@Jax Best. Advice. Ever.
Honestly, I wasn’t planning on trying it, not least 'cause I’m not a newbie there. But boy, would I love to be a fly on the wall in THAT scene!
@Jax Best. Advice. Ever.
Honestly, I wasn’t planning on trying it, not least 'cause I’m not a newbie there. But boy, would I love to be a fly on the wall in THAT scene!
@EDI7078 Thanks for the heads-up. I’m already playing there, and have been enjoying the place.
@STD Never heard about anyone trying that. IMO, it’s pretty clever. Since it’s never happened to my knowledge, all I can do is speculate; sorry I can’t be more helpful here.
If a new and well-liked member of a staff-favored faction did it, I could see them pulling it off and getting away with it. Maybe more than once.
Someone else doing the same thing might be accepted as a running joke character. Don’t know what they’d do to the player/character if that didn’t happen, though. Winding up with permanently nerfed dice rolls just to keep the ‘loser’ losing comes to mind, since they have no problem spoofing dice rolls for even less reason.
Since cowardice goes against The Way, I doubt such a character would be accepted among the Koras. They might even kill the character themselves. Which, since the Koras are the faction most likely to benefit from such trolling, would probably get a character ostracized or killed for nothing.
@imstillhere And let’s not forget the old ploy of non-Koras (often newbies) in Kora clique scenes being used as blaster fodder while Koras did everything important in the scene, which is at least as bad as staff alts steamrolling the low-level targets. At least the newbies had a chance of being relevant to the scene the other way.
And as for the OTHER thing… gross and vicious doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. I don’t remember witnessing one of those ‘gifts’ being opened, and I’m glad I didn’t, but I’m deeply sorry you had to suffer through that particular horror and humiliation, Zephyr.
Seriously, what normal human being could ever think another person would ever find that anything but sick? On any sane game, with half-ass decent staff, that guy would be GONE.
@Popes I suspect yours is a pretty common experience for a newbie there. They are big on discussing options that don’t involve killing characters, such as capture, or being wounded and incapacitated and then dragged off the field by your friends. Or maybe they realize your health is about gone and stop sending attacks your way. This is more for the benefit of the dinos, who don’t want to lose their borderline maxed-out charbits, but since the cat’s out of the bag now, these benefits are spilling over to newbies as well, to avoid losing PCs after one or two battles.
But you will definitely feel useless in any kind of combat without a weapon with high-end mods to make it useful. Your average stock pistol, the most common weapon for newbies, has an accuracy of around 70 percent, which means you lose almost a third of your skill with the weapon before you even roll your attack. So even a character with a skill level of 100 with pistols would only have a 70 when using one. Combine that with the often high defensive skills of coded NPCs and the generally low skills of new players, and you’re going to miss A LOT. Stock carbines are only slightly better than pistols, and even stock rifles will have 85 percent accuracy at best. Get used to missing a lot more than you hit.
And when you do hit, it’ll often look and feel like flea bites, since most coded NPCs have better stats and armor than new players, and attack roll results play a role in determining damage. Even a high-damage weapon with 90-100 percent accuracy can have its damage cut in half or more by the time rolls and armor are factored in.
When those same NPCs shoot YOU, on the other hand, you’ll KNOW you’ve been shot, for the same reasons as stated above; higher skills, better gear. It’s like a blind puppy trying to fight two ogres waving sticks around; you’re trying to nibble them to death when you can even hit them at all, while they can almost casually whack you just a few times and you’re done for the night.
Doesn’t exactly feel like the movies, does it? By AoA standards, farm boy Luke Skywalker from Episode IV would be a dino char, if his results on the screen are any indication. Made up to actual farm boy stats on the game, he wouldn’t have survived the escape from the Death Star. Not even with a captured Stormtrooper blaster and a lightsaber, and with the Stormtroopers deliberately missing him (Vader and Tarkin WANTED the rescuers to escape, after all).
@GF Some people do go for that sort of tedious keyboarding and waiting to “simulate” flying a starship and loading and unloading coded cargo to earn money.
I don’t think I will ever understand those people. It’s certainly not what I imagine when I think of flying a starship, or when I think of roleplaying. And especially not when I think of FUN.
To each their own, I guess.
@Popes I thought I remembered something about such a bonus straight out of chargen, but I couldn’t remember whose idea that was… it was pretty far back in the thread.
Completely unsurprised that he’d steal your idea. Though genuinely startled that he stole an actual GOOD idea.
@Istus Speaking of inflating player numbers, Cujo is chasing new players HARD ATM. These announcements hit the boards during the wee hours last night:
Hello all
We’re instituting a new Chargen feature, in the form of a free starter ship. If you make a new character, and want to request a free ship once you are IC, then we offer you the newly updated Slingshot cargo hauler.
The new Slingshot comes with 200 tons of cargo space. Max Speeds of 50 MGLT in space, and 80 MGLT in atmosphere. It is still a 1 crew ship, with a bunk behind the pilot’s station, with interior room for 2 passengers to at least sit fiairly comfortably while traveling the space lanes.
In the end, we are now offering free ships out of chargen. If you make a character, and want a ship to start off with, and the new Slingshot variants sound appealing to you, then make that new character, and put in the request once you are approved and IC!
Hey all
Throughout the rest of the month, we are offering 1000 XP in bonus for your new characters. If you create a new character, get approved, and want the bonus XP to start fresh and new on the grid, put in a +rquest once you’re IC!
We’ll happily support your new characters leading in to the new year!
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and prepare for 2024!
The desperation is real. A year ago, any bonuses to new players wouldn’t have passed staff’s laugh test (after all, the pointless gulf between newbies and dinos MUST be maintained!). And new characters who wanted a ship would either have to join an org and hope they felt like loaning a ship out (good luck, Chuck) or go into debt to a crime lord to buy one and hope they could pay off the loan through trading (or outlast the crime lord character, which, given the rate at which players quit AoA, is a weak but viable strategy).
Not that I think this ship’s going to sink much faster. But I got a good lol reading the obvious newbie/alt bait. Makes me wonder if the dinos will demand an equivalent bonus.
@Warma-Sheen Duly noted on the quality thing, and thanks.
@oknow Sadly, no longer so. The game remains open, but activity is largely nil. One fachead has been working hard to make things happen, but I suspect he’s getting burned out.
Also, most of the new arrivals from Jan - Feb seem to have left. Not sure where they’ve gone. A few may be on Rebirth.
@Wuff @Polk You’re both exactly right. While there are commands to keep from flying past or crashing into things you’re trying to reach, they make no actual difference; 99 times out of 100, if you’re running cargo, you’re not RPing.
And that remaining 1 out of 100 is most likely a very slow and laborious scene.
@Kyppi You’re not wrong about the cargo-running. I’ve never seen coded cargo-running promote RP on ANY MUSH I’ve ever played on, but I can tell you from experience that it certainly gets in the way of RP. Especially when you’re stuck on a ship at the corner of No and Where, and nobody’s schedules match up. Which I suppose is convenient if you aren’t interested in RP outside of scheduled events anyway; you always have an excuse to be unavailable. Those stuck on military starships that never seem to make port anywhere have a similar problem, a fact that has (temporarily) killed at least one faction on the game.
You’re not wrong about how demanding the general MUSH community is about RP, either. While there are individual players who are known to be supportive of RP with newbies, most cliques are not, and most orgs qualify as cliques. The handful of exceptions are mostly trying to recruit new members.
Unfortunately, cliques can keep a game running for a very long time without any meaningful influx of new players. SerenityMUSH and AoA are both proof of this.
P.S.: This is probably not my best writing, no thanks to fatigue and illness. Editing may follow.
@Pavel Technically, SerenityMUSH was both run by an idiot AND got people who just wanted to ruin others’ fun playing them. Not the majority, by far. But there were at least three serious problem players who played Feds during the time I played there…
It’s been long enough that I don’t remember the names (I think one might have been named Forge, but I might be wrong). They followed a pretty painful formula; force their way into others’ scenes, powerpose being all stormtrooper-y and ‘YOU WILL RESPECK MY AUTHORITAH!!!’ (misspellings deliberate), and generally walking all over other players 'cause they could. Complaints were pointless, since no pro-player action was ever taken.
Just as an example of how egregious this could get, I once witnessed a major disturbance (I believe there was a bomb involved) that resulted in panicked flight from Eavesdown Docks by everyone in the area. A Fed whose name I can’t remember powerposed stopping everyone passing through at least one of the exits and inspecting everyone’s hands for signs of powder or explosive residue. This at an exit almost as wide as a four-lane street, with panicked people running through like their butts were on fire. Needless to say, no PCs went near that exit, but there were at least two others available, so it didn’t much matter. None of the other PCs responded to this goof’s pose, which was just as well.
On two different occasions a ship I was crewing on decided to host an undercover problem Fed for the purposes of a plot of some kind. At the time I was left wondering just who thought this was a good idea, and in the end things either went as badly as I expected, or worse.
The really pathetic and stupid part of all this is that Mal went above and beyond to empower this handful of problem players (well above and beyond what was allowed for most Fed players), only to turn right around and complain endlessly about the amount of complaints he had to deal with regarding these very same players, and how much of a headache they were for him.
The answer seemed pretty obvious to me (get rid of the problem Fed players!), but apparently not to Mal. Most of those schmucks eventually left when other PCs stopped playing with them.
(Edited for mild clarity)
@Krautistanian True in both cases. On-grid RP is so rare that it barely exists at all, and the little that IS available is centered around bars. I catch a scene every once in a while to get a +nom or two, so I can collect my paycheck for a few weeks, but what’s out there isn’t exactly motivating. Though knowing that my continued presence annoys some long-term asshats there is reason enough for me to ensure I remain at least slightly active.
@Krautistanian Very likely, though I very much doubt you’re the only burned-out, bored player hunting for RP that doesn’t require you to become a blaster sponge in Sith- and Kora-run scenes, no matter who is shooting at who, or to be a target for known sex pests.
For what it may be worth, there is a weight system in play. However, calling it a system is ludicrously generous; since the numbers that go with each item are never explained, it’s no more effective than having no weight system at all.
@Anony-Mouse Actually, SerenityMUSH DID have coded ammunition. Mal threatened on the Public channel to wipe out PCs’ stores of ammunition that weren’t stored in lockers more than once. Actually did it once, which at least one player quit over.
@icanbeyourmuse Like Charlie Brown, I’m fascinated by failure.
Especially staff failure.
@Jennkryst They have since added such ‘features’ as several varieties of weapon powerpacks, medical supplies, coded space combat (which may or may not work; a few ‘work-around’ non-coded space combat systems are still in use), and coded weapon and starship mods and devices to allow them to be added. All the other pointless code you mentioned is still there, including a tram on Coruscant that not only forces you to wait, but demands you pay coded money for the ‘privilege’ of using it.
A number of SerenityMUSH players/staff migrated there years ago after the most recent reopening, which is probably why the game has been ‘blessed’ this way.
@TNP It is (DSS). Some of their code has been updated, but whether it can incorporate virtual objects or not, I have no idea.
I do know it’s one of the laggiest games I’ve ever been on, and potential database bloat may be a factor (I know severe overcoding is). SerenityMUSH, another infamous DSS game, had similar issues, and at one point was confirmed to have a severe database bloat issue, or at the very least a similar issue to database bloat.
As for ships, the number of examples of different ship models is kept artificially limited there, so there is a hard cap of sorts on the number of ships on the game. Not nearly all of them are taken, but the nicer ships are, and tend to stay that way. IMO, Cujo and Company probably want some non-friends’ ships freed up so they and their friends can claim them.
@Jax The World Wonders.
Speaking of turds, this just hit the water today:
Greetings, denizens.
In an effort to keep the game’s grid functionally flowing, we’re updating the rules of item and property retention. The general rule on this is 30 days of not logging in can result in your starships being recycled back in to the system. 60+ days of not logging in can warrant your ships and items to be recycled back in to the system.
But now, we’re going to add in a period beyond that where if you only login and do not participate in the game, after 90+ days your ships and items are up for recycling back in to the system.
I.e. we need you to participate in the game too, in order to keep your stuff. Please start seeking out RP and garner +noms iff you really want to keep your character’s things on the MUSH. We are a game, we need to continue to keep the game’s grid flowing as it was designed. We need people to play and help create a fun atmosphere for all involved.
So, in summary, please do not just sign-in to try and retain your items, but please consider sending and receiving +noms for viable RP so that the game can just keep being ffun, and functional, as it was designed.
Thanks,
Gee, I wonder who this could possibly be aimed at?
This is pure speculation based on past experience, but I suspect AoA’s vastly-overcoded object list is running in the red again (which is known to happen if you demand coded objects for ammunition packs, healing items, effing BOOZE, and similar things for no good reason). That, and the age-old desire to recycle ships back into the system, whether to allow the dinos to buy more ships or to provide ships to the very occasional new player. Most likely the former, since we all know AoA staff’s concern for the situation of new players could fit inside a thimble, most likely with a lot of room left.