@Jax I mean, there WERE some very fine JexCo Products to be had.

@SockMonkey RL do be RL’in, always and forever. I hope life is treating you kindly and that things are going well for you!

I feel like I wasn’t on a lot of the same games as the majority of people, but here’s my playlist:

African Tails MUCK, TLK MUCK, Redwall, various other MUCKs, Elendor: I started in 1998, so character names from this era are long forgotten by now. I made a million characters and all of them were Very Cool with wicked scars and dead families and stuff.

Fort Bloodshed: John
Firefly Into the Black: Hezekiah
Blood of Dragons: Talbard, very briefly, but someone else was him after me and that went in a whole other direction
Serenity MUSH: Fael
Masquerade: Joel
Battlestar… something: Jonah Quill, but I cannot remember what Battlestar game this was. @Third-Eye knows, she was my boss, lol
Star Wars Age of Alliances: hahaha YAY, AOA. GOOD OLD AOA. Hex Ashkuri, Oran Arcantael/Malik Ren, a few others
Arx: Savio, Ezra (not the shady Ezra that got banned)
Liberation: Asher, Arden (neither for very long)
Shattered: Ikua, Sol, Mothman

Ares handle is @Hex.

https://gizmodo.com/googles-veo-3-is-already-deepfaking-all-of-youtubes-most-smooth-brained-content-2000606144

cool cool cool this isn’t problematic at all

Somebody tell the When Is Good people that they’re single handedly propping up this entire community on their pillar of weirdly free neon green scheduling tool

@Raistlin said in AI Megathread:

they’re real people trying their best to engage meaningfully with others. The poses still come from a human with emotions, motivations, and a genuine desire to connect, regardless of what tools they used to craft them.

No, that’s not genuine. That is literally disingenuous, particularly when it is undisclosed to other participants.

Engaging meaningfully requires thought, creation, intentionality, and vulnerability, not throwing half an idea into the word blender to come out with whatever sounds slick in the algorithm today.

As @Flitcraft said, if they can’t spend the time and effort to write something, why should I spend time and effort interacting with it?

@Kestrel I would upvote this more than once if I could

The AI problem is now so bad that people are trying to defeat it with… more AI. I don’t even know. What is life.

What I do know is that if someone fed my poses into ChatGPT or similar, I’d be pretty pissed off about it.

@Tez it worrrrrkkkkeeeed THANXU

Gently bumping the thread as I inadvertently ran into the same issue, I thought I could change my profile picture but got the same error.

EACCES: permission denied, copyfile '/tmp/36b4542115da5b4ee84adad875694127.jpeg.png' -> '/home/nodebb/nodebb/public/uploads/profile/uid-64/64-profileavatar-1744902192432.png'

Not a big deal! Just wanted to make others aware to be cautious about changes.

I don’t think anyone is trying to keep all 60 players that come in The Bubble. They’re trying to keep the 25 that really would find the game a good fit.

But we’ve got multiple people in this thread alone who are saying “I don’t like the experience of the bubble, it turns me off and drives me away, that’s not fun for me.” So as a game administrator, wtf do you do with The Bubble? You can say it happens for whatever reason you want, but it happens.

How do you provide an experience for 60 people that is so good at the beginning that it will hook some amount of players even after everyone who came to check out the new hotness has gone on to the next hotness? If the answer is “magically have enough bandwidth to support all 60 of them with individualized attention and exciting content and then simply scale it way back after,” idk that it’s realistic.

@Trashcan said in The 3-Month Players:

every way of trying to manage it administratively has some flavor of contraindication

That feels accurate to me, which is frustrating. Maybe you just have to time new game openings with another new game opening so that there’s multiple new hotness and the bubble is split.

Interesting thoughts here, that people want to stay and are looking for the right content to stay for. I think that’s true for some players, and maybe not as true for others.

Most people like the idea of the long haul in theory, but some players definitely find it much easier to start a new idea than to continue playing an old one for a long time. I don’t know that any amount of Great Game Content is ever going to outweigh the allure of “what’s new and all the potential that could be had there” for some people.

I’ve really made myself crazy over the years trying to put out the best possible content and hooks and RP so that people won’t go. I took their departure to other games as a sign that whatever I’m doing is not good enough anymore and is not fun or interesting, which felt terrible. But I think these days I just have to accept that some people like new things no matter how “good” the old one was.

That’s kind of why I’ve been thinking about this Playerbase Bubble phenomenon to begin with. Doubtless a lot of factors go into it, anyway.

From the other “Why MUSH” thread:

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Why MUSH?:

@MisterBoring said in Why MUSH?:

Is three months the sweet spot for a MU?

Actually, yes. It is. Story time!

Once upon a time when the Earth was young and I first became staff on a MUD (LegendMUD for ye curious) in the late 1990s, Raph Koster was one of the implementors (you may know him as Ultima Online’s Designer Dragon). No, I’m not name dropping here – I think I talked to him twice, it’s not like I know him. (His wife is awesome, though).

Anyhow. Raph Koster did a study on this and reported his findings. There are three cut-off points.

Three months: The average time a player will spend on a game, any game. Once the new shine and sparkle has worn off, many move on to the next new thing.

Eight months: Those who were severely and firmly hooked have now done it all. They start to look for expansions, new things – and end up wandering off to elsewhere in pursuit of those things.

Forever: And finally, there is a core group of players who have found a home. Nothing short of pulling the plug on the game will get these guys to move on.

I kinda want to dig in on this three month thing a little bit. After being in the Ares space a while now it seems like every game that opens gets hit with “the bubble” for about 3 months, a huge influx of players that are there and then just leave and go to the next game. Then the next Ares game has The Bubble for a couple months… then the next, leaving the old game(s) with a much, much smaller player base of longer-term residents.

I’m not saying this phenomenon is good or bad, I think it just is, but I am interested in thoughts on administrating it. Is it better to cap a game rather than struggle to support The Bubble for the short duration it lasts? Is it better not to cap players joining, because The Bubble definitely won’t last? Has The Bubble always been there, but games came out more slowly back in the day so we didn’t notice it as much? Is there a difference in the kind of stories that can or should be run during a Bubble period?

@Roz said in WoD/CofD/Supernatural Games, One Splat or Many?:

@catzilla One splat, or a VERY limited selection of splats. Basically I think that your whole staff should always be able and willing to handle all splats that you make available, or else you’re going to run into the inevitable issue of how you continue support when someone needs to dip.

I came here to post but I was only gonna say this exact thing, lol

The facts are what they are and they’re never going to change. It’s a Star Wars game! They’re doing stuff. Some is ok. Some is really stupid. The good guys and/or bad guys have the upper hand this week. There’s some spaceships and some guns. If you are unlucky enough to have an issue with someone, especially a harassment issue, no one will help you.

That’s the only thing to say about this place. It does not matter what the theme posts are. It never did. I think it’s ok if we don’t give them free publicity for every single bbpost.

The systems are onerous, the dino gaps are frustrating, the personalities of the staff and key players are sometimes terrible, that’s all kinda whatever in the end. It can be dealt with.

More to the point, and pointing at where this thread started:

Every MU in this day and age has a “harassment won’t be tolerated” policy. They vary by content and complexity, but to name just a few across a few genres/types/codebases: Liberation has policies of this type, Spellbound has them, Disquiet has them, Silent Heaven has them, Arx had them, I think even Shangrila has guidelines and policies around welcome and unwelcome player behavior.

There is one game out there that does not have a “harassment won’t be tolerated” policy and that is Age of Alliances. @Zephyr asked Cujo to put one in and he refused.

What on earth reason is there to refuse putting up a line of text that says harassment won’t be tolerated?

Make of that what you will, I guess.

This might sound complicated, and maybe it is. The goal here is to make it as approachable, as possible, though

lol

@SirKay if you don’t have the bandwidth to give game content to OCs, just don’t have OCs. Building second class players into your game design is asking for a headache.

@SirKay said in Consensus on Roster vs OC vs Mix:

Focus of potential place: upper echelon would receive more staff attention (events/missions) and considering Roster for this level; lower echelon might receive directive/TPs/RP from the upper (a team under a roster).

I would be a lot more concerned about a system in which some players explicitly and by intent receive “more staff attention” than I would be about anything to do with rosters.

Good luck tho

Today someone AMBUSHED ME (idk if you’re on the forums but you know who you are if you read this) with a link to a website for a game I played around 2012-2018. It was run by a head wiz who became a close IRL friend and who passed away in 2019. I had no idea the site was even still up.

What a kick in the feels. All the old logs are there, and our snapshots of funny ooc moments, and our pictures and playlists. There are lots of captures of jokes and stories and fun moments of my friend who’s no longer with us, and other friends as well, some I still talk to, some I don’t.

I am so grateful and I am so sad. MUSH is such a strange medium in the way it can feel so all-encompassing at the time, and then enough time goes by and it’s just a little snapshot of how things were, and who you were then, and all the fun times you had writing stories with other people way too late into the night.

Really, really grateful and sad.