@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”.

@Testament said:

@Faraday If you don’t have a Jill the Guest or a Bane section, I will riot.

I don’t have enough WORA/Hogpit tea to do it justice.

@Jennkryst You should.

Lol now I kind of want to write a book about the history of MUSHes, even though it would basically only appeal to the tiniest of audiences.

@Apos said:

For me it is less about intentional exclusion and more just being fine knowing that a lot of people won’t play a game of X, Y, or Z.

Same. I design my games a certain way: Co-Op PVE, minimal “carrots” for advancement, an emphasis on self-sufficient storytelling, etc. I acknowledge that this is going to cut out a segment of players, but that’s not why I do it. It’s more about making it clear who the game is for than deliberately excluding folks it’s not for.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

Obviously this is the correct course, but basically every institutional use that I have personally seen has been lacking in the latter section.

Which is a problem in terms of work culture, not the tool, yes but when you’re relying on the tool to make decisions that directly impact a person’s likelihood of getting a degree, or getting/keeping a job? I don’t think we should be using, much less relying on, imperfect tools for in those instances.

This is my problem, yes. However, I attribute it to the tool as much as the work culture.

These things portray themselves as far more reliable than they actually are in practice. The UX also lends toward this reliance, displaying results like “31% likely to be AI”. That, again, is giving the misleading impression of a highly precise and reliable tool. And unlike a plagiarism detector, which can point you to the original, these tools are much more opaque.

You don’t have to look far on substack to find tons of authors (pissed off about the recent addition of Pangram to the site) pointing out false positives in their own work. Even a comparatively low false-positive rate can create massive implications when used at large scales.

@Tez said in AI Megathread:

3 out of 5 did okay? They are tools to use alongside human reasoning. But demonstrably they aren’t garbage.

One of the tools you’re saying did “okay” in the first article is the same one the second article raises concerns about. Do they sometimes work? Sure. Are they reliable across a wide variety of use cases? No.

FYI, AI detectors are still kinda crappy.

Can AI Detectors Be Trusted? The Authors Guild Put Five of Them to the Test

“Our test confirms that while a couple of AI detection tools accurately identify human-authored text, some commonly used consumer-facing AI detection tools are wildly inaccurate, which presents a major risk for authors. Moreover, these tools change constantly—updated models, shifting benchmarks, evolving AI outputs—and their accuracy at any given moment cannot be assumed.”

Pangram Flagged My Own Writing as AI

Regarding false positive benchmarks: “that benchmark tests pure human text and pure AI text under controlled conditions. It doesn’t describe real-world use cases”

@Juniper said in Age Verification & Games:

TBH I’m not worried about minors infesting my spaces because they’re not interested in the level of effort that is required to get invested in this stuff

I don’t think that’s true at all. My oldest plays on discord with a bunch of other teens. They are aware of MUSHing; have helped me playtest a few things on Ares. They write fanfiction. My youngest likes Dwarf Fortress and clunky RPGs grafted onto Starcraft, neither of which is that far afield from MUDs.

They are not allowed to play MU*s because we have a family rule about playing online with strangers. I’m not sure I would encourage it regardless, but the level of effort isn’t really a barrier in the slightest.

@Yam said in Age Verification & Games:

Gosh, are there any NON 18+ games out there? I figure maybe some MUDs?

A quick scan of Ares games shows at least one game that’s 16+, a couple that have no age policy at all, and two that are a bit unclear (like they say no TS with underage players in one place but in another place say 18+ only, so… which is it?).