@faraday
In my experience, unfortunately, you'll get more complaints and bad feelings about "exclusion" if a private event is posted publicly where everyone can see, than you will if who can see it is locked.
Which sucks and is another player-behavior problems, rather than a tool problem, but it does make me hesitant to post smaller-scale stuff on a public events calendar.
MUs are social games.
This is a basic and obvious statement, but I feel like the failure of players to grasp this, or to really internalize it, is at the heart of a lot of non-fun in this hobby. You cannot one-shot this shit. You cannot do it in a corner by yourself. At least, not in any long-term or with any amount of depth. You 'win' these games by telling the best story, and sometimes that means ceding the stage to someone else or taking a loss that dramatically rich down-the-line. These are not the first instincts of most people and we aren't good at it, so we fail to 'win' a lot of the time. Gotta keep in mind what the win is and keep trying, though. You attain the happy medium when you find GMs and RP partners who trade off the load and let everyone share in winning/the best story. This is the ideal I feel like we should all strive for. It's hard some days. Gotta try and be better, though, because that's the only way this works.
@apos
I don't personally think the idea of games as permanent and unending is positive for a lot of stories. I feel like the average game has a shelf life of about two or three years best case and staff at least should be realistic about that and structure accordingly. I would welcome staff being upfront but idk if what I want out of a game is what other players want (I hate a solid 50% of my fellow players on a given day so).
@caryatid said in Forgiveness in Mushing:
It isn’t that I don’t forgive. I just don’t forget, and if I see the behaviour that made me red flag them in the first place continue then you can bet I’ll avoid the hell out of them. I can politely interact with people who’ve pissed me off. But if they keep on? I’m sure as hell not going to indulge or enable them, even through something as simple as proximity.
It's the forgetting people seem to want a lot of the time, which I'll admit does bother me. I like to think I give second chances pretty regularly, but I'm not going to induce amnesia about f'd up stuff someone has done and, if they do it again, not going to have time for that. Like others have said, I believe people can change, but change is hard and takes a lot of internal work.
@mietze said in Learning how to apply appropriate boundaries:
- you do not need to give your same time commitment to people you dislike as you do with people you do like, and in fact if you try to do this you are probably going to end up being needlessly mean or impatient with them because nobody hides their genuine dislike of someone as well as they think they do
I feel like this is big. It's OK to just not enjoy dealing with someone, make your peace with that internally, and go your own way. I've bent my RP circles a little bit just to be a happier person OOC. This is generally far more pleasant for both people involved, since there is no way dealing with a person that dislikes you is anymore fun than dealing with someone you dislike.
I'd like to think a staffer can tell the difference between a personal conflict where two players should just leave each other alone and actual harassment. If they can't, the game has other problems.
Thing is, 9 times out of 10, the person who's being a creeper to you has been a creeper to other people before and will again. A lot of what they do with paging and ooc'ing weirdly at randos is a process of feeling out targets.
I have rarely felt like I can't deal with people who're making me uncomfortable. I'm pretty good at not responding or telling them to stop. If it rises to a level that skeeves me I'd sure as hell report them, though. Even if I deal with it on a personal level That Guy (of indeterminate gender) has maybe just moved on elsewhere. There's usually a pattern with these types and reports that may not result in a ban at least establish that.
@Pacha said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:
On both of those games (much more so on SoI) there was a policy of strongly discouraging nonheterosexual characters, on the basis that they did not 'fit' within the settings. This basically took the form of a staff member pulling you aside before approving you and making it clear that if you were discovered to be gay IC, it was basically open season for you to be subjected to any level of discrimination (up to and including your character being outright murdered) and that no complaints about it would be entertained.
As you might imagine, this had a chilling effect on anyone rolling up anyone that was nonheterosexual and of the few attempts that I did see (including the only gender non-conforming character I ever saw rolled up there) most ended up getting brutally tortured and murdered almost as soon as they were discovered. I will say that I generally played on 'team evil' there, so I am not sure if this was less pronounced in the more heroic areas of the game, but it was made clear that it was discouraged and opened you up to any level of IC discrimination wherever you played.
Holy fuck this shit. These are umm not people I'd want to spend my free time with, is all I can say. I'm glad MUSHing's been a comparatively better experience, insofar as most experiences sound better. comparatively.
@mietze said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:
I find the people who obsessively check the who/where and keep tabs on alts and comment to/about those alts while activity is going on to be extremely creepy and offputting. I do not think this is the intention but it comes across to me as extremely controlling. It is an instant turnoff to being involved in RP with that player, and I have instantly ended scenes where that person pinged my alt that had no association with them as if to check up on me. If you want me to avoid you, "playfully" paging my alts with questions about my activity or commenting about where my alts are located or if they are on while I am scening with you is the #1 way for me to dump your ass as a RP partner immediately.
Seriously this shit is NOT OK and it's extremely controlling and makes me NOPE away from players pretty fast, whatever the intent is.
I'm very curious what the game would even look like with dominion implemented at this point, given that the growth that's taken place outside it would never be comparable to something more gated with more actual checks on armies and lands and stuff. Maybe it's not even desirable if the current elevations are what people want. Idk. It's one more mini-game I have zero interest in but so are lots of things and that's ok.
I don't get anything out of an OOC room that I don't get out of Public/general Chat channels, and on games that have them I generally hide in the quiet room even when I'm not idle, so I'm not spammed.
@thesuntsar said in MU Things I Love:
I saw my alt's name mentioned in a scene today and I thought the
was over but it's not. But that's kind of nice in a way. BITTERSWEET.
It's lovely in that, it really feels like they were small parts of a bigger story, and that story's continuing. It's so rare to get this out of the hobby, because so many characters just kinda fade away or get cut off when the game they were on ceases to exist. I've only gotten real closure that feels like ending a chapter in a good book a few times, and I'm incredibly grateful for @Darinelle for giving me one of those that still reverberates now and again.
@SG said:
Has anyone played on a Mush with successful campaigns?
On Battlestar Cerberus,we sure as hell tried.
Did we succeed? I think for a long time yes, though the players would be able to say better than I can, and ultimately the game's plot heaviness is what made it unsustainable, when the headwiz went to law school and we ran into problems with what we'd envisioned as a major turning point arc on Gemenon (it was both over-plotted and under-plotted, somehow, and suddenly it was time to do it and none of us who were around could 'fix' it on the fly).
This is our game timeline, and I think it basically held together through the big Pegasus Rip-Off arc, which was about a year and a half into things. So not too bad. http://battlestarcerberus.wikidot.com/timeline
I don't know if I'd staff like that again. It was a stupid amount of work. But it was, by far, the most fun I'd ever had and the most invested I'd ever been in a position, and that was because we all cared about the story so much.
@Lotherio said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
It is forcing a 'you were not at your post'. Player cannot be on 24/7, or even every day of the week. Their char would be, this is making a weird cross over of OOC/IC.
Yeah, this. Half the reason people burn out on these games is the implied, inflated obligation they sometimes feel like.
Also, on the more code-heavy games I've played, there was usually coded resolution that staff could apply (or NPC commands players could access) if a particular PC in a particular role wasn't online at the exact hour they were needed. Because the two PC doctors that exist on a game usually aren't, sensibly, the only two doctors that exist in the entire city.
@Auspice said in There's Nothing to Do Here:
There has definitely been an increase over the last few years, in my experience, of people expecting Staff to entertain them constantly.
I've seen people leave games, citing that there's 'nothing to do,' when there's 1-2 Staff-run scenes a week and a few player-run +events beyond that.
Yeah, this is where I'm at. It's absolutely a shared responsibility, but there's been a shift in the last several years more toward 'entertain me, bitches!' that frustrates me. I think it's part of a wider trend in how people interact with the Internet and stuff like MMOs/mobile games, and for better or worse I don't see it changing. I think the best you can do it try to fight against this on a local level (encouraging player-run stuff and just generally doing shit as a player).
Sci-fi has always struck me as a genre that attracts a lot of system/gear-focused players. No shade, though it's frustrating as a player who gives no fucks about those things but likes sci-fi stories.
1.29
Rep is sitting at exactly 1,500 right now. The magic hour. Or something. It's probably a sign I should retire from posting to maintain the round number. But then I'd have to come up with other time-wasters, so, nah.
Which one are you most passionate about? That's going to need to be what carries a person through the giant PITA that is running a game.
I think The Magicians and The Expanse are both decent settings for a MU, depending on the execution, though as you say The Expanse is a better natural fit for FS3 (not that I think The Magicians is un-doable, mind, if you don't want to get terribly crunchy with the magic stuff).
My only concern about the original sci-fi pitch is the "akin to Firefly" bit, because when I think Firefly I think small/tight-knit crew of a single ship, which I don't think is really replicate-able in a public game (I'm someone who found the world-building of Firefly very wonky and stuck with it for the crew dynamics). Even a small one. It is all about execution, though, and I think Arx demonstrates that original themes can attract an audience if they're done right (and that it frees you from certain canon expectations and allows you do make whatever the f changes you please).
@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs.
This is why my eyes glaze over whenever people talk about how "the hobby is dying." There's TONS of text-based RP, it's just in places most of us don't interact/acknowledge on this board. Like, RPI MUDs aren't much different than MUSHes, but that's still a very different audience. Once you get into stuff like Dreamwidth journals or Tumblr or whatever...people be RPing. If every PennMUSH game imploded tomorrow, I could go find a place to text-based RP. I like MUSHes because of the immediacy they provide and the way they create a persistent, shared world, but I can imagine that being created another way.
How hard is it to be polite to someone without using their name?
I've honestly never felt the urge to call an employee at a store by their name on their tag. If anything, I think I'd feel awkward doing it. I just try to say 'Please' and 'Thank you' and not be a dick about what I'm looking for.
@meg
What bugged me about that particular mod action, is that people weren't attacking you because of your story. You'd made the decision to share it and it led to a few decent posts before @auspice came in (without using mod voice, which also bugged me, so I'm not even sure I can call it a 'mod action' or not). If that post was flagged, that was one thing, but I did not perceive any sign it had been. If it was just a personal response...that should be separated from moderation in some kind of obvious way.