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

So of course over the past 8 years or whatever I’ve had scenes not work out, offended people I definitely didn’t mean to, had jokes land badly, or GMing annoy people. That’s almost inevitable. Even trying to be as careful as possible, as well intentioned as possible, in trying to just create an RP scene where everyone has a good time, it can be really, really hard to predict what is going to land very firmly in a player’s ‘Absolutely Not’ zone.

Some players are ones I would never, ever GM a conflict scene with, or a tense scene where they are subordinate to someone. I would exclude them from any scene where that would happen. That’s not because I think they are a terrible player or anything, but it would obviously just really piss them off oocly and they would absolutely destroy the mood of the scene for everyone else. Some players think they are okay with it and just aren’t, and some players really enjoy it if it’s with other people they have trust and rapport with, and some really enjoy dynamics other people despise.

The worst, hardest to deal with examples are vanishingly rare. The person that actively seeks out conflict relentlessly and freaks out about any degree of pushback- I can legitimately only think of 1 out of the several thousand players Arx had, and it wasn’t this latest banning. And the ‘I want to run scenes just to bully people’ is also that level of rare. Sure I’ve heard of it from MU forums. But I just have not seen it on Arx, even from the people I’ve banned and definitely not from staff. The trouble is with like, 20+ years of most players having baggage, there’s way, way too many people that see the absolute worst of intentions where it just plain doesn’t exist. And that makes them incredibly hard to deal with.

At any rate, the options usually are just be incredibly insular and keep RP and storytelling to a small circle of people that someone trusts, or take a risk by being more inclusive without knowing how people will react. Imma keep grabbing the hot stove and doing the latter, which probably says some unflattering things about how smart I am but I just prefer it, and would rather err on the side of being inclusive even if it means the odd blowup now and then.

@Cobalt said in A Constructive Arx Thread:

Be a pretty cool podcast too

@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."

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.

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.

@Cobalt said in Why is Pack closing?:

No response. Nothing. He continues turning the phone around and around in his hands, soothed by the mindless motion.

ok but was he looking at tinder or cat videos

nods

To me, whether negative emotions should be built upon goes hand in hand with what tone you’re striking for a story and a game in general.

Of all the things I’ve struggled with while running a game, I think tone is one I never feel I’ve gotten exactly right. Which is more to say that it’s so personalized that it’s incredibly hard to get it right all the time for everyone, and you can’t really do it. Some people are just going to be completely incompatible with the right tone of a story or even a game, and you can try to minimize it by having something be as obvious as possible so people can self-select out of it, but it’s so very easy to accidentally do something that flatlines the fun someone would have on a game by hitting the wrong note.

And what makes this hard to talk about is the degree matters. A lot. The degree is everything. Someone that feels a little spike of annoyance at an NPC is vastly different from someone feeling like bone deep loathing. Someone feeling disappointed or frustrated is just different from someone feeling crushed or devastated. And it can be super hard for people to hit the right point of just enough to get someone engaged without too much and really knocking them flat.

I do like content warnings in general, however they might get dragged for being oversensitive or adding too many barriers for engagement, but they aren’t a catch all either. Someone that thinks they are okay with something in the general sense, can really, really not be okay with a very harsh presentation of the same vibe.

i mean if you have a long enough view, every friendship ends badly

@bailey said in Bailey Fork:

is referring to was a socially awkward alien character making general confused comments about humans in an attempt by me as a player to be funny

I am certain someone out there has made a character like this work to more than just their friends but I don’t recall having seen it and would always say do not do this. The unfrozen caveman/alien confused by your quaint ways/stranger in a strange land is basically always awful and I’m not sure how many talks I’ve given to players of ‘your weirdo shit is not as charming as you think it is and/or you are creeping them out’ but it’s too many and almost all of them wound up banned.

There are some tropes that sounds great but just don’t.