Grid vs Web Scenes
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@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
’ve wondered recently how much of this is changing player expectations from the people who were always on the platform 5+ years ago, when the first Ares games like Spirit Lake and Gray Harbor were around, and how much is players from more time-shifted mediums like Discord coming into Ares because it has more QOL features.
Are we getting more players from other mediums though? I’ve only heard of a handful here and there, but I admittedly don’t have hard numbers.
I really wonder how much of it is just shifting player preferences. Other folks in other threads have talked about the MU population getting older, having more responsibilities, less time, etc. And in a world where Netflix designs TV shows around distracted-viewing, is it really that surprising that fewer people want to devote an uninterrupted 4-hour block of time out of their evening to pose every 5 minutes?
I don’t want live RP to go away. I still far prefer it. But even I don’t have time for it any more.
@Pacha said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more.
Ares lets you choose.
You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.
You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.
If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.
While that may be paltry consolation to those of us with different preferences, the good news is that server doesn’t care how you play. It just may take more effort to find your people. Make a game where pickup RP is encouraged, or where staff runs only live events. And even if it’s not your game, you can still lead by example, organize, and try to find folks who want to play that way too.
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@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.
You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.
If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.
TEZ, THIS IS OFF TOPIC, fork me if you want.
I’m not positive this is a conscious choice people are making as much as it might be influenced by some of the game design of Ares and the web portal in particular. The Ares game I played on (just one, so grain of salt) was probably 80% ‘live’ scenes, and I don’t know that I ever saw someone start a scene from the grid a single time. It wasn’t even clear to me as a new player that you could. What was clear was that using the scene system rather than just walking into a room and posing at each other had huge benefits and you should use it.
Even knowing that you could start a scene from the grid, again, I never saw anyone do it and I never did it even though I’d just come from a game where that was the only way of RPing. Why? Because it is just so much easier to click ‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client. You don’t have to wander the grid like a fool peering in shop windows for the right room. You can just select from the list.
Following on to this, the default privacy setting when setting up a scene in this manner is prepopulated for you as private, and therefore I wonder how many people are even thinking about whether this scene could be open or not as they’re going through the motions to get something started if they did not predetermine that they wanted it to be open before they even got to that screen. On a grid-only game, this is not something you have to think about. If you go to a public place and start RPing, it’s an open scene. If you start a scene on Ares’ webportal, unless you deliberately and intentionally set out to have an open scene, the UI assumes you meant it to be private, and people tend to follow the path of least resistance.
Conversely, if you start a scene from the grid without passing additional arguments, no matter where you are, the default is open.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
@Trashcan I think what is meant by starting a scene from the grid is that you can be on a MUSH client and scene/start in any room on the grid.
Theoretically, if connected to a client, you COULD go into a room on the grid and pose into the void. But without starting a scene, no one would know you have a scene there, and it would require pretty random chance for someone else to also be connected to a client and wander into your space on the grid at the same time.
I wonder if it would make a difference if scenes started from the web defaulted to open. I don’t know. I think when Ares games initially became a thing, open scenes were a lot more prevalent. But again, that also was a time where ‘live’ or traditionally-paced scenes were more of a thing. Now-a-days, I rarely see open scenes ever, and I usually don’t join them when I do see them because I cannot keep up with a live pace.
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@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I think what is meant by starting a scene from the grid is that you can be on a MUSH client and scene/start in any room on the grid.
That is what I’m referring to, correct. I never saw it happen.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
@Trashcan I’m not sure how you would be able to “see” it happening because there’s no indication one way or another if a scene was started from the grid or started from the web. I will say that in my very early Ares days, I would start scenes from the grid all the time.
It is only recently (when Ares got rid of their web portal thing) that I stopped logging into the game, because I don’t have a MUSH client. So now I just use the buttons on the website. But I know a lot of people that still log into Ares using a MUSH client and start scenes from the grid.
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@Trashcan said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client.
The power of web UI cannot be overstated. If you want to start a game and you want it to have a forum, working mail, working pages, play screen, events, scene system, modular profile fields, a wiki, literally all of the QoL features that apparently all of these other platforms fail to package into the core code… you go to Ares. It is a game in a box and there is a one click install mode.
I realize there are still tinymux islands out there, traditional moos, etc, but I gather most of this forum is or has been on at least one Ares game. Who would win, a stack of text syntax you have to dig up from the help file to fill out a bunch of fields, or one webpage input field boy.
I’ve run 3 ares games. I set up a grid, people go through the grid to get a feel for it, then permanently retreat to web scene system. I cannot remember the last time I started a scene on the grid. What would happen on Shattered is that I’d log into the client to do a combat scene from the grid because it was easier than working with the combat UI (I think? I never looked into the combat UI too hard), but then I’d also have the web scene open too just in case I missed a pose. And then I’d also have the combat UI open anyway! Three interfaces!
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So, at least on the client, Ares does tell you whether the scene was started on the grid or from the web (which is always a temp room).
You can also easily check how many scenes were a temp room or not, where the grid is always not a temp room. On Shattered, the ratio of temp rooms vs not (i.e. started on the grid) was 4204 to 83.
It’s not never but that’s 50:1.
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@Trashcan Oh shit! I stand corrected, that’s a pretty cool metric.
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@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:
TEZ, THIS IS OFF TOPIC, fork me if you want.
fork u
(from https://brandmu.day/topic/643/rp-safari-pacing-styles/80)
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T Tez referenced this topic
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@Yam said in Grid vs Web Scenes:
I realize there are still tinymux islands out there, traditional moos, etc, but I gather most of this forum is or has been on at least one Ares game.
This is YET ANOTHER OFF-TOPIC POST in a thread that was forked already, but a lot of this is ease of actually finding a game. I used to troll MudConnector for games but that site is imo basically unusable now and no replacement has stuck. They certainly exist, I have some of them bookmarked, but they’re neither particularly user-friendly or complete. Ares and Evennia has complete and easy-to-view game listings, so that’s what people know about, at least this audience.
I honestly have no idea how I’d even go about finding a new MUSH/MUX at this point apart from hollering into the wilderness either here or on Reddit’s r/mud section with mixed results.
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@Trashcan I used to do it all the time specifically so that I could avoid having to come up with the required location name. Physically go to place, scene/start. Sometimes, I would start the client, go to the place, scene/start, then RP the whole scene on the portal via web.
Otherwise I would do whole scene and try to post and realize I didn’t have a location set and it wouldn’t let me because apparently knowing where you are in rp is critically important.
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao said in Grid vs Web Scenes:
because apparently knowing where you are in rp is critically important.
this is why I came up with “Somewhere out there” and “Textlandia” as locations because I am, in fact, out there somewhere.
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@sao I used to do this, too. If it helps you any…
You can also do this by going to the /locations directory on the game, finding the room, and clicking “Start Scene” from there.
It still marks them as Temp Rooms, but it imports location name and room description into the scene for you. Which I like.
The only flaw I’ve found is that, if you then change the location using the portal, it keeps the original room desc in the scene info.
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@KarmaBum Yes! That is the only way I ever found anywhere on Shattered while I existed there, because at that time I was no longer using a client much for a variety of reasons.
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Oh good, other people use the ‘Locations’ menu to start scenes, whenever I say this is almost exclusively how I do it people are surprised.
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@KarmaBum said in Grid vs Web Scenes:
The only flaw I’ve found is that, if you then change the location using the portal, it keeps the original room desc in the scene info.
I thought this for a long time before discovering that instead of going to ‘Edit Scene’ and changing the value for Location, there is an honest-to-god ‘Change Location’ BUTTON under the ‘Play’ menu.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
@Trashcan I’ll be damned.
Thank you!!!
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@Trashcan mind blown
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Ah the annual rediscovery of the change location button
