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Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo
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@Krautistanian said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
Oh, another thing. I don’t entirely understand how they had 700 players recently.
This seems inflated. Even in Covid-Highs, we didn’t use to have so much activity.
Not my monkeys, not my circus, but it looks like this is counting logins, not players. And then adding together all of those logins to get the “Total Players” number.
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@Krautistanian That just says total players. That’s likely all approved bits
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I think @Polk has it, total players is probably total bits created over the lifetime of the MUSH. Imagine if we had 700 regular MUSH users logging in daily! Man, that’d be like 90s era MUSHing. The left side is probably counting individual logins. Based on the data provided I’m not too sure if that’s logins per IP (limited per 24 hour period) or total login attempts made to the MUSH per day. The latter would create a lot of noise with people losing connection and reconnecting, or logging in, checking +watch/equivalent code to see if friends are around, then logging out, etc. A smart coder would put in a limitation on number of attempts per IP per day. That said, this is an extremely confusing chart.
If it IS tracking individual bit access (which it seems to imply), this shouldn’t be adding up to anything because it’s a rolling total. It would mean in the last 3 months there were 219 login attempts made by individual players, whereby this last week was relatively slow except for a day ago when nearly 60 individual players connected to the game. A pretty respectable number, but this isn’t tracking how much activity those 60 people had in one day – though I did see a pose counter above – or how long they remained on the game before logging out.
The longitudinal data here going back to 90 days also a weird choice from both a UX and data usefulness perspective. At a glance and without thinking about it too much, it appears there are declining numbers which isn’t ideal to show your userbase – they’ll likely know that you have declining numbers because they’ll have experienced it, and this will reinforce it. From a data collection perspective, a rolling quarterly total is not going to give you any more information than a monthly one.
If it’s tracking any connection made at all to the server (less likely and really not a useful metric for the customer-facing UX but still possible because it can be useful from an admin perspective), then that means that there were 219 successful TCP handshakes made in the last 90 days, which could potentially be someone logging in multiple times because their internet isn’t great (or they’re idling out). Also, considering many people MUSH on mobile devices now and I’m pretty sure there are Android and Apple clients that have auto-reconnect, one consideration would be people who stepped out of range of a router or lost their data connection and had it reconnect.
I sincerely hope they wouldn’t use the latter since that’s a bit… dishonest, but having never played here and looking back at the thread I guess I wouldn’t be too surprised. Wow, I didn’t intend this to be that long, but boy do I hate shitty graphs and charts!
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@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.
Also, notice how both Rebellion and Sith Empire group/org poses per day, which were low anyway, seemed to just walk off a cliff after July 25th? I suspect history is busily repeating itself with the Sith Empire, to the tune of the faction dying off for lack of fachead activity, just like the First Order back when.
Maybe I’m stupid, but I have no idea how to get that particular data from the game. And I’m wondering what those pose numbers look like since your post. I’d be super grateful if you could post them.
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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?
