, I'm going to guess that your complaints can be boiled down to The Apology Thread in particular, and specifically one person in it.

I understand being bitter that a thread has gotten out of your control and wanting to regain understanding, wanting to get everyone on the same page, but when you put yourself out in public and on, I dunno, let's call it some kind of Soapbox, you open yourself to commentary from those passing by.

Looking at the +1s (I believe this thread is before the -1s were removed), people agreed with you and @Miss-Demeanor about equally. Remember, I believe in "the silent majority", I figure that most people who want to comment here don't want to open themselves to criticism and will use that +1 as meaning "I agree" and nothing more. I use it as a metric to mean how much I should pay attention to the post, to actually read it.

In the Apology Thread, these posts were most upvoted:

• The original post
• Miss Demeanor's counter-point
• @mietze's advice trying to be honestly helpful
• Cobalt's winning one-liner: "MUSoapbox; Where we argue over apologies."
• WTFE's reiteration of it
• @VulgarKitten being funny, because I like it when she's funny; she should be funny more
• @GangOfDolls' counter to Cobalt/WTFE in defense of the original post
• @surreality explaining "consideration of others" to Miss Demeanor
• @gasket saying how one post makes Soapbox as bad as WORA
• @Tinuviel actually using the apology thread to apologize
• @Coin getting involved to say that apologies have more meaning face-to-face
• mietze reiterating how public apologies are dangerous for inviting commentary
• gasket saying how one person's actions represents the entire board

I'm stopping here. I thought I'd get about 5 posts out of this, but this thread has really split opinions in Soapbox, but I would like to note, in the way usually used for yelling: The opinions were very passionately split.

Looking at this thread, I cannot believe that Soapbox is any one thing but passionate. I see humor, understanding, frustration, caring, and the odd insult all being +1'd, being thanked, someone saying "yes, this represents how I'm feeling right now".

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Final note: If you want to now remove the +1 you gave me before I finished this unexpectedly long edit, Ghost, I don't blame you. No hard feelings.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

While there are absolutely players willing to run their own stuff (and I love them), they are the minority. There are also a lot of players who are gunshy about participating in PrPs.

Because we have made this not fun. That was my point. The PrP system was created to put some mechanical controls on things that players were doing anyway but complained that the rewards people could invent for themselves were unfair to others who ran similar plots but didn't get the same goodies.

PrPs came from D&D and Shadowrun games, where systems monetizing the risk/reward cycle were much more researched; I had a lot of push-back when explaining why PrPs wouldn't work for WoD because they obviously worked so well elsewhere.

Before the introduction of the PrP to WoD games, people would run whatever, whenever. Even I, one of the worst STs you could have the misfortune of running something, could feel comfortable saying, "Hey, let's go out into the swamp and kill some ROUSes!" Now? Forget it. I'm not sticking my hand in the blender of bureaucracy.

My last few games have all but begged players to run PrPs and empowered them to do a lot, but the number of people actually doing so is tiny.

Quelling the willingness of people to do things on their own didn't happen overnight, either. You can't expect people to trust you personally when the experience has been quite different elsewhere.

As much I abhor a certain member of the Arx staffing team, they lead by doing, not by telling people to do, and that's the other problem with PrPs; it was designed so that staff didn't have to be involved in the storytelling portion of the game.

So PrPs:

1. Tacitly turned RP into a monetized activity
2. Turned the reward system of doing things into a bureaucracy
3. Removed staff from a key position of running of their own game

No, I don't believe that "The Players" are at fault. It seems like blaming Millennials for being poor; reversing cause and effect. I don't buy it.

It is extremely important that you know what I'm doing, because if I don't tell you I get barked at and begged for treats.

If I do tell you, you get confused and run off for the ball.

I mean, either way is good. Who's a good girl? Who's a good girl? You are!

(That never gets old.)

Oh that's okay. We know that MUDs are full of minmaxers and griefers who roll-play instead of role-playing.

Wait. I think I'm talking about WoD Mushes.

Uh, let me get back to you on this.

Now that I know that Tell Tale Games is going out of house to finish The Walking Dead, I’m thinking about asking for my money back for the next two episodes.

What a complete dick move to fire your entire staff then outsource to finish development. Continuity is shot, people are abused, just leaves a bad taste in my mouth that I want to vote with my wallet.

@Mercutio

Like I agreed, some permissions knowledge can be important.

As far as things like setting everything wizard, there is a benefit to learning things the hard way. It is far less dangerous to make this mistake now than you used to. My goal is more similar to @faraday or @Ashen-Shugar; get people willing to make the damn game.

Because people should be able to make the damn game without waiting around for one of us.

People, learn just enough code to make huge mistakes.

Then make your damn game

@arkandel said in Mux Logger Objects:

@thenomain Future MUSH historians will thank you!

The OOC room for The Reach?

I deleted them at her request.

Future MUSH historians will thank me.

@sunnyj said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

@Demiurge Do your thing, or don't, dude. Defending yourself here won't help zilch.

This.

In fact, it usually hurts.

Guess who has two thumbs and managed to land a Spiderman PS4 $200 deal and Last Of Us for $5 and Horizon Zero Dawn for $15?

No, don't guess. It's me.

So, the latest development blog for the new version of Changeling, and it's about Storytelling, and it's here: http://theonyxpath.com/storytelling-changeling-the-lost/

In this, she reveals some ideas from other RP groups and icons on how to indicate intensity and discomfort in a scene. My purpose of this post is to see how this might be applied to a Mu*, or other text-based online persistent platforms.

First, the text:

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LINES AND VEILS
A classic safety technique originally described by Ron Edwards, Lines and Veils allows players to pick and choose what they want to address in the chronicle. Before game, the Storyteller should prepare two sheets of paper. Label one “Lines” and the other “Veils.” Lines are things that will absolutely not be touched on in the chronicle, not even mentioned in passing. Veils are things that can happen, but will not be played out, and instead addressed with a “fade to black.” The Storyteller asks players what they’d like added to the lists, and notes that the lists can be edited at any time. Veils can be moved to Lines, Lines can be moved to Veils, new Veils or Lines can be added, or Veils or Lines can be taken away (with the consensus of the other players). Veils and Lines cannot be used to cut out antagonists (i.e. “I don’t want the True Fae to be a part of this chronicle at all, not even mentioned in passing”) but can be used to restrict antagonists’ actions that might be uncomfortable for some players (i.e. “I do not want the True Fae in this chronicle to use sexual violence”).

Common Lines: Sexual violence, explicit depiction of torture, force feeding, starvation, mutilation, racial slurs, gender-specific slurs, spiders, trypophobia-inducing imagery, needles, bestiality, explicit depiction of bodily functions

Common Veils: Explicit depiction of consensual sexual activity, torture, emotional abuse, physical abuse, body horror, human experimentation, dream or nightmare sequences, childhood memories, prophetic visions

FADE TO BLACK
In a movie, when the hero is just about to get into bed with her love interest or be “forcibly interrogated,” sometimes the camera cuts away right before the action — occasionally with a moan or a scream included as appropriate. This technique is called “fade to black,” and can be used in your chronicle as appropriate. If you don’t want to narrate every caress of a love scene or the weirdness of a changeling’s personal nightmare or the agony of Faerie torments, simply fade to black and focus on another scene. A player can also request a fade to black if they are uncomfortable with what is happening at the table.

THE STOPLIGHT SYSTEM
This is a relatively recent technique and was pioneered by the group Games to Gather. The Storyteller lays out three different colored circles on the table: red, yellow, and green. Each color indicates a response to different levels of intensity. Green means “yes, I am okay with and encourage the scene getting more intense.” Yellow means “the scene is fine at the intensity level it is now, and I would like it to stay here if possible.” Red means “the scene is too intense for me in a bad way and I need it to decrease or I need to tap out.” Players can tap the colored circles as appropriate to indicate to the Storyteller what they want or need at that moment.

The Storyteller can also use the stoplight system to ask the players if they’d like intensity increased or decreased as necessary without breaking the narrative flow. To do so, the Storyteller can repeatedly tap a color — green for “more intense,” yellow for “keep it here,” and red for “do you need me to stop?” The players can then touch a color in response. Players can also respond by saying the color in question out loud.

THE X CARD
An up-and-coming technique, especially in storytelling-game circles, the X card was designed by John Stavropolous. The X card is fairly self-explanatory. A card or sheet of paper with an “X” drawn on it is placed in the middle of the table. At any point, a player or the Storyteller may touch the X card to call a halt to any action currently making them uncomfortable in a bad way. If they would like to explain themselves, they may, but it is absolutely not necessary and the Storyteller should continue play once everyone is settled back in.

THE DOOR IS ALWAYS OPEN
This is another technique that needs very little explanation. If a player needs to stop play for any reason, they are free to do so after giving the Storyteller a heads up. The chapter (game session) is then on pause until that player either returns or leaves the premises. Storytellers should use this technique either in conjunction with other techniques, or during sessions where players may have to leave abruptly for personal reasons.

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Now, the question: Besides Fade to Black (which should always be available to everyone, always) and The Door Is Always Open (which I think is common sense), which method do you think would be best for our hobby?

I am leaning toward Stoplight. It's more nuanced than a straight-up yes/no, and doesn't push players to wait until they need to stop. It does, however, mean more fiddling with commands and keeping track of things.

Thoughts?

I would happily throw basic code at PhoneMUX.

@crayon said:

In summary, I don't really expect that Optional Realities is going to appeal to every person in this community. That's okay.

Okay, putting on my blunt hat.

There, it's on.

Please do not offer us crap pudding like this. We do not need placated or pandered; we are adults even if we don't act like it some, most, or all of the time. I know the irony of basically saying the same to Jeshin just one post ago, but it sounds to me like he's trying to negotiate a mutual understanding and I know how it is to fight your own moral code. I don't think he needs to fight it, and would probably be better for our perception of him if he doesn't and hopefully he'd be happier too.

@crayon said:

Effectively, there's a difference between offering feedback and criticism and trying to debate while predicating your entire argument on telling us you disagree with our preferences

What? You (Jeshin, really, but your site) are the one who wants to bridge text communities, and when given a pretty clear example of how our consideration of "quality RP/game" did not mesh yours, you said, "Mm, no." This is not one of those matter-of-opinion things, you said our entire community was wrong.

You don't get to do that and say you want to build bridges at the same time.

This is why I berate you two. You don't get to be the arbiter of anything but your own community unless you are truly willing to explore common ground.

You are not.

I'm not talking about the articles, here, I'm talking about page one of your web site. I'm talking about how you present your community. It's not honest, and I can see the value in it if only you were honest.

We here at MU Soapbox are very keen on calling out bullshit; it's practically our charter, and as Surreality mentioned we each have our bugaboos, our triggers, and our amusements. You guys could be pretty damn sweet, but you are undermining yourselves at best, two-faced at worst, and that is pissing me off.

Either be your own community with your own rules and your own focus, or seek a greater understanding of quality gaming.

One of these options allows you to ignore our ranting as opinions. The other allows you to build bridges.

For fuck's sake, pick one.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

The latest controversy revolving around CDPR with Rock Paper Shotgun telling Mike Pondsmith what he should be offended with the game he created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDUTcFCdPpw

I was on the fence about pre-ordering.

I’m not on the fence anymore.

Remember to order through GOG to give maximum profit to the creators.

@wizz

I was hiliting your "it wasn't happening on its own" then supporting the statement. It won't happen on its own, even though we here are largely no longer anonymous to one another. I might not be known as anything other than Thenomain to a huge number of you, but Thenomain is a solid identity, as is Wizz.

That it's text is a huge part of why, but also as I mention in this comic-book game related thread, even when confronted about certain behaviors that we might call toxic, quite a few people stand up and are proud of them. This isn't just our hobby, this is the state of the world.

The only answer to people like this is moderation--to agree with you further. I was concerned when @Arkandel called this "censorship", but he seems to have backed down on that view. This is a pickle indeed and we are, indeed, human.