Posts made by Thenomain

I was having this very interesting discussion with a bunch of Mudders on the Evennia Discord about if Mush is a culture or a codebase.

I kept trying to explain that Mush is not a culture.

So.

Here we are.

@Tempest said in General Video Game Thread:

Any chance Borderlands 3 isn’t going to suck?

I know one thing that won't suck.

@faraday said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

I was resistant to coding it into Ares because I worried that the "OMG you mean staff can dig into the database and read my pages!?!?!" hysteria would drive people away from playing on Ares games.

Didn't we once have a...discussion about how staff can access all that information anyway, so worrying about this kind of thing is pointless? (edit: Because you can't stop staff even if you wanted to.)

For the record to the world: This is why I'm for Soapbox and places like Soapbox and disagreeing with each other. If we settled, nothing would ever improve.

@Cobaltasaurus said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

It was things like "don't huggle-snuggle people on public channel, unless you know they want it. respect people's OOC physical boundaries"

This was the element I forgot, yes. (Half mentioned in "respect others and expect to be respected".) And I was quoting the behavior policy.

"Don't make staff care" is a pretty damn good policy for games with responsible staff. There's no policy that will help a game with irresponsible staff.

I didn't want to mention the "no rape" policy because I didn't want this thread to become a discussion of details. You can usually tell who to toss by their general behavior, even over specific situations.

@Ghost said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

If you need someone to help word "be good to each other" policies/mission statements, I'm down to help.

Just ping @Apos to give his top, mm, three to five things people should do or not do. Or one. I have confidence he could get it down into one.

Possibly "Be good to each other."

On Dark Water, it was:

• Act like an adult.
• Treat others like adults.
• Respect others and expect to be respected.

I believe there was something about taking an adult situations out of public places if asked by another player, because this came up way too many times.

99% of the players respected all of this. At least in public. Sometimes they were disrespectful of staff, but since @Cobaltasaurus is nicer than she needs to be, almost nobody got thrown off the game for it.

@Prototart said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

how can you even sit there & imply that "let's make a version of mu in a minute that works" isnt a viable solution to "the actual reasons normal people refuse altogether to mu or drive them off after a short time are entirely due to a culture of acceptance of horrible behavior & mediocrity" w a straight face

Because you have to be extremely careful when you try to make a technical solution solve social issues.

What an Insta-Mush does is to reduce your overhead to get started running and/or playing. What it doesn't do by default is make staff better or make players better. Maybe it helps in reducing the emotional investment in the game and therefore staff might be less likely to lash out to players. I'd give you that.

I know that @faraday has tried to design Ares with some things that lead to certain social behavior, either freedom of it or steering it a certain direction. I've certainly made code decisions thinking, "How do people want this code to work and how do I see people abusing it." It's a balancing act, but I don't expect most of my code to solve situations of bad behavior. I try to make staff's job as easy as possible, even in these situations.

At least that's what I see @Ghost saying. If I've misread your point, ignore the above as pertaining to you, tho I'm pretty resolute in my core thesis: Getting code to solve social issues is hard to do.

@Auspice said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This doesn't, however, disagree with his premise that 'tech is not the answer to getting new blood.'

Then I'll say it:

Tech is part of the answer to getting new blood.

Responsible staffing is part of the answer to keeping it.

Along with responsible staffing, here is a short list of things I have observed to keep people playing, not all of which are needed and some may repeat or even counteract each other:

Interested staff, interesting events, support of player creativity, supported setting, supported theme, whatever you—the reader—personally think you'd like to play with other people about.

Pick your mix. Add whatever you'd like.

I can summarize what @Ghost said as the player saying, "This is more trouble than it's worth, and I'm showing myself the door."

@Ganymede said in Fringe/Weird RPGs:

@Killer-Klown

I liked B&B. I also liked Wabbit Wampage.

Although not really a fringe game, I adore Earthdawn.

Some day I will be able to get through any printing without feeling like the layout artist wants to stab my eyes out with the text.

Back on target. Back on target!

@Ganymede said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

@Auspice said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

He needs to tighten up.

I am so gay for that quality of animation.

@Sockmonkey said in Good TV:

@The-Sands said in Good TV:

I will give one 'quibble' to Carnival Row, they introduce a sort of steampunk aesthetic early on and it runs through the series in the background but then never really seems to do anything beyond being window dressing.

I know this is really old but ...

It's that exactly what steampunk is? All appearance, no function.

(Could not find the first comic without the second.)

@Auspice said in First Through the Gate Syndrome:

Why are people afraid to be the first pose in an event?

I will be blunt: I have never, not once, in probably as long as we both have been around, seen an event not start right out of the gate.

I’ve seen people ask if someone wants to go first, but it comes across to me as politeness.

I’ve seen people go back and forth with “what do you want to do” / “I dunno, what do you want to do”, but that’s not fear of going first, that’s just...normal writer’s block.

I never set because I’m terrible at setting, and I will throw kudos to people who can do that thing I somehow have no knack for.

But not wanting to start? This is a new one on me.

@Tinuviel said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

Are we seriously debating the idea that there are assholes everywhere?

Well everywhere you are.

.

.

.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

@Ganymede said in MU*, Youth, and LGBT+ Identity:

I'm responding to the suggestion that a person cannot write about a particular minority's experiences because one is not part of it, which I think is implicit in the advice you received.

That wasn't my take-away. Writing about any person should imply or at least be informed by their history and culture.

That one shouldn't write about an identity I disagree with in general, but believe it's much harder. I can play a gay man, but I don't have the knowledge (either through education or experience) about Being Gay.

So it's probably easier to write about a person than the identity, making the advice good for rule-of-thumb, but yeah, it's probably a lot more nuanced once you scratch the surface.

@Admiral said in Getting Young Blood Into MU*'ing:

This community has been talking about 'the new code hotness' for as long as I've been a part of it.

If by “the community” you mean “Bane and Canink”, sure. You know, people who are no longer here and never offered up code to solve any problems they identified, and rarely offered up as much as an idea for a solution.

In the meantime: Rhost. I don’t know when @Ashen-Shugar went from “The most secure mush codebase or I will eat your soul” to “Kitchen sink? Why stop there?”, but there are a lot of problems that Rhost solves.

I mean it’s still mushcode, but can execute from the command line now too. So...yeah.

And the new code toys never solve the problems.

Yeah, I’m with @Tat, here; we are only now trying new things, and I’m not sure what problems you’re thinking about because besides “Telnet Is Bad LOL”, I don’t think anyone ever agreed with anyone else what those problems were.

@Joyeuse ...

I think the only time I saw problems with anyone’s sexual identity have been when they were flagrant about it being about their sexuality. I believe this was less about their sexual identity and more that they were pushing their agenda harshly on bystanders.

So only jerks being jerks.

I haven’t seen a clique for a while, in the sense of a clique shutting people out for being new or different. There are a lot of opinionated people around here, but we are a bunch of nerds after all.

Well, most of us are.

At least some of us.

Well, I am.

@Auspice

You mean like a default After-Effects filter?

Mind you, they had me at "Bojack Horseman". Hopefully the producers are as savvy as the creators and it'll just get better as they find their feet.

Telltale Game's The Wolf Among Us is on sale on Steam.

Get it before you can't anymore.

@mietze said in RL Anger:

"it is okay to show nazi symbols and be a holocaust denier because, you know, WWII was fought to preserve free speech!"

Here, for your community facebook group:

@Apos

Your definition is approachable and even-handed. Thanks.