I’ve thought up a new pacing style:

Tedium game pacing. The MU will be connected to a generic incremental idle game (like Cookie Clicker), and each player will be given a number of pose tokens. Each pose will cost a number of tokens based on length, and if you run out of tokens, you must play the idle game to generate more tokens, which can also be spent to make the idle game work faster. Scenes will progress at a speed decided by the various players progression in the idle game generating the tokens.

@catzilla said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

All Bar RP is social RP but not all social RP is Bar RP.

I still want to make a game with a single IC grid square: The Bar.

All RP is Bar RP. The only plot is The Bar.

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

They just do not entertain me, the same way that I am not entertained by Bridgerton or MMA.

My brain left out the or in this sentence the first time I read it, and I suddenly imagined an MMA promotion that forces its fighters to dress in Regency appropriate attire for their fights.

@Gashlycrumb I think there’s honestly a lot of nuance and discussion to be had on job queues all together. There’s a whole gambit of different job writing styles out there. Some people pack all of their requests into one big thing, some people fire off dozens of jobs a week, and others barely submit any jobs at all. In addition to that, some people just absolutely cannot explain what they’re actually asking for in a job request for whatever reason that is. I’ve seen some absolutely baffling requests in the times I have staffed at games, and I know at least one of those people probably got frustrated and quit because I (and the other staff on those games) were missing their point entirely.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

Certianly the unending job-mill could tire a staffer out, but “I am too busy responding to a small extremely active group to get around to you,” just makes people wonder why you don’t do one job from each person who has one open, and get to those second and third and sixteenth ones from Job-Millers after you’ve dealt with the one from the guy who hasn’t made a request in weeks.

This is feasible on some games. On other games that are pushing huge numbers, the job glut can just be from the 60+ PCs currently approved on a game. If 60 PCs are generating jobs, then some players expecting a certain turnaround on their jobs are going to get frustrated.

@Clarion It’s more about the grid feeling like a virtual location where Ares / web scenes just have a flatness to them that I can’t get out of my brain (even though I know they’re both just scrolling walls of text).

I need the grid for my RP to give me something to use to RP off of.

My character is in a world, they are not the world.

I’m split on it.

Sometimes I will stick around until a game dies (and in a few cases, still log on well after the staff has left, but the server is still up until the end of the month or whatever). Other times I’ll just bounce.

It has absolutely nothing to do with how bored or entertained I am either. I have sat on games until they died that absolutely bored me to tears, and I don’t honestly have an explanation for it. I’ve also bounced on games that entertained me immensely, but that’s usually at the first sign of stuff I just don’t want to deal with. (A recent example was the introduction on a game of a person who showed up with a character that had the disclaimer: “My character’s IC racism is not a reflection of my OOC beliefs.”, which usually isn’t true.)

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

It’s just not enough hours in the day and then the guilt of not including others.

This used to be me, but I think now, going forward if I do run a game again, it will be “If you make it to plot, awesome. If you don’t, well, I hope you find something interesting to do.” or “I’m limiting this game to a maximum player count I think I can responsibly handle, and once we hit the limit, no PCs will be approved.”

@xCroaker From my personal experience both as a staffer and as a player witnessing things:

1. Answering questions that are already covered in the game’s documentation. I have been on plenty of games that have excellent documentation both on their wiki and in the game, yet people will still constantly ask questions that have already been answered elsewhere.
2. The subgroup of players that exist across all MUs that I refer to as “The Job Mill”. These players will generate more jobs than the entire rest of a game’s players combined, in some extreme cases multiple jobs a day. They are few, and usually just very invested in the game they are playing, but holy cow can some of them clog up a job queue. The frustrating thing is they’re almost always not malicious about this. It’s just what they do to show love to a game. And holy crap is it frustrating. Even more so when large amounts of these jobs require scenes and NPC support. (And now that I think about it, this could almost be it’s own topic.)
3. Continuing to work on build / code stuff. A lot of games start allowing players onto them well before their grid & coded elements are actually ready to go, and this will generate a lot of extra work where staff is trying to finish their baseline game and people are breaking things already.
4. Dealing with OOC drama. (This one probably feels like the worst even though it’s mathematically not.) Having people get into an OOC argument, or finding out that a player is a sex pest, or is exploiting the game code to their advantage, is rough on staff. It’s 100% guaranteed to require some level of confrontation about it, and that shit is draining.

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.

Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.

It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch. It has definitely done that for me, and it’s probably why the few Ares games I’ve joined I’ve eventually idled out on.

It’s not whether it is or isn’t able to do live scenes, it’s more that people view it as mostly asynch. I know it seems to me that a lot of people praising Ares do so for the easy way it enables asynch, so I just assume all Ares games are mostly asynch, and I say that having attempted to play a few.

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

I don’t think we’re actually talking about specific cases. Just the general “Staff that ignore problem players is bad” + “Players that refuse to believe they’re an issue when they really are is bad” concepts.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

Then people in authority need to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.

Let me fix that for you:

Then people in authority need to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.

I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who have developed a bad reputation in our hobby that have been told they have a bad reputation, with receipts, and they just dismiss any argument in that regard. Sure, there are plenty of staffers who are non-confrontational, so they just ignore the people that have a bad rep, which is a problem in its own right, but largely it feels, to me at least, that the people with the bad reputation are just as guilty of bad communication skills as the staff.

I guess after watching other staffers on other games attempt to communicate and get shut down, staff on the games these people are currently on give up on attempting to talk it out. Communication is a two way street, and what it seems like we have is problem staffers who aren’t willing to talk it out, and problem players who aren’t willing to accept constructive feedback.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.

I think our hobby is getting small enough that it’s getting more and more common.

For me it’s probably the 7-10 minute pace. I don’t like asynch because of several bad experiences I’ve had where players would put their characters into multiple scenes that would twist up the narrative chronologically and require retcons and other stuff to fix. In one extreme case, a PC died while asynchronously participating in 3 other scenes with wildly separate chronological order to them, and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

I would say that I’d be okay with asynch or slower if the game had a rule that any given PC could only participate in a single scene at a time.

The whole 0-3 minutes thing seems like it has it’s own pitfalls, but even in my 30 years of playing I can’t honestly remember more than a handful of people attempting it.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with, that may manifest in ways you don’t anticipate. Something you gotta’ just roll with and improve upon. People forget as folk cycle in and out, but I wonder how many people will forget Polk trying to torch 2 game servers in like… 1 year.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.

@sao said in Tips for GMs:

Having a set solution to a problem is a way to frustrate yourself AND your players!

I agree, but I also feel the exception to this is scenes where the players are all on board for a very very specific resolution from the start. The easiest example of this are those one off scenes where a GM gets a bunch of the more combat oriented PCs together to blow off some combat steam against nameless minions of evil. In those situations, trying to find an alternate route to resolution will also frustrate everyone involved.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

Ask any staffer who was DEDICATED to prompt, “fast”, consistent responses how long they stuck around. How long the game existed.

I can count the number of staffers that were dedicated to that stuff that also stayed through the end of the game and did not contribute to the game’s ending on one finger. It probably didn’t hurt that the person in question was on full disability with a lower back injury and so didn’t actually have a day job.

The closest thing I will ever get to paying to RP is the entry fee to gaming conventions.

Thankfully I’m social enough that I have several MUs to play when I want online RP, and a reasonably sized local tabletop scene for in person RP.