Yeah, I don’t think this is about the low xp cafe worker who is in the correct faction.

Can you please clarify this and maybe give it an example? It doesn’t seem inherently toxic to either play a non-combat character in a conflict org or to refuse to give Mr. Big Fighty their ego ups in beating on a weaker character. I can actually think of several ways this would be intriguing.

In good non-toxic PvP environments, the game is designed with a lot of built in conflict invitation flags so players can signal to other players what they want. The health of the environment absolutely depends on players using these flags accurately.

Someone who joins a high-conflict faction is signalling that they want to participate in that conflict and should not do that if they can’t OOCly handle it. Pacifists don’t just sit out, they tend to belittle everyone participating and take a revisionist approach to the faction’s raison d’être. Just hope they weren’t given a high value macguffin to protect, they might just hand it over because fighting is wrong.

If your game has an area called Murder Alley and it’s well known that going there signals that you are interested in being mugged… sometimes pacifists will wander up and down and snap OOCly at anyone who steps in front of them, and eventually it stops being a reliable signal to find RP.

It’s absolutely infuriating for everybody trying to participate in the game’s design as intended. It would be SO easy for the pacifist to join the kittens and hugs faction and avoid Murder Alley.

Not to mention that standing there condemning violence while someone punches you in the face is something only video game characters can do. Please… don’t.

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

One system I’ve been thinking about which I’d like some feedback on:

Would you play a game where:

1. Ordinarily, character death requires consent. Your character can get into serious fights and someone can even try to assassinate them in theory, but the setting’s magic prevents them from falling into the red without prior staff discussion/approval from both parties.
2. Players can permanently toggle a setting that makes their characters killable when they roll in; the flag is publicly visible and is intended as an “I’m up for anything do your worst” signal. In exchange they enjoy slightly accelerated XP gains (think in the realm of 10%), but obviously it means staff won’t rescue them from open PK unless there’s a very obvious/overt sign of OOC-motivated abuse.

I’m mainly interested in how people who wouldn’t turn it on would feel about this sort of system. Would it make you feel like a kind of second-class citizen that some people are getting more XP by being more willing to risk their characters? Would you feel pressured to turn it on even if the idea of open PK makes you uncomfortable? Do you think it would create a toxic subculture within the game’s wider community?

I wouldn’t turn it on. I’m the kind of player who is up for basically anything except death. I’d definitely be interested in some kind of flag to encourage people to enjoy some conflict with me, but the story abruptly ending because ganked ain’t it.

On staff side I immediately foresee people turning it on for XP gains, insisting they are cool with it, but then being so unpleasant when targeted that everyone steers clear and they essentially get that +10% xp for free.

Well, I’ve done weirder things to keep things fresh. Let the skulking commence.

No ERP? What in the fuck is the point then?

You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.

So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.

I don’t like them. There’s no real reason RP should be invisible to the room simply because it occurred at a table, and it ends up being used so people can have their secret conversation while also being able to see everything else that happened in the room.

It’s a hugely requested feature on games that don’t have it. But if a scene is so busy that you need to split it up, just do that? Move to a different room. Take your friends onto the balcony. Actually commit to moving far enough away to experience some quiet. Don’t just move to a table and listen to everything anyway.

I’m not going to crawl up someone’s ass for being illiterate but I’m also not obligated to put a lot of time and effort into somebody who isn’t my match. If it gets bad, I’ll just politely excuse myself and bounce.

Imo hard standards are useless because 1) people will twist any kind of written rule, do the bare minimum, or get extremely loud and teary about their disability or personal circumstances, and 2) you can’t force two people to hang out together ANYWAY, so it’s a problem that solves itself as players suss each other out and pick their partners.

People attract people of similar ability. They’ll find someone who enjoys their monkey-keyboard-smashing or they’ll move to a game that fits that culture better.

All of this hinges on whether the person actually is guilty of poor behaviour or not.

Without that crucial context, all this reads as a bunch of people vagueposting past each other and probably not even imagining the same people as they do so.

乁⁠(⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠Ĺ̯⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠)⁠ ⁠ㄏ

Standard/live for me. I don’t mind waiting for an emote that has some weight to it, but I expect my partner’s full attention. If I am waiting around because you’re trying to seduce Bridget in another window, that’s just disrespectful.

I have been known to do some novella in various forums. I fell out of it mainly because people would get bored of a story literally by the time everyone had finished doing their introductions and just bounce to the next thread. I’d started plenty of stories but god, I wanted to finish a single scene with all the people I’d started with.

I think permadeath should be wholly excluded from the Bad Things Bucket just because it’s so difficult to give a character death a satisfying amount of story lead up. Character deaths shouldn’t be a side note in someone else’s story, it should be part of a story explicitly dedicated to wrapping up your character in a respectful and awesome way.

People are always so scared to be mean to me! I wish they would do it more.

I promise I won’t whip around and start crying about being griefed if you do anything mildly cruel. I think players in general are pretty traumatised by bleedy targets and now they don’t even want to take the risk. A lack of trust all around.

Thanks all, I needed a good laugh.

I’m afraid of Arch. A do it yourself approach seems like something I’d enjoy, but I do have to be realistic about the learning curve.

I’ll look into Bodhi and Lubuntu!

A post after my own heart. I’ve been working on ditching Microsoft and Google, but it’s a PROCESS.

I have a side laptop I’ve been tinkering with as a way to dip my toes into it, but I think as a side effect of being easily 10+ years old, this thing runs like a fridge. It has Debian (LXQt) on it now, but tends to freeze and crash.

Windows ran fine on it but I do wonder if it’s just so old that it needs something more lightweight. If you know any distributions that are particularly well suited to ancient shitboxes, I’d appreciate a recommendation.

My first text game was hellMOO.

I will be taking no further questions.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

If you’ve been turned away from a game, or know that you’re probably not welcome on a game-- DON’T SNEAK ONTO THEM.

This is especially funny on games with bans that aren’t permanent, but become permanent if you try to sneak on.

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)

And that’s just a spar, not even a real attack! Such a bummer.

I really like Faction conflict play. In my opinion it’s better to fight with somebody based on being in opposite factions, than it is to fight with somebody based on your character hating theirs. Players really struggle to stomach being targeted with conflict, and knowing they’re consistently going to be targeted by Faction A for reasons that are completely impersonal is reassuring.

In practice, there’s always some kind of snafu and I haven’t seen it work right. Often a bunch of players sign up for faction play and end up being totally disinterested in it, or worse, get really upset when they get affected by faction conflict they explicitly signed up for. Don’t do that. There are so many games that don’t feature competitive play that you could be playing.

Software development practices are crucial, but the kind of people who find AI the most useful probably haven’t been introduced to those practices so in addition to potentially being let down by the bot, they’re not doing OTHER project activities that would really help them and the bot isn’t going to introduce them to. Version control, unit tests, checking logs, using a debugger?

I have found AI code extremely unhelpful compared to jumping into a debugger, but those things are also learned skills that you can’t assume everyone has.