@Third-Eye said:

the MOST clanker

@Artemis LLM aside I’m struggling to figure out wtf they’re actually advertising…

“Current Windows testing uses MonkeyTerm with a Macrocosm XML connection file” is this what it sounds like when I try to explain using a telnet client?

@Wizz True! I was mostly using the previous peeve to highlight my own peeve.

On a somewhat different note:

‘Butcher of Bosnia’: convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić dies

There does also need to be room for a character who, due to experiences in the game, has earned the ability to be a little blase or otherwise confident around weird shit. If your character has been around for a good long while and they’re still as overwhelmingly frightened by their fifteenth grue encounter as their first that’s just as tiresome, in my view.

@Tez said:

Check to see if you can block banned people now pls.

Can block banned users, still can’t block administrators or global moderators plz fix.

@Nelly said:

Another difficult topic are the characters who have quippy one-liners or otherwise unserious comments in serious scenes.

It would be one thing if it were occasional, but it’s very much the MUing equivalent of having something scan as the wrong price at the check-out line and saying “Must be free!” Like, it’s great for you in that moment but that’s just one moment in five hundred thousand that cashier has had to deal with.

I partially blame the MCU, though I can’t really say whether their quip-per-scene quota is an originator or a symptom.

@Kestrel said:

@Faraday said:

@tez Didn’t there used to be a button to hide all posts from a particular user? I was looking for it for the recent troll and I can’t find it now. (maybe I’m remembering this from another forum though and it was never here…)

I think blocking them does that, but it doesn’t prevent them from seeing your posts, which would be more useful tbh.

At least if you block them you can’t see their replies… until someone quotes them, alas.

@Faraday I know there was one on The Other Place but it broke at some point. One can still block people, thankfully.

@Juniper They just need to edit the parts out that are stupid before posting.

@MisterBoring said:

referring to PVE as CVE causes me to double take because CVE is a special IT term

Try being a therapist talking about CBT at a kink-friendly clinic…

@dvoraen banned-boo

@Tez said:

no branching. get fucked.

Fork you.

Not to be that guy but I wonder whether this would not be better placed in the Game Gab section rather than the advertising section.

@Faraday Oh yeah, totally not unusual prices for the time. The main difference between now and then? I’d be the one paying this time.

From what I have managed to glean cheque and money order were popular, but some services also accepted AMEX and VISA after a time (Toth, 2011, Section 63). Though Mostellor (1999) seems to suggest that services like CompuServe would tack on the hourly fee as part of the user’s subscription in some way, though I could be misreading.

Adjusted for inflation those prices are… ridiculous. Gemstone III during peak hours would be ~$46USD/hr and British Legends(MUD1) would be ~$33USD/hr. I love you, Faraday, but I’m not paying you over five hundred bucks a month for a casual twenty hours of pretendy funtimes.

References
Mostellor, T. (1999, May 16). Genie and CompuServe offer die-hard adventure fans wide new on-line worlds. Richard A. Bartle. Mud.Co.Uk. https://mud.co.uk/richard/pcmjun90.htm

Toth, V. T. (2011, December 31). News archive 1997-2011. Mud2.Com. https://www.mud2.com/CMS/about/news/13-news-archive-1997-2011

@Faraday Cheque or money order (or cash) sent through the mail, most likely. Along with a unique identifier, like a username or account number.

@bear_necessities said:

You either paid up front for a set number of hours or were billed after the fact for usage.

I don’t know if it applies to the early MUs but I know some services also billed through one’s ISP.
I think I still owe my dad a hundred bucks or so from that period…

@L.-B.-Heuschkel Is there a way to filter these people out purely through game design or community design, or is it a case of finding them and plucking them out like stray hairs with the tweezers of fuckoffitude?

@Faraday Amen. It’s getting weird in my practice, too, when empathetic statements and self-accountability start to sound like AI-level sycophancy.

“That must feel frustrating” or “I can see how that would be intolerable” or even “I think I remember you mentioning this before” have started to ping AI hypersensitivity.