MU Peeves Thread

[mietze]

I love the ares system, I have love faraday’s combat systems for like…longer than ares has been around I think. I love how accessible it’s made running a game. I love the integrated wiki and the web play is frankly phenomenal and easier and more intuitive IMO than most client-only games. But I’ve always struggled to figure out why it’s so hard for me to process stuff much of the time and more importantly why I tend to have a massive, unexplainable surge of anxiety on almost every game on it I’ve played.

After spending a couple of years very frustrated and wondering why on earth I could not seem to cope on just about every ares game I’ve tried in recent history…I finally had a revelation. For the vast majority of my mushing time, I’ve been on games where sometimes logs are nice but not required (unless it’s an event, or like…I dunno. On TR where certain proof was required for training logs or PrP credits, or whatever. So knowing something was going to be formally logged made it kind of a “you better be ON so that you don’t make a fool of yourself published for the world to see.” I like the sensation of being On every once in awhile. Like I wouldn’t want to have a job public speaking, but I’ve always enjoyed the adrenaline kick and afterglow of running a general meeting of the PTSA or giving presentations, running a work meeting, ect.

I realized that the process now of HAVING to fill out a log form before RP even starts just to RP triggers that needing to be ON feeling, even though I wasn’t even aware of it. ALong with all the anxiety. I realized the reason why I did not feel that way on the battlestar games I’ve played (which used the FS system!) was because although there was a built in logging system on the last 2 I played, the game was run like a classic one where people RPed on a navigatable grid, and then IF for some reason someone wanted to log it they’d initate the command in the scene. You didn’t set up for presumptive logging before you could even get people into a scene.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to be that way (I know on Testament’s game I totally ran around on a grid space without setting up a scene) it’s just the standard on most is using the web to set up that scene.

I’ve been having a lot of issues lately I think mostly due to post-covid issues where a lot of the cognitive stuff I struggle with is very pronounced right now. So frustration with “why the hell am I shutting down/why is this so freaking difficult it shouldn’t be” has been really bad the last few months. I was able to play on an ares game that had signficant modifications so that frankly it really didn’t even look like one, but it was small and by invite for awhile. So needing to set up scenes before RPing was less of an issue because I knew everyone and it probably didn’t trigger the feeling of needing to be “on”. Once it opened up, i found myself with rising anxiety in many respects when that was triggered.

I know a handful of folks who like me have been mystified for a really long time about why ares games didn’t seem to work for them even though all the elements are things that they, like me, adore. I wonder if maybe even if it’s not necessarily conscious if maybe the 100 percent log/display might add to a sense of pressure that at the time just is mystifying as to where it came from. Or maybe I’m weird!

The strange thing is that I don’t really care to hide RP that I do. I really don’t understand why I feel performance anxiety when I know even the littlest baRP will be flung on the website. Nobody cares. I think the percentage of people who read every single log available is relatively small and like…they’re not going to expect every pose to be fine epic literature quality. But I have been wondering for a long time why my already slow processing speed was slowing down even more on those games and mitigating strategies that had worked on tinymux games and on Arx for years and years just seemed to not be as effective on ares, and sometimes the freeze ups were worse even in the middle of a scene. (I already know that the 24/7 lingering pages/many chat thread conversations plus channels and everything else scrambles my brains, but it happens in scene scenes too and I know I’m slower because on ares I can also see the minute count of how long I take to pose.)

I’m hoping maybe now that I realize where a lot of that anxiety is coming from, maybe it’ll go away. I was just wondering if anyone else has experienced perhaps something similar. But it is a relief in a way, that I have a reason that makes sense. Vs wondering why anxiety creep just kept happening more and more, even on places that were chill and full of people I adore and who like me in return.

[Tributary]

@mietze I just… don’t bother to share all the logs.

They generally time out after awhile if you don’t share them, and I feel no loss from that. And I never bother filling out the scene information when I start a scene. In fact, sometimes having to fill out that information to share the scene means I don’t bother sharing.

Also, I try to do as much as possible from my client and treat the web portal as a wiki to a large degree. This makes it feel a lot more familiar. I mean, I do check the portal if I’m working on a second scene async or I’m away from home and want to poke at an async scene, but for the most part, I try to do one traditionally paced scene at a time.

So I mostly just set up scenes in Ares so that I’ve got convenient scroll back to reference, and if you think of things that way, you might find it more chill. Look me up for RP. We’ll try it.

[helvetica]

@Tributary I also treat the portal like a wiki, and play from the client. I’ve found it very hard to stick on games where client-side play isn’t supported. I have enough tabs open for work and something about having a tab open for ongoing channel chatter just… doesn’t translate as fun to my brain.

[Pavel]

@helvetica At least for me, I need the flashy-flashy of the taskbar that a client provides. I’m often doing a half-dozen other things to keep my ADHD-addled brain occupied, and if I don’t get the flashy the concept of “remember to check the thing” just evaporates from my mind.

[Third Eye]

@Pavel
I’m primarily on Ares games these days but I still find the notifications and other quality-of-life features significantly better enough in client I’m almost always connected there. I find portal-only play very…I’m never sure how much someone solely there exists on the game at any given time? I’m sure ‘remember to check the thing’ is part of it.

[Roadspike]

@mietze I think a lot of what you said speaks to some of the anxiety I’ve been having myself. I don’t know if it’s exactly the same, but there’s definitely a mental barrier to entry that shouldn’t be there (because like @Tributary said, you don’t have to share the scene) but is. I think it’s the tiniest barrier, like a slightly-raised floor at a doorway, but with everything else going on in real life, I just don’t have the spoons. I don’t know if this is something that can or should be designed around because there are plenty of workarounds (you can always start a scene from the client in a room without all of that info just with the scene/start command, for instance).

I think it may be part and parcel of the fact that in the last year or two, most everything feels harder, and I have fewer spoons.

[Pyrephox]

@Roadspike said in MU Peeves Thread:

I think it may be part and parcel of the fact that in the last year or two, most everything feels harder, and I have fewer spoons.

This part is it for me. I just don’t have the energy. And that is my peeve. I miss RP, but…

[sao]

yeah… the spoons issue is real.

For me, having the client open is better because my internet gives me weird socket issues and I am surrounded by sad picard for basically no reason all the time.

Sometimes I’m not smart enough to open the client, and then i lose a pose and have to rewrite it because I randomly went to sad picard in the middle of writing it.

Yam watched this happen to me in horror. “Sao!!” she cried. “You need to at least download a browser extension that will save your text!”

I didn’t.

[Juniper]

For whatever reason, Charlotte decided she doesn’t like James. That’s fine, these things happen more often than we’d like in this hobby. Just don’t RP with that person and have fun with the people you can have fun with.

But no. Charlotte can’t just leave James alone. She continuously pursues storylines that place her in conflict with James and then cries when conflict occurs. She feels the need to constantly rant and rave about how much she hates James. Everything James does or didn’t do is new evidence for how awful he is, no matter how insignificant the issue. In fact, everything awful going on right now must be because of James.

Today, my peeve is people who simply can’t take a chill pill and stay away from people who bother them.

This scenario is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

[Coin]

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

For whatever reason, Charlotte decided she doesn’t like James. That’s fine, these things happen more often than we’d like in this hobby. Just don’t RP with that person and have fun with the people you can have fun with.

But no. Charlotte can’t just leave James alone. She continuously pursues storylines that place her in conflict with James and then cries when conflict occurs. She feels the need to constantly rant and rave about how much she hates James. Everything James does or didn’t do is new evidence for how awful he is, no matter how insignificant the issue. In fact, everything awful going on right now must be because of James.

Today, my peeve is people who simply can’t take a chill pill and stay away from people who bother them.

This scenario is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Yeah, agreed.

I also think there’s something to be said for, like, Charlotte not wanting anything to do with James, and then James doing stuff to impede Charlotte’s RP, talking shit about her, starting rumors about her, telling people not to RP with her, seeking her out to RP under false pretenses or without her knowing it’s him, etc.

I’ve seen that a lot, too. I guess maybe just people need to let people be, but people just don’t do that, in my experience.

[Juniper]

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

I also think there’s something to be said for, like, Charlotte not wanting anything to do with James, and then James doing stuff to impede Charlotte’s RP, talking shit about her, starting rumors about her, telling people not to RP with her, seeking her out to RP under false pretenses or without her knowing it’s him, etc.

Classic mutual slapfights are a whole different beast but equally frustrating to witness, yeah.

[Coin]

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

I also think there’s something to be said for, like, Charlotte not wanting anything to do with James, and then James doing stuff to impede Charlotte’s RP, talking shit about her, starting rumors about her, telling people not to RP with her, seeking her out to RP under false pretenses or without her knowing it’s him, etc.

Classic mutual slapfights are a whole different beast but equally frustrating to witness, yeah.

If you say so. I think they’re beasts that are pretty related.

ETA: Not sure what’s ‘mutual’ about my example, either.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:

I also think there’s something to be said for, like, Charlotte not wanting anything to do with James, and then James doing stuff to impede Charlotte’s RP, talking shit about her, starting rumors about her, telling people not to RP with her, seeking her out to RP under false pretenses or without her knowing it’s him, etc.

Classic mutual slapfights are a whole different beast but equally frustrating to witness, yeah.

Given how this scenario is laid out it seems like it’s neither mutual nor a slapfight. It’s clear one of these parties is a bad actor, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the straight-to-video release of Warlock 3.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@sao

Most of my Sad Picard experiences are driven by weird ISP-specific DNS issues, but still I definitely see ‘em.

[Juniper]

Given how I laid this scenario out with A being hostile and and combative towards B, its pretty fucking weird to swoop in and rewrite it to make B the villain as if you expect me to slap my forehead and realise “egads, you’re right! James was the villain after all”.

You know Charlotte and James are interchangeable names in this scenario, right? What do you want me to do, swap this anonymized name with that other anonymized name? The only possible reason I could think of for this bizarre conversation is that you think you know who Charlotte is and have taken some sort of offense to it, so you’re leaping to her defense to vaguepost about how she’s NOT THE REAL BULLY, ACTUALLY.

Like why the actual hell are we having this conversation.

[Cobalt]

@Juniper It has taken me longer to learn how to. But, yknow, at some point we all get wise or die…

[Pavel]

@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:

But, yknow, at some point we all get wise or die…

But this is my emotional support self-doubt-and-loathing burnout!

[SpaceKhomeini]

I guess the problem I’m noting here is that on a lot of smaller-to-mid-scale games, it’s not incredibly easy to avoid someone. Particularly if they’re well-connected.

[Panic]

More a self-peeve than a MU-peeve, but when you take a long break from the MU* world because life gets busy and you really want to come back but you sit and wonder how you ever had time for the MU* world at all before. It is amazing how when you set aside one thing, twelve other things take its place.

All this to say - I miss RPing and this community. The end.

[Twinkle]

@SpaceKhomeini I’ve recently left games because of this. Life is too short and stressful to deal with that shit right now. Byeee!