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Elder Tale Online Discussion
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@icanbeyourmuse Looks like MUX or Penn, just from looking at their command syntax. Not 100% sure, though.
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@Mercutio I do not have particularly constructive suggestions to offer as I was cycling through games at the time in an effort to find a new home so I do not recall many details. The only reason I piped up is I wanted to mention that even though I did not go all the way, my experience was a positive one. With that preface out of the way…
I am pretty new to these games and my attention span maybe isn’t the same as most of the community. I think at a high level, my problems mostly hinged on my disillusionment with writing backgrounds and filling in these massive personality quizzes that never come up beyond getting in the door past whatever gate staff has erected.
I do not have a specific desire to spend hours detailing my childhood, creating a dozen memories of varying gravity, and digging through a Codex just to get a feel for things in a game that I may or may not enjoy. I also did not know anyone on the game. The desire to invest so much time piecing together things just was not there.
I have never had my background have any meaningful impact on a game unless I instigated it and at that point whether or not the hook I drop is in some staff set field on my bit is immaterial. The purpose of these fields, aside from the ones that are obviously there to define what my faction is or whatever mechanics underpin the rollplay part of the game, is not apparent to me. I get that the application process is a filter of sorts but a broad strokes overview is likely just as effective at gauging my ability to roleplay in a sane way as a granular recounting of every major event of my character’s formative years.
I would like to see, in all games, the barrier to getting started drop as low as possible. This could result in limited power, or a restricted involvement in things until more concrete decisions are made, but it at least would encourage me to see the value in completing a big application in the future once I am more invested.
TLDR: I’m lazy and either need an extrinsic reward to invest the time or understand the value of each field in an application when it comes to my future roleplay.
Feel free to prod me on any point of this rant. It’s probably not particularly articulate and it is not specific to just Elder Tale.
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I’m guessing Penn, as Mercutio’s SceneSys is for Penn.
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Are you Mercutio of ye olden days back when The Storyteller’s Circle was still around? I remember him being a good dude.
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@Istus
They’re fair points. A lot of the history of MU*dom has garnered ways to do application processes, and it’s not often questioned why certain factors are done.I’ll just touch on a few items though.
Personality Quiz - we added the Bartle test to help define what Relics you obtain and get a quick idea of the character. As well as helping make sure you end up in the right guild and all that. Help make sure with placement. Background wise, personality is a paragraph - we know it’ll likely change - but it filters out people applying for psychopaths (which doesn’t happen often, but happens more often than we’d like).
Background - we largely are making sure the theme files were read so that the player has a similar ‘understanding of the world’ as the others. Factors like the Viruses that occurred in the background flavor a lot of their experiences and their viewpoints on things, and alliance alignment.
Memories - we actually use these as bargain chips. They serve more purposes than on the face-of-it writing more background. Basically, to ensure there is a factor to ‘dying’ within the MMORPG Isekai genre, the character loses memories. This would influence the character’s personality, and creates a sense of ‘there are only so many times you can really go around getting yourself killed’.
Codex - hard to search through to get what you are looking for - recognized and something we should look at. But most of the important info is just on the website at this point. Beyond that, the codex tracks secret info you might know post-approval. And is largely used as a medium of sharing information with others and garner a sense of discovery.
Edit: Updated on the site & in the application room, so there’s a better understanding of their values.
Liminality @ Elder Tale Online
Original creator of SceneSys -
@IoleRae I am afraid that may be a different Mercutio. I fear I am not familiar with Storyteller, beyond that the system exists.
@Roz, @Pavel, @icanbeyourmuse - this is indeed PennMUSH.
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@Jumpscare I’d love to learn more. I admit it’s not the lowest barrier of entry game, but there may be factors that as admin we are blind to here.
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@Mercutio Noting that somewhere on the website could help a bit with the comments about it having a difficult entrance bar. Adding a ‘at a glance’ page for people might help too. I just lightly glanced the website so I can’t really comment on anything beyond general. I might look at it more in depth later on, as I have said on other posts, I like to try out games advertised even if it is not necessarily something I am into.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
@Mercutio Noting that somewhere on the website could help a bit with the comments about it having a difficult entrance bar.
What does the ‘that’ in this sentence refer to? Just for clarity.
@icanbeyourmuse said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
Adding a ‘at a glance’ page for people might help too.
I’ll see what I can do. We have a Premise page on the wiki, but what are the important touch factors you believe must exist? No rush of course. I’d just love to learn.
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@Mercutio Including these points in the application would be helpful. I would also include examples so that I can get excited and engaged with the ideas and thus more motivated to slog through this.
Picking the Memory item at random here: What might happen if I lose a memory? Am I aware that I have lost a memory? Is the memory lost random? Provide a made up scenario like: Sarah likes puppies because she had one as a kid. After dying, she lost that memory and instead of being happy and excited when it comes to interacting with cute animals, they just make her sad now and she can not explain exactly why.
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@Mercutio Woops! Brain blank. That you are using Penn. The code base being used tends to be a factor for a lot of people. IT also gives them an idea of what to expect.
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@Istus I’ll look into documenting this more closely!
To give a direct answer, let’s say that the memory is that she had puppies, and that made her happy. Let’s now assume as an extension, they likely adopted an animal in the Isekai world because they remind her of her puppy.
Losing that memory may make Sarah still like the animal, but no longer understand exactly why the animal makes her so happy. Maybe it deteriorates the bond, maybe it doesn’t - that’s something entirely within the player’s hands.
It is important to note that it is the player’s choice which memory they lose, when they lose one as a result of actions.
Edit: Memory files in Application have been updated to expand documentation on this.
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@icanbeyourmuse
I was not aware this was an important information point. That’s easily documented, and I’ll do that right now!Edit: Completed.
Liminality @ Elder Tale Online
Original creator of SceneSys -
@Mercutio said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
@icanbeyourmuse
I was not aware this was an important information point. That’s easily documented, and I’ll do that right now!Edit: Completed.
We’re nerds, everything’s an important information point to some of us.
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@Pavel said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
@Mercutio said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
@icanbeyourmuse
I was not aware this was an important information point. That’s easily documented, and I’ll do that right now!Edit: Completed.
We’re nerds, everything’s an important information point to some of us.
Fair.
A bunch of updates have been made on the site and application rooms to cover some of the information discussed above.
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On a more serious note, I’m testing out some questions I want to ask anyone advertising a game that I’m hoping you can answer for me.
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In conversation with your players, what is the key (or top three if finding one is hard) thing that they describe this game as excelling at?
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Do your players have any oft-repeated complaints that are worth noting?
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While we all might want a game to go on forever, do you have future plans to draw the game to a conclusion - and if so, how far away do you anticipate that to be?
and
- What’s one thing you, personally, like about the game and one thing that you find a challenge about it?
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@Mercutio You’re willingness to listen to feedback and take it seriously endears me to play the game. It is not so much the implementing the requested feedback that endears me but the listening.
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@Pavel said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
- In conversation with your players, what is the key (or top three if finding one is hard) thing that they describe this game as excelling at?
- Deep Lore.
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- Even on day 1 we had people who spotted the use of Hymmnos on our front page (originating from a game called Ar Tonelico) and they rushed to translate it, and were theory-crafting about what it could mean.
- Friendly players / sense of community
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- We are generally just very low drama.
- A sense of ownership
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- Ownership of things they created, especially as a community. All shops, inventions, homesteads, etc are done by groups. We always have people offering assistance to eachother. Also, because we mark milestones both on the MUSH and on the site. For instance, the Scale Emblem Alliance has to beat a boss to get to a higher level of the tower - and each room shows what they beat, and who were there to beat it!
@Pavel said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
- Do your players have any oft-repeated complaints that are worth noting?
- Staff has been pretty slow on +jobs in the past. We are addressing this by hiring on new staff (a much needed thing) to solve this on the long run.
@Pavel said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
- While we all might want a game to go on forever, do you have future plans to draw the game to a conclusion - and if so, how far away do you anticipate that to be?
- There are a variety of ways we could draw the game to a conclusion, but we also have a lot of long term plans. We have enough content for at least another 10 years or so. It’s a bold statement, I recognize. Every single year played is one I am happy with.
@Pavel said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
- What’s one thing you, personally, like about the game and one thing that you find a challenge about it?
- Like: I adore the excitement people get about engaging with the deep lore and slowly peeling away the many layers of secrets.
- Challenge: Having a lore-heavy game has made it so the players feel it is harder to run their own (larger scale) content, something that we intend to address in the next few months by making more lore publicly findable and creating a way for them to find spots to interact with / things they get to hold onto and play with, with less staff interference.
Liminality @ Elder Tale Online
Original creator of SceneSys -
@Mercutio Most excellent answers, thank you. One more question, since I forgot it off of my list
How friendly is the game to more casual players? Many of us are old and grey(ing) now, with many commitments. Is there a distinct disadvantage to only being able to put in an hour or three a week?
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@Pavel said in Elder Tale Online Discussion:
@Mercutio Most excellent answers, thank you. One more question, since I forgot it off of my list
How friendly is the game to more casual players? Many of us are old and grey(ing) now, with many commitments. Is there a distinct disadvantage to only being able to put in an hour or three a week?
I think the best way to answering this are the following items that our game keeps in mind:
- Unless it’s an FC, we don’t ever idle a player out, and we don’t have activity requirements. And even with FCs, we are fairly relaxed in our stance, as long as folk at least log in. Most importantly, we just do not idle-nuke, ever (aside from non-approved characters who have sat idle in the app room for ages).
- We have a few European players. We have a few players who actually use SceneSys to play-by-post when they are having trouble with schedules.
- We keep a page of ‘things that have happened in the world’ so that if someone was not around for a while, and comes back, can catch up quickly.
- We do recognize that more casual players may miss our bigger scenes, during which lore tends to drop. Which is why we use the Codex system to try and distribute it. We keep all bigger scenes published as public Scenes, which can be found on our website.
- Bigger scenes are scheduled, usually at least a week ahead of time. They are announced on Discord, so more casual players at work might be able to check in on the game.
- Players can also use our OOC and IC channels through Discord, which connect directly to the MUSH.
