Re: Dies Irae
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Yeah, staff churn & burn seems high on the list of reasons games die. Even if we eliminate staff churn caused by toxic behavior, I still believe it’s high on the list. I’ve seen plenty of games with no major toxic issues die to burnout.
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@MisterBoring I heard along the grapevine that there was some behind the scenes troubles too. What exactly it was, I do not know. But, at least a small handful of staff left because of it.
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@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:
It was fun while it lasted but seemed to suffer from revolving door of staff and then piling multiple spheres on the replacement staff.
From my experience there was a lot of power grabbing and control issues with nothing to show for it. A whole lot of NOs from the sphere lead, then not a single scene ran or plot introduced for the sphere.
The game had sky high potential and almost all of it was ultimately wasted. Vamp sphere seemed to have the best go of it towards the end, but it faded out pretty quickly.
Personally it was crushing to see this game fade out so quickly. It could have been really fun.
2/10 - Would NOT recommend running a game without a head staff. The idea of that is nice but in practice, without the right people there (as opposed to: anyone who is who is willing to do the job), it blows chunks a lot - and instead of one strong lead (which is rare enough) you need one for every sphere. Pipe dream.
@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:
@MisterBoring I heard along the grapevine that there was some behind the scenes troubles too. What exactly it was, I do not know. But, at least a small handful of staff left because of it.
I don’t think there was anything too major - at least from what I observed. I just think it was normal stuff and people weren’t invested in the game enough to want to deal with it. It never really got off the ground. So they either quit or quiet quit. On staff and player side. And the game just died.
Of course, there could also have been major drama that wasn’t made public to players or other staff.
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@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:
without the right people there (as opposed to: anyone who is who is willing to do the job)
This is also the reason that the large WoD LARP clubs are dying. They keep flooding their staff with people whose only reason to take the job is to prevent the game from closing, and then those people end up burning out in 3-6 months at best.
@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:
Of course, there could also have been major drama that wasn’t made public to players or other staff.
I vaguely remember a WOD MU in the late 2000s that just shut off randomly and later people found out that it was because the head staff and the Vampire lead met for dinner and drinks after they found out they lived close to each other, and ended up getting into a fist fight by the end of the night.
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@Warma-Sheen said in Re: Dies Irae:
Of course, there could also have been major drama that wasn’t made public to players or other staff.
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@somasatori while I never played there past a flirtation with Alpha, I will say, I still remain thoroughly impressed with the pioneering you did with Evennia. It’s incredible how much you taught yourself, and what you pulled off.
"She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something."
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park -
@Muse said in Re: Dies Irae:
@somasatori while I never played there past a flirtation with Alpha, I will say, I still remain thoroughly impressed with the pioneering you did with Evennia. It’s incredible how much you taught yourself, and what you pulled off.
I think the first big death knell or sharp decline of the game was when @somasatori left.
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@Muse said in Re: Dies Irae:
@somasatori while I never played there past a flirtation with Alpha, I will say, I still remain thoroughly impressed with the pioneering you did with Evennia. It’s incredible how much you taught yourself, and what you pulled off.
From what I’ve heard other people say, and based on what was said behind my back, all I did was boil a bunch of water and churn toxic sludge out of an AI data center.
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The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.
Staff was as stressed out about it as anyone, but the issues were (apparently) far reaching and difficult to determine due to the hallucinations of AI code which had been applied to the game. The fatigue of trying to deal with this, and being unable to fix this, surely burned out staff and players alike.
I don’t have the facts or knowledge to say who applied this AI code to the game or why, or if that is really what happened. I do know things were very, very broken though, and that the message given to staff and players was that AI code was the reason.
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@Ashkuri This is actually fascinating to me if true. I want to hear more.
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@Tez I can’t speak of the AI part, especially since @somasatori is saying/implying they didn’t use AI code… but the rest is true.
More than a few scenes had to be postponed/cancelled due to the issues Ashkuri stated. There were work arounds to the issues but there was never a real solution.
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I explicitly want to avoid any value judging around the AI issue. If there was AI code, ZERO JUDGMENT ZONE. I just want to understand what happened and work through it without it becoming JUDGMENT ZONE on the AI part of it. I’m begging you, mystery person who holds the knowledge. I think it would be fascinating to understand how this actually unfolded in our hobby.
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I too am curious about this issue, because I’ve been eyeballing Evennia for whenever I decide I have time to try running a game, and want to know if there’s something to learn that I can apply to the technical side of a potential future game.
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@catzilla said in Re: Dies Irae:
@Tez I can’t speak of the AI part, especially since @somasatori is saying/implying they didn’t use AI code… but the rest is true.
I definitely did a lot, like a LOT in the beginning, because my exposure to Python was me screwing around with a Cyberpunk RED project so when Diablerie I was trying to scramble with the tools I had available. By the end of it, I was only using Claude to consult, but the mark had been made as it were.
@Ashkuri said in Re: Dies Irae:
People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.
This was due to a bug introduced into the game when I set up the hangouts and ooc/ic thing. In Evennia there are three levels of abstraction on how characters work on a game: Session -> Account -> Object. I didn’t know this when I initially set up the hangouts/ooc/ic auto-travel stuff, but basically what was occurring was that it was moving the character object to the location, which left the account “object” (or meta object?) in the previous location. This is why sometimes you would see OOC chatter and character movement in the OOC room when you were on the grid.
In addition, it wasn’t telling the session id that the object and account were occupying a new room dbref, so that’s where you would get the issue with people not being able to see each other’s poses in the same room. There was effectively a timestamp error on what could be seen. You might be on a session that hasn’t theoretically started yet, especially if you lost connection or had frequently long idle times.
I ended up figuring this out after I left DI and applied the fix to my local copy.
Edit: Also, I really feel no need to defend myself here. Dies Irae was not my project. Scylla set up two pseudo-headstaff through which she could launder her reputation. I was not chosen as a coder when I started, I was brought on to do Mage.
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@somasatori I’ve run into some struggles with the Evennia layers myself as I dick around with it. I’m sympathetic to the issue.
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@Tez said in Re: Dies Irae:
@somasatori I’ve run into some struggles with the Evennia layers myself as I dick around with it. I’m sympathetic to the issue.
It’s a bit of a mess. Channels are also a little difficult. According to the Evennia dev discord, they’re aware of the problem and told me that channels were notably kind of strung together and needed some review.
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Re: AI Code
So you’re telling me not to trust this ChatGPT Ruby code for the L5R idea? Shock! Horror!
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in Re: Dies Irae:
Re: AI Code
So you’re telling me not to trust this ChatGPT Ruby code for the L5R idea? Shock! Horror!
Here’s my suggestion: if you use AI to do your code, use it to help you learn how to code in the language of your choice., So if you’re coding up Ruby and YAML files using ChatGPT (I would not suggest ChatGPT for coding, but use Claude or Github Copilot), ask it to explain to you why it’s doing what it’s doing.
You may still get some hallucinations, but it will help you understand what sort of variables, functions, and how to write it yourself without relying on AI. As you go along, AI can also be useful if you get exasperated with an issue and say “what am I missing here?” Asking it to solely create, develop, and manage a codebase is not an effective use of the software.
Finally, you want to make sure it’s in an IDE and not something you just interface with on whatever website version you choose.
