Sometimes there’ll be a player you really like that you just kinda lose touch with after you both lose the connective tissue of the game you were on at any given time. MUSHing is a transitory hobby, I try not to get too down about it.

Then 15 years will pass.

Then you meet a player you really like a new game and you both think you’re a TOTALLY NEW FUN PERSON.

Then one day you’re talking about old games and you realize that, in fact, you played together quite a lot on that one random game 15 years ago, and the internet has now brought you back into proximity for the first time in this decade+.

Sometimes the smallness of the hobby is actually nice.

Thank you BMD mods for making it easier to rubberneck and preserve this trashfire…I mean stay informed.

NGL the thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is this pile of refuse passing as a game not having a WORA/MSB thread prior to this.

I voted no due to the potential for abuse by bad actors but get why the Magicians guy deleted his post and think the kind of reception is worth reflecting upon.

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

I wish people didn’t always turn this into “if you’re not in action/plot its because you just prefer social things” that is honest far from the truth a lot of the time.

I was once told - by someone in control of plot stuff - that because I was a ‘social RPer’ and in a decent number of scenes (many of which I asked for) that I didn’t need plot involvement. It was a hell of a thing and like five years later I’m still mad about it.

@Cobalt
Whatever worked or didn’t work about The Pack, I really hope the experience wasn’t too discouraging for you. Like I said lots of posts back, it DID seem like a game a lot of players responded to in positive ways, and I am really impressed with how you responded to an atmosphere that you didn’t feel good about being the gamerunner of anymore, because that was obviously really hard and Unfun to deal with this directly. I think it’s always constructive to reflect on why something didn’t work, or didn’t work for you personally, or get across what you wanted to get across, but I hope that doesn’t mean it was as wholly negative experience because you are a gamerunner lots of people like and respect and it’d be awesome to see another project from you in the MUSH space when you were excited to do it.

@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?

My beast from the Black Cat Army. She is the night.

@Selira said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’m still pretty shocked Derp made up a multiparagraph theory wholecloth and tried so hard to sell it. Why? What was the benefit of that kind of speculation? I realize I’m speculating here, myself, but he’s more than welcome to come here and provide the answers.

That was the first moment I was sorry I was banned (apart from every time I try to find something on that mess of a board because the bad search is even worse if you aren’t logged in) because I would’ve enjoyed enthusiastically and repeatedly reporting Derp’s own post for violating his ‘you need to bring receipts’ and ‘no personal attacks’ rules.

I thought about going back but end of the day I came to the same conclusion I did a while ago: I left my most active period on Arx on a really good note and that’s the experience I want as my strongest memory of the game. It’s cool to see a chapter of it get a conclusion, though, a lot of MUs don’t, and I’ll be interested to see how it ties it up.

@Yam
MUDs absolutely suffered more from the rise of MMOs than more RP-centric games did. You CAN RP in WoW but it’s a real different experience than logging onto a MUSH and posing with other players. There are still players left because ultimately some hobbyists will always stick with Their Thing but you saw the impact more in that space than in MUSHes 15ish years ago.

I’m not a mini-game person so I’ve kinda stayed out of this thread. This kind of thing will never attract me to a game, it’ll either me an ‘oh that’s nice’ thing I engage with sometimes but appreciate being able to avoid, or a I think that just makes me nope the fuck out because, Not For Me! That’s OK.

So, grain of salt.

For me, the big question with all this stuff is, why aren’t you just playing a single-player video game or MMO to get your engagement fix? They do a lot of ‘mini-game’ things better. So, what’s the appeal, for a person into this sort of thing, of not just having that open on your secondary monitor? What does it add to an experience that’s unique to a MUSH?

ANSI art and object descing absolutely do this. While I didn’t do much with them personally, I always enjoyed seeing what people created, and it’s a unique form of creativity you can do on a telnet-based client you can’t do anywhere else.

I like journaling. I like vignettes. I got a surprising amount of RP out of writing IC poems of dubious quality. I do it for myself for character building if there’s no outlet to post it. Also I post it.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m inclined to agree. I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior, perhaps due to some fallout, maybe in the form of banning or lost friends.

I’ve seen people change both for the better and, unfortunately, the worse. In the ‘better’ case it took years and major life changes, not any MU punishment.

@Jenn said in Strike Systems:

Like. If you’re one of those places with an activity requirement? Then yeah, some strikes are better than a perma-ban because someone’s kid got ill and they couldn’t make the one scene a week minimum. Aside - thank eff we got rid of that ish for the most part.

Getting banned for not meeting an activity requirement seems very extreme. What game did this happen on? Is it still up? I’d love to read this policy.

@Pavel said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

That said I would personally avoid any formalised ‘welcome wagon’ team. Purely due to experiences in the past where bad actors have used such a “thankless” and “honoured” position to act badly and draw people in to unhealthy cliques or harems. Formalising the role can also lead to burn out and frustration, especially as we remember that most of us are in our early-to-mid soon-to-be-deads and we don’t have time to sit and work out the roster for who’s sitting at the park gate to welcome the newbies this week.

Having been a person who was in a ‘welcome wagon’ role both formally in that it was a thing my staff-bit position was supposed to do, and informally, there is nothing that kills a person’s desire to RP broadly and inclusively than turning it into a clock-punch gig. This is how you make staffers or active players who do this naturally turtle up or quit.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

I could reasonably see imposter syndrome being just as much of a cause for jumping to ChatGPT for posing. I know I struggle with imposter syndrome regularly, and when I make a 2 line pose that describes my characters actions and dialogue in only the most basic terms, I honestly wonder if I shouldn’t just quit for being abjectly bad in comparison to some of the excellent prose I see my scene partners producing.

I’ve said my piece of my dislike of what LLMs generate (what they are doing is not writing) on a qualitative level before so it didn’t seem necessary to say it again. It also gets into matters of taste that are whatever, if someone loves playing with ChatGPT that ain’t my business. But, I assure you, there are some of us out there who would much rather play with a real person whose writing wasn’t the best than try to read purple autocomplete nonsense.

ETA: This gets back to the original peeve that restarted this conversation. If a game allows or doesn’t care about players or staffers using LLM-generated content, then whatever, my problems with it become Me Problems rather than the game’s problems and I’m probably just in the wrong place. But it seems like it’d head off a lot of problems if people doing it said they were doing it so people who didn’t like it/weren’t comfortable with it didn’t have to waste their time

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I don’t know why, but I find that both sad and completely hilarious.

There are a couple times I’ve gotten an LLM to almost 90% replicate what someone has ‘posed’ or ‘written’ (LLM’d) on a MUSH by using a prompt that was more or less asking for the same thing. It is, indeed, both hilarious and maddening.

@catzilla
A hilarious amount of That Guy’s hatred of PBs feels tied up in ‘I associated with Emma Stone at a barbecue once and she told me how much she hated people using her likeness’. Which I kinda love because I’m a person who lives in Phoenix, and people developing a whole personality around one association they had with Emma Stone (she went to high school in a 'burb of the Metro area) is kind of a meme for a certain person in the late 30s/early 40s demographic who came up here.

@catzilla
This is another one that doesn’t really read like Ghost’s MO to me, unless he’s decided to change his personality for like the fifth time. He also never had an issue with PVE games, whatever one can say about his other annoying qualities. But I’ve been wrong before.