@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:

o continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single locatio

Why wasn’t this person banned? I mean, instead of catering to someone, just ban them. Sounds like a lot of this could be avoided with liberal usage of the banhammer.

@KarmaBum said in General Video Game Thread:

@dvoraen TY for posting this recommendation. I was on the fence about paying for a new game, but you tipped the scales and I bought it a few days ago.

I have not finished it. I am going to!!

But I was playing last night, having a grand time. The gameplay is fun, the scenery is gorgeous, the characters and voice acting are spot on, the universe is intriguing. I’m super loving this! I’ve hit my stride! Each party member has a fun mechanic, I love the synergy of the fight mechanics and how I customized my team to work together and then–

I had to take a wee break after an emotional gut-punch (I’m sure y’all can guess~).

Will tap back in once I get to the end - which, to be clear, the beautifully sad story has only made me more afraid and excited to uncover. I hope it keeps being this devastating.

So entirely immersed in this world, I have cried and laughed and cried and cried, and I just got to that same emotional gut-punch and had to take a break but WANT TO PLAY AGAIN SO BAD!!!

I usually spoil myself because I hate surprises and spoilers don’t really ruin the experience for me, but I am doing everything I can not to spoil myself this time around and it’s slowly killing me. I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING lol

@Faraday I do see chatGPT being used a lot now for marketing and “personal branding”. A majority of the stuff I see on LinkedIn is just chatGPT shit anymore. A few business consultants I’ve worked with have suggested using chatGPT to assist with everything from marketing strategies to codes of conduct for employees. So I don’t think it will be too long before they churn a profit off of that market alone.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

OpenAI lost 5 billion last year while making only 3.7 billion in revenue. 3.7b is certainly not chump change for us normal folk, but for a megacorp like that it’s pitiful and unsustainable. In contrast, for example, Apple made 95 billion in the fourth quarter alone.

Not to get super nerdy here but it’s not that unusual for a company of that magnitude in early start-up phases to see significant losses, nor is looking at net loss vs gross revenue a great judge of financial performance for start-up companies. I could go into a lot of detail here but this is definitely not the place.

w/ regards to THIS CONVERSATION, it looks like I might be confusing the different AI models but it doesn’t really change the conclusion that the “Machine Learning” AI is just as harmful and will result in significant job losses. It just doesn’t impact our games. Yet, anyway, IDK one day it might.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

In your circles. It’s not part of the general zeitgeist, so it’s easily missed or ignored.

I actually can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not. The world of finance and business is not exactly my small little circle here.

@Third-Eye said in AI Megathread:

@MisterBoring said in AI Megathread:

Science AI model releases an open source schematic for a water powered drive system for cars that gets 450 miles to a gallon of water and can drive at freeway speeds. crickets

That’s not driving advertising dollars and making anyone’s money. ChatGPT does…somehow…

Honestly, I see a lot of promise in narrowly-tailored AI designed to wade through data and do pattern-recognition, but that’s not atm a money-maker for anyone.

This is already being done? There are many companies who use AI tools for data sorting and pattern recognition. It came out a few years ago in the public accounting space and is used for “efficiency” - we were forced to utilize these tools after the company I previously worked for dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars in creating it. When I was using it, it was more trouble than it’s worth but it’s definitely a thing.

AI is a big topic right now in business circles, specifically around data sorting. I’m not sure why you think it’s not a money maker? It’s a huge topic of conversation and it is concerning for me in particular as a CPA because eventually AI will be able to do a lot of what I currently do.

ETA because I don’t actually understand the comment. Who is it not a money-maker for anyone to? The people who design the AI and are going to make HEAPS of money implementing it in the businesses they go to? The people who are currently working in data analytics, finance and other data-driven fields who will eventually be replaced by robots? I mean damn near every day I am inundated with Linkedin requests and cold calls trying to peddle their AI-driven accounts payable programs or credit card such-and-such or financial statement reporting programs. My whole executive team was tasked with determining their AI spend for the next year. It’s a huge, big deal that could impact many, many lives.

@MisterBoring now I have to add to my +finger I don’t use LLMs to write my poses sometimes I just suck as a writer thx

I don’t remember the original argument now about BarRP, SocialRP and whatever-else, but if all your game offers in terms of gameplay is for people to sit around and talk about their personal lives, it’s probably not going to last very long. With regards to the L&L genre specifically, it’s why most “popular” games have always offered something else, whether that’s magic or exploration element or something.

I think a lot of people say they want an L&L politics game but the vast majority of players aren’t actually politically savvy, nor would it be very fun in the long run. I can honestly only thing of one person in all of MUSHdom who would absolutely lean into it and be an absolute joy to write stories for, frankly. It’s why all popular L&L games in recent memory have offered something else beyond your standard L&L shit, whether that’s magic or some sort of mystery to investigate or what have you.

The new season of Game Changer just recently released and I haven’t laughed this hard in ages.

If you don’t have a DropoutTV subscription what are you even doing with your lives?! It’s the only streaming service who’s content is getting better and better and better as it goes along.

The idea of one “main” love interest just sounds exhausting for whoever is playing them. Every single person is going to want to be in private scenes with you, and if you are keeping them as an NPC for public events only, I think a lot of people are going to lose interest rapidly. I have a lot of other thoughts but this is the main one, it just sounds like a LOT on a single person and would quickly become Not Fun.

@Third-Eye said in The 3-Month Players:

New game opens. The theme at this point almost doesn’t matter. The appeal of it at this point almost doesn’t matter.

It is mobbed by the same 40+ people, most of whom evaporate in 3 months.

The cycle repeats at the next new game, the XYZ of which almost doesn’t matter.

IMO the bubble seems to largely happen on specific genres of games and my theory is that it happens because 1) it’s the genre people want to play, and 2) there aren’t enough games in that genre to tickle everyone’s fancy. So a game in that genre comes up, 40+ people rush to play (even tho the theme/setting only appeals to 10-15 of them), then slowly but surely those people who aren’t really “all in” on the game trickle off & the game settles into a ‘reasonable’ population. But then the new hotness in the same genre pops up, and the rush happens again, and hey your friends are playing over there and not over here, so you go over there too and by 5 month’s time the first game is dead and the second game is about to lose half of their population because the theme/setting didn’t appeal to them but they want to play in that genre, rinse & repeat etc. etc.

Then you have the OTHER side of it where gamerunners determine a game’s success off “The Bubble” and the natural trickling off of people to settle into a more “reasonable” population makes it seem Unsuccessful, so they give up. Or they burn out. Or they didn’t hook the people they wanted to hook and they don’t really want to Rp with the people who are left so they give up.

I suspect if you had 2-3 high fantasy/pretty princess games and 2-3 modern supernatural games opening up at the same-ish time, you wouldn’t experience that bubble. But IDK, I could be wrong.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

The main issue IMHO is that many (most?) games open without a clear plan of what players are going to do.

This. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a game and gone “oh this concept sounds neat, but what will I be able to DO here?” I also can’t tell you how many games I’ve created in my head that sound neat and then @KarmaBum is like OK but what will people RP?

The “What Will People RP” question sticks with me now and is not just the reason why I don’t personally open games, it’s why I don’t join a lot of games anymore. It’s more than just the theme or the meta plot, to me it’s how do you give players the agency to run their own stories and do more than just RP the random karaoke night until I feel fucked to run another plot, if that makes sense.

@Ominous said in Lords and Ladies Game Design:

Alice, Bob, and Carol, a trio of town guards, could be the ones to come across the zombie horde and report it to their sergeant, the commander of the town guard, or the mayor.

But what happens when Alice, Bob & Carol, a trio of town guards, come across a zombie horde and horde that information to themselves because they want the plot? IDK there’s no real perfect way to ensure everyone gets a bite of the plot cake except to just put the information out there for everyone.

@Gashlycrumb said in The Magicians:

@bear_necessities I like. My own druthers would be to set it in the 1930’s or 1960’s, but I bet the appeal of that is too narrow. I’m pretty much against cannon characters as PCs and want every PC to be original. Roster PCs created for the game and played by someone who didn’t create them are great, but the characters from the shows and books, naw.

I would totally be down for 1930s or 1960s, but I think you’re right about the appeal being too narrow. Your scope is probably already narrow enough with an existing IP that isn’t currently “popular”, and you could always run ‘back in time’ or alternative timeline events which work with the existing magic system.

And don’t get me wrong, I am sure magic school could be a fun concept. It’s just the appeal of The Magicians to me was never Brakebills, it was everything else. TBH if I was making a game, I’d probably base it in Fillory or new-Fillory, or maybe even the Neitherlands.

@Gashlycrumb I personally would start a game after where the show ended. Fillory is destroyed, the Fillorians are in a new world, and you can establish from there. It would be a blank slate that you could really create from, vs having to deal with book/show stuff involving the alternate timelines and cannon characters, etc. And I would just require all the PCs to be post-Brakebills at that point.

@helvetica Yeah that sounds about right, I can’t keep all my MUSH drama straight

It really is a great theme that I would love to play, I just don’t see how it can be done. Even from a systems standpoint, the magic system is so complicated, it doesn’t seem like something you could just throw together or “make work” on FS3 or anything.

Double-post but this was what I told my bfffff way back in the day when I wanted a Magicians mush:

Almighty Me — 7/7/20, 7:13 AM
and again, the fun part of magicians is strangers in a strange land, where they are in the Narnia-esque world and all of the creatures are assholes

@Gashlycrumb I did not play the latest Magicians game, but if I remember correctly, there was a known sex-pest who sex-pested her way into running the game into the ground. I admittedly was exaggerating on the whole ‘awful MUSH every time’ because I too only know of two instances, but I am pretty sure the other one burst into flames too.

I am probably generalizing here but it has seemed a common theme that people equate the Magicians with “adult Harry Potter” and want to play kids at magic college. Which, whatever floats your boat, I just felt like magic college was such a small point of The Magicians and PERSONALLY do not want to play kids at magic college, it’s just not my thing.

@NotSanni said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game.

I think most people who want a Magicians game want a magic school game and … again, that’s not really what the Magicians is about. I agree with everything else you said, and I think the dark interpersonal social drama of the Magicians makes it not a great theme for a MUSH.

@Gashlycrumb I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time