So with the wrap of the final big story of the game, Arx goes into a GMing hiatus as work begins on Arx 2. It’s always hard to estimate how long a project like that will take, but ideally will be able to begin testing with players later this year. It will be a very far time skip, with the setting significantly different and new characters, and also a new code base.

For this version of Arx, it means it’s now a low touch sandbox environment. The game will continue to stay up in a low touch environment without active staff support, so players are welcome to sandbox RP and pursue whatever stories they want, but they shouldn’t expect any kind of GM response. I’ll keep the game running, but I also won’t do any kind of deeply involved work to support it. Which means if anything ever catastrophically breaks, that’ll be it. So while I don’t plan to take it down anytime soon, I’d really encourage everyone to save anything they want to keep now- logs, events, action responses, etc.

With that in mind, if anyone wants access to an old character to retrieve stuff, I’m also fine with that, and I’ll give whoever access if they want to grab old RP records for nostalgia’s sake or pop into the sandbox.

All that said, I want to say thank you to everyone. When I started work on Arx over 8 years ago, I thought it would be a small game for a few friends. I never planned for it to become what it did, and it was the tremendous creative energy inside this community which made that happen. It was a privilege to create stories with so many truly gifted writers over the years, and there’s quite a bit I’m very proud of. I made tons of mistakes, and have a lot of regrets as well, and in the times I fell short- I’m really sorry, and I hope you’re all doing well, and still enjoying creating, whether in this hobby or elsewhere. But I think the end of Arx I couldn’t have asked for better, and I’ll never stop being impressed by how positive the environment was and how great the final stories were. So for you folks at the end, I’m very grateful.

Thanks again, everyone. I’ll be around on the sandbox- not a lot, since I’ll be busy working on the next version of the game. Look forward to seeing you in the future.

8 years is a long time for a MU. About a year and a half ago I stepped back from Arx for a lot of reasons, but one of the big ones was to get to coding so I could eventually relaunch Arx as the game I wanted it to be. The current Arx has always been completely unsustainable as it is designed and I have pretty firm ideas on how to address that and make a better game, but I just could never do that while head staffing the game full time, as it was basically impossible to find time to code while still doing everything else I needed to do.

The past year has been extremely difficult for staff, and I largely wasn’t there to help mitigate that. They’ve been facing increasing demands on their time and RL issues they can’t ignore, and the raw workload generated by the game has just gotten more and more daunting. So with that in mind, and knowing it can’t go on forever like it is, and that I can’t fix the underlying problems while running it, the game is going to go on hiatus pending a relaunch with new systems, story and characters.

But not just yet.

I decided I’m coming back as head staff and set aside the next few months, going until the end of January, in order to finish out the current story of the game. I’ll finish out the current big stories, and go very hard on this, bringing the same energy that I had when the game first launched. I feel there might be a few people who are interested in seeing how it all ends and what I have in mind, so I decided to post here for it. I honestly have no clue who, if anyone, would want to come back to take part in the story, and who currently on the game are still interested with an end date announced. But for my part, I’ll be okay with going all in on telling this story and finishing out the game whether it’s for a dozen players on or five hundred, and doesn’t really make that much of a difference to me.

For those that are interested, here’s more explicitly what I’ll be doing: all administrative requests and book keeping are going to be largely shunted aside unless it has direct RP/story relevance or acts as blocker to RP. Anyone that wants to return may, and anyone wanting to return to a long retired character for nostalgia’s sake probably can though I’ll decide case by case depending on their story. Since I’m going to be largely squelching busy work and actions are tied to the player rather than their characters, I’m raising the alt limit from playing two characters to three, mostly because I know there’s a bunch of people that have nostalgia for a small army of characters and I wanted to make it less difficult to choose for their final hurrah.

So yeah this might be a little insane of me rather than just continuing a BG3 playthrough and coding, but I’m very much looking forward to storytelling the finale of this version of Arx. The next couple weeks I’ll be doing all apps for anyone interested and then kick things into very high ear starting towards the end of October, and running at that until the end of January. Come Feb 1st, requests turn off, and that’ll be it for the current characters canonical story save for one shots I or others might GM to test systems. And then, a bit down the road, Arx relaunches as a very different game, which I am extremely excited about. But just not yet. Time to go all in on a story first.

Sinister BMD plot to destroy MSB called “sit back and let Derp talk” proceeding according to plan

Since I’ve been asked, let me give some stats to the fellow nerds out there that have been wondering just how much was going on under the hood for the past 8 years.

Arx had a few players. There were 2689 character bits created, played by 1889 unique player accounts. A few of these changed hands, as there were 5602 roster applications submitted.

Players liked exploring. There were 4933 clues to be discovered and 359 revelations. They did tend to share these, with 151,687 instances of clues shared or discovered, and 6363 instances of revelations discovered.

Players built a few things. Of the 156,997 unique objects in the database, 1858 were retainers, 4081 were places set down in rooms for tabletalk, 4000 were rooms created on grid, 1481 were temp rooms for PRPs, and of surviving crafted items, 37813 were player made clothing, 1083 were hairpins, 3876 were wearable bags, 3398 were weapons, 2457 were perfume, and 24919 were tchotchkes.

Players liked the goal system more than I expected. There were 4376 goals. 257 were classified as megalomanic, 39 of which were marked as successful. The least popular category was Heartbreaking Modest, with a mere 30 goals. 1 was marked as failed. It was to find true love, and buddy, let me tell you, that’s not an easy goal.

First impressions was more popular than I expected. There were 102,698 First Impressions written. They were overwhelmingly positive, and the amount of negative ones were far under a fraction of a percent.

Players like Played Bys. There were 14979 images uploaded to character galleries, and it being a roster game with people wanting clean slates, there were 6979 photos stored in the end.

I wrote 1277 global emits. At least 4 of these were mavs to the entire game. I will still be getting shit about it in Arx 2 without a doubt.

Players wrote 706 theories. It was fun to read these. Some were truly unhinged.

Game started with 41 crafting materials. We ended with 91. I am pretty sure we would have had many times that if I had agreed to every ‘I want to create a new material’ action or request. It was way more popular than I ever anticipated, and oh boy did it create a lot of work, with each recipe taking a long time to create. And on that note, started with around 200 crafting recipes and ended with 459. 27045 items were modeled, as fashion was a bit more popular than I expected.

But mostly, people just loved to RP and write. There were 7528 cal events run. For message objects in the game (board posts, journals and messengers), there were 1,519,201 created. Since mosts were not persistent, there were only 40,601 messengers still existing at the end and 90,562 journals. Of that, 37,072 journals were private black journals. Black journals, on average, were significantly longer than white journals. I’m not going to query a character count, but I’d say the average length was around 4 or 5 paragraphs.

I can look up more for the desperately curious but that’s it for now.

I do not believe that those left involved at MSB are capable of running a successful online forum about text based role playing games. Whether you think that bar is high or hilariously low, they don’t cross it.

My dog Braum certain he saved me from imminent death this morning at the hands of a deer.

@Narson said in Bannings:

It isn’t like BMD was set up by people on a jolly jape

Interrupt this only to request that this become the official clique name

I appreciate people running a game or forum or anything making a very earnest attempt at being fair minded, but yeah I wouldn’t lose sleep about this one.

Sure, I go through the ‘what if they are well meaning but being silly’ motions too, like yeah okay maybe someone they cared about was called creepy unfairly and they get really set off by it, but I don’t think that was likely. The DM thing didn’t sit right with me for another reason, because there’s two likely possibilities really:

Either:

• The person has a huge, longstanding grudge with lolRae and was able to immediately think of a thread from whenever ago on a whole different forum for why they disliked them. I can’t think of someone like that coming to another board but to pick a fight, and they aren’t gonna be someone that will make the forum a more fun place to be if that’s the case.

Or:

• They have never heard of lolRae before, and incredibly obsessively searched through MSB until they found something about them they thought made lolRae look bad and then shared it with a stranger. And while I think the term creepy might get thrown around more than it should, holy fuck that would actually be super creepy. Let’s just say no to super angry obsessive stalker types tyvm.

So sure maybe they were someone that’s normally chill and having a bad day but uh, yeah.

@mietze said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

A lot of the times (not always, but a lot) predators work in ways that circumvent formulaic approaches. In fact they /thrive/ in that environment because most of the time they operate on the gray area. Not breaking the letter of the law, but being extremely invasive and gross in the spirit of it.

I can’t remember if it was the very first banning but one dude at the very start asked Hellfrog to define ‘creepy’ for him in the context of ‘don’t be creepy’. Her instincts, then and now, are 1,000,000 times better than mine. She called it immediately.

Types of salt. Fuck you, lore questions

@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

And then, a bit later that day, I made a petty crack in reference to it:

<X-Men-OOC> \/// SNIKT Logan says, “I’m going to this UN thing. Any other X-Men want to pretend we’re part of the world and come with me?”
<X-Men-OOC> GreenPeace Lorna Dane says, “Sorry, I just got done fight Hydra outside. :(”
<X-Men-OOC> GreenPeace Lorna Dane says, “Not to get too political by talking about fighting nazis or anything”

Making a remark about it wasn’t really the best choice, I don’t mind owning that. It’s still really strange to me, though, for the reasons outlined by @Apos/the reason I tried to get at: Alex Jones is pretty objectively a shitty, fucked up person. It’s weird that just saying that much is controversial and considered political, because one would think that if someone is now legally proven to be an entertainer/liar who makes shit up to scare people into paying him money, acknowledging it ought to be fair game.

Yeah as Roz mentioned, snowballing is the good faith angle of why I think it’s still probably best practice to avoid talking about extremists and falling under the no politics rule.

The problem with hammering something that’s universally true to drive home why a partisan figure is bad, is that hitting very obvious extremists is used fairly or unfairly as an implicit criticism of anything that could be construed as politically sympathetic to it. And while it starts from a point that’s not controversial, it can very very quickly cross to a point that is pointedly offensive to people that really wouldn’t be inclined to defend an extremist to begin with. And frankly, MUs aren’t exactly great places to have calm, reasonable dialogues with strangers about that kind of thing.

Politics rules really aren’t about what is considered politics. They are about what is considered controversial politically, and what is likely to start a fight, and to avoid anything that’s going to start an argument or make someone feel unwelcome.

It is manifestly obvious that Alex Jones is a far right wing extremist and conspiracy theorist. I don’t think anyone could look at him saying Sandy Hook was funded by the Democratic Party and George Soros as a false flag operation and think that is in any way apolitical. But what I think feels off is that he’s so far outside the normal range that condemning him should not be considered controversial politically, anymore than claiming that really hateful ideologies are bad. It’s just too uncomfortable a move of the Overton Window.

@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity

okay okay but we’re talking about running a MU right, the bar is so low most people trip over it but I think any game runner would die of cringe if someone described them as a serious person because they ran an online roleplaying game well

I have complex feelings about it. Most of the games I play on my own are PVP games, and one of my earliest RP experiences developed organically from PVP on a game, and it was good and memorable enough it sold me on online RP to begin with. And then even before I started MUs, antagonistic tension in stories made for some of my favorite character dynamics of all time.

But man, for all the good times I’ve had personally in those dynamics going perfectly, I’ve seen them happen in just god awful ways to other people dozens of times more often.

For one thing, I think trying to achieve the balance that a competitive environment requires more often than not stands in tension with a strong narrative atmosphere. Fairness is always a good goal, but you can rapidly approach the point where unless everyone gets exactly equal storytelling, regardless of how excruciating they are to RP with and how miserable they are for GMs to attempt to entertain, the field gets unplayable in terms of balance. It can be extremely corrosive, and that’s why a lot of the games that allow PVP in close to unrestricted ways don’t really care about that kind of balance which creates enormous OOC toxicity and resentment.

In other words, competitive PVP needs a balanced field but in narrative games, but people are just not equally fun to RP with and not equally good storytellers.

And in more limited and restricted PVP, you are usually trying to avoid two separate poles and creating an enormous amount of effort in avoiding them. The first and most obvious, just bullying and people feeling they can push around characters weaker than they are without consequence, and without regard to whether the other player is having a good time. And the other, some character that really merits consequences, but it would be absolutely miserable for anyone to inflict it on them, so they are being incredibly obnoxious and a drag for everyone else to deal with, while trying to pressure other people into being the bad guy in a way that would be zero fun for them.

You can make a pvp game that addresses all those but the amount of time and effort involved is just hard to justify to me, when I could do other things that aren’t possible in a PVP environment that I think are generally better for story. Like you can make entirely collaborative systems without having to always worry about, ‘but what if the players are in opposition’. It skews the whole design, and you can’t ignore it.

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

and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the mu message board that i got mad.

@BeetPoet idk to me that reads more like confusion than being dishonest. When staff has to deal with something like that, especially people that do that usually have like some vpn so they have like 200 different ips you all are sorting through and just seeing a match here or there, it’s pretty easy to get mixed up. I could be wrong but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t just be losing track of the exact reasons.

From my own experiences, even a full on IP match isn’t necessarily right because there are some ip ranges for different providers that are cycled constantly so it’s easy to have an exact match that are entirely different people too, and that’s why some really bad actors are like impossible to ban out entirely without yeeting whole providers into the sun.

@Cobalt said in A Constructive Arx Thread:

Be a pretty cool podcast too

@Jumpscare said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

I think I was the third player of Lady Lilia Grimhall.

Good Ansel was a demon that was bound to Lilia and spent his days telling Lilia things only she could hear.

Playing Lilia and Ansel was basically like being Bea and Luci from Disenchantment.

Kinda delighted someone got that vibe from the secret. I don’t think most of the other Lilia’s cared for it tbh, which I found a bummer since of the couple dozen Secret Buddy secrets I wrote, this was one I particularly liked. Secret text:

"Lilia was alone in her room in the Granite Suite at the Grimhall Longhouse, waking up in the middle of the night from the sound of the door opening (which was unusual, as it was locked), and then the sound of Good Ansel the Pocket-Sized Dog scampering down the hall. In the middle of the night, with a surprising absence of guards, she remembers following down after the dog and the little thing had bolted all the way towards the Thrax estate, stopping at a park bench on the way and hopping up on it, barely visible in the overcast, moonless night sky. And then, as she approached, the little dog began to glow.

Not just glow, but burst into light, with a rainbow prism of colors streaming out and sparkles and glitter (glitter?), with little stars bursting around, as the dog floated in the air. Good Ansel spoke in a high pitched, child like voice suddenly yelling, “GREETINGS PRINCESS, YOU ARE VERY LUCKY AND HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO BECOME A MAGICAL GIRL, BLESSED BY THE GODS TO…” And then suddenly the light all stopped and the dog dropped to the bench, staring at her in shock. “Lilia? Shit! I was expecting one of the children of Thrax royal family to wander along. Damn it! UGH! Fuck, you saw all of that?” The tiny dog groaned and flopped over on its side in disgust, letting out a big sigh, “Well, cat’s out of the bag now I guess, this is awful. Wait, you’re with Aetheris right? I remember that! You’ve been getting notes from the Rex! This could still work, okay. We can do this!” The little dog paced back and forth, its brow furrowing in thought before it stopped and seemed to come to a decision.

“All right, so I don’t actually go by ‘Good Ansel’. What a stupid name. Arn wasn’t very creative. I’m Norm’argal’valthryx. Technically, I’m not a dog, but I’m an imp. A major imp! I run imp operations for Aetheris in Arx. You know, the whole convincing people talking animals are the best thing ever and becoming their familiars to guide them? That kind of shit.” The little dog shrugged its tiny shoulders, “Truth is, things are not great. Sure, the imps are still doing operations, like we have a cat thing going on throughout the city to gather primum, but Azazel just fled the city, and I think things are going to get bad. -Real- bad, and I have zero interest in being screwed over as everything comes crashing down.” The tiny dog looked up at her, “How about you and I make a deal? I keep the Aetheris imp actions on the down low, and we start making plans to not get killed when the Despite finally collapses? Which it absolutely will. The imps are all scared about it, but they are just going through the motions now. Only a matter of time before someone starts trying to hunt down talking animals and all.” The little dog looked at her speculatively, “You need a familiar? Yeah. You need a familiar. You can trust to old Norm with that. I’ll keep up this ruse, and as things get messy, we’ll figure out how to get through this together. And don’t worry, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’.”

There is, however, an ‘I’ in ‘imp’."

@Kestrel said in Song of Avaria:

In this regard it’s worlds apart for me from most MUDs. In fact I would say the game has made me reconsider some of my previously held beliefs that more mechanics = less RP. The mechanics exist to support rather than supplant RP, notably in the aforementioned emote system.

I’m pretty curious. I’ve been leaning into being more mechanically heavy in design to support RP, and it sounds like a different direction than I was planning on going but still the same philosophical bent.

@helvetica said in The Arx Secrets Thread:

Lumen had a killer demon tricked into being trapped in the body of a little bunny rabbit. He horribly devoured her enemies.

ngl I think people got a good example of my sense of humor when I added secrets like that, the actual secret text here for posterity:

"To be fair, Lumen hadn’t really expected the rabbit to talk to her.

It seemed such a mild thing to adopt the obvious run away pet rabbit. She had just received a locket as an anonymous gift, a beautiful if quite strange locket shaped in to resemble a rabbit, with a very old picture inside of a woman that bore a striking resemblence to Lumen herself. It was somewhere between charming and creepy, as anonymous gifts go, and perhaps it was a sign when she just found a rabbit in her room the night after she received the locket.

It had to be a runaway pet, spirited away by another Whisper, of course, and while dinner wasn’t out of the question, Lumen couldn’t say what quite had stayed her hand and allowed the fluffy floppy eared varmit to stay. The white, wide-eyed hare looked like an adorable snowball, gazing at her thoughtfully, and maybe it had just a tiny edge of an imploring edge to it. But she did tell him that he was permitted to stay.

And then on the thirteenth night of the month it spoke to her.

Baron Flopsarian the Annihilator of the White Legion, Viceroy of the Mirror Plains, Grand Vizier to the Archduke of the Silent Wastes, and sometimes called Flopsy the White Rabbit, explained that he is a guardian demon that was bound to the locket some five hundred years ago by a Whisper. He’s still rather indignant at the form he’s forced to take, in accordance to the original Whisper’s directives binding him to whomever holds the Locket of the White Rabbit, but he points out that in fairness, he was expecting someone taller for his next master so she really can’t throw any stones. Flopsy says in accordance to the Convenant of the White Rabbit, he is a guardian charged with defense of the Whisper House if the one holding the locket commands him to do so when it comes under direct attack, and also he can answer one question to the best of his ability truthfully on the thirteenth night of the month. He says if she’d like to renegotiate the terms, it’s fine by him, and she just needs to break the locket and free him. The first Truly Answered Question she asked if that was a bad idea had him admit, “Oh yeah, absolutely terrible. Under no circumstances should you do that.”

For most of the time, she just has Flopsy the white rabbit following her around. Most people never, ever notice the hateful little eyes, and he never speaks to anyone else under any circumstances."