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Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo
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@somasatori Hit nail on head, Daniel-San. Given Cujo’s desire to have the most successful Star Wars MU out there, unethical data calculating and compilation would be right up his alley. Much like the way Mal used to encourage the SerenityMUSH playerbase to upvote the game on a rating site (MudConnector?), over and over and over again.
Do all DSS games inspire this kind of toxic competitive behavior? The World Wonders.
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Isn’t the point of sites with ratings for something to upvote if you like it? Usually places that do not want the same person doing multiple of something set it up as such. Doing what a system is designed for is not unethical. Did Mal push it a lot? I don’t know. When people do stuff like that I just ignore it because it is annoying not unethical. Equating annoying with unethical just seems weird to me.
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@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@Zephyr Was wondering about something… does Civilians count player bits that are solely Civilians, or any player bits that just have the Civilian group label? 'Cause a lot of players are Civilians that belong to other groups/orgs, like Mandalorians and likely Clan Kora… so a Civilian posing might trip another group or two as well.
It only counts whatever group they’re focused on, so unless they’ve changed it, it should only be counting one group. My info on this is based on how it was back in January though so I’m unaware of any changes they might’ve made to make them look better. I wouldn’t put it past Cujo to try that, but he doesn’t have the skill to do that himself.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
Did Mal push it a lot? I don’t know. When people do stuff like that I just ignore it because it is annoying not unethical.
I DO know, because I watched it happen on Public channels on SerenityMUSH at least once a week, and usually more often, sometimes even once a day. Whereas most games mention upvoting a few times a year at most. But where a player might upvote once or twice and get on with their life anywhere else, Mal pushed for it constantly, and a particularly loyal group of players and staffers rushed out to do it every time he did so. Eventually SerenityMUSH had the most upvotes on the site by far, which is what Mal was after.
The term for this is vote brigading, and it is at best unfair, at most highly unethical. The most common use of vote brigading is to artificially inflate an approval or disapproval of some chosen issue.
It is less about the What and more about the Why; Cujo and Mal want to have the biggest, most successful MU on the web, and don’t much care about how they get it.
Mal was apparently willing to go to greater lengths to do so. He had a reputation for taking a group of his staffers and visiting competing games regularly and frequently, often creating charbits there without ever apping characters, just so the players and owners of the games had no doubt about who it was. If the bits were erased, they recreated them, or logged on as guests.
While there is no rule against this, it was creepy at best, because except for occasionally posting ads for their own game, they said not a word to the players on these games. This was less true for the staffers on the games, however; rumors swirled around that he and his were harassing them via pages and OOC comments, especially if they used to play on his game. I believe at least one of these competing games eventually banned him and his regulars to put an end to this. A few didn’t, just in case one or more of Mal’s buddies decided to come play on their game (none did).
Annoying? Very. Unethical? Maybe. Technically there’s no law against spam calls, but that doesn’t mean people want their phones being rung at every hour of the day and night by salesmen or scammers.
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@Zephyr Point. Dunno if Banshee has the coding chops, either, and I’m not sure Yeti would go along with such a thing.
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@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@icanbeyourmuse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
Did Mal push it a lot? I don’t know. When people do stuff like that I just ignore it because it is annoying not unethical.
… visiting competing games regularly and frequently, often creating charbits there without ever apping characters, just so the players and owners of the games had no doubt about who it was. If the bits were erased, they recreated them, or logged on as guests.
I have never understood the perspective of “competing games.” I think most WoD MU*ers, and maybe this is different for science fiction or firefly games, may have one main game and they’ll likely have alts on at least one other if there’s a game available. I did have a bit of an ego boost that The Reach’s population was so high out of the gate (then panic because we weren’t prepared for that), but I really wanted people to keep playing Metro, New York City, Dark Water, or Haunted Memories as well. Feeling like you have only one place that is the place for you without looking for other options, imo, creates a toxic sense of dependency on it. We all like different things, different themes, different ideas and media which cannot necessarily be created in a single space.
they/them
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@somasatori I think this goes for game runners over the years to a certain level as well. I’ve seen plenty of game runners and staff folks (especially on WoD stuff) that refuse to recognize other games as valid. It would be absolutely wonderful if those people had instead chosen to share ideas and stuff with each other, but instead it was all treated like finite resources.
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@MisterBoring said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@somasatori I think this goes for game runners over the years to a certain level as well. I’ve seen plenty of game runners and staff folks (especially on WoD stuff) that refuse to recognize other games as valid. It would be absolutely wonderful if those people had instead chosen to share ideas and stuff with each other, but instead it was all treated like finite resources.
Just spitballing here, but maybe that was because of the difficulty of finding and retaining staff? Particularly good staff? People only have so many hours in a day and with the added weight of RL, those hours might be very small indeed. So staff very much was a limited resource. You wouldn’t want to let any of those people (and their man-hours) off to another game.
This went double for coding staff since MU* code up until recently was a horrorshow.
And it might’ve spilled over into competition for playerbase as no one likes to think they’re wasting their time. Larger playerbase means more opportunities for staff to staff.
All that said, the three times I’ve lost my sanity and staffed on games, I never encountered this sense of competition. Either I was oblivious (very possible) or just lucky to get onto games where this just wasn’t a thing.
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I think it comes down to whether the game runner is emotionally intelligence or toxic in their approach to running the game. Everything follows from that.
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@somasatori said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
New York City
Honestly, I’m just glad I’m not the only one who remembers that fever dream.
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@oknow said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
I think it comes down to whether the game runner is emotionally intelligence or toxic in their approach to running the game. Everything follows from that.
Yes and no.
In general, the competitive nature is natural when operating in an environment with limited ‘consumers’. Even more so if they’re operating in the same genre, or using the same source material. If we both make soap, we want people to use our soap and not the other, for instance.
It’s how one goes about “winning” that competition where problems lie. One method is to provide the best service one can, with diligent staff, engaging story, etc, etc. The other is by creating a sort of cult mentality around their game, caring more about the transient victory than about actually providing a service.
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@STD That’s true that staff are limited resource, but I was also referring to people treating ideas and stuff as limited resources. Good observation though.
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@Pavel This, exactly. Generally the headwiz of a particular game is who decides whether other games are considered ‘competing games’ or not. I’m glad to see that most headwizzes these days don’t seem to see other games this way.
Cujo does. Mal emphatically did, and probably still does if he’s gone on to running another game after he left SerenityMUSH.
So did a number of Mal’s staffers, mostly the long-time staffers who were his friends and hangers-on (staff culture on SerenityMUSH was incredibly toxic, to the point that newer staffers had extremely high turnover and burnout, while the older, much more toxic staff hung around forever). Most likely they were the ones who were cruising other games with Mal to recruit players and harass staffers, and both repeatedly upvoting the game and encouraging excessive upvoting by other players…
This activity was kept very quiet on SerenityMUSH, for obvious reasons; wouldn’t want folks thinking the game was run by jealous and creepy people, right?
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Do we need to open a post for Mal and crew? I know Cujo and Mal share some traits.* I don’t know if we’re doing a disservice to those that went through the special hell that was Serenity mush, but didn’t ride the shit show amusement ride that is Aoa.
*Source: I was on both game and interacted with both. Please don’t make pick my favorite turd
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@Jax The World Wonders.
Speaking of turds, this just hit the water today:
======================<* 7: Game Announcements - 167 *>======================
Message: 7/167 Posted Author
Activity and Item Retention Update Aug 18 2023 CujoGreetings, 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,
- Staff
------------------------------< +bbread 7/167 >-------------------------------
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.
- Staff
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I don’t know how code works. Does having unused items affect the system negatively in some way?
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@GF Once, a long long time ago, there used to be such as thing as ‘database bloat’. As a for instance, players could only build a limited number of rooms for their homes. That’s almost unheard of now with cheap GB sized storage, cheap, huge bandwidth, etc. But if that’s a really old game running an outdated code base… Maybe?
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@TNP I don’t quite remember how their code works, but I’m fairly sure they use virtual items: Usually set as an attribute on your character rather than an @created object.
Starships are likely made of actual rooms with code objects in them; things like ammunition and the like probably aren’t, and any scarcity is artificial.
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@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.
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@TNP If memory serves, it’s Penn, using DSS for sheets and equipment (the same thing that Serenity MU used, except they didn’t have clips for weapon reloads… essentially unlimited ammo, bit this may have changed), TSpace for ships (but only flight/cargo, no coded combat), and other weird subsystems, including elevators you have to wait for, fully mapped out Tatooine desert and Naboo grasslands which took hours to walk around, hope you have a speeder - 15 km per room, forced to wait until X time had gone by before you get to the next room (X based on speeder… speed)
Edit to add - some ships were needlessly excessive, the Millennium Falcon having 15 rooms inside. Others are bare-bone, you’re lucky if you get a cargo bay AND a cockpit. Some systems had up to 20 ships just idling in orbit doing nothing but providing vibes, which is fair, but had no way to dock or board or land on them, so… pointless beyond vibes.
