@Pavel said:

I’d be more okay with it if it weren’t implemented so stupidly.

This. I’m not opposed to the idea of better age-gated protections. As a parent, it is pretty much impossible to guarantee that your teen doesn’t encounter anything shady on the internet. I mean, I suppose you could try to look over their shoulder every time they’re online or ban them completely, but as @junipersky pointed out, that has other problems. In the physical world, that would be the equivalent of never letting them leave the house without you standing right next to them.

There should be a reasonable way to set limits of where they go and who they’re with online just as you do in person. Of course a determined enough kid could circumvent the safeguards, but it’d be nice to at least have them in the first place.

All that said, these laws are so dumb. They’re a privacy nightmare and a whole set of data breaches waiting to happen. They try to block kids out of spaces that could be safe and useful for them, and they’re so easy to circumvent that they do virtually nothing to keep kids out of spaces they shouldn’t be in. Oh and they’re a burden to implement. Aaargh.

@MisterBoring said:
I suggest this because playing a PC in a scene at the same time as one is staffing a scene can add to burnout at a faster pace.

I haven’t observed that personally, but it certainly does take more work to both GM and play in a scene. I still think it should be up to the individual staffer as to whether that’s something they like and can handle, and not something to be universally discouraged, but YMMV of course.

@Roadspike said:

@Faraday Very much appreciate the compliment, but it wasn’t always this way. I’ve been accused of spotlighting my own characters and she’s been accused of running scenes just for my characters. It’s been a learning process to get to the point where we feel comfortable running scenes that we have (or our partner has) a character in again.

You’ll never escape that kind of accusation, even on a game with a dozen staff members each keeping perfectly to their silos. Heck, I once got complaints about my character being spotlighted when the plot was run by someone else (a regular player) as a thank-you. And as @gashlycrumb also pointed out, there’s nothing inherently wrong with running plots for yourself/your friends. Staff deserves to have fun too. As long as there’s transparency and clear expectations, players can vote with their feet if they don’t like the way staffers are running plots.

@MisterBoring said:

I believe that no staff member should act as staff for a scene involving their own PCs.

I used to believe that too, but I no longer do. On a good game with a decent staff, you can trust staffers to remain fair even for their own characters. I’ve been on a number of games run by couples (@roadspike and @blu for instance) and have run games entirely by myself. These games have demonstrated to me that strict impartiality of rulings is unnecessary. In contrast, countless games where “impartial” staffers rubber-stamp crazy things for each other have demonstrated that the thin veneer of neutrality on most games is just performative.

@Wizz said:

I think choosing to play or not choosing to play are just different ways to engage with a game you make, each with their own unique challenges and pitfalls, and aren’t inherently problematic or better on their own.

I agree with this. Some people just have more fun with coding, building, or GMing. As long as they’re not exhibiting any other troublesome behavior, I have no problem with it. I can think of several staffers like this, but the most iconic was Death from TGG (EUBannana I think was his MSB handle?) He rarely played a PC (at least while I was there) but ran a great game. I think mostly he just liked watching people play in the war sandbox he’d made

I do think that if staff isn’t actively engaging with the players in direct RP, it’s important to have some other mechanism for getting the pulse of the game. It’s easy to be out of touch if you’re not playing (for the reasons @kestrel mentioned).

@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.