MU Soapbox

Thenomain

MUSHers only tolerate it because that's what we're used to.

Except spawns. Ask any ten Mushers if they would use a client without spawns again and I'd put good money down that 8 of the 10 would threaten to chew your arm off for the suggestion. Maybe 7.

Seriously, good money. $5.

We only tolerated it because it's all we had.

@Sparks was a hero because she gave us something new, something more modern, based on her experience with Trillium.

A lot of clients are still catching up.

Thenomain

@faraday

But you had to make sure that this was part of your development. Compare this to, e.g., adding a command to Mux.

Just because nobody else has to do it once it’s done doesn’t mean it’s not development, nor a spike. It just means that it only needs to be done once, which is just good design.

But if I add a command to the game, I should also develop the web interface for it.

Development time increases.

If I want it to look good and not ass (which is where I started, if you follow my comments back), it’s going to need more design work.

Development spike.

This is all I was talking about. This is all. No hidden agenda. No trickery. Just evidence that doing this shit gets harder, not easier, if we want to compete with Web 2.0/3.0 design style.

Even after mentioning this twice.

That.

Was.

All.

—

Edit: What @Lotherio and @Ashen-Shugar said more calmly.

Thenomain

@coin

Or in other words: Fuck the “guilty” part; these are just pleasures.

For instance, I actually liked the Super Mario Brothers movie. I know that nobody else on the planet did, and I know that if I saw it again I would cringe so hard that I’d invert myself, but fuck it.

Thenomain

@faraday said in A new platform?:

If folks are going to re-design mail, BBS, finger/profile, repose and whatnot just for the hell of it

Who said anything about re-coding anything for the hell of it? I was talking about layout and design, a keystone of the Web 2.0/3.0 I was talking about.

What were you talking about?

Thenomain

@faraday said in A new platform?:

If the bulk of the web portal and basic systems are already built

Giving us even more to re-design to bring the hobby into last decade.

Either way, development times are going to spike. I'm not saying that we will have time from leaving an antiquated and honestly kind of horrible scripting language, but since there are only a few of us doing the bulk of the coding for multiple games via code packages, I still think the development spike is something to be very aware of.

Thenomain

@rizbunz said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

@Thenomain I get that. I guess what I meant was if you can't find fun with the general cliques, you have to find your own tribe in these types of games.

In all types of games, I think. The only game I've personally ever played that I could fall into anyone's group was City of Heroes (and as an extension, City of Villains). I rarely had anyone get judgy at me, except for those times where people would add speed to my super-speed character and I absolutely could not control aggroing the next group because I hit the "forward" key for a millisecond too long and launched me into the future.

It squares people off, and while conflict should be understood and accepted, it kinda grinds gears.

The downside of playing almost exclusively WoD games online is that I have a very broad understanding of a very narrow topic. For instance, because oWoD's core gameplay is antagonistic, people tended to play characters antagonistically. Games attempted solutions to this that caused even more friction.

Haunted Memories, then The Reach, both started with the ideology: Fuck it, we're going to just go with the flow, but in the decades-long history of this genre, this is very new and recent.

What this doesn't analyze is the same phenomenon in different genres.

I'm not going to say that Superhero games haven't traditionally had the same friction, but that they have it for different reasons.

That Firan had the same friction for largely the same reason as WoD games was interesting and makes me wonder if we WoD games are holding onto vestiges of the 90s.

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@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

@thenomain Save us, Theno! You are the coder we need, not the one we deserve!

My Python-fu sucks, so I'm not sure anyone needs me right now. I, too, am a vestige of the 90s.

Thenomain

@rizbunz said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

It all depends on the fun YOU make for yourself.

To borrow a phrase from @surreality, it depends.

Sometimes the fun you make for yourself is going to run counter to someone else's idea of fun.

Sorry, let me clarify that:

The fun you make for yourself is WILL run counter to someone else's idea of fun.

The drama we get is the friction between our actions and the actions or beliefs of others. Just as much as finding out what is fun for us, we also have to be accepting of the differences of others.

Not stupid, just accepting.

Thenomain

@lotherio

You know what I think might help?

Leave the text window the text window. Leave the most basic things there, in text. say, go, even page (tho maybe change it to \w for whisper).

It's our plus-commands that are the problem. I may be re-stating what you're getting on about, but I imagine how easy RP used to be in not only Muds, but in IRC and BBS. What separates Mudding/Mushing from Chatrooms? The depth of their systems.

A challenge would be to make the system not look like ass, as in...well, that screenshot.

Another challenge would be making the Mu* a UI-relevant platform, when keeping things code-relevant is difficult enough. We could absolutely hook HTML5/CSS3 into it, and probably fairly easily, but now you need someone to run the game, someone to code the game, and someone to UI the game. These can overlap, but we're adding to, not simplifying, the requirements for entry.

I would like this, but I fear its feasibility.

Thenomain

@thatonedude

To note:

Beast is not done. It is done enough, but the Kinship Nightmares weren't touched because their conditions were very, very frustrating and I didn't work out the best way to limit these. (The answer is to limit all Kinship Nightmares and let the staff work it out, but I don't like this option.)
Promethean is not done, mostly because I ran out of energy. I really do like this game line, but I think it suffered some of the similar issues I had with coding Demon: Too many contextual stats. (edit: Yup, there they are. Refinements. Sigh.)
Hurt Locker is not quite complete, but I really want it to be. Its mostly-complete status was implemented on @SunnyJ 's Mage game. You know, that one. That one we all know. That one.

I'm sometimes amused by my commentary. "New Old VtM Castes". Like "instant classic" it only makes sense when you ignore pure logic for whatever the human brain does.

--

I've gotten in mild trouble with my bosses over time for assuming pure logic when things were stated, and not marketing logic which is a "pay attention to the spirit of the topic" logic. Meh.

Thenomain

@coin

What I've learned from this is you like poorly reviewed movies, because fuck the man for telling you what to like.

I've also put How to Talk to Girls At Parties on my watch-list, and my listen-list because there's a Gaiman-read version of this. He reads his own work beautifully. Let me tell you how moved I was by his reading of Snow Glass Apples. Answer: Very.

Thenomain

Something to note:

When all of this was being developed, the idea of 100%ing Metroid Prime was pretty common.

We had less to do with our spare time and more time to do it.

I'm sure this has been brought up before, but doing things better for the people who are used to the simplicity and feedback of Web 2.0/3.0 and social media (tho I still don't know what's simple about Facebook; I think it's more a black hole than anything) with the tools we have at hand is why Ares and Evennia are even a thing.

And even then, catching up to the ability of hyper-focused tools in our app-centric computer experience is going to to be rough going regardless.

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What I'm saying is: Go team.

Thenomain

@rizbunz

I enjoyed Paris:FdM and that New York City one. They were just goofy, therefore fun. CrackMUX before the staff got Srs Bznz.

Really, a lot of these games were fun before the players got Srs Bznz.

I had fun on Haunted Memories in spite of staff, and that our TLs let the sphere pretty much run itself, which was amazing for the players and fostered an environment where the Good Players were allowed to make things up with mostly a thumbs-up, and I know a Good Player because they mostly do things that involved the sphere, adding to it, not absorbing and therefore subtracting from it.

There were plenty of OOC complaints/reactions/fits. I was one of the problem children, sure, but I was handled well by the other players, which allowed the sphere to continue on. Acting like an adult and expecting others to act like adults is the best counter I've ever seen to this.

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The point of oWoD as written was to be silly. Oh I know that they wrote it with grimdarque in mind, but doing silly things for grimdarque reasons is practically part of grimdarque's MO. Taking it too seriously is usually there too, but you look at Warhammer 40k and go, "Being self-aware works too."

In my very first tabletop game of Vampire, my character with help of another worked out that we could ghoul about 15 hamsters a night, so we did this and let them loose in a park in a rival city just for the laughs.

And maybe that's why we don't have many oWoD games anymore: "Just for the laughs" does not seem the direction games or gamers want to go with their urban horror.

Not that you'd know from OOC channel chatter. I wonder if people would jump all over "just for the laughs" if given the chance, to get it out of their system.

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edit tl;dr:

oWoD was stronger on the tongue-in-cheek. People didn't like each other's tongue-in-cheek so things got more serious. I think more tongue-in-cheek, as long as it's thematic, would be a very good move.

Thenomain

I try to put as much name completion (tab completion without tabs) as I can. Every little thing helps.

Thenomain

@lithium said in Cheap or Free Games!:

@thenomain Ahh danke, already have all that then I am on an ancient uplink atm, if it has pictures or the like, talking freeze everything forever.

I call mine "Spectrum".

Grumble.

Thenomain

@lithium

From the link:

The Shadowrun Returns Deluxe product contains the following content:

Shadowrun Returns base game

Shadowrun Returns Anthology DLC

Shadowrun Returns Soundtrack DLC

Shadowrun Returns Soundtrack
From the composers of the much-loved Shadowrun SEGA and SNES games, the Shadowrun Returns Soundtrack will pay homage to the classics but with a modern twist.

Shadowrun Returns Anthology
Explore the world of Shadowrun Returns even more with an illustrated PDF of short stories written for the game and edited by Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun.

Thenomain

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

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

This whole thing reeks of kickbacks and corruption and idiots who want a shiny toy rather than the sensible solution to help the city.

And I think your city is trying to steal Columbus' soccer team.

So, yeah, fuck Austin.

No, the owner is trying to ditch Columbus and wants to go anywhere that he can finally make a profit.

That even the city of Columbus is threatening lawsuit against this guy if he packs up in the middle of the night, Art Modell style, is strong indication how organized the fans are.

The corporations in Columbus couldn’t care less. Nationwide funded our relatively shitty NHL franchise and I don’t know who funded our relatively shitty minor-league baseball stadium downtown, but The Crew’s fans have heart in the face of their relatively constant relatively shitty situations.

We’re not Browns Fans level, but we are motivated.

Go Crew.