@RedRocket bro once again, some of us have played and GM’d plenty of PVP, and we love PVP, and we don’t run it anymore because it’s so onerous and toxic that it’s not worth it.

Just go play Star Wars AOA. I guarantee that it will check much of your list, lol

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

@Pavel Can we not call her a weirdo, man?

I have run a lot of PVP as a villain faction head! Some thoughts:

Death was not involved. We did what was called “cinematic defeat”, where you can lose a limb if you want to or fall down a reactor shaft or topple over a cliff. Whatever thing happens and just removes you from the action. “Full loot,” or losing all the items you had on you to the opposing party WAS possible, but rarely happened.

So even in this not-losing-your-char PVP environment, some observations:

• PVP is more exciting than PvNPC. It always is, full stop.
• PVP espionage is an unmitigated disaster. Even if you do everything perfectly in your secret covert actions, someone OOCly assumes you’ve cheated and raises hell about it, and it’s hard to speak to the accusations without blowing the successful spy’s cover. If you’re transparent about who the spy is from the start, no one will allow themselves to be spied upon.
• PVP “outside the box” actions that aren’t “direct attacks” are an unmitigated disaster. Trying to pin down exactly how much advantage a sneaky plan or trap gives and how to weight it is a losing game. People get mad when you don’t let them do their Super Genius Plan exactly the way they saw it, they get mad when it doesn’t obliterate the enemy, and the enemy gets mad when it has any effect on them whatsoever.
• Even when you plan specific events so that your own villain self will take an L, so that people can beat you up and capture you, people find something to be mad about and find a million things you did wrongly and badly. Even when you lose to them completely.

My PVPs were really successful, exciting, and fun. People did love beating me up and some loved the threat my group and I posed. Some gentle players participated in the PVP, and told me they were never brave enough to do PVP before mine. Some of them are still memorable to this day in a way PvNPC generally isn’t.

However

I recently cleaned out my discord and it was full of crazy abuse about how I suck, I’m a cheater, I’m a dick, I’m unfair, I interpreted the mechanics or rules wrong, I played favorites. That’s just the discord, never mind the smoke I got on-game, like people freaking out when I walked in a room or abusing me on channels and in pages for existing.

I would never, ever run a PVP game/faction again. The excitement is fun but the toll it takes on me just isn’t worth it.

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.

I hate AI PBs. I hate them so much. All the reasons @Roz said, plus the fact that I am somewhat face-blind and AI created PBs are so generic that it’s nearly impossible for me to grasp the likeness in a meaningful way. They’re just face soup to me.

Again because face-blind, my PBs are actors I can recognize and who stand out to me either by unusual appearance or by “this person is a lunatic” vibe or both.

IMO dealing with points, levels, ranks, tokens, achievements, etc are just levels of bureaucracy that take ST time from actually doing the things that points, levels, ranks, tokens, and achievements are meant to unlock.

The intersection of sad and funny is where I thrive.

@Jax I mean, there WERE some very fine JexCo Products to be had.

@SockMonkey RL do be RL’in, always and forever. I hope life is treating you kindly and that things are going well for you!

I feel like I wasn’t on a lot of the same games as the majority of people, but here’s my playlist:

African Tails MUCK, TLK MUCK, Redwall, various other MUCKs, Elendor: I started in 1998, so character names from this era are long forgotten by now. I made a million characters and all of them were Very Cool with wicked scars and dead families and stuff.

Fort Bloodshed: John
Firefly Into the Black: Hezekiah
Blood of Dragons: Talbard, very briefly, but someone else was him after me and that went in a whole other direction
Serenity MUSH: Fael
Masquerade: Joel
Battlestar… something: Jonah Quill, but I cannot remember what Battlestar game this was. @Third-Eye knows, she was my boss, lol
Star Wars Age of Alliances: hahaha YAY, AOA. GOOD OLD AOA. Hex Ashkuri, Oran Arcantael/Malik Ren, a few others
Arx: Savio, Ezra (not the shady Ezra that got banned)
Liberation: Asher, Arden (neither for very long)
Shattered: Ikua, Sol, Mothman

Ares handle is @Hex.

https://gizmodo.com/googles-veo-3-is-already-deepfaking-all-of-youtubes-most-smooth-brained-content-2000606144

cool cool cool this isn’t problematic at all

Somebody tell the When Is Good people that they’re single handedly propping up this entire community on their pillar of weirdly free neon green scheduling tool

@Raistlin said in AI Megathread:

they’re real people trying their best to engage meaningfully with others. The poses still come from a human with emotions, motivations, and a genuine desire to connect, regardless of what tools they used to craft them.

No, that’s not genuine. That is literally disingenuous, particularly when it is undisclosed to other participants.

Engaging meaningfully requires thought, creation, intentionality, and vulnerability, not throwing half an idea into the word blender to come out with whatever sounds slick in the algorithm today.

As @Flitcraft said, if they can’t spend the time and effort to write something, why should I spend time and effort interacting with it?

@Kestrel I would upvote this more than once if I could

The AI problem is now so bad that people are trying to defeat it with… more AI. I don’t even know. What is life.

What I do know is that if someone fed my poses into ChatGPT or similar, I’d be pretty pissed off about it.

@Tez it worrrrrkkkkeeeed THANXU

Gently bumping the thread as I inadvertently ran into the same issue, I thought I could change my profile picture but got the same error.

EACCES: permission denied, copyfile '/tmp/36b4542115da5b4ee84adad875694127.jpeg.png' -> '/home/nodebb/nodebb/public/uploads/profile/uid-64/64-profileavatar-1744902192432.png'

Not a big deal! Just wanted to make others aware to be cautious about changes.

I don’t think anyone is trying to keep all 60 players that come in The Bubble. They’re trying to keep the 25 that really would find the game a good fit.

But we’ve got multiple people in this thread alone who are saying “I don’t like the experience of the bubble, it turns me off and drives me away, that’s not fun for me.” So as a game administrator, wtf do you do with The Bubble? You can say it happens for whatever reason you want, but it happens.

How do you provide an experience for 60 people that is so good at the beginning that it will hook some amount of players even after everyone who came to check out the new hotness has gone on to the next hotness? If the answer is “magically have enough bandwidth to support all 60 of them with individualized attention and exciting content and then simply scale it way back after,” idk that it’s realistic.

@Trashcan said in The 3-Month Players:

every way of trying to manage it administratively has some flavor of contraindication

That feels accurate to me, which is frustrating. Maybe you just have to time new game openings with another new game opening so that there’s multiple new hotness and the bubble is split.

Interesting thoughts here, that people want to stay and are looking for the right content to stay for. I think that’s true for some players, and maybe not as true for others.

Most people like the idea of the long haul in theory, but some players definitely find it much easier to start a new idea than to continue playing an old one for a long time. I don’t know that any amount of Great Game Content is ever going to outweigh the allure of “what’s new and all the potential that could be had there” for some people.

I’ve really made myself crazy over the years trying to put out the best possible content and hooks and RP so that people won’t go. I took their departure to other games as a sign that whatever I’m doing is not good enough anymore and is not fun or interesting, which felt terrible. But I think these days I just have to accept that some people like new things no matter how “good” the old one was.

That’s kind of why I’ve been thinking about this Playerbase Bubble phenomenon to begin with. Doubtless a lot of factors go into it, anyway.