Posts made by Thenomain

Earlier this week I went to my first In-n-Out Burger. I quite enjoyed it. Coming from the city that brought you White Castle and Wendy's, it was a nice change.

Sigh.

On HM, we Changelings wouldn't wait for things to happen. I understand that people think that "plot" is a definable thing, but stop it. Stop thinking like that. Seriously, stop it. Everyone who thinks like that, stop. To those who lament the lack of plot, please stop mis-attributing the problem. A lot of people don't need permission to act, but have been whipped by staff out of trying.

Un-learn this. Become responsible active participants. Stop thinking about plots.

@Mr.-Pedantic said:

Hey, I was never a thread-spammer.

I also offer delusions to myself. For instance, my little explosions were always for reasonable, well-founded reasons. HR still thinks he's funny and insightful, for some reason.

If this place is designed to move away from the negativity, then I guess I'll honor that.

Designed to, no. Ended up being, more like. I think a lot of us were tired of Wora, even when we were defending it.

What Happened to WORA.

So far this board is more about discussion and less about trolling, Ped. It's up to @Glitch and @EmmahSue if you want to spam threads trying to derail them, but I'm so very tired of that I have given up on trying to resurrect WORA's database even for archival reasons. This is just one man's opinions, though. The Mud Pit is "meant to be Wora", so I guess get your social manipulation on?

THE BLACK WATCHMEN

The [World's] First Permanent Alternate Reality Game

sip

If it's done by the people who did some of The Secret World ARGs, it's probably going to be worth participating.

So one of the things we have on Eldritch is "Player Experience". This is our nod to people who help the game by running scenes, the award that they get some XP for participating but the extra award is that they get to spend it on any character that they play. It should be a lot easier than watching people transferring XP from PC to PC, and calculating how many, and etc. etc.

So we set up an Alts Registration System. ARS is mostly a way to verify that one alt belongs to another and is entirely optional. In small part it helps staff check alt limits, but it's mostly meant for players to use:

xp/convert, the system that converts Player Experience earned from running scenes to Normal Experience, which is the raw pool each character uses to buy nearly everything.

I can't say it was easier to set up than a way to regulate converting XP from one alt to another, but it's our way. I hope that it gets good use.

After 2 failed attempts, I figured out what Witcher was expecting. I'm going to try and stick through it.

Grumble.

@Jeshin said:

Have tutorial/newbie friendly chargens ever been explored as a means to increase new player retention?

Depends on the game system being used and the level of expertise of the coder. AetherMux rolled their own RPG system and it was simple and straightforward and very easy to create a character. WoD, as said above, exists in micro rulesets across a bajillion books that are, let's not kid ourselves, copyrighted by people also in this hobby and used without permission. If you don't know the ruleset, then it's not really up to the Mush to help you out.

So the question is too vague, because the answer to has it ever been explored? Yes, yes, a million times yet. Recently? Well, let's see what kind of Mushes we have recently. WoD, D&D, and systemless. I don't think there's a lot of opportunity for it.

ICly, everyone is 'unfindable' except when they're within visual range.

That hardly prevents stalkers.

I want to expand a little:

@Thenomain said:

[The Unfindable flag] is, again, a tool in your arsenal, not a solution.

So the other side of this argument is that Unfindable reduces the chances for role-play to happen. I don't entirely agree that this is so, and I don't entirely agree that the lack of the Unfindable flag will be a panacea for role-playing. Code on a game should be focused mainly on facilitating the role-play, so this is an interesting situation for me to ponder.

What we can do is have it both ways. Hotspots can be drawn out without revealing who is there, or even though softcode allow a 'findable lock' to allow your friends constant access to where you be at, or even everyone if you want. The popular friends code '+watch' does something like this already.

The Unfindable flag is not going anywhere, and nor should it. It does its job and it does it very well, but it's a hammer when more finesse from code is being requested.

It's kind of amazing that we've been doing this long enough that more finesse from server obfuscation code is in hot demand.

@Arkandel
I knew this, and played straight-man to draw out the different uses the Unfindable flag has. It has its uses, stalkers and otherwise, and therefore there will be no throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

A Full-Featered Character Approval System

From the Explanation:

Characters tend to go through a number of various states, from completely new to dead. 
This part of the character generation system keeps track of that.

Here is the formatted GitHub code for it, ready to be thrown into Muxify

Here is the help file: http://eldritch.mechanipus.com/w/index.php/Help:Chargen_2

This can be translated to any Mux with four spare user-defined flags. It would be trivial to change the code from 'cg/<status>' to 'app/<status>'.

I think this is pretty fucking cool code to have, and I finally think it's done. Please share.

@Misadventure said:

Code solves my social problems.

You're using the tool of code in a way that aids you. This is why it's there.

@Arkandel said:

Here's the thing... what we are conceivably trying to do here is have code to protect people from stalkers.

We are?

Oh, then Unfindable is a bullshit nonsense solution. I concede HR's use of it, mind, but it is, again, a tool in your arsenal, not a solution. There is only one solution for stalkers: Banning them from the game.

Man, I was having an entirely different conversation. My face is red.

@tragedyjones said:

Let the Changeling Arguments continue:http://theonyxpath.com/changeling-the-lost-second-edition-elementals/

No complaints here. Oh, wait:

with wings

We'll correct this in post.

@Sammi, that's Vera.

@Gingerlily said:

In a private place in order to try to keep people from figuring out who you are having secret political meetings with, yes.

I would rather let everyone hide out than ruin one genuine role-play experience. Staff (and code) is meant to facilitate role-play, and having to run around on-grid to obfuscate the OOC abuses of being able to locate all people all the time is, in my book, not worth it. Then again, if you read my book you can see that I don't entirely disagree with you either.

My book is in another castle thread, the one this thread came from.

@Coin said:

And all my neat pants will fit me again.

You are such a girl.

@Coin said:

To be fair, I think the solution here is to conflate systems and see where it leads, which is partly what we're doing on Eldritch. The +dir and +hangouts code is essentially the same code.

The point of Where is to find where people are.
The point of Hangouts is to find the hot spots.
The point of Directory is to show what's available.

This is why on Eldritch, the same "also 4 people are unfindable here" code is in place for Where as well as Hangouts. (n.b., I just discovered that Eldritch's Where is not respecting Unfindable. Well shit.)

Ignoring that oops, protecting or ignoring the Unfindable flag is a code consideration no matter how you want to address it. The location commands must account for it if you're using it, which is par for the course.

--

I prefer having the Unfindable flag as a way to help enforce theme and setting.

@Ganymede said:

I've been gaming as long as TNP.

I never understood why people wanted the Unfindable flag unless they wanted to hide from a player that was harassing them. And if that's the case, the proper method to address this is to go staff. And if they don't do shit, you're playing on the wrong game.

I've been gaming as long as both of you, and I can see reason why. I provided an example. I figure disabling all uses of Unfindable just isn't worth the headache.

@Rook said:

I never understood why a simple +IGNORE-like command made you unfindable to people whom you don't want stalking you. Maybe another level could hide you from simple WHO, +WHO, +WHERE, +HANGOUTS when they run them.

I'm with Ganymede (and thus kind of with Sponge) on this one: Working with issues that interfere with the facilitation of your enjoyment of the game is Staff's duty. It certainly isn't code's. Code makes for a very poor social control system. It can be done, but only when done right.

I have seen one good use for the unfindable flag: Rooms. People, not just a few people nor just troublemakers, will use the meta information of who's with whom for political gain. I see that you are off grid with the Sherriff, and you said you support me 110% against him, I may have the final bit of evidence that you are lying to me. I can act on this without reproach because who is going to be able to prove that I'm abusing OOC information?

Answer: Nobody,

This happens even with the unfindable flag, but I've not seen any evidence that the epidemic of this from the 90s has stopped. People are going to be people, and in this case I think it's one of those times.

@Thisnameistaken said:

The problem is that people don't use it.

This makes any concept difficult to justify putting time into. In fact, if a lot of people don't engage a concept, I would start to question the concept. I'm not a populist, mind you, but when coding for a Mu* you're mainly coding engagement tools. If you think a concept is worth it but it's not being used, find a different way to engage people. i.e., in this case I don't think it's the problem is in the people who don't use it.

@TNP said:

@ThatOneDude Though just looking at +where and seeing who's IC can do the same thing. With one caveat: STOP idling in public IC rooms people!

Note to self: Bring over Reach's idle-move code. It will pick on people who are not OOC and not 'home'.