I haven’t really had a stake in all of this, and mostly I’ve been following along for the hot goss, but this is the thing that’s so wild to me. This specific behavior of “you aren’t allowed to call Ghost a bully, but Ghost can call you a bully” truly boggles the mind.

In any case, if people just stop posting about this on MSB, it’ll probably slowly die off. Ghost and Derp will just quietly seethe and read this forum until someone tries to spark some kind of discussion they think is really, actually quite clever, or until Ghost can’t stand screaming into the void by themselves and rehashes this with some disingenuous post about toxicity or positivity.

@icanbeyourmuse said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’ve already said my thoughts on the others. Except ghost. He just gives me the vibe he likes creating drama while pretending he isn’t out to do just that.

That’s almost certainly what he’s doing. He shows up on r/mud to do the same thing once in a while. He’s a dillweed.

@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

no

I think that there’s a place for games that have conflict between the PCs, but there’s a few things to be mindful of.

Rephrasing PvP as “CvC” and allowing for CvC - Character vs Character - conflict while not tolerating PvP (player vs player) content is a good first step (which is something that Silent Heaven does, to my understanding). But with that, you also need to make sure that the community is well maintained and managed - games with hard coded conflict/competition (especially in the RPI space) tend to draw a toxic crowd, and making sure to get ahead of that with a cultivated community goes a long way towards making sure CvC doesn’t become PvP.

Something else to be mindful of is a “talk shit, get hit” kind of system of CvC can exacerbate problems, as well. Typically, troublemakers do what they do for attention, whether it’s positive or negative attention, so when someone rolls up to a space that has codified conflict, it’s very easy to generate attention by just acting out. This tends to get solved in the “community cultivation” step of things, but it’s one of the things that can crop up with having open conflict between PCs.

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up

This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.

lmao i can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want you listen to you.

The common thread I see with people who support and use LLMs casually makes a whole lot of sense - they consistently aren’t willing to put in the work.

@Pavel said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

I think we’re all coming at this with a more ‘traditional’ MUSH mindset, when this seems (at least to me) more of a role-play-intensive MUD kind of environ, at least as it’s presented. So our cultural mores and expectations might be off.

My first impressions (having gone through Char-Gen/Tutorial, both of which are very good and like Jumpscare said probably very good indicators as to whether or not Silent Heaven will be a good fit for someone) is that it sits somewhere between RPI and MUSH (maybe more of a MOO, idk, all of the labels get a bit weird and sometimes I think the MU community relies on them too heavily).

It’s live, real time RP, with some crunch, but progression isn’t gated behind repetitive skill-based activities the way it generally would be in the RPIs and RP-enforced MUDs I’ve played in the past. I think the front page of the website says “RPI-Lite” and I think that’s a good way to put it.

My gut feel from wandering the grid a bit and reading helpfiles/interacting with the code a bit is that the systems Jumpscare has in place do a great job of telegraphing the theme and setting of the game.

@Cobalt said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I just can’t even…

I’m more MUSH adjacent than a MUSH player. I mostly like to just be kept apprised of problematic actors that might wander into adjacent places (MUDs, MOOs, etc.), so I don’t really have a lot of stake in any of this. I followed over to BMD because I see value in those aforementioned things, and keeping my finger on the pulse, and didn’t really like the writing on the wall on MSB.

But from a pretty unbiased place (aside from being biased against the draconian nonsense that went down, but whatevs), what it looks like happened is Macha got mad that she got called out, and decided to stir up trouble on the other board (just like she stirred up all the drama over on MSB) to try to obfuscate the situation and discredit you.

Maybe that isn’t what happened, and maybe there IS something else going on, but I’m of the opinion that: if that’s true, it will eventually be outed, because to me it’s MUCH more plausible that a problematic player is obfuscating things than a game dev is obfuscating things to the degree that they would shut down their entire game (and that’s a WHOLE lot of tracks to cover, compared to one problematic player trying to flip the narrative).

Hence all of the mental gymnastics they’re going through to try to justify that major decision.

If you don’t feel comfortable or safe living in the US and you’re lucky enough to have a parent (or possibly grandparent) that migrated here from another country - look up their country of origin, and see if they have Citizenship By Descent Laws. I was born in the US, but because my mom was born in Germany (and was a German citizen when I was born), I was able to get a German passport.

Obviously this won’t help EVERYONE out - but for the folks that are unaware that it is an option to them, it might be useful.

@Tributary said in City of Glass - Discussion:

@Apos said in City of Glass - Discussion:

I’m feeling a little slighted, tbh.
I’m still pretty put off by this whole thing tonight.

I… had to check again to see what I’d posted because for a moment I thought you were actually quoting him.

You may recall that I put in my original post that an old mu friend of mine (from Ithir) messaged me on Discord saying that her boyfriend had been banned from CoG and that she was puzzled because none of the behavior he attributed to me was part of her experience with me (like 5 years ago!).

Here’s what he told me:

Shamash — Today at 18:10
fucking gross
I actually feel, like, vaguely violated.
This is new.

Shamash — Today at 18:13
I told a player on that game I didn’t want our PCs to continue seeing one another because said PC was also seeing other men. I was not rude. I didn’t slut-shame. I literally just said “I wish you the best, but it’s not my vibe, I’m genuinely sorry if it upsets you.”
I got banned for “bad vibes”.
I was punished, by what I must now assume is a staff alt, for telling them no to a relationship

Shamash — Today at 18:15
I could get a ban for bad behavior. But damn, this is just gross

Shamash — Today at 20:00
It’s just so angering. The idea I was punished for not giving someone what they want.
Like they were entitled to me pursuing them IC.
ugh. Hour later and it’s still rubbing me wrong. Like grease on my skin.

(Timestamps hers. Also, girl, find another man. This one is a lying manipulative sack of shit.)

someone using the name Shamash (shamash4264) got banned from the r/mud discord for being a dick within like a week or less of joining (he was also a raging, callous fascist) - dunno if it’s the same one, but the name struck me as memorable!

The common thread I see with people who support and use LLMs casually makes a whole lot of sense - they consistently aren’t willing to put in the work.

@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

no

@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I wonder if anyone still cares about The Magicians.

I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game. There’s nothing wrong with this, it just isn’t really what the Magicians is about at the end of the day, and I tend to think that most of the most important themes just don’t translate very well to what most people want out of an RP game.

I also think that there probably needs to be room for (if not a focus on) interpersonal conflicts within the characters of the player-base, which requires both a very mature/responsible p-base and a well curated and moderated community with very little tolerance for people that are taking advantage of the social-conflict heavy nature of the setting. Which is probably why…

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time

The MU attempts have largely been unsuccessful. People, it turns out, don’t tend to want to play in an ironic, “magic actually can’t fix your problems you have to deal with your shit” game that’s high in drama and social conflict. And many of of the people that do end up kind of sucking (or being willing to put up with people who suck, because they have limited options for this particular scope of RP).

@kalakh said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@NotSanni said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

@Kestrel said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

One side is accidentally doing Nazi salutes twice

And the other side suddenly cares now that it’s not their side’s cause du jour doing it

I’m stressed. I’m concerned.

lol “accidentally”

Look, sometimes you just caught up in the moment and invade Poland.

sometimes one does a lil nazi salute with one’s whole chest, by accident. many such cases. a lil uh oh whoopsy.

@Kestrel said in Unspeakables: The Politics Thread 2024:

One side is accidentally doing Nazi salutes twice

And the other side suddenly cares now that it’s not their side’s cause du jour doing it

I’m stressed. I’m concerned.

lol “accidentally”

@Meg Very unfortunate I started the process for myself back in Spring, and both my brother and my aunt dragged their feet. Only the recent election results have been sufficient to light a fire under my brother, at least, with regards to getting this done.

if nothing else, maybe it would help to try to sell it to your mom as being able to more freely travel Europe?? that’s the only reason my aunt got kind of interested, when I brought it up to her most recently.

If you don’t feel comfortable or safe living in the US and you’re lucky enough to have a parent (or possibly grandparent) that migrated here from another country - look up their country of origin, and see if they have Citizenship By Descent Laws. I was born in the US, but because my mom was born in Germany (and was a German citizen when I was born), I was able to get a German passport.

Obviously this won’t help EVERYONE out - but for the folks that are unaware that it is an option to them, it might be useful.

I’m not sure about RL information or not but my understanding is that there’s (at least) one staffer that’s been leaking things to player cliques, and the ARM staff have been trying to figure out who. No one came forward, so they made the decision to shutter the game. The only CONFIRMED leaks I’ve seen myself have been related to their back end storytelling documents, so players getting access to information they wouldn’t otherwise have access to, that was pertinent to the plot. I’ve heard that sensitive player information was shared, but not given any specifics. Lots of hearsay, and lots of REAL angry ARM players that might be muddying the waters with conspiratorial thinking.

I don’t play, myself. But as someone that plays in the MUD space side of RP games traditionally, I like to be apprised of nonsense from certain spaces - one of the reasons I’m here, in case some new predatory nonsense pops back up!

My less good reason (both for watching ARM and being in this space): my absolute guilty pleasure is other people’s drama that doesn’t impact me, it’s like my version of a reality TV/trash TV fix.

So when ARM drama began to really explode onto r/mud last year, I started checking out the arm official boards (the “GDB”) and the “shadow boards” that are run by a group of disgruntled people that range the gamut from “serious problems to levy” and “angry, sweaty grognard”.

Watching both of those spaces, I think the truth is that the ARM community is just poisoned beyond a point where it can be healed, from 20(?) or more years of just… Unhealthy game design and poor community management.

Like, the staff there? Probably pretty crummy overall. But the actual playerbase is also just absolutely a burning garbage pile - very similar to the vibes of Haven RPG, on a much smaller scale.

I am not, at all, surprised that the game runners decided they didn’t wanna deal with it anymore.

WOW super belated at this point maybe, but I remember Cel from Ravencroft I played Charly.

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:

dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there

I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.

nah i found the “zine” they’re publishing, including the zine’s social media presence on the fediverse (and one of the two main contributors to the zine’s accounts/handles).

there’s a reason they weren’t loud and proud with the fact that they publish IDDQD Magazine and instead did a soft sell (probably trying to find likeminded people here to DM them to grift for money).