Best posts made by Thenomain

@saosmash said in Reasons why you quit a game...:

I found it helpful writing out our guidelines if only because it helped ensure we were all on the same page.

@EmmahSue and Troy and I once wrote out our guidelines. It was late into the game but they were clear. They didn't help ensure anyone was on the same page because we never enforced them.

If you have rules, enforce them. Not draconically, but consistently enough that everyone else knows what to expect.

If you do something consistently enough, people will assume it's the rule. If you break the presumed rule for someone, you will come off as a bad staffer.

TinyMUX. It has the most I need and the player base I want to code for. I wish it had about, mm, three or so Penn/Rhost features, but that's about it.

Rhost players, Mux players, and Tiny players seem to be cut from the same cloth, but there's something about playing on Penn that rubs me the wrong way. I would follow Javalin into code nirvana, but playing on Penn is like wearing a horse-hair shirt inside-out. And the channel system. Holy crap, that channel system is worse than what we used to use for mail before @mail. (Myrddin's Firelizard Mail ring anyone's bell?)

Even stock TinyMUX is not my preferred system anymore, as @Chime has opened up hard-coded limitations and fixed the bugs that opening these limits revealed. (I would crash The Reach about once a week before she fell to my cute puppy dog eyes and fixed it.) I haven't looked into Rhost lately, but last time I tried to run a stat system as data-heavy as WoD, it looked at me like I was trying to solve world hunger in Perl.

I think I lost sight of the question. Er, yes, all of the above. USA! USA!

@aria

I refer to these as nerd honey traps. It's not as sweet, but it's sure to catch someone.

(edit: specifically "nerd honey traps", because as nerds we are super cereal in our desire to make sure the world is correct. Actually this reminds me of Um Actually: The game show where nerds correct nerds. It's formatted as a game show and it's actually pretty good. Good times.)

@aria

To paraphrase a different quote: Start the thread you want to see. I would bet you a dollar that we would get all the stories possible. Heck, keep that dollar; save up for the bottle and pass it around.

@Ashen-Shugar

Does the menu allow me to globally turn off the cutesy "Did you mean Help?" style error messages which, okay, I've always found demeaning. That's just me, mind you. Sometimes when I forget I'm logging into an Rhost that message set set me scrambling to remember what's a flag and what's a trigger and what knife at the dinner table is best to plunge into my eyeballs so I never had to see it again.

edit: That reminds me, what I want out of my Mu* is things to be more consistent. What's a flag on one game is a toggle on another? No. None of that. No more of that. What the hell is a "toggle" anyway? Oh, it's a preference? But on some games it's a flag? Quiddit.

And no, I didn't mean "allow players to turn off annoying help messages", but "menu-driven kill it dead with a pitchfork".

edit on edit: This is why I think Penn, tho having the older chat system, has the worse of the two between Penn and Mux. It involves the kind of laissez faire approach to systems that Mushes suffer from. It may be better featured, but I don't believe it to be better presented.

final edit: Which may be the source of my "hair shirt" feeling when dealing with Penn. Again, A+++ to Javelin and Faraday and so on, but I sometimes can't shake the feeling that there is an undercurrent of professional superiority from other Penn coders based on what appears to me to be nothing more than feature set. I dunno.

@insomniac7809:

It helps if you learn to translate Customer, and learn how to speak Anti-Salesman.

Speaking Salesman is like talking to a normal person, but that person expects you to do or say anything to convince them to do something they don't want to do.

Anti-Salesman is a way of speaking that counteracts this. My managers didn't care for it, but it worked for me. "Hey, s'up? What brings you in. Shoes? Well we have a lot of those. Which shoes?"

It also helps how to filter Customer back into a language that isn't one spoken by someone who expects you to do or say anything to convince them to do something they don't want to do.

"No questions." -> "I have a ton of questions."
"I don't want that." -> "Thanks for the recommendation but I have something else in mind."
"I have a quick question." -> "I am about to waste your time for half an hour."
"I have a stupid question." -> "I thought about this already and I'm stuck; please help."
"Just looking." -> "Keep an eye on me, because I could have a ton of questions I'm just not ready for them yet. I could also be just looking."

If I can make the suggestion, here's what worked for me as a follow-up:

Customer: Do you carry BearClaws?
Me: No, but we do have shearling footwear by <brand>, it has <brand feature> and we're running a sale--I can grab you a size to try."
Customer: "No, I was looking for BearClaws."

You: "What about BearClaws were you looking for?"
Customer: "I can't find anything else that fits my foot as well."
You: (knowing about BearClaws) Is it the arches?
Customer: Yeah, <rambling story about how when they were a kid they were frightened by a McDonald's and therefore his feet lost their Golden Arches>
You: Huh! Well maybe try these MonsterFeet boots on for size. They've got great arches for some people.

And if it doesn't work for them, then at least they tried.

This assumes you're on commission. If you're not on commission, it's super-busy, or you just don't want to deal with this person, then skip the advice. Making five-minute friends in a retail environment is not impossible. As a light introvert, it's I think it's kind of fun.

@gangofdolls

What is staffs policy on it?

It sounds like you hit an All Or Nothing game. That is, either the situation is bad enough to “fix” the situation, or it’s not worth fixing.

This is a horrible management style. Nobody needs a rule to say, “Yeah, I’ll talk to them about this, see what’s up.” And yet, because this is so often not the case that your typical scarred player is going to assume that staff is going to brush them off.

I don’t think this is enough to say nothing, though. It’s possible that staff will misunderstand, mock, cause problems, but if the worst that can happen is they ignore you then the worst in saying something is the stress coming from putting your trust out there and having it betrayed.

Don’t trust, but don’t avoid the problem. Give all staff one chance to do the right thing. Then I figure it’s okay to give up on them, tho I’ve tried to turn this around when I heard it on my watch.

This is just advice, to try and soften the blows of trying again, and again, and again, knowing that there is a bad pattern that needs to be reversed. I’ve been where you’ve been, again and again. There is a reason I prefer code to trying something new.

Staff need to try again, and again, and again too, starting with understanding the words being given to them, and trying to offer a reasonable response.

@Cobaltasaurus

I do, but I never give up a chance to see if you want to jump on a particular code-wagon.

Without the help files in front of me, I can think of a few things:

• escape() instead of secure(). Escape will comment out commas and similar. However, when you read the attribute, you will probably need to s( get( <blah> )) to turn it back into legible text.
• The attribute flag 'no_parse' (or possibly 'no_parse') on the $command attribute. This will mean that the system is reads the text as typed (tho space compression still happens). The danger here is that when you read it, you must use get() or v(). If you don't, you risk running the contents as the object, which could be pretty horrible. If this is what you want (it happens), you want to do it this way: [setq( x, get( <blah >))][eval( %#, s( %qx ))] <-- there may be better ways to do this.

If you're using my update to @Sammi's notes system, the latter half of the 'no_parse' method is kind of what I do, because showing a %r as a return is pretty darned important for notes. What I think I do is more like this:

&c.note [no_parse]: $note/add *:@check everything; @set target=attribute:[eval( %#, %0 )]

So this way, the note is stored already parsed, and I don't have to do the 'get() with wizard privs, but eval() as the player' trick. Nope, it's set in stone when it hits the attribute.

I haven't tested this to make sure I'm right, but I'm pretty sure that I am and this is the way I'd recommend it.

That reminds me:

Yoko Kanno.

I might not like everything she's done, but I know that she is so good that I will always recommend her.

Brus’ Five Pillars Of Good Staffing.

Sigh.

@skew said in Recc/Squee/Kudos Code?:

The general idea is to allow players to use a command to give kudos to their follow players. Unlike most of the other systems, I don't want this to translate to any sort of benefit (such as experience points or whatever). It should just be informational, and display on screen, and log.

I think this is pretty clear. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, people.

@zobi said in Good TV:

I adored Jem as a little girl. Fuck, I still do. I got the damn theme song stuck in my head the other day for no reason. will never grow up

That's totally outrageous.

@kanye-qwest

Point. I’ll blame other distractions and that it’s hard to come up with a more cogent reply on a tablet, which I also do too much.

Working as a professional, I see “professional behavior” as what you choose to do and how you choose to do it and after that it’s a cultural thing. The more we dig into this answer, the more we will probably quibble and tangent.

I’ve also played on many games in which the staff were not ethical, yet still had strong convictions and logical arguments that they were. For the sake of this discussion, I will not go on about Dark Metal, Firan or the like, but I think it’s important to note that staff ethics have never really made or broken a game.

And finally, my own personal edict: Understand and accept.

Understand that nobody is perfect. Understand your own limitations. Understand the words being said to you. Understand your own convictions. Understand that others might not share those convictions. If you don’t understand then there’s no way you can even begin to act ethically.

And accept the reality of yourself and others.

I should note that I haven’t come with a pithy way to add, “DO NOT be a Welcome Mat and DO NOT forget, Hell you don’t even have to forgive.” But you should sure as hell be accepting in this hobby, and all the messy imperfections that means in our post-political, sometimes-SJW, belief-heavy world.

@Mercutio

My long-haul is three years, but I also code for portability. Coding portability with SQL is not quite but close to as bad as coding portability for Mediawiki hooks. Nnnngh.

I've broken a game before, but it's entirely due to lbuf and nothing else. A smart selection of lattr() statements and organization of data and it can fit. That said, the game only broke because who wasn't me someone decided it was a great idea to list every single rote, book and home-made, from Mage in the stat lookup system instead of creating a different system for it.

@surreality

Here's your honorary Kids These Days pin. You are officially old.

@kanye-qwest said in Period Piece Face vs Modern Face:

@thenomain A. you're wrong

"No You" already? You're slipping.

B. Jason Momoa is a hard one.

Shave his dreads. Any (edit: West) African period piece. Seriously, you're not very good at this.

The child room has no access to the filter attribute (the attribute, not that it's a filter) on the parent. I'm not kidding and it's a design feature for security. Here's one of the few times I'm going to say: Use iter() to build your own inline filter.

@tnp said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@auspice said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Maybe we won. But was it really winning?

I'd call it a Pyrrhic victory at best.

We can make Pyrrhic pretty deviant, too.

@rebekahse

I agree with you. What's the point in wanting to play a period piece if you're not going to play a period piece?

But I have one note: Star Trek.

Utopia shouldn't mean boring, we're just not creative enough for them. Just like the people who think "Lawful Good" means "stick up their bum".

@Chime said:

Now if only we could find a good way to explain what this all means to the typical mush user...

"Zhu Li, do the thing!" (Korra humor.)

edit: Get the coders to go with it first. You know how we love to code in production.