What has changed?

[Polk]

One thing that is changing about the world is that most people on the Internet are not using a traditional desktop computer. They are using phones and tablets.

MUSHes are adapting to this with web clients and web interfaces.

At Liberation I worked very hard to make sure that the website was mobile-friendly in its core design, and that the player wiki could be as well, including the character page template I supplied.

A web client is planned eventually.

RhostMUSH got full websockets support in the engine, as have other old school MUSHes.

Adapt or die. We are choosing to adapt.

One key pool of new players we need to draw from are the Discord RPers who are re-inventing IRC and Forum RP.

[Roz]

@Arkandel said in What has changed?:

@Roz said in What has changed?:

I can’t really comment on this shift, tbh. I have pretty much always played games with a large amount of consent. I think it matters what level of consent vs nonconsent we’re talking about? Like, just more clarity/detail would be helpful here, because I think these words can mean a variety of different things, and most games are somewhere on a scale rather than one or the other.

I left it purposefully vague but since you asked, this is what I was referring to.

• Sexual themes. Back in the day “I’m just playing a sexual predator but I’m a NICE GUY” seems to have been a much more openly available choice.
• Games being more explicit about what and they’re looking in terms of PvP, ST runners being more frequently upfront about their plots’ themes, etc. Just a matter of being consciously considerate about it.
• There seem to be inroads and more inclusiveness in terms of race, sexual orientation or gender identity. Not allowing slurs even IC, for example.

Ah, yeah, none of those are things I would categorize into the “consent vs nonconsent” bucket when it comes to MUs, although in thinking about it, I can see how it could be looked at as a different category of the discussion.

I do agree that, over all, there has been a shift over the years along these lines.

[Third Eye]

@Polk said in What has changed?:

One thing that is changing about the world is that most people on the Internet are not using a traditional desktop computer. They are using phones and tablets.

For this reason, one of the things I’m surprised hasn’t changed is the relative usability of mobile clients. I can play an Ares game on my phone without much trouble but it’s not a mobile client, really, it’s just a webpage I can refresh in a mobile browser, so that feels a little different than something focused on phone or tablet players. The available clients themselves like Blowtorch and Mukluk have the same issues they did when I first started using them, it feels like.

[Polk]

@Third-Eye It’s weird. The mobile app-based clients are actually just dying off, rather than exploiting the growing user base.

I guess the big MUDs all getting their own dedicated web clients just killed the market.

[MisterBoring]

@Polk said in What has changed?:

I guess the big MUDs all getting their own dedicated web clients just killed the market.

I agree with this, and also want to point out that a lot of newer phones are blocking telnet in ways that even app developers can’t get around, so that’s probably caused some issues with continuing development of apps for mobile platforms as well.

[Arkandel]

@Polk You know what hasn’t changed and I’d think it would have by now?

There’s still no real alternative to ‘the Mudconnector’ of olde. Just an up-to-date web site that lists all active games (and periodically checks automagically to see if any are down, their ‘who’ lists, etc), and has some kind of categorized statistics on demand.

For example it’d be nice if we could run a query “modern fantasy games, order by number of average online players” and see what comes out.

[Polk]

@Arkandel It’d be nice if Grapevine would show more stats like the old mudstats did, yeah.

[Faraday]

@Third-Eye said in What has changed?:

I can play an Ares game on my phone without much trouble but it’s not a mobile client, really, it’s just a webpage I can refresh in a mobile browser, so that feels a little different than something focused on phone or tablet players.

Yeah I have these grand visions for an Ares mobile client, but it’s tough to balance the nifty widgets (that would make it better than the mobile telnet clients that have been around forever) with game-specific variations. Also I’m not a mobile developer, so… it’s all a ginormous learning curve. Someday maybe.

[Faraday]

@Arkandel said in What has changed?:

There’s still no real alternative to ‘the Mudconnector’ of olde. Just an up-to-date web site that lists all active games (and periodically checks automagically to see if any are down, their ‘who’ lists, etc), and has some kind of categorized statistics on demand.

AresCentral doesn’t have live queries like what you describe, but it does auto track game “up” status and show average connection data.

[Third Eye]

@Faraday
It’s definitely not a complaint, just an observation since sometimes the browser functionality when used on a phone gets talked about as if it were a mobile client. As it is Ares games are the only ones I’ve ever managed to RP on my phone in a way I remotely enjoy, so I’ll take it happily. Though I admire the fortitude of those who do most of their RP everywhere on their phone. I’m always surprised when someone says they do, but there seem to be a decent number of users like that out there.

[Prototart]

there definitely aren’t more superhero places than there were forever ago, when i first started playing there were like a dozen-plus and 4-5 with major player populations, now it seems like there are usually like 2 at a given time with more than maybe 20 unique logins and tbh i’d say the quality has dropped p dramatically

[SpaceKhomeini]

This post is deleted!

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Third-Eye

Le sigh, we’re still chained to the built-in limitations of Telnet (which as someone mentioned above, is helpfully being killed by security-minded folks to begin with). That and the fact that mobile devices OS’s just don’t have the same persistent connection ability that desktop ones do.

The only non-MU* application I ever seem to have for a Telnet client is troubleshooting server status/connectivity.

[Faraday]

@SpaceKhomeini It’s not really “telnet” that’s the limitation - most MUSHes communicate on a custom port, not standard telnet. Unless you’re trying to connect over a raw telnet terminal (whyyy??) instead of a regular MU client, you aren’t really going to be affected by the security changes.

The real issue with playing on mobile is the other thing you mentioned - that mobile OSes just aren’t designed for persistent connections. As soon as the phone goes to sleep, your connection drops. That’s never going to change, and even if we upgraded MUSH connections to the more secure SSH, it wouldn’t help. The “telnetesque” command-line interface will always have these limitations.

What will solve this is a mobile client that operates on push/pull rather than a persistent connection. That’s going to require server-side code changes to support, on top of someone making an actual mobile client that works that way.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Faraday Yeah I’ve had similar issues with using SSH apps in a pinch.
Shamefully I’ve used raw telnet before for, well, reasons. I’m not proud.

I’m gonna detour for a sec to give a tremendous shout-out to you for all that you’ve done making Ares a robust platform that I can actually play on a tablet OS (my preferred device for these things). The web portal has made this something of a joy again.

[farfalla]

@Arkandel It’s not exactly the same, doesn’t show average connections for example, but there’s Mustard.

[Testament]

I honestly don’t know if there’s been a shift towards the fantasy genre, honestly. At least , not to the point where it’s become more visible. Yes, there is Arx, which is by all accounts the largest fantasy mush out there(I say mush, not MUDs, as there are some massively huge fantasy MUDs out there), and a handful of smaller 10-20 person playerbase fantasy mushes that tend to go under the radar most of the time. Personally, I would like to see more original theme fantasy out there.

I do think the number of superogames has stayed pretty consistent over the years, as I could name a good number of them ten years ago, the number of games seems to of stayed relatively the same, only the name and synopsis appears to of changed.

[Pavel]

I’d definitely argue that, once again, we’re only a tiny corner of the hobby. What we see reflects what people here are interested in, not what exists. More people here are interested in Arx and superheroes than World of Darkness, so we see more of the former and less of the latter.

The popularity of the superhero genre in other media, especially with the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, may have had an impact on the number and longevity of superhero/comic book games, but we lack the data to really make that assessment outside of our own anecdotal experience.

[Testament]

It really does make one miss Mudconnector, because that was the best metric the hobby had for a long time.

[Third Eye]

@Pavel said in What has changed?:

I’d definitely argue that, once again, we’re only a tiny corner of the hobby. What we see reflects what people here are interested in, not what exists. More people here are interested in Arx and superheroes than World of Darkness, so we see more of the former and less of the latter.

Arx is to me an example of something that’s maybe not really new as just ‘new to regular discussion’ because - in addition to the players from RPIs and stuff it pulls in (and people who play because it’s a big game and those always have a gravitational pull) - I noticed anecdotally when I was active there that a lot of folks on it had played Firan and just kinda dropped out of the hobby after Firan, then came back when Arx became a thing. Which feels like in part another example of players who just don’t play much outside a particular genre (which makes sense, really, a lot of folks do).