@Kestrel said:

But that rarely seems to how child NPCs are used by players. It usually seems to be some sort of house-RP wish-fulfilment fantasy and I really don’t like being a part of that

Interesting. That does all sound pretty annoying, but that hasn’t been my personal experience. I wonder if it just comes down to the types of games or specific players or something. When I’ve seen child NPCs used, it’s usually been for a specific plot point. When I’ve done it, either been for that or just because my character happened to be a parent. Almost all of the times were after I myself was already a parent, so there definitely wasn’t any wish-fulfillment going on. It was just exploring an aspect of the character that seemed interesting to me at the time.

I remember one amusing scene where @Roadspike’s Viper pilot was getting grilled by my character’s NPC kid. That would certainly become tiresome if it happened all the time (for me to play as well as for everyone else to deal with), but the kid was largely off-camera with his grandparents. As occasional flavor, I think he brought a bit of levity to scenes, while also highlighting who the PCs were fighting for. It also added depth to that character, who was struggling to balance being a single mother in a war.

YMMV of course but that’s just my experience.

I have often used children NPCs, same as any other kind of NPCs. A world full of stories where children don’t exist would be kind of weird. Of course you probably want to have some policies about how they may appear. This would depend on the game and its tone/rating, but perhaps something like “no child vampires” to “I don’t care if it’s the apocalypse, don’t harm children on-camera on my game”.

@Tez said:

Check to see if you can block banned people now pls.

Yay, thanks. And the menu too!

@Pavel said:

One can still block people, thankfully.

How? I do not see a BLOCK button on either the post or on their profile.

ETA: I think if they’re banned the block button doesn’t show up. I don’t see it on troll’s profile menu, but I do see it on other peoples’.

@tez Didn’t there used to be a button to hide all posts from a particular user? I was looking for it for the recent troll and I can’t find it now. (maybe I’m remembering this from another forum though and it was never here…)

@dvoraen said:

I CAN’T EDIT MY OWN POSTS (SCREECH)

That’s been that way for awhile for me. I found a workaround by shrinking the browser width. It moves things around enough that the edit button becomes clickable. If it can be fixed for real, that would be wonderful.

@Kestrel said:

I don’t think that liking PvP in a creative writing game is necessarily about being competitive.

It doesn’t have to be, but for a great many people it is.

Couple that with the extreme amounts of OOC bleed in this community and you get a very explosive brew.

Does that mean those people are bad players, or that PVE players are in some way superior? No.

But it does mean that, for me, allowing PVP in an open game with Internet Strangers is just not worth the headaches.

@Raistlin Ideal UX would probably be a client-side filter, so you could choose the cluttered (all maneuvers) or uncluttered (only available maneuvers) view.

I have fond memories of that game - until a few of our game group found the combo of maneuvers that always won.

@Pavel I am amused beyond words that you made that your signature.

@MisterBoring said:

I can also confirm from a few AOL CDs I kept for my collection that AOL had an unlimited plan as well that was $20 a month.

Yeah, that came later though as competition heated up between the dial-up providers. The original AOL was a monthly fee with a few “free” hours and then an hourly rate on top of that. Reference

@Pavel said:

Adjusted for inflation those prices are… ridiculous. Gemstone III during peak hours would be ~$46USD/hr and British Legends(MUD1) would be ~$33USD/hr. I love you, Faraday, but I’m not paying you over five hundred bucks a month for a casual twenty hours of pretendy funtimes.

Thanks for the sources! And yeah, those prices seem crazy, but keep in mind that with AOL at the time you were also paying $3-4/hour just to check your email and access early internet forums, on top of whatever you were paying your phone company. People just weren’t online as much. I remember having to meter usage carefully until I got basically unlimited access through the university computer labs.

@bear_necessities said:

ou 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.

That isn’t what the article says. It specifically says that there were commercial MUDs that made money off people connected to them, and that when AOL became a monthly instead of hourly fee their business model collapsed. (implied: because accessing the internet suddenly became easier and cheaper and hourly fees felt excessive) If people were only paying AOL, none of that makes any sense.

There were also pay-for-access BBS systems that people dialed into directly. Pavel is probably right that people just mailed a check or sent cash. Light research suggests that some of the larger studios possibly invested in some early online payment portals.

@Pavel Yeah that’s why I was curious. Sending in a check every month to pay an hourly MUD bill seems wild to me

@bear_necessities said:

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

I figured that part, I was wondering about the logistics of how they got paid. The infrastructure for shopping online was still in its infancy then.

@Prototart said:

People will 100% try to impose their will on others even on places where they can’t be killed for doing so. I doubt there’s any meaningful difference.

I’ve played on PVP games and I’ve played on PVE games and I’ve absolutely seen a meaningful difference in the levels of cooperation and antagonization between players depending on the type of game. YMMV obviously.

@Kestrel said:

But I just don’t really buy into the idea that PvP/PvE inherently inspires a higher calibre of players.

I wouldn’t say it inspires a higher calibre of players, but it absolutely creates a different type of drama. I personally would much rather deal with some nitwit who gets pissy because someone else got a medal / got promoted / got more “kills” in the last battle / etc. than deal with players trying to directly kill / ruin / impose their will upon other PCs.

@Roadspike said:

But you’re very right that designing away from PvP and toward PvE will limit some of the toxic aspects of PvP and competitiveness.

Yeah, it’s true that you can’t prevent people from being competitive, but discouraging it works pretty well.

@bear_necessities said:

They said AOL had a “pay to play” model and IRE was the first one to do it for free.

Where did you read this? There’s talk of Gemstone III running on GEnie, but I don’t see anything about AOL being pay-to-play other than a vague reference to its switch from hourly to monthly dialup rates.

Also, they don’t say IRE was the first one to do it for free, period, since the first games (like Colossal Cave) were free. They said they were the first to do a free game with micro-transactions.

I don’t actually know much about the early commercial text games. When they say:

Players paid between six and twelve dollars per hour to access it, which sounds absurd today but reflected the genuine cost of network infrastructure at the time. … By 1995, the pay-per-hour model was generating real revenue for a handful of studios.

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.

@Kestrel I hate that people assume that too. But you can have my em-dashes when you pry them from my cold, dead, fingers. Along with my “it’s not this, it’s that” comparisons, and my sentence parallelism, and my triplets.

I’m not Kenyan, but otherwise this is apt: I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

@Kestrel said:

In terms of preserving history, I think that what would interest me most would be any kind of effort to try and trace the history of that exact evolution.

A lot of that already exists for the early stuff. The evolution from the cave game to MUDs to MUSHes is pretty well documented. Iron Realms has a good summary. The Wikipedia MUD page has a lot too.

I agree with you that the hobby will probably never die completely.

I’m not as convinced that there’s as much to learn from the other subgenres. I was recently in some discussions with folks who do more MUDs/RPIs, and I felt like we didn’t have very much in common. In fact, the goals were often in direct opposition. Even when I tried to write the MUSH 101 tutorial to introduce folks who had never MUSHed before, it was almost impossible to make broad generalizations. And that was just among “MUSHes”.