Today’s peeve is:

If you have played somewhere for years and you’re not happy with it anymore, by all means, I will listen to you vent. I get it.

If you just joined a game and all you want to do is bitch about it…

maybe…

simply do not play there?

In this the year of our lord 2025, why are people still allowing bad actors in their game community? Why is there a concern with “we have to be fair” to people who are toxic to staff and other players, totally obnoxious, or otherwise a bad fit? It’s a mush, not a constitutional right, if they’re no good for the community then EVICT THEM.

If it helps people orient themselves in the scene and approach others, IDGAF about walking in and introductions.

What I hate is when I set and then the person poses in and doesn’t interact with me. Get the fuck out with that what are you even here in this scene for, why did I set for you, stop being the worst.

The facts are what they are and they’re never going to change. It’s a Star Wars game! They’re doing stuff. Some is ok. Some is really stupid. The good guys and/or bad guys have the upper hand this week. There’s some spaceships and some guns. If you are unlucky enough to have an issue with someone, especially a harassment issue, no one will help you.

That’s the only thing to say about this place. It does not matter what the theme posts are. It never did. I think it’s ok if we don’t give them free publicity for every single bbpost.

Today someone AMBUSHED ME (idk if you’re on the forums but you know who you are if you read this) with a link to a website for a game I played around 2012-2018. It was run by a head wiz who became a close IRL friend and who passed away in 2019. I had no idea the site was even still up.

What a kick in the feels. All the old logs are there, and our snapshots of funny ooc moments, and our pictures and playlists. There are lots of captures of jokes and stories and fun moments of my friend who’s no longer with us, and other friends as well, some I still talk to, some I don’t.

I am so grateful and I am so sad. MUSH is such a strange medium in the way it can feel so all-encompassing at the time, and then enough time goes by and it’s just a little snapshot of how things were, and who you were then, and all the fun times you had writing stories with other people way too late into the night.

Really, really grateful and sad.

I feel like the gist here is “Social rp is fine if it doesn’t suck” which… I mean yeah, that’s true of any form of rp, isn’t it?

I feel like this sums up several many MUSH interactions I’ve had with people over the years

This thread has everything. False dichotomies. Hyperbole. Hot takes on literature. Viking hygiene. MU RP is Dying️. Class struggle. Book recommendations. Furries.

Playing a young/teen character is less about nailing the slang du jour and more about being vulnerable, inexperienced, confident about things you have no real clue about, unconfident about things that really are okay, feeling Big Emotions and maybe not knowing what to do with them, and discovering Nietzsche and then explaining it to people 25 years older than you.

I think it’s tricky for players because believable teens get so much “wrong” as they flail into adulthood (and players don’t like to be wrong), not so much because it’s hard to know when not to say yeet.

@Trashcan As if you’re just going to gloss over my coded soda machine in the rest of the list like that wasn’t the best piece of minigame on anything ever, the most outstanding and revelatory achievement of all time

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Once the initial novelty wore off, I never liked these kinds of systems much. They either got in the way of creativity, or were annoyingly tedious, or both.

This is true though, soda machine included lol

@Yam said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Please explain how the coded bounties for players worked.

There were bounties for me on there all the time, and I let people collect them from time to time. However, me putting a bounty on anyone or anything else was huge drama 100% of the time. I don’t want to get into PVP, we have another thread for that, but the bounty minigame definitely emphasized that different people have different tolerances for it.

My favorite minigame of all was when we ran Space Cargo on Into the Black MUSH, but the flight was not automated, you just had to sit there and be ready to navigate the proper coordinates at the proper moment for an hour. If you failed to do it properly then you flew off (into the black, I suppose) and ran out of air and died and staff had to resurrect your entire crew from the dead room.

That sucked. lol.

The code was so broken on Dies Irae that people could not RP because it just fundamentally didn’t work. People couldn’t see each others’ poses, couldn’t see when someone else came into the room sometimes, couldn’t see OOC messages in the room sometimes, it was very difficult to get even simple scenes done.

Staff was as stressed out about it as anyone, but the issues were (apparently) far reaching and difficult to determine due to the hallucinations of AI code which had been applied to the game. The fatigue of trying to deal with this, and being unable to fix this, surely burned out staff and players alike.

I don’t have the facts or knowledge to say who applied this AI code to the game or why, or if that is really what happened. I do know things were very, very broken though, and that the message given to staff and players was that AI code was the reason.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior

I have encountered:

• People behaving very differently to me from one game to another game, in that the game structures and communities themselves brought out the best or worst of that person
• People making a big effort to change their toxic MU behavior after fucking up so bad that they realized they need to get their house in order. This would probably be the ‘lost friends’ or fallout aspect you mentioned above
• People who went on mental health medication and/or therapy and as a result developed more community-friendly and cooperative patterns in their MU spaces

Things that can’t get you banned from AOA:

• sexual misconduct and harassment
• bullying
• cheating with alts, fake dice rolls, and abuse of the item system

Things that can get you banned from AOA:

• requesting that people with the above behaviors not be staff
• shipping wrong

womp womp womp

@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:

she can’t be assed to RP with people she doesn’t like–which, fair enough. I also don’t think it creates a healthy community in a MUSH either, since it’s a shared space

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

I think it’s a neutral thing in itself. Where it goes foul is when there’s ST cooperation to make it so the group can fully engage with every plot without ever RPing out-of-clique. Or making rulings that allow them to defeat PC foes without engaging, or remove the consequences

@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:

If one refuses to RP with people they dislike, that’s fine, but avoiding RP with people they don’t specifically like can make a game feel very unwelcome indeed if it’s the norm.

@Roz said in Numetal/Retromux:

whenever people complain that someone doesn’t RP with people they don’t like I’m like ??? that’s how hobbies work??? you do hobbies for fun???

Harvesting some viewpoints here because I feel like this topic deserves its own thread outside of the Numetal/Retromux thing.

No one thinks people should RP with players/characters they actively despise. But there is some gray area here in RPing with people who are not your top 8 favorites, RPing with people who are “just ok”, RPing with total strangers, and ST obligation (or lack thereof I suppose) toward attention/activity/fairness to the entire game population, crappy people and great people all.

I’m interested in people’s thoughts here.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

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

I’m sorry you feel this way, and I’ve heard people say this before, but ChatGPT churn is not the answer.

@tsar said in AI In Poses:

Just write the short pose. I beg. I’m tired. Don’t make me read all that, lol.

In this very thread people are saying they would just prefer your short pose. Short poses are fine. Sometimes tiny poses are excellent and desirable. Like @tsar and @Third-Eye, I would much prefer to read a normal small pose than an LLM-addled longer one.

We all, in the end, RP with people who like our unique (human!) pose style and we avoid or less frequently interact with people who don’t like our unique pose style. If someone doesn’t like what you do, you probably don’t need them in your online life.

Use your unique human pose style, short or long or whatever it is. ChatGPT churn is not the answer.

@bear_necessities said in AI In Poses:

@KarmaBum This. At this point, if someone is secretly an AI? Fine. As long as they bring more spice to the table than “grim man in a trench coat who sighs meaningfully,”

But it can’t “bring more spice” than that, lol. That’s exactly what it’s trained on. It is not technically possible for ChatGPT to excel at creativity, the best it can do is a mediocre average of all the writing it’s been fed, because that is how it works.

But writing quality or lack thereof aside: There are already LLM/ChatGPT apps and services for role play out there. It will adore you. It will make you the star of the story. It will be on any time frame and theme that you want. It will make any changes you want.

If we as a hobby aren’t using those services, then it’s because we decided there is something valuable about human interaction and responses that ChatGPT can’t replicate.

Is it cool to enjoy human responses to your content while being unwilling to write human content for the other person?

@bear_necessities I mean obviously some metapose is a normal part of RP, right. But in other types of fiction writing the reader often observes from a perspective of omniscience that is not part of MU-style RP. AI poses will often give you that omniscience where you don’t expect it, and it can be jarring/a red flag.

Few of the items in the list above, all by themselves, would indicate AI use. In my opinion, there’s a degree of severity + combination with the other ones that makes it ring as AI.

Here’s the thing for me about the AI writing.

It’s never em dashes, semi colons, and oxford commas that make me think something is AI. Here are the traits I’ve seen that indicate AI:

• The sudden arrival of stylistically different content that is unlike anything this person has ever been able to produce before (like a poem sent in 2 minutes from a player who doesn’t usually write poems)
• A lack of that person’s usual writing quirks (or any writing quirks), smoothed out into something that sounds very generic and is devoid of typos and human mistakes
• A weird regurgitation of theme content in an “in this essay I will” sort of manner, often using sentences directly lifted from the game website
• Bizarrely positive/cheerful content that doesn’t particularly fit the character/situation and is somehow boring at the same time
• Use of the second person, especially in descs: ‘you see this, you feel such a way about this person’ or other types of vaguely power-posing comments that are out of vogue in MUSHing, like ‘he intimidates everyone who sees him’
• More thought-posing and metapose than is common in mushing. People do of course metapose in RP, but the AI will churn out poses that sound like a novel or fanfic, as though the reader can and should be expected to extensively know what’s happening in a character’s mind by listening in on their unspoken thoughts and motivations. We don’t do that in MU. AI doesn’t know that.

Check enough boxes here and then put it through multiple AI detectors and they all say 99-100% AI likely? Not 40-50%, but 100%? It’s AI.

@somasatori Validation, probably. A certain number of MU*ers don’t do this because they love the craft of writing RP, they do it because they want people to notice them and like them.