But Why
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
Heck, I would build it myself if I had the money but I have to work for a living.
Could independently wealthy game runners that don’t need to work for a living please raise their hands?
I’m independently wealthy in memes and random cyrptocurrency that have no actual value. Does that count.
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Me reading the OP and everything after
People wanna play what they wanna play. If you don’t wanna play that, don’t play it?
Just this opening line:
What is the appeal of playing humans in a world without magic, technology, or even indoor plumbing?
Let me just say that indoor plumbing has never been a cornerstone of my roleplay, so a lack of it doesn’t bother me one bit.
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@Rucket sorry you had to find out this way that you’re playing wrong
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
Heck, I would build it myself if I had the money but I have to work for a living.
I know I’m probably opening a can of worms by asking this, but why do you believe there’s a financial barrier to building a MU*? Silent Heaven costs less than $30 per month to keep running, and I could probably downgrade to an even cheaper server once a certain bug in Evennia is fixed. There were also no costs beforehand. None with learning how to code, nor doing the actual coding and building.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare In my experience it’s the time crunch. When I had a paid-to-MU* job (call center work, in my case, but later as a web admin at a university), it was definitely easier to keep up staffing and running things. That said, the Reach cost all of $12/month for hosting back in 2011-2012. We hosted with Mechanipus so that included someone managing the webserver and stack. I’ve got a few Digital Ocean droplets for testing servers and it’s like $24/month.
I mean, that amount is also potentially a no-go for some. People live on shoestring budgets due to many factors, but it’s more likely that the expectation of staff/running a game is that it becomes effectively a full time job especially after a certain size of player base. That’s a largely unsustainable approach, but an enduring one in the hobby.
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@Jumpscare said in But Why:
why do you believe there’s a financial barrier to building a MU*?
Most Ares games run on the $12/month droplet. A few giant ones needed the next bigger size, but that’s rare. Tiny/Rhost games can be run on even less, depending on the MU host.
But like @somasatori said, even that much may be a burden to some.
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@Jumpscare I think it’s more the ‘I do not have to go to work to pay rent and buy food, so that X hours a week can be spent STAFFin’,’ instead.
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
@Evilgrayson
If Elon Musk had all his billions stolen by Jeff Bezos then raised a mercenary army of criminals to kill Bezos and steal everything he had, would you consider that a heroic story?Well that’s the story of Robinhood with the names changed. He was the son of a nobleman who had all his wealth taken by the corrupt Sheriff while the king was away fighting a war. He only became an outlaw because he was suddenly poor. He didn’t give a wet squirt about the poor people until he was one of them.
In some versions of the story the Sheriff killed his father, in some versions he was a knight who returned from the crusades to find his home had been plundered, but the one thing that holds true is that the start of the story is rich-guy-on-rich-guy violence and the rest of the story is all about taking back what was stolen from him.
Disney may have romanticized it with adorable foxes but make no mistake, this was a story about a wealthy lord standing along side a band of thieves to take what they felt they were owed.
Even in the Disney version he didn’t start giving away money until the Sheriff started squeezing the peasants and offering high rewards for Robin’s head. His generosity was a move made out of tactical necessity, not out of kindness.
The whole reason the Disney Robin Hood exists is because a bunch of animators were making a Reynard the Fox cartoon and the brass got wind of it and more importantly, what the traditional story contained. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Needless to say, this got the axe.
What was left was a bunch of assets which got repurposed for…Robin Hood.
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@Jumpscare
My mother is disabled and has extensive medical bills.
We are eating 58 cent burritos and 68 cent boxes of mac’n cheese to survive. It’s very much:
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I feel like it’s super weird how hard you’re going against the concept of people playing fantasy while ignoring a lot of the exact same issues in sci fi. But at the same time, I also absolutely get when one thing is just your thing and something else isn’t.
But either way, I’m really sorry to hear about your mom, and the circumstances y’all are facing. And you’re not the only person I know for whom $12/month to spare on games is an unattainable luxury. I hope at some point soon that will change, because it’s terrible going check to check that way and knowing the only place to cut back is from your own plates.
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@Jumpscare said in But Why:
@De-Villefort said in But Why:
Heck, I would build it myself if I had the money but I have to work for a living.
I know I’m probably opening a can of worms by asking this, but why do you believe there’s a financial barrier to building a MU*? Silent Heaven costs less than $30 per month to keep running, and I could probably downgrade to an even cheaper server once a certain bug in Evennia is fixed. There were also no costs beforehand. None with learning how to code, nor doing the actual coding and building.
Until a few years ago, there was a considerable financial barrier if you lived outside of the US. Today, though, I’ll agree – with online payments having become a matter of click n transfer, and web hotels such as Digital Ocean being internationally accessible, it really isn’t a big deal anymore.
That is, the practical side. I too have been in a situation where the 54 bucks a month Keys costs would have been money I could not afford to spend on entertainment.
Any pronouns. Come to Chincoteague. We have ponies. http://keys.aresmush.com
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in But Why:
@Jumpscare said in But Why:
@De-Villefort said in But Why:
Heck, I would build it myself if I had the money but I have to work for a living.
I know I’m probably opening a can of worms by asking this, but why do you believe there’s a financial barrier to building a MU*? Silent Heaven costs less than $30 per month to keep running, and I could probably downgrade to an even cheaper server once a certain bug in Evennia is fixed. There were also no costs beforehand. None with learning how to code, nor doing the actual coding and building.
Until a few years ago, there was a considerable financial barrier if you lived outside of the US. Today, though, I’ll agree – with online payments having become a matter of click n transfer, and web hotels such as Digital Ocean being internationally accessible, it really isn’t a big deal anymore.
That is, the practical side. I too have been in a situation where the 54 bucks a month Keys costs would have been money I could not afford to spend on entertainment.
Presuming you live in a place whose currency is comparable to, or at least near, the dollar.
Lots of countries have staggeringly weak currencies that are constantly in flux. I live in Buenos Aires, and we don’t have hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados, fires, or even really bad floods… our natural disaster is inflation. Not to mention the taxes levied on us should we purchase goods or services in dollars (or euros) from outside the country, adding up to a minimum 65% increase. So for me, $12 for Digital Ocean becomes $19.50 (at best), and cuts into my ability to purchase dollars as the only (effective, if not efficient) way to actually have any (semi) stable savings, because as a private citizen I’m limited to the purchase of $200 per month (a law I am not against, as it stops people with a lot more money from completely ruining it for anyone else). Keep in mind, Netflix, Spotify, all those services --while they are regionalized and thus don’t have the 65% tax-- all still charge in dollars and thus cut into that purchasing maximum.
If my friend who lives in the U.S. wasn’t footing the bill for our game, I couldn’t run it.
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@Coin Yes, sorry. I was having a Eurocentric moment there. I really should know better, considering what the Ukraine war has done to inflation over here and that’s peanuts in comparison.
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My apologies. I have a job that’s thankfully above minimum wage, with my life costs minimized as best I can in order to be able to save up a small amount of cash each month, and it didn’t even cross my mind that even that is privileged.
That’s a failing on my part. I’m sorry. Thanks for calling me out on it.
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My only comment on here is that Concordia is about seven cities from seven worlds that got dropkicked into an alien planet 60ish years ago, at which point giant holes in the sky opened up and started barfing out Serious Issues.
This does not conform to the Standard Model, is all I’m saying
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@Jenn
I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.It’s like making a game where everyone is a billionaire out to maximize their portfolio. Much more horrific than WoD ever could be.
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Should go try one of those first person shooters.
They don’t glorify anything at all.
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It goes back to, my horror and your horror are very different?
It is pretendy‐fun times? Part of that is you can make that whatever you want it to be. Few of us can play the “bad guy” well, so on these games the nobles tend to be good guys on the general. Or at least rogues with a heart of gold. (GENERAL PEOPLE, GENERAL)
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.
Hey, hey. Not all the L&L games are about the British.
