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.

@Roadspike said:

But you’re very right that designing away from PvP and toward PvE will limit some of the toxic aspects of PvP and competitiveness.

It also has the added benefit that one can more easily establish and enforce rules against the more insidious PVP and competitiveness toxicity, and will build the kind of community (ideally) where such things are more likely to be reported or commented upon.

@MisterBoring said:

@Apos said:

It’s canonically the same game world, if warped by the passage of ages and catastrophic events, though I am trying to write it so it should not require any knowledge of Arx 1.

Do the actions of any of the PCs in Arx 1 directly connect to said catastrophic events?

It’s all Dawn’s fault.

@Faraday said:

Lol now I kind of want to write a book about the history of MUSHes, even though it would basically only appeal to the tiniest of audiences.

Once upon a time in 1978 Trubshaw and Bartle made a MUD. The world sort of all went downhill from there…

@Prototart said:

an actual WORA Wiki

OH BOY WAS THERE

Thenomain’s still around, but I think he’s the last person of admin-level around from that era. Lord knows if he’s kept anything.

@Apos said:

The Necropolis

@RightMeow said:

@Pavel said:

@hellfrog It’s like dating.

This must be why I’m not MU*ing anywhere right now. I understand.

In this economy, who can blame you?

@Kestrel That’s not at all what I said.

ETA: But, of course, also important to remember.

It feels even worse, for me, when someone oversteps something that I didn’t know was a boundary until after they stepped over. So you feel, in a way, violated but you also know that you can’t really be angry at them—you didn’t know, they didn’t know.

@Aria said:

Am I even real, you guys?

It’s complicated; every client is different, etc, etc., caveat, caveat…

Therapy, at its core, is helping someone to make a change.

Often, what a client thinks they need or want to change isn’t at all what they need to change, and it’s part of a therapist’s job to help a client explore those unseen avenues.

Admittedly, my scope is typically working with survivors of domestic abuse—there’s something delightfully fulfilling about being a Safe Male Figure in someone’s life for, perhaps, the first time. But the intention is the same: Help a client uncover maladaptive or dangerous behaviours, thought patterns, etc, and then with time help them overcome the need for such strategies, untangle the core of their particular problems while also helping them mitigate the impact of their, for lack of a better term, symptoms.

If all a therapist does is validate and ego-boost, they’ve failed both the client and themselves. That’s an emotional fluffer, not a therapeutic partner.

@Gashlycrumb said:

Also because you are probably at least somewhat aware that therapy generally does not teach abusers not to be abusive. It teaches them to use concepts and terminology from therapy to be better at abuse and victim-blaming. The therapist’s job is to improve their client’s, in this case the abuser’s, well-being. The therapist isn’t working for you or everybody else around this guy. So “I will reach out to my therapist about this” is pretty much the opposite of addressing the problem. Really it goes, “I will talk to my therapist, who will almost certainly give me reasons I am not really in the wrong here and help me more effectively reverse our roles so you’re wrong and what I did is no big deal.”

Yeah, that’s fuckin horrible, incompetent, and unethical therapy. Sadly common, but that’s not how it’s meant to be.

@hellfrog It’s like dating. Show an interest in the other person/people, have a sense of humour, and be open to trying new things at least once.

Giphy works.