@Faraday You weren’t paying for the MUD, not really. On AOL, you were paying for the hours you used to dial up. The games themselves were free. I believe the same thing for Gemstone on GEnie, you were paying for GEnie and not for Gemstone itself.

@kestrel you had a different experience than I did. No one ever promised me a paid position with IRE, or dangled it in front of me. I did spend a lot of money on the game but I was pretty young, stupid, and didn’t have any parental oversight. I don’t know how much money I spent, but I didn’t have a job so it couldn’t have been that much, it just felt like a lot of money for someone who didn’t really have any. I was also a God (Cassiopeia), I think on Aetolia but it might’ve been Imperian. Maybe I wasn’t a great one, I surely didn’t have a fanclub.

I’m not saying that IRE MUDs weren’t toxic or the things you are saying didn’t happen though. I dealt with a ton of toxicity as a player and was admittedly pretty toxic myself back then. I have a lot of bad memories, but a lot of good ones too. And all in all, it was 20+ years ago now and I’d like to think I grew from it. I’m not discounting your experience, just telling my own. I think the things you are expressing aren’t exclusive to IRE though.

@Faraday said:

How did that actually work, logistically, in an era before reliable online payment systems? I’ve heard of paid BBS systems, but I never gave much thought to how they got their money.

You either paid up front for a set number of hours or were billed after the fact for usage.

@Kestrel said:

Yeah IRE’s “free-to-play” model was always incredibly predatory. I actually think how they treat both their “volunteers” and even paid staff might be worse. But that’s a rant for another thread and another day.

I was a volunteer on IRE! Ask me anything lol I never had an issue as a volunteer, except for other players. I also knew Matt Mihaly and some of his team. They were nice people (at least to me) and I never heard any complaints from the paid staff. But I’m sure it happened, and I’m sure that some paid staff and volunteers had bad experiences, if only because it was really the wild west era of MUDing and in general some people are terrible to other people online.

I do think the model was predatory, but I believe that about any micro-transaction sort of situation. I spent a considerable amount of money on IRE games and never got anywhere, mostly because I didn’t understand how to make triggers.

It’s funny reading this IRE History because … they get it wrong. They said AOL had a “pay to play” model and IRE was the first one to do it for free. But AOL’s model (at least in so far as a few of their games, Modus Operandi comes to mind, and I think there was a dragon-something game too) originally WAS free to play, and then they switched to pay to play and THAT was a catastrophy. I was an early adopter of Achaea and played from the very beginning; that it was free to play is a bit of a joke, since you couldn’t walk out of safe rooms without getting killed repeatedly by people who spent hundreds of dollars on credits lol

ETA: Unless of course they meant AOL’s fee, which was per hour and then went to a monthly flat. I think that was around the time that the MUDs on the platform started doing pay-to-play.

@Tez is that a game you are designing right now?

Sooooo why isn’t there a Dungeon Crawler Carl MUSH yet?

@Roz I definitely feel like everyone deserves a right to privacy and was being too overbroad. I don’t expect people to link their handles, I have played games where I don’t link my handle, and I don’t think it’s something that should be required.

I HAVE seen multiple cases of bad actors hide without handles or change their handle to hide, so that eyebrow twitch is mostly just a ugh, what if this is secretly someone I know is a bad actor?? But that generally works itself out, handle or none.

As far as staff having a handle, I prefer to play on games where I know the admin. I do think staff alts should be tagged.

Hopefully that clears things up.

@Yam I would play any damn thing @KarmaBum slapped her name on, like even if it was cardboard box: the mush

My two cents? If you don’t have a handle, you have something to hide, and my brows immediately raise. I feel that way about everyone, players or admin, but I give players way more grace because I know not everyone wants to slap their handle on right out of the gate and sometimes it’s nice to have a haven alt.

ETA: I would also play anything @tsar made so long as it’s Janitor: the MUSH. I’m still waiting @tsar

@catzilla the becoming was a Lord and Ladies steampunk game that was on Ares for awhile. The premise was great.

@RightMeow spill the tea

@catzilla said in Neon Protocol:

Double post

I just checked out the Roster list. Out of the 14 PCs available, only 5 are female and one of those 5 is an old woman that is sure not to be a threat to any potential quest to collect all the peen on the game.

This doesn’t surprise me. From the couple of people I spoke to who app’d female characters, they waited significantly longer than other people to be approved.

The staff at Neon Protocol is likely the same person that ran The Becoming. I don’t believe that is the same person as jujube/inuki/etc.

@helvetica what’s even worse IMO is that the staff alt will submit jobs under their alt and then they will answer themselves in said job as the staff bit. Which is just… lol crazy IMO

@catzilla

@catzilla said in MU Peeves Thread:

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@bear_necessities said in MU Peeves Thread:

IDK how to explain it better, I just feel like staff should be upfront about who their PCs are.

I agree with this. I also believe that staff should not include their PCs in the scenes they are running. In my experience it often leads to Mary Sue / Gary Stu behavior.

At the VERY MOST, I could see them using their PC like, ‘hey I found this spooky rock, can you guys go investigate it?’

But then again, a NPC could do that as well.

This is the weirdest thing about the Staff at Neon Protocol. Their NPCs are the heads of every single org - not a big deal, in fact some people prefer that. But then their PCs (Margot & Punky, I believe) are like… also org heads? Second in command of the orgs? But very blatantly story-surrounded, to a point where it is a feature of the character, and it would be FINE IF IT WAS DISCLOSED. The problem is the non-disclosure, and my particular issue with it is the subterfuge, and the weirdness around it. Specifically, the character I randomly chose off the roster had a secret that centered around both of her alts, to a point where I believe that the intent was to create some sort of romantic vibe with one of them given how it was written, and very much cast Margot as a (if not THE) plot device. When I paged Margot asking her how she wanted to play the secret, she came off very “tee hee, I don’t know, I had no idea that you even had that secret about me!” and I’m just over here like what the fuck?

So. If you want a game where your character - or characterS - are the central plot, if you’re going to link every single character to your character, if you are going to have secrets centered around your characters … god damn, at least be up front about it and tell the people that it’s your character.

I’ve noped off the game, but I think everyone who plays there should be aware of what’s behind the curtain.

@pixiedustflyer yeah. In full disclosure because I believe in naming when I shame, I’m talking about Neon Protocol (be kind rewind?).

That being said I think staff should play their own games. I even think staff should have their PCs in scenes they run, because a lot of times you as staff are the only person running story anyway. It’s the non disclosure and subterfuge that is bothersome.

@Ashkuri I don’t know if other players “cannot be” central to the plot and that’s not really my point. While I believe staff should play their own game and should be able to participate in the story, it seems super disingenuous to have a character that’s central to said story and not reveal that it is a staff alt. IDK how to explain it better, I just feel like staff should be upfront about who their PCs are.

It feels weird and disingenious for game runners to have an undisclosed PC (or PCs plural, possibly) that are seemingly central to story. Like, I get on one hand that staff sometimes just want to PLAY and not have everyone climbing over themselves to play with the staff PC because they are the staff PC and they THINK they’ll get story out of it … but if your staff PC is already “the story”, why not just be clear about it?

IDK, it’s weird.

@Roz cool downs are dumb and shouldn’t be a thing

@Pyrephox said in When is the last time you played?:

No OOCly hidden lore.

This is the one part i struggle with, mostly because i’m not sure how to make the lore 100% accessible without people feeling … I don’t know, like they know the whole story so why would they need to play I guess? But hm. Things to think about!

@catzilla said in When is the last time you played?:

run a silly one shot that will (probably) not have an effect on the setting.

so, curious, how could a game get you to run a plot that could have an effect on the setting, affect the metaplot or change the world in some sort of way? Is it just as simple as keeping that “You can do whatever you want here as long as it doesn’t break the world” on the tin or would you need something else?

@Yam idk. sometimes I think we just as a community need to stop expecting one person to hold all the story on their shoulders. Maybe a lot more people would build games if they thought that the community would tell stories with them instead of them having to tell stories for everyone? I’ve thought about that a lot. I mean I’d love to run a game and have 10,000 ideas, but I don’t have the dedicated story teller time.

@ham said in When is the last time you played?:

We’ve all seen the “waves” come and go, and honestly it comes down to the fact that a large amount of folks don’t take initiative to engage beyond “oh hey this is new and everyone’s here.” The amount of fun we have on these games is really pretty largely up to us, and it doesn’t require newness or hotness. It requires effort.

I do wonder what everyone is waiting for, really. Like we’ve had in however many years since Arx ended multiple L&L games, fantasy games, supernatural games, steampunk games, WoD games, and they either don’t pop off or it does pop off and then the activity plummets and the game dies. And games die for many reasons but I think a big one is what you said - people don’t take initiative to engage, and everyone just keeps waiting on someone else to Do Something, and when everyone is waiting around, no one does anything, and the staff can’t keep up with constant demands to Do Stuff so they get burned out and yeah.