@Ashkuri said in When is the last time you played?:
For those who haven’t RP’d in several years, what keeps you checking in/weighing in on the forum? I’m referring here to the forum parts specifically about MUSHing and RP
The possibly vain hope that someday life will settle down enough that I actually have the time and spoons to play again.
I also stay involved in things because of Ares, though I don’t think that really counts as “playing” per se.
@KDraygo said in Scenes within Scenes:
On table and place posing, I know that it would probably make it harder on Ares in terms of posting the log. Maybe a table doesn’t want their part of the log posted, but I believe in Ares, everything is posted. Which is why it has a pseudo place code where it’s just normal posing, with a header of where that person is situated in the code.
Ares doesn’t suppress table talk. It just identifies which poses are happening in which places. It would be difficult to suppress table talk on the web portal because you could potentially be controlling multiple alts and/or NPCs simultaneously from the same window. Also Ares’ scene system fundamentally doesn’t modify / customize the pose output per player. Anyone subscribed to the scene sees the same thing. You’d have to make significant structural changes to the scene system to support old-school table talk. And since I hate it, I have no intention of ever doing so.
@Pavel said in Scenes within Scenes:
Because one can interact with people outside of their little group, should they choose.
Theoretically I guess, but in my experience this almost never happens. (see the comments above regarding interruptions, being yelled at for spam, etc.)
The only poses I ever saw going to the main room were the static announcements or the “oops I forgot to use tt command” nonsense.
But to each their own.
@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:
But I want to have a sense of being able to RP with a smaller group WITHIN that space without having to always worry about missing poses or spamming the greater room (since a small conversation is likely to go faster than the larger scene).
But if you’re not interacting with anyone outside of your little group, and you don’t want to spam other people or be spammed in return, why does the room actually matter? What is the tangible advantage of keeping everyone jammed together rather than in separate rooms / separate scenes?
You can do the same big “announcement” emits to multiple rooms in a variety of ways to keep a shared context. It doesn’t even require any special code or tools, just some coordination among a few staff alts / NPCs.
@Pyrephox said in Scenes within Scenes:
Hate Ares places system because it doesn’t fix the main thing I want from tabletalk - reducing the number of poses I see that I don’t need to react to and making it easier for me to keep up with the poses my character is focusing on.
Yeah I think a places system needs to consider several different concerns:
When I was designing Ares’ places system, I concluded there’s just no way to do ALL of these things at once. You have to pick and choose priorities. For example, traditional table talk emphasizes the first few and compromises the last few. Ares’ system is the opposite.
Since everyone has different things that are most important to them, they’re going to prefer different systems.
@bear_necessities said in Scenes within Scenes:
In Ares, I really find places to be distracting and I haven’t seen it used in any meaningful way.
I don’t really like them much either, but I absolutely hated the old-school places systems so… meh.
@Ashkuri Ares has built-in places feature that simply identifies chat happening in different places. It doesn’t mess up the log because nothing is hidden from anyone.
@bear_necessities I think it’s more just a clash of expectations.
Some people see async as merely a “last resort” when you can’t sync up to play live, but still expect a degree of responsiveness to get the scene done. For example, even back when folks were doing async with LiveJournal or Google Docs, it could be considered rude to let a pose go three days without a response. At that point, it’s not really about syncing up timezones and can start to feel more like the other player just doesn’t care enough to reply, isn’t engaged in the scene, etc. (Or they, aka me, just have ADHD and forgot the scene exists. 
)
Other people (including those who are influenced by other, slower RP modalities like forum RP, storium, etc.) might not even think twice about going days between poses.
@Roz said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
oftentimes it really just literally is “my brain cannot keep engaged in this format.”
Yeah that’s me. I’m not judgmental about async. I just don’t enjoy it as much. It’s just hard for me to stay engaged and keep track of things.
@Pavel said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Could you make it blank or unknown, if you will, and require the field to be set before it can proceed? I don’t know if that’s implementable, nor how easy it would be, nor whether it would be worthwhile.
On web you could, but I think it would annoy people. And so many scenes are started from the client just by doing scene/start; it would definitely be annoying to try to require a pacing parameter there.
FWIW Ares 2.11 comes with a new scene/stats command.
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
Total Scenes: 13
Scene Pacing
Traditional.........12....(92.3%)
Asynchronous........1.....(7.7%)
+==~~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~=====~~~~=====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~====~~~~~==+
The stats should be taken with a grain of salt since many people don’t bother changing the pacing from the default (Trad), but I don’t really see a good way around that.
Minutes between poses is too easily skewed by outliers (one slow guy tanks the whole scene even though everyone’s mostly posing around him).
Making the default “Unknown” will give better fidelity when it IS set, but then most scenes will just be Unknown. So that’s not super helpful either.
I dunno. Just something to play around with.
I think folks are dramatically underestimating just how much mathematical averages can be skewed by outliers when there are sample sizes as small as most MU scenes have.
This really doesn’t have to be this hard. We’ve been having scenes with different pacing since I started playing in 19-fricking-95. All Ares does is provide more tools so that adults can communicate and collaborate with each other in the hopes of finding people who like to play in the same way. And it even includes a handy guide to explain said tools:
MUSHes have traditionally been focused around live, synchronous RP, with players all being online together. With the web portal, Ares supports more varied playstyles. You can specify a Pacing for your scene to let other players know what to expect before they join.
- Traditional: Live, synchronous RP with poses coming minutes apart. (Default Setting)
- Distracted: RP that is still synchronous, but with longer time between poses due to work or other distractions.
- Asynchronous: RP with poses coming in at various times, possibly in different timezones or schedules, or even over multiple days.
If you wish to add extra detail about your scene’s pacing, use the scene notes field.
If you can’t find people willing to RP in a way compatible with you, that’s not a tools problem, that’s a people - I hate to call it problem, because it’s not really a problem, it’s just you being at the wrong party.
@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
If the system had a way to track the date / time for each pose, it could feasibly keep a running tally on the average time between poses and then sort the scenes by what type they are.
Except as mentioned above, not everybody agrees with these definitions.
@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
When I venture into staff waters again there’ll probably be more conscious tracking of this stuff in real-time because it’s useful in creating the kind of environment you want.
Would folks like to see scene metrics in AresCentral alongside the player login metrics? If so, which ones?
Tracking TRUE scene pacing is tough because there are so many variables, unfortunately.
@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
Wouldn’t scene pacing be easy to capture if the game is capturing time / date stamps for all of the posing?
Once a scene has been shared, that data is no longer available.
@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
@Trashcan I would think that data is skewed because the play screen defaults to traditional pacing and people may or may not make a selection there when starting the scene. I think a more reliable source of data would be the avg time between when the scene opened and closed, or when the scene was opened and shared, to determine true pacing.
I agree that the data is skewed because of the default setting, but neither of those other ways really work well either. A scene can be started and left open because people forgot about it, can be started and stopped multiple times in multiple synchronous chunks… there are lots of different ways to play.
And at the day, the stats are kinda fun (from a data nerd perspective) but I’m not sure they mean much. Just because there’s live RP happening, if it’s happening in private scenes, or at a time incongruous with your work schedule, or whatever… YOU might not be able to find live RP. That’s ultimately what most people care about.
@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.
Ares has player activity metrics baked in, which you can see on any AresCentral game page.
You could also do some db-level queries to figure out scenes started per day easily enough.
Looking at the details of those scenes (private vs public, on-grid vs off-grid, scene pacing) is more problematic because those things can be edited, and for pacing may reflect a default value rather than an actual depiction of reality. So at that point I think it’s down to vibes.
@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:
*Ares doesn’t have a publicly available ‘scene shared date’, so I’m assuming that scenes posted on those days were also played those days (credit for “live” scenes).
To really do a data analysis you’d have to see scenes played, which is not directly connected to scenes posted, and have a way to tell whether those scenes were truly live or async (which may not always correspond to the option the person picked when they created the scene). Ares just doesn’t provide that data in form that you can easily query after the fact.
Some Storium games have word count min or max limits, and it only ever gets in the way.
Some of my friends prefer rapid-fire poses with a higher degree of response/interaction. Others write multiple paragraphs. I’m somewhat in the middle. Regardless, it’s not something I would ever want to regulate.
My kid is just starting out as a freelance artist. If you’re in the market for character art commissions, check them out. They’re especially good at anime styles, but do other stuff too. (#proudmama)