@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

that’s how Red Planet is doing it

We’re actually capping the XP at 10, which is 5 weeks of accrual (on our game). I don’t have any experience with systems where a request is required to spend XP, but in a general sense I think there is a reasonable implementation of some limitations on XP accumulation and spending, depending on how your system works.

The point of XP is to reward players for playing. As long as the system does not punish players who are playing, then it’s probably working just fine. I do find the time gate on how quickly XP can be spent on a single stat as implemented in FS3 by default a little punitive in that dimension because you have to spend it EXACTLY when the cooldown runs out or you are “missing out” on progression. This is a small window to hit. On Red Planet, you can go 5 weeks before you’re “missing out” on anything and frankly I’m okay with that. It is still incumbent on you, the player, to engage with the game’s systems on some level to benefit from them.

I have played on games where you could bank unlimited XP and jump up whatever skill you needed in the moment and I can’t say that was my favorite thing. It absolutely happened and there was no law against it, it was just a little cheesy. It’s not a realism thing for me as much as it is a min-maxy approach to play that I don’t particularly enjoy in others. I’d rather see folks lock in a narrative and play it out than sitting on the fence until the literal last second, but some balance in there for players to live their lives and forget sometimes is definitely more user-friendly.

Improv stuff aside, what is meant by “My Guy Syndrome” is a particular ordering of priorities. A true “My Guy” player’s priorities have Characterization in some order above “the fun of others” and even above “my own fun”.

A true “My Guy” player is not politely deciding to sit out a session that they just aren’t feeling into. A true “My Guy” player is sitting there staring longingly through the glass wishing they could participate but they feel they cannot because it would contradict Characterization. They signed up for the trip to the dangerous planet, got there, and realized “My guy would stay on the ship” and feel genuinely disarmed and rendered powerless by this realization. That’s what we’re talking about here.

@Pavel said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

If there’s a wiki or a place to stick a character image, chances are nobody will even read your description. (yes, yes, sans several very loud exceptions)

Yes, let us simply discount and ignore any experience that doesn’t fit within our own.

MUs are improvisational writing. “Yes, and” is a commonly cited improv principle, and people sometimes fail to remember “No, but” is its equally important partner. The important thing is to find a way to proceed that is interesting and fun for the other people participating and yourself.

@Babs said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Just reuse the same description. Chances are no one will notice.

Chances are no one will say anything to you.

Applications serve exactly one purpose: to make sure you and the character are a good fit for the game. The app process should be as short as functionally possible to meet that purpose. More complex themes will necessarily require a more involved application.

That being said, I absolutely prefer a shorter application process and endorse doing the absolute bare minimum to get an app over the line. GET ON THE GRID and start playing.

If your theme requires all players to spend multiple hours in chargen, you may want to consider whether your theme/mechanics can be streamlined or at least offering premade rosters who don’t require much time to get started with. Applying is not playing, and a long application process usually means more staff work as well, and a nonzero population will apply and then never play. It’s worth making this as painless as you can for everyone involved.

@Jumpscare
Based on what I’ve seen of how AI codes, this does not surprise me.

@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:

@Roadspike said in Scenes within Scenes:

• Have them in their own side-scene, either happening at the same time as the “important shit” scene that they can watch freely

That is practically the same thing as using places code, when it’s used correctly. Additionally, not every system allows you to just watch other scenes freely.

It is practically the same thing, and I don’t actually think it would be that hard to address with code. You’d create a sort of sub-scene class that links back to a parent scene and shows the emits from the parent to the child but not the reverse. It’s not wildly dissimilar in concept from how combats work in Ares.

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Would folks like to see scene metrics in AresCentral alongside the player login metrics?

I don’t know. I do worry somewhat that if your game isn’t reaching the exact blend of async/traditional/distracted a given player is hoping for then that might be a turn-off for no good reason, especially given that these stats have a margin of error.

Metrics never tell the whole story, though, so that’s not a reason to say no flat-out. As a gamerunner, I’d be interested in seeing them in a convenient location.

If we have coder permissions and believe that when players set the pacing on a scene in Ares, they’re being honest, we can, in fact, produce stats on this.

ruby Scene.all.each.count {|s| s.scene_pacing == "Traditional"}
ruby Scene.all.each.count {|s| s.scene_pacing == "Asynchronous"}
ruby Scene.all.each.count {|s| s.scene_pacing == "Distracted"}

On Shattered, we had 3220 traditional scenes, 656 distracted ones, and 411 async scenes. These commands pull the ‘current’ pacing, and in my experience, trad/distracted scenes may become async in flight but not the other direction.

Even if we lump ‘distracted’ in as ‘non-live’, traditional outnumbers them 3 to 1.

The bar is on the floor.

I am a stay-er, and I thought a lot about why that is, and I think most of it is just particular to me and how I operate. I have never played on a game I was not invited to, and once I am established on a game, I don’t even think about looking for a new one.

When I had more free time, I’d try out another game if I was invited, but these days I know that I only really have time for one game at a time. For better or worse, history says that means whatever game I’m playing on at that time until that game shuts down or I quit over sexual harassment (sad lol).

So there’s some interesting work done by social scientists on romantic relationships that, while they probably don’t track directly, I think they have strong parallels with Mushing and people’s relationship to a game/the people who play there, specifically John Gottman at the Relationship Research Institute.

The two things I think track best to MUs are these:

1. A ratio of positive:negative interactions during conflict
2. A ratio of successful:unsuccessful “bids for connection”

You can’t expect a game to provide a connection every single time you want one, but there is some ratio where you feel like generally speaking you’re easily able to get plugged into things when you want to, and below that, it starts to feel like it’s quite hard, even if ‘most’ times you actually are successful.

Gottmann’s numbers for couples are 5:1 and 20:1 respectively to predict a successful relationship. I think the standards are probably higher for a romantic relationship vs a game, but I put the numbers to illustrate that the gap needs to be pretty large to stave off a perceived feeling of ‘this is actually quite difficult’ from creeping in.

@KarmaBum said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

The only flaw I’ve found is that, if you then change the location using the portal, it keeps the original room desc in the scene info.

I thought this for a long time before discovering that instead of going to ‘Edit Scene’ and changing the value for Location, there is an honest-to-god ‘Change Location’ BUTTON under the ‘Play’ menu.

So, at least on the client, Ares does tell you whether the scene was started on the grid or from the web (which is always a temp room).

You can also easily check how many scenes were a temp room or not, where the grid is always not a temp room. On Shattered, the ratio of temp rooms vs not (i.e. started on the grid) was 4204 to 83.

It’s not never but that’s 50:1.

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I think what is meant by starting a scene from the grid is that you can be on a MUSH client and scene/start in any room on the grid.

That is what I’m referring to, correct. I never saw it happen.

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

You can plunk yourself down on the grid and scene/start a random pickup scene --OR-- you can selectively start private scenes with only the people you want to play with.

You can RP with live/traditional pacing --OR-- you can play async across disparate schedules and timezones.

If more people are choosing the alternatives, maybe it’s just showing that the old ways were never that popular to begin with.

TEZ, THIS IS OFF TOPIC, fork me if you want.

I’m not positive this is a conscious choice people are making as much as it might be influenced by some of the game design of Ares and the web portal in particular. The Ares game I played on (just one, so grain of salt) was probably 80% ‘live’ scenes, and I don’t know that I ever saw someone start a scene from the grid a single time. It wasn’t even clear to me as a new player that you could. What was clear was that using the scene system rather than just walking into a room and posing at each other had huge benefits and you should use it.

Even knowing that you could start a scene from the grid, again, I never saw anyone do it and I never did it even though I’d just come from a game where that was the only way of RPing. Why? Because it is just so much easier to click ‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client. You don’t have to wander the grid like a fool peering in shop windows for the right room. You can just select from the list.

Following on to this, the default privacy setting when setting up a scene in this manner is prepopulated for you as private, and therefore I wonder how many people are even thinking about whether this scene could be open or not as they’re going through the motions to get something started if they did not predetermine that they wanted it to be open before they even got to that screen. On a grid-only game, this is not something you have to think about. If you go to a public place and start RPing, it’s an open scene. If you start a scene on Ares’ webportal, unless you deliberately and intentionally set out to have an open scene, the UI assumes you meant it to be private, and people tend to follow the path of least resistance.

Conversely, if you start a scene from the grid without passing additional arguments, no matter where you are, the default is open.

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

If a majority of scenes on the “active scenes” list began several days ago and are still ongoing, and nearly every single scene on the “recent scene list” are also several days old (versus, say, from yesterday or even two days ago), how does that say “live” to you?

The argument is that people prefer scenes that: a) are not async, b) are taking 7-10 minutes between poses, and c) end within the day.

If we take ‘two days ago’ as 2/23, then the recent scenes for Empty Night has 2 of those and both of them show the IC and OOC date as the same, which usually means it was started and finished on the same day. Aegis Company has 4 of those and all 4 show the same IC and OOC end date.

The active scenes list being mostly ‘stale’ scenes is survivorship bias. The scenes that are not going to finish in a day stay on there; the scenes that are end up on recent scenes, and between these 2 games I’m counting 6 likely same-day real-time scenes in the last 2 days.

I’m not saying we’re drowning in games where this is happening, but I am saying “none” is not accurate.

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

There are very few public games on Ares, and none of them appear to have a “live scene” culture.

Empty Night and Aegis Company both have a heavy majority of ‘traditional’ pacing scenes listed in their 10+ active scenes. There are probably others.

The truth of MU*s that we’re always going around about on what behavior is expected and what behavior is not okay and who is owed what and what sort of obligation anyone has (player or staff) is that this is all free and no one owes anyone anything. The only obligations are social ones, and you only have as much right to be offended by the perceived deficit as compared to what the other party has explicitly committed to providing.

If staff has a policy of handling all requests within a two-week timeframe and yours is not, then it’s fair to be upset. If there is no policy, then whether you like the way that things are being handled or not is your personal preference and not any reflection on whether staff is good or bad. You’re certainly free to decide this doesn’t match your preference, but it’s not really fair to decry it as a miscarriage of justice.

This is why it is so important for games to have explicit policies for staff and players to follow. The only thing you have to pin down a game on whether the people there are being fair or not is how they measure up to what they have committed to. If they have not committed to anything, you have no ground to stand on, and I would not personally play on a game that did not have any clear policies on subjects I feel strongly about.