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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:
And yup. I mean, comparing it to a MUD, which had a functional weight system… yeah. Even if I had to have the weight system open on an external utility to see how weighed down I was, they were transparent about how it worked. On AoA it is random guesses, frankly.
Bear in mind that Banshee is of the opinion that even help files are telling players too much. Actually helping them understand how things work has never been a priority of staff here. Small wonder this mess of a weight system goes unexplained.
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Well I logged in as a guest just a bit ago. I don’t really care if that outs me with ip tracking in their monitor channel. Cujo can get fucked hard for all I care.
They nuked all my bits except my jedi. Why the hell they keep him around is beyond me. To be treated as some sort of ken doll for Cujo or Banshee’s odd fantasy? No idea. They didn’t do that for my last jedi who seemed so integral to the game they made an entire plot around him for the jedi without my knowledge which I had to step in and finish because aryn and staff were having disagreements. Perhaps I’ll never understand the basement dwelling dipshit enough to comprehend his expert level of story telling. (Sarcasm)
Im still working on my own game. More free form and Bleach themed. I have caught up in the Mandalorian and am watching Ahsoka which has inspired me to perhaps do the same with a star wars theme. All we ever needed was imagination, a place to write notes, and an optional pair of dice to tell a good story IMO.
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@SqeakyClean Probably to hand over to a theoretical new person whomst ‘earns’ the Force User slot, that’s the way they did it back in the day. Not create a new bit. Hand the character over to a new player. Hope you didn’t have anything too personal saved in @mails or whatever.
I really need to get back to work on the FFG game again. Much chaos, mechs still need to get painted.
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@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)
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@Warlander It seems like most people were running cargo 24/7 back when I played. It was weird seeing people move like ants in a colony performing an endless cycle of credit-making without wanting to engage in any kind of roleplay. Especially in a MUSH.
The community also seemed really demanding. Everyone’s above the dreaded “Bar Roleplay” with new and unestablished characters. At this point it’s pretty much “Be An Established GM And Do All Your Own Advertising And You’ll Be Graced With Roleplay”. Not really sure how much a game like this can last, honestly.
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@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.
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@Warlander The theory behind the minigames is that it keeps people engaged with the game in order to make RP happen.
But I find the downside of real-time travel is that it nukes RP.
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You’re either spamming your screen with flight stuff and you might miss poses. Or your not looking at it cause you’re typing a pose when you might need to be landing the shift and not just crashing into a planet,
Remember folks. Don’t RP and drive!
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@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.
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@Polk More likely in play to inflate online player numbers.
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@Warlander It’s a dopamine mine that’s tied to the most boring part of exploration. I don’t enjoy yucking someone’s yum but it’s more than a little silly that it’s such a demanding system with so many people strictly adhering to its schedule. There are infinitely better codebases that handle space trucking in both active and passive flavors. Honestly it might be a blessing more than it is a curse because the people I got stuck with were absolute creeps and turned me off from SW:AOA entirely.
It was bad enough that it changed my opinion about how monitoring in codebases like these need to be ran for the sake of moderation. There’s nothing I can possibly do to prove what happened in any meaningful way. I could have provided the log that I saved but I’d just be concern trolled to hell and back about it being altered. There becomes a point in which a MUSH is a platform and not utilizing or having auditing tools is a choice.
Most of what I have to say would be off topic though. I never directly interacted with Hadrix or Cujo. Staff was in their towers very much aloof and above the players. I don’t know if when I played Hadrix was staff when I was a player.
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@Istus Speaking of inflating player numbers, Cujo is chasing new players HARD ATM. These announcements hit the boards during the wee hours last night:
=========================<* 8: Game Updates - 218 *>=========================
Message: 8/218 Posted Author
Free Starter Ship Dec 09 2023 CujoHello 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!
- AoA Staff
------------------------------< +bbread 8/218 >-------------------------------
======================<* 7: Game Announcements - 176 *>======================
Message: 7/176 Posted Author
Year End XP Bonus Dec 09 2023 CujoHey 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!
- Cujo
------------------------------< +bbread 7/176 >-------------------------------
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.
- AoA Staff
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@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
======================<* 7: Game Announcements - 176 *>======================
Message: 7/176 Posted Author
Year End XP Bonus Dec 09 2023 Cujo
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!Oh look, the thing I suggested when I played there, but not flavored as a bonus.
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@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.
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@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
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[sic] comfortably while traveling the space lanes.
Maybe this is a me problem, but I cannot imagine joining a Star Wars game to play a trucker who has to micromanage cargo capacity and standing room for other people to roleplay with but seemingly has no capacity to engage in the whoosh whoosh pew pew laser fights the movies are full of.
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@GF said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
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[sic] comfortably while traveling the space lanes.
Maybe this is a me problem, but I cannot imagine joining a Star Wars game to play a trucker who has to micromanage cargo capacity and standing room for other people to roleplay with but seemingly has no capacity to engage in the whoosh whoosh pew pew laser fights the movies are full of.
Speak for yourself. I for one am itching to tell the tale of Blorf Medtrix, Imperial Insurance Adjuster.
I woke up feeling so good, I think I’d better call in sick/ I need a personal trainer to help me hold my drink
I plan to be spontaneous next time we meet/I’m putting off procrastinating until next week
I’ll get onto it when I give a shit -
@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:
@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.
Like I said way back in the thread. I never felt like I was treated as an outsider or a lesser, nor was I sex pested. BUT I did feel real goddamn useless in big combats because I did not have the XP to keep up. Of course, nor did I get murdered either.
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@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.
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@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).
