MU Peeves Thread
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:
Personally I’d see it as, ‘hey this is a closed scene and we don’t want other PCs randomly joining just because it’s on grid’.
Being off grid in RP Rooms doesn’t stop everybody though. Also, some games have commands that make it very apparent that the scene is closed.
It could just be me but isn’t joing an RP Room uninvited like, universally unallowed?
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@catzilla Yeah. But people can be dicks.
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i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C
I don’t want a simulationist grid, but I want a grid with enough spaces for multiple groups of social RP and a decent number of spots that are going to be key to the primary storyline.
Oh, before I forget, for me, this peeve only applies when Staff is attempting to run a main plotline for the game. If they’re just doing a sandbox thing based on PRPs with no central plot, then hell, they can just have an OOC lobby and 20 RP rooms for all I care.
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
i love real, tangible, simulationist grids and i’m sad the hobby keeps leaning away from that more and more :C
I love them in theory, but I can’t really tell if I love them or if I just yearn for the life I had when they were the norm. The same with everything I have nostalgia for.
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@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:
I guess, for me, I don’t assume that staff has ever written a grid so THEY can tell stories. A grid has the basics so that characters less familiar with the setting have ideas and places to congregate, the concept of where are folks most likely to gather. Putting together a bar, diner, movie theater, park, etc for the playerbase to run amok from and through.
Yeah, I think this is part of it for me. A lot of rooms aren’t built specifically for storytelling purposes, they’re being built to give folks places to RP in outside of that? Or because staff thinks this is what players want. That they want this kind of immersion, that they want the streets and all the intersections.
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Because grid bloat sure is a thing.
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@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Yep. I don’t like massive grids either, but I also don’t like small grids where none of the rooms have a point.
My ideal grid (for a game with a central staff driven plot line) would be maybe 20-30 rooms consisting of:
- 3-6 hub areas to represent different neighborhoods of the city or regions of the kingdom or whatever
- 3-4 rooms in each neighborhood or region to represent common social areas of that region / neighborhood
- A few rooms in each region that are earmarked by staff as key locations to the central staff driven plot.
I’d probably also allow player builds if they wanted to add their characters houses or businesses to the grid, but have those set up so that they are turned invisible and locked if the character that ‘owns’ it goes idle.
And if the game required faction specific RP places, I’d probably throw 1-2 of those out there for each faction that needed it.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
but have those set up so that they are turned invisible and locked if the character that ‘owns’ it goes idle.
This is a good solution to the dead grid issue that a lot of older games face. Something I tried to do, which I didn’t do well because I’m not much of a coder, is set up the housing system in DI to be linked to your approval. If you were set to unapproved either through staff freezing your bit or the idle freeze, you’d trigger a script that checked builds linked to your bit and then cleared them. I couldn’t get this to work for builds that weren’t created by the rental system since that operates differently.
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@somasatori I really feel like most grid bloat in most games is from PC builds from idle / dead / retired PCs that just didn’t get cleaned up after they leave. I think most games just forget to clean that stuff up when characters idle out, but I have seen a few that will post up a bbpost about PC owned grid spaces that will be removed in an effort to allow other PCs to claim them if they’re popular.
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No matter the grid layout, another key feature games should have is the capacity to change the description in an RP room, at least temporarily.
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I love a well-designed grid! If you’ve got nostalgia for a grid, please feel free to be a tourist and walk around Silent Heaven for a day. There are roughly 45 rooms in the main RP hub, and they’ve acquired quite a history in 2 years.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Fully serious question. How do you really expect staff to build a limited number of places people want to go to when you have a constantly shifting player base who all want different things?
I think the grids are there because staff wants to put all possible options out there for people and people can pick for themselves and ignore the ones that don’t. In theory it seems easy enough for a player to pick the places they like and use them, and ignore anything they don’t want to use. If there are 5 places you want to use and 1000 that you don’t, the other 1000 are irrelevant anyway. Just ignored them.
But reading the thread I see people saying that it is a negative if a game has rooms they don’t want to use. I don’t understand that, personally.
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@Warma-Sheen I think that depends a lot on how easy to navigate your grid is, or how accessible the locations you might want to visit are. And I guess this is largely dependent on the type of game; I’ve been on plenty of Star Wars games where the grids were expansive, but people pretty much only stuck to Spaceports and Spaceport-Adjacent Cantinas, in no small part (though I’ll fully agree that the “space” aspect keeps people close to ships, etcetera) because figuring out how to get to the deeper locations is confusing. In this kind of case, I think having a grid chock full of “filler” rooms can be more of a detriment than a benefit. Yes, you can ignore them, but unless there’s a handy system for teleporting to favourite locations, you’re still stuck navigating through them to get where you want to go.
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@chorus Agreed. I hadn’t considered that there might still be places without the ability to jump to a hangout spot directly. Its 2025.
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@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:
in 2 years
Oh my god has it been open that long? I feel like we were JUST reading posts about you developing it. Two years is great, congratulations!
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@Warma-Sheen said in MU Peeves Thread:
Fully serious question. How do you really expect staff to build a limited number of places people want to go to when you have a constantly shifting player base who all want different things?
Great question!
So having just opened a game myself (ahaha lol screaming), my original plan was to just do one big room per area. The game itself is an ocean with a bunch of island city states, so I was like “One room per city state, boom, done”. Because at the end of the day, descing 40+ rooms just felt like a chore to me.
MY GOOD FRIEND @Nilli was more into descing out spaces, so she went ahead and did I want to say like 3 rooms per city state. And they’re, I think pretty classic MU hang out spots.
If we need more spaces, or players want them, it’s easy to build them out. We’re operating on Ares, it’s super convenient.
And I guess I should clarify when I say I don’t like big grid games, it comes down to that I personally don’t want to build a giant grid of rooms all at once, or have a room of dead business and empty apartment buildings. That said, I also specifically created a game where that’s more or less not a thing that’ll happen super often.
But otherwise, yeah. I can ignore the rooms that are used less often, it’s not the end of the world.
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@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Jumpscare said in MU Peeves Thread:
in 2 years
Oh my god has it been open that long? I feel like we were JUST reading posts about you developing it. Two years is great, congratulations!
Thanks! And congrats on launching yours!
Running a game is a far greater responsibility than developing a game. Once it’s live, your players will be playing even when you have IRL responsibilities. There’s always the looming thought in the back of my mind that I need to check in when I’m not home, because what if a bug happens that breaks the game, or some troll has shown up overnight?
I try to relax, even though there have been 2 instances in the past 2 years where I decided that I needed to go to sleep and that I’ll check in on the morning, only to wake up to a disaster I could’ve fixed the night before, haha.
Just remember to forgive yourself and keep going forward. Some beloved players will just stop playing one day. And that’s okay.
