Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Alzie
Hate to break it to you but if someone has been gone and unplayed for seven months there death has the exact same impact as a nameless npc no matter how important they may have been..

I don't think this is true. PCs who had pre-existing relationships with a PC who dies off-screen will generally RP about it, and take more active steps to investigate it if warranted, because there's more of a feeling of investment. Even if it's seven-months gone investment, at least that's kind of a person you can pretend to have some knowledge of. NPCs who die get much more sporadic attention, in my experience, even if the ST wants their death to be important to an ongoing plot and to affect people.

@Songtress said:

IDEA: a game called "StarDust". which is Fantasy-space esque ( so Dune/ Fading suns), but without being of those things directly. For me Dune had their 'awesome concentrated into a great set of novels, but makes it hard to game.

Based on the Neil Gaiman novel and movie of the same name?

(Don't get me wrong, I'd get a kick out of an actual "Stardust" MU*, but I'm only one of a dozen people who would and this is probably not the thing you actually wanted to do.)

@Ide said:

@Patty, in general it gives me the impression that someone studied all night for their certification in Business Process, fell asleep, woke up and opened a fantasy mu*. The 'rule of fun'. Idlenuking vanilla characters away for a month. The pages (and pages (and pages)) of generic fantasy mish-mash culture and history when the game has never had more than 35 average online (characters -- not uniques!).

I can't level a general criticism, apart from the 'We will take your character away after two months if they haven't had a scene we consider substantive and posted it on the wiki' as a posted policy. But the whole thing reads as very high-handed to me. "Business Process" is a better way to put it.

@BetterJudgment
The original group of staffers who were banned 4 months ago were the ones my friends told me were crazy people. Now that those people are gone, they submit that the game is better.

@Bargle

This part particularly, which applies to "All Characters," not just FC roles:

2 months of no logs or memoirs of substance on the wiki, but your character is still logging in = Written Warning

3 months of no logs or memoirs of substance on the wiki, but your character is still logging in = Your character will be @newpassworded and the character noted as "available" at staff's discretion. You must wait at least two months if you wish to re-apply for the character (if they haven't been claimed in that time), during which you must be active and contributing with another alt.

Like, that's the game's prerogative if they think that's how they want to run things, but it's my prerogative to find it off-putting. The aforementioned friends who play there did tell me this basically isn't enforced now, but I'm not sure if that's better or worse, since it's still a posted game rule.

Also, what does "of substance" mean?

I've got a couple friends who play on Eternal Crusade and have told me it's better now that several staffers who were (by their accounts) terrible have left. That said, I've never really been able to get past the way some of the Policies are worded on the wiki. Particularly the Activity stuff.

http://eternalcrusade.wikidot.com/activity

It's not even that I don't think I'd be able to meet this, I just find it very off-putting.

@AmishRakeFight said:

ETA: They want them anyway because there no matter how tedious and friendship pyre inducing; a title has a significance. It suggests you deserve the role even if you don't. We all want to feel like we're good enough at what we do in these games to warrant this kind of recognition. It's not solely about ego but that's a big part of it.

I think a large part of it is a way to denote "winning," in a games where "winning" is often a very ephemeral concept. When it's not straight-up inapplicable. I got a medal, therefore I Won. I got a higher level of status, therefore I Won. It's not a mentality that's compatible with cooperative RP, but it's hard to shake.

@Ganymede said:

@Tempest said:

The longer I play WoD MU*s, the happier I am that there are games where the political positions either don't exist, or just aren't open to PCs. Such a huge source of drama.

That's horseshit. I've seen the same bickering on BSG games.

Oh GOD yes. I spent way too much of my pretendy funtime life dealing with these fucks.

Any game with a hierarchy will have this, really. It becomes less an organizational tool, more a Shiny that it's very important for you to have. And for other people not to have, because it's less Shiny then. And yet, I do still think high-status/power PCs are very useful and very RP-energizing when they're done well. It's just hard, and it's apparently very easy to be a petty fuck.

The other incarnations were also meaner, to varying degrees, so I'm sure most people here have hated another person here at one time or another.

@Ganymede said:

I'm currently trying to adjust my diet, but I'll be honest: Im a gourmand. I like good, tasty food -- French, especially -- so I have to be very, very judicious. My other problem: I do like drinking.

I started exercising essentially just so I could continue drinking beer and occasionally having some pizza. I also feel a lot better so, bonus.

@JaySherman said:

The fallout effect was pretty much the entirety of many games I played on in the past, in which there were no STs, period, only players interacting with each other and letting whatever happened, happen. This was pre-wiki, pre-log-posting, pre-board-post-TPS-reports, in which the only way anyone knew what happened was if someone else ICly talked about it. The lack of OOC awareness of plot created much more RP, because scenes such as "report to the crime boss about the shooting down town" was absolutely necessary.

It's nice that this was fun for you, but it's not how things work the vast majority of the time in games where no information is available, particularly if you can't be around 24-7 and actually kinda like to know what's going on that you might involve yourself with.

It's largely cultural (like oh so many things. Nerds are entrenched, tribal creatures). Players played on a game that used Wikidot/Mediawiki and so got used to the Wikidot/Mediawiki syntax/quirks/positives/negatives, and so used it themselves when they started their own game. Much like codebases, chalking stuff like this up to anything but the comfort of the user who runs the website is probably just quibbling over really minor pluses/minuses.

I have no explanation for people who use Wikia, though.

@Shebakoby said:

I'm curious. If there were a significant portion of the Oregon population that had any sort of health care wait, wouldn't they contact the governor or their state representative and thus make him aware of the issue?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahem. Sorry. Maybe for someone who isn't American this isn't a laughable idea. Which is all I have to say about our health care system compared to the rest of the civilized world, really.

@Coin
Oh, I'm sure that's part of it. Though I feel like I see it with newer, younger players as well in ways I didn't used to. It (whatever it is) feels more cultural than anything I can measure in hours or Other Shit To Do. I don't know. It may well be just part of my continuing morph into Old Grump Who Yells at Clouds and growing hatred for The Children, which is always continuing apace.

What I've wondered about lately, probably more than I wonder about any MUSH-related thing, is if this is actually getting worse. I swear, five years ago it was not as hard as it is today to find people who do shit to play with, and I don't feel like it's strictly a matter of more activity/more games back in the day. Or maybe my rose-colored nostalgia glasses are just getting bigger. I don't know. It frustrates me more than anything else about this hobby.

I assumed it was partially what @Arkandel said, and also how characters who reappear after being "killed" are dealt with. Like, there's no RP around Bob's death ICly, since Bob just respawns.

@Jeshin
It's way less about comfort (dude, it's your website, it certainly doesn't offend my sensibilities) than it is about my suspicion that this is going to lead to a lot of long, repetitive conversations with every MUSH or MOO or MUD who might ask to be listed. I'm not worrying about MUSHes being wronged, I'm just betting this is going to get extremely silly and isn't as good a measure as you might've originally thought.

But it will get silly for you, not me, so that's OK.

All of this seems aimed at keeping the list of games on the site more limited than something like MUDConnector. Which is all well and good, I just think it's clearly more arbitrary and subjective than might have been intended, as it was seemingly written by players with more experience with RPI MUDs than anything else, and that's going to cause headaches for y'all going forward.

@TNP said:

Then forget the coded part. If that game qualifies for your list, then too should most non-consent Mushes.

From reading earlier in this thread, it's more the "automated systems" bit (the definition of which I find kind of fuzzy) that would keep a lot of MUSHes from being listed. Even in games with varying levels of consent, if your character dies in the story they are dead. The perma-death thing struck me as much more aimed at combat MUDs with continual respawning.

You see no ads if you have an account (any account anywhere, you don't need to be a member of a particular site) and are logged in. If you log out (and I guess don't have Adblock enabled, but idk since that's not a program I use) you'll see what it looks like. To me, this is not a horrific atrocity, but my definition of horrific differs from many of my fellow players, I have realized, so ymmv.