@Warma-Sheen
This

it won’t work today.

is

But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.

defeatism

They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen.

by definition.

At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.

Disagreeing with you does not equate to insulting you. If your argument is not that there is nothing (in any practical sense) that we can do, so why bother, feel free to explain what it is.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys.

This is a misrepresentation of the historical facts. Laws and regulations that reformed the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution happened because ordinary people demanded it in spite of overwhelming monetary opposition from the incredibly wealthy and influential capitalists of that time. John D. Rockefeller’s net worth is estimated at around $253 billion in 2013 dollars, Cornelius Vanderbilt at $203 billion, and Richard Mellon (of Carnegie-Mellon) at $103 billion. These and other “captains of industry” of that era commanded money and influence on the same scale as any modern tech billionaire.

The government did not decide to regulate because there was no money telling them not to. “Strikes organized by labor unions became routine events by the 1880s. There were 37,000 strikes between 1881 and 1905.” We owe the eight-hour workday to continual agitation by hundreds of thousands of workers over more than fifty years. The President of the United States sent federal troops to end strikes (these are all different Presidents), and Rockefeller was widely blamed for organizing the murder of 21 people, striking miners and their families. Between 1850 and 1937 almost 900 people were killed by the authorities in labor disputes. Regulations did not “catch up to what was happening,” they were dragged kicking and screaming by we the people.

This kind of mealy-mouthed defeatism serves no one but the ruling class. Ordinary people have stood up for themselves and demanded better treatment in the past, and we can do it again.

PvP as implicated in the “death of the medium”

There are good reasons why PvP used to be more common in an MU environment that have nothing to do with personal preferences, as @Hobbie has repeatedly tried to make the case for.

Factor #1: people do not read or write as much as they used to.

When the internet was new, there was not a whole lot else to do with it other than read or write. These days, you can do anything online. Social media alone accounts for over 2 hours a day on average, of which big chunks are watching video (i.e. not reading or writing). The average (American) person spends more time on YouTube (24 minutes/day) alone than they do reading (16 minutes/day). Reading (for pleasure) is down by 7 minutes per day from 2004, a 32% decrease. Writing is much harder to find stats on but I assume the number is smaller as there are many more readers than writers, and I would expect it follows similar trends.

Factor #2: At the core of PvP is not story-telling, but the thrill of competitive victory. There are much more evocative mediums available for experiencing this thrill.

VIDEO GAMES. On an MU, the competitive aspect is always attenuated through a sheet+gear and dice rolls. In a video game, the competitive aspect is much more nakedly down to player skill. You do not lose a shoot-out in CoD due to a dice roll; you lose because you were slower, less accurate. On top of that, you also get to experience rich audio/visual imagery that an MU cannot hope to provide. The timer to repeat this tension is short, the barrier to experience it with a group of pals is low, the improvement in your skills (not a character) is quantifiable, and the dopamine hits of advancement and reward are lab-engineered to maintain engagement. 25% of all PC gaming time last year was spent on 4 PvP games.

MUs are not waning in popularity because they don’t have PvP.

They are waning in popularity because the things that they are made up of are not what people are choosing to engage with in their limited free time. Emphasizing PvP as a core of a game’s experience will not lead to a meteoric rise in popularity because this aspect of gaming can be done better in other game mediums. MUs exist at a weird confluence of social interaction, creative story-telling, and TEXT, which may better explain why so many games have left PvP out; why invest significant time capital (and despite the laissez-faire presentation of PvP given above, the investment to manage PvP is significant) in something that another medium does so much better?

The timer may be running down on when video games get better at approximating social interaction and creative story-telling. In the meantime, text-based RP remains a compelling hobby because it is the only game in town that can offer those two elements from the comfort of your home, for free, with some of the coordination elements of TTRPGs removed; the increase in options to run Actual TTRPG sessions online is arguably much more of a problem for MUs than too few opportunities to punk newbs.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

You are looking at this as if it’s taking away from artists when it makes you magnitudes more productive.

As a reminder of what professional artists have actually said for themselves:

More than half of respondents (57%) do not consider their area of creative work to be a sustainable career, and 72% believe that their work opportunities as a creator have been negatively impacted by generative AI. While 14% thought that there had been an increase in their earnings which they could attribute to the developments of generative AI technologies, 86% said that such developments had caused a decrease in their earnings. When it comes to feelings about how generative AI might impact creators, 11% are more optimistic than a year ago, 20% are neutral, but 69% are more pessimistic.

source

Reading over @Roadspike’s post, I want to pick out this line about CvC: “when done with a player who you trust”. I would kindly submit that this is rare less because games don’t allow it and more because it requires a solid underlying OOC relationship with the other player. This is not the dynamic we enjoy with most other players and not really something a game can be designed around.

I also want to pick out a few words that turn “CvC” (positive connotation) into “PvP” (negative connotation):

Frustrated, upset, stress, toxicity, egos, [dislike of] losing

These are the same pitfalls endemic to any competitive context, and these are things that we can design around. Healthy PvP requires the same things as “CvC” as described above, and there are things that a game runner can do to address them.

1. Trust/fairness (the belief that success is based on mutually shared controls, evenly applied)

OOC masque and private sheets came up earlier as things that make a game system more conducive to PvP, and that FS3/Ares is bad for PvP because it emphasizes transparency. A hot take here on my part is that transparency increases your odds of maintaining a healthy PvP environment dramatically because it helps address concerns of trust and fairness directly without relying on OOC relationships.

A more obvious thing is having referees who ensure that the rules of an encounter are understood and enforced evenly.

Other things game design can address in this space are stat bloat for older characters by limiting the amount of progression that can be made and access to “high caliber” gear. This is not to say that any advancement is bad, but the more advantages long-time (or “staff favorite”) players have, the less fair the playing field will feel and the more likely it is to incur OOC upset.

2. Sportsmanship (the practice of winning or losing graciously)

This one is harder to set up mechanics around, but you can easily design policies with it in mind. The expectation that players do not complain about the outcome of an encounter, that they do not engage in mean-spirited activity, that they maintain a modicum of care and concern for the fun of other players, applies in any competitive context and should be enforced. Referees in most sports can penalize players for bad behavior just as they would violating any other rule.

Why bother?

Even if your game has no PvP, PvE is not a panacea and the two points above still matter. The big difference between PvP and PvE is not that drama connected to these two things or the lack thereof doesn’t occur in one and they do in the other. It’s that in PvE the target of the upset is much more limited: one GM rather than a whole crew of opposing PCs. Designing and policing your game to promote Trust and Sportsmanship is still a good idea because even a PvE game is, fundamentally, a game.

I played on the same game as @Ashkuri and had many of the same sorts of experiences there, and I echo many of the same takeaways. “PvP” does tend to be higher stakes than what “PvE” can provide, and higher stakes are generally more exciting. Whether that is worth the additional baggage is a personal preference, but I disagree pretty strongly with some of the assertions in this thread that PvP doesn’t drive story, or that PvE (as it is commonly run) is just as thrilling.

I also don’t agree that PvP needs to mean character death/mutilation, or this sort of Running Man + Mad Max dystopia where PCs are subject to devastating consequences 24/7.

On one game I joined, maybe a week into playing there, I attended an event where PvP combat occurred. It was the first combat of any kind I experienced on that game. I was instantly one-shotted by a veteran player. I can see how for many people this would have been an instant turn-off and they would have logged out and never logged back in. I thought it was dope as hell. I decided to lose an arm, my PC languished for days in medical treatment, there was a whole side-plot spun out of his journey to obtain a mechanical arm (this was a sci-fi game), and he ended up switching factions in the resulting STORY from the simple act of me getting pwned in my first ever fight on this grid. It was fantastic, it was the best thing that ever happened to me on that game.

Nobody made me do that, though. The only part that was “enforced” was my guy getting shot and being out of the fight. I didn’t have to go do chargen again.

On the flip side of this, I stayed on that game and I ended up running an opposition faction and many times that meant organizing and facilitating PvP events, and no matter how much communication there was about what would be allowed to happen, or what stakes there were for PCs involved, or even preset outcomes to where the fighting would end up overall, could ever outrun the resulting drama around the mismatch between people’s expectations for how things would go and how things actually occurred. There is simply a scale and trust issue with running PvP on an MU* that TTRPGs (which we should remember that WoD was designed as a TTRPG) do not have.

You can do everything right and communicate everything down to a T, but on a long enough timeline, somebody is going to get their wires crossed about how something went down and become convinced that something was done unfairly. There are players that I would probably still be friends or friendly with today that do not want anything to do with me because of PvP that I was doing my level best to make as fair and story-oriented as possible. It’s just the nature of the beast.

God, I love it though. We should probably start a support group, PvPers Anonymous.

I prefer to use PBs that are public figures, especially actors. They are cast as characters for a living, people make “dream casting” lists for adaptations all the time, and their images are in the public space and easily credited to them. Many times they’ve played a role that fits the vibe of the theme in question.

These days I like to use character actors, supporting actors, and international film actors over A-listers, but I find them by watching something and later thinking “hey that person would be right for this vibe,” which to me is the main consideration for who to use as a PB. The vibe comes first.

@Superbia
FS3 comes packaged with Ares and has support built-in for vehicles. The default options are geared towards Battlestar Galactica, but you can configure your own without needing to code anything new.

Welcome, friends and enemies.

Redwall MUCK
Magramba
Dagda
About 100 others, the alt culture on that game was wild

Star Wars: Age of Alliances
Tarion Tavers
Kylo Ren (2017- early 2023, I don’t know, whenever that thread popped off)
and more!

Shattered
Hyacinth
Welly
Nia

@OT-The-Real
I know this guy is banned but I was sat here looking at this wondering who tf the people mentioned even are, and for posterity’s sake, here’s the “cool shit” we’re “missing out on”.

Corpse Kings

Not a creator, but a game. Corpse Kings is print-on-demand RPG rules set created by Wade K. Savage. The art is AI.

The text is… probably also AI.

Sandy Petersen

Sandy was the principal author on Call of Cthulhu back in 1981. As far as I can tell that’s about the only thing he’s ever done in the RPG space. He was Definitely Canceled Due to Woke, though. In 1981.
ETA: I did some more looking on this and it turns out Petersen has recently made transphobic comments online and will be guest of honor at an upcoming 30-50 person anti-woke gaming “convention”, which I assume is what got him on the honor roll here. Still no new RPG systems I can find.

Blaine Lee Pardoe

Pardoe was a writer for BattleTech (released in 1984) but was not its sole creator. He wrote a number of novels for the series but has not done any game work since 2012. The publisher of BattleTech material publicly disowned Pardoe in 2022 due to “online activities which do not align with Catalyst’s publishing vision.”

Alexander Macris

Macris went to West Point but didn’t finish, changing gears and eventually attending Harvard Law School. He then went on to create The Escapist, an e-zine that was notable for its role in the GamerGate controversy around 2014. Macris, at least, seems to be still creating game content and paying actual artists. He has two main systems, a sword-and-sandals concept ripped from Conan (Adventurer, Conqueror, King; which you may recognize from the titles of those Conan books) and an anti-woke superhero system called Ascendant.

Macris was the CEO of Milo Entertainment, a company founded by alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos, until the company imploded following the death of its crypto-billionaire funder. Yiannopoulos has a range of repugnant views and behaviors that you can easily find. You will recognize his name from the Gamergate Forbes article above. Weird!

Macris is also so hostile and litigious against anyone who criticizes his systems that he and his systems are banned subjects on RPG.net and the RPG subreddit.

So yeah I guess you could say we are super missing out.

@Raistlin said in AI Megathread:

rather than considering how it impacts real creators

https://societyofauthors.org/2025/03/26/soa-report-into-authors-views-on-the-ai-and-copyright-consultation/

@Raistlin said in AI Megathread:

or understanding the actual humans you’re supposedly trying to engage with on a game. There’s no empathy for false accusations

Of course there is. Most people (in this community) know that AI detector tools are not a silver bullet. Most people would feel badly upon finding out that someone accused of using AI had not, in fact, used AI, in the same way that all false accusations garner empathy if they are disproved.

What most people are expressing is the desire for transparency, to know if AI was used to create the content they are engaging with in the MU* space, and if there was more of that, I expect there would be less false accusations to go along with it.

AI cannot improve your writing. I’m not saying the LLMs are bad at writing, or worse than you are, but I am saying that if you use AI it’s no longer your writing. Being that I am only RPing with you to interact with you and read your writing, kindly keep that shit away from me.

If you want a sentence to hit different then think harder.

@Tez
This may have been introduced during the last update/upgrade? Looks like it might be a quick fix. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/15860/solved-eacces-errors-after-rebuilds

@Ashkuri
I think there’s sort of two different things here, at least from the previous topic/your title and the question you’re asking, one being 3-Month Players (3M) and one being The Bubble a new game experiences that they contribute to.

I don’t think there is a right answer to The Bubble. I think it is in large part inevitable if awareness is high and especially if the game is good, and every way of trying to manage it administratively has some flavor of contraindication. You can waitlist, but then you burn enthusiasm when people can’t get in or don’t get in with their friends. You can roster-only, but then you burn enthusiasm when people feel blocked from the concept they wanted to invent (even if it is 90% the same as the roster). You can just plow through it, but then you burn enthusiasm when there’s not enough content coming from staff for everyone to engage in. All of these burn staff enthusiasm too, from knowing about the burnt player enthusiasm.

I saw some assertions made that there simply needs to be enough for players to RP about on their own, and I don’t agree that this solves everything. Nobody is coming to your game solely to come up with their own content in your incredibly original and unique setting; there has to be enough content coming from staff or you will burn enthusiasm, period.

I also don’t agree that all players want to stick on a game but the game fails them, and I don’t agree that you can make the game so shiny that these people will stick when they would have otherwise gone off to the new shiny thing. Some people are 3Ms and that’s just the way they are. You can make the greatest, most inclusive, most content-having, most relationship-building game anyone has ever seen, and they will still wander off to check the next up and coming game. The grass is always greener. People (and that is what players are) love novelty. People love the idea that something different will fill the ‘want’ inside them, and that something different is always the next thing that I don’t have yet. Nothing is more important than tracking that incoming package, and nothing matters less than the thing that came in last month’s package.

Some of this is down to bad player expectations, that a volunteer staff providing a free service will supply a bespoke, on-demand, endlessly entertaining funbox filled with interesting (and new!) entities for them to meet and build fulfilling relationships with. It’s always going to be a ‘pick your poison’ scenario for how you handle those expectations and the inevitable failure to meet them, especially during a bubble.

How do you tell a 3M from a forever player? Wait three months. You don’t have the benefit of knowing which flowers will set fruit and which won’t. You have to treat them all well, or none of them will. I’m always devastated when a tomato gets end rot or splits before what I felt was its time, but there’s only so much I can do, so I try to enjoy the harvest I get and not shed (too many) tears over the harvest I don’t. Do your best, get some help if you need it, and let it ride. There’s always next summer.

And hey! Where is it written that 3Ms are bad, actually? If you can whirlwind through in 3 months and make me remember you enough to miss you when you’re gone, my hat is off to you. I love you. I hate you. I think of you often. I hope you’re doing well.

We should talk about 8Ms too, but this post is long enough already.

@Lemon-Fox
It’s nice you’re having a good time. None of the people in this thread left because it was impossible to have a good time, or there was too much gatekeeping, or it was hard to get started as a newbie, or there wasn’t enough content, or the mechanics weren’t ideal, or the DB was bloated.

We left because players who had behaved in unconscionable ways were promoted rather than disciplined. These same players remain on staff. You may not care what kind of people they were to other people or at another time, but there are certain activities that, change of heart or not, I’m simply not ever willing to be around those who have done them or who tolerate them. It’s hard to say which is worse, but at AoA you don’t have to decide; you get both.

Of course we discussed these concerns with Cujo. I spoke with Cujo a few times a week for over five years. Zephyr spoke with him every day. We tried appealing to a sense of decency over this particular decision and were rebuffed. That’s why we left. We wanted to see some justice. We wanted protection from an abuser. We didn’t get it, so we had to leave.

There is a lot of unrelated salt in this thread, that is true, but this post was not put up out of a sense of revenge but sadness and concern. I am still sad, three years gone, about the outcome of those conversations, and I am still concerned for players who, like me at the time, did not know that the environment was unsafe. Please watch carefully for yours and your friends’ safety; staff won’t be.

@Faraday
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent on both client and the portal, but to me, the channel mute situation is something I typically handle client-side with a trigger that simply does not trigger an activity alert. This is a “best of both worlds” scenario to me, because I’m not checking the window and finding “oh, it’s just Bigmouth Joe for the 18th time”, but I can follow the conversation if someone I care about is engaging.

If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair, but the annoyance to me has always been “oh ACTIVITY- …and it’s Bigmouth Joe.” I can skim over that when I find it, it’s the checking that makes me insane.

@Jax
These are the mechanics the sex pest in chief pitched a few years ago, so.

@Meg
I played Tarion Tavers and Kylo Ren on this game, among a few others. I am the Trashcan previously mentioned in this thread as momentarily having been put on staff. I am one of the people who protested Hadrix being made staff in the same elevation as I and a few others were, which was done without asking us if we actually wanted to be on staff. I stepped down from the staff bit I didn’t ask for, and was banned from all of my bits while I was away on vacation. I’m not sure on the exact timing of when I was banned vs when I resigned but they were all in there together.

I’m not sure what else you’re asking other than if I also condemn Cujo’s behavior and of course I do. That’s why I quit the game.

Here’s me resigning:

If that doesn’t answer your question, please let me know.

I played on this game for a long time; in fact, I am the aforementioned jerky second-Kylo, after Banshee. It seemed odd to me that somebody would keep coming back to drag this game over and over again while also clearly having a long history with the game, citing events and posting logs so old that even I was not there for them. I joined this game over 8 years ago and left almost 2 years ago when this first post went up, and almost 2 years later you are still coming here to read people for filth.

I went back over your posting history to try to get a clearer picture of what sort of deep salt might be driving these posts, @Anony-Mouse, and what I’ve read here makes it fairly obvious to me that you are probably one of the few players that was ever actually banned from AoA for sex pest behavior. The character was Sion, a bit that repeatedly, over the course of actual years, posted emits about their pants abruptly coming loose and falling down, exposing their undergarments to the other characters in the room. This was so pervasive that Cujo, a headwiz so clearly uninterested in policing bad behavior, finally was moved to ban the player.

I doubt it is a coincidence that you’ve taken aim at me in these posts, given that I booted Sion’s alt from the First Order faction because of their unremitting OOC negativity. There are a litany of accurate critiques to make about AoA, and many of them are laid out in this thread, but you are not the voice to make them.

The receipts are long. I’ve hidden them in a spoiler tag.

Spoiler

TL:DR, the very specific stories and knowledge cited by @Anony-Mouse support the conclusion that they are Rhona/Nova/Sion, one of the few sex pests ever to actually be banned from AoA.

If true, it is really rich to come on this thread with righteous fury given your history.

@Narrator
Of course using AI tools is expedient. At this point, everyone involved in the conversation recognizes two things: AI tools are expedient to use and they stand to make the people creating and using them a lot of money. No one is arguing these points.

I’m glad you’re being transparent about your business practices, but the complaint in this thread is about people who are not being transparent. To use your Whole Foods analogy, you may not care where your eggs come from and that’s fine. Keep buying your 5 dozen egg trays. However, if someone thinks they’re buying the pasture-raised free range eggs and when they open the carton, they are, in fact, the same eggs from the factory farm, that just ain’t right.