@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I’m saying that they are dying because they are being run the way a small hand full of whiny forever-victims who instigate the problems they then complain about want.

The more generic and baby proofed the games became the more the player base dwindled away. What is happening now isn’t working. What people did then was working. Back in the day there were hundreds of active players on at a time. Now you’re lucky to see five.

Maybe, just maybe, you might want to think about why it worked back then instead of just dismissing the only time the medium was actually successful at retaining a large player base because it hurt the feelings of a few bad actors who just want to stir up shit and make drama.

Text-based games are dying because gaming mediums are changing. People who want their dopamine fix have tens of thousands of choices, very few of which need telnet to access. This is no longer the Wild Wild Web 1.0 of unbridled creativity spawned by techological limitations.

Young people getting started go to Discord because that’s where all the RP is now. Thousands upon thousands of servers joinable at a click. Infinite accessibility. MUSHing is kept alive because of a dedicated and committed group and the average age of people in that group is rapidly ticking upwards.

It’s pretty clear now you’re arguing in bad faith. Everyone has their personal preferences, but I don’t see anyone else in this thread so virulently lambasting others for having preferences different from their own.

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

I miss RPing. I’ve filled my hours with other things, but I miss logging on and writing stories with people. I also miss the daily chatting with people I use to chat with about random stuff.

However, the idea of making a new character makes me feel like I don’t have the mental energy. Then I’m not sure how well my RP will be after the ‘break’ I’ve been on.

Anyways, in conclusion – if we’ve RPed at all, you’ve been on my mind and you rock - so thank you for writing stories with me.

I don’t post here very often, if ever, I’m mainly content to just lurk and read and keep up to date.

But this hit me like a brick.

I’ve got no game to play on right now and haven’t for over a year. Part of it is because I’m picky, another part is trust issues, and a third is a general lack of time. But every so often, at least twice a week, I think back and I miss logging on to a grid, seeing the familiar faces, and getting stuck into a bit of chaos.

I’m despondent that the last game that I invested a lot of time in went up in a sea of toxic flames, and I’m saddened by the lack of anything equivalent out there that’s similar in systems and size. I miss the people I don’t talk to anymore, and I miss playing in a codebase I understand.

I would love to find a game out there that fits my specific niche, but at this point I’d have to loosen my stifling standards and try something new.

I think I’ve been sitting on this for a long while, and I needed to let it out.

@RedRocket

No.

What is irritating me here, now, and far more than it should be, is the endless repetition of the burden of work upon other people. You are seeing something you do not like, and you are insisting that others must try it your way.

Do not do this.

Your preferences are unique just like everyone else. It is not your place to say that they are wrong (unless it’s illegal or really gross, we have other threads for that). If others like PvE games, they do not deserve to be lumped into a category of play-it-safe whingers. They are doing what they like, same as you.

If you are seeing the same mistakes made time and time again, the onus is on you to fix them to your satisfaction if it is within your power. Correcting the catastrophic freefall of the world’s economy is a bit out of our reach but learning how to code Penn or spinning up an Ares game is very much not insurmountable. So stop listening to us, and yourself, getting upset on the internet. Be bold, try new things. Innovate!

If you don’t see it, make it. That is the essence of creativity.

Finally, half of those analogies fell flat on me because I’m not American. I know nothing about yank politics or weird handegg besides that they exist and people are very noisy about them. I will not see things your way, and that is not something you can always change.

@Pavel

@Testament said in Celebrities We've Lost 2025:

Coming back to post that Ozzy died today.

https://x.com/DiscussingFilm/status/1947720771889205473

>plays the biggest farewell gig of all time
>dies

What a way to go.

@RedRocket why is it on others to make the game you want? There’s enough tools and know-how around for you to develop one to your requirements.

@dvoraen This is one of my favourite reads lately: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

Here’s the “Fighting against AI in SRE” update for the past week.

• Experienced developer raised a PR for our IaC that was full of AI slop, which he only admitted to when pressed, and expected it waved through.
• Stumbled across Claude (free version) configuration in a very proprietary repo.
• C-level keeps setting up meetings every two weeks asking how we get AI in our product, unsatisfied with “it breaches GDPR so we don’t” as an answer.
• Got sent this painful little article which caused war flashbacks to my desktop support days: https://thenewstack.io/vibe-coding-the-shadow-it-problem-no-one-saw-coming/

Oh man.

When I get a cold it lasts for like, four days.

Except the cough. That sticks around for a month.

Two weeks in now and auuuuuuggghhhhh.

Notepad doesn’t need Copilot.

So as most people with young dogs do, I have to deal with my pup going absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolting out the back to yip and growl ferociously at a bird sitting at the fence or a particularly aggressive wave of a distant tree branch or some other random nonsense. This is normal, and is usually ignored, because it’s rare enough to not bother the neighbours (most of whom also have yip/growl dogs) and it’s usually something harmless.

Except two-to-three weeks ago it was because a kitten was in the backyard and could not get back out.

My dog, overly energetic pup that she is, would love this little thing to death. Emphasis on “to death”, so I definitely couldn’t ignore what was going on. Not that I would have, that’d be rude. Also dangerous. Somehow got the dog back inside and spent an hour cornering this tiny little adorable thing and getting it into our old cat carrier. I love cats and kittens are objectively the cutest things on the planet so I consider it time well spent.

Whilst nursing my brand new battle scars (I think I look rakish but my wife says I’m whinging over a tiny dot) I heard a yell from over the fence. It’s the neighbour’s cat. Alright, great, not the same cat I know they have but at least now I know where to take this adorable and terrified little bundle of fluff and claws.

So I hoof the cat through the house, ignore the extremely happy and noisy dog, let the kids take a look through the carrier window (not too close, there are rules), and take the cat back next door. This is the part where I become vexed.

The situation with this kitten is as follows:

• Her mother, next-door’s cat we already knew (and always comes over whenever my wife is out the front), is not a desexed male but an un-desexed female. This was a complete mystery to us and the neighbours until it suddenly ejected three kittens in their laundry.
• All four cats are allowed total unrestricted/unobserved free roam. Outside. Where there is bushland across the road. Where there are snakes. And spiders. And kangaroos. I cannot overstate the number of snakes over there.
• The kittens are seven months old.
• The kittens are not desexed.
• The mother cat is still not desexed.
• Existence of kittens = At least one roaming undesexed male.

This is how colonies start. This is how we wind up with feral cat problems and threats to native wildlife. The whole reason there is bushland where I live is because an endangered species of frog lives there. The irresponsibility of it drives me completely up the wall, and the apathy from the neighbours (who are otherwise great!) irks me even more.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, when my pup goes absolutely bonkers at random hours of the day and bolts out the back to yip and growl ferociously, I now have to check every single time to make sure it isn’t a free-roaming kitten.

EDIT: I got to listen to cat-in-heat yowling for a few hours last week, so more kittens on the way soon I suppose.

It’s not just multiple alts, but those alts connected multiple times. For example, Sumi in the past used to connect all her alts from three-to-five different devices, meaning over a dozen connections from one player. That’s the number WHO looks at, and the number iberia.jdai.pt sees.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

I just want them to consider that what hey have been doing isn’t working and try anything actually different instead of just hanging a new theme or setting on the same frame work full of bad ideas that have failed for decades.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Am I wrong? Is there some thriving hub of young people out there playing some game I’ve never heard of? It looks like this hobby has gone to seed because it’s been made so generic and uninteresting it can’t offer anything worth the effort of the barrier to entry.

This is now the second time I am telling you that people aren’t MUSHing because there are more convenient, better known alternatives.

Here’s some examples:
https://www.facebook.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/
https://disboard.org/

@kalakh This is the variant I’ve seen

@Pavel that is a genuine QoL feature I use daily.

But I don’t need to have Copilot/Gemini/whatever advertised to me every time I open something that isn’t a video game.

I don’t even read the AWS roadmaps anymore because it’s endless updates to Q and nothing about bringing their existing functionality out of minimum-viable-product stage.

AI has its effective areas of use, but it is far narrower than what has been marketed and sold.

Yes. No. “They’re new, they’ll be gone in two weeks.” I’m a male btw.

I noted it down on a lesson on what not to do. Which to be fair I’m doing with a lot of the examples I see here. It’s the weirdest thing, the common sense to actually take something like this seriously doesn’t seem to be very bloody common.

I judge my neighbourhood’s lawns as I drive past.

@MisterBoring this is the same game that made a DL-44 identical in stats to a DL-18.

@dvoraen AI is an interesting (read: frustrating) topic that comes up at my job quite often. I can usually sort those trying to get it brought in into one of two categories:

• A C-level exec that wants it so they can slap “Powered by AI” on the product.
• A stressed junior/mid developer who wants it to do their job for them.

Setting aside misunderstandings around what AI actually is, both of the above are fueled by a lack of comprehension of the problems they’re facing in their day-to-day life.

The C-level exec wants to sell and thinks a shiny sticker will do just that. But the issues with what we make (and there are always issues in product development, that is a fact of life) have nothing to do with a lack of AI, nor will adding AI provide any tangible benefit. Asking “how do you want to use it in the product” usually results in a blank stare and instructions to just get it done. The only success I’ve had at stopping the AI implementation bandwagon is telling C-level how much it costs to build, run, and maintain.

The biggest issue that I can go into specifics about is that implementing AI in the way our execs often ask will run us afoul of GDPR. Not might. Will. I cannot elaborate further.

For the dev, working under Infinite Crunch, they see an easy way to work faster and more efficiently. They don’t have the time to assess the code being produced by the AI let alone their own code in the grand ecosystem of the product as a whole. Ninety percent of the time, when a dev asks me for a copilot license, their code is actually pretty good. The problem is the gigantic tech debt and clashing design differences etc etc, stuff that needs to be solved by a manager wielding the Refactoring Mallet.

The manager, however, is usually too busy telling C-level how much AI integration costs to build, run, and maintain.

I sound sour about this, and I assure you, I absolutely am. AI is a scalpel being sold as a hammer, and the only people who stand to gain anything from AI implementations are the ones selling it to hapless C-level execs who don’t know better.

In conclusion, there is a detailed (and deliciously crude) blog post I often refer people to when the AI conversation comes up for the umpteenth time. At the very least it’s good for a laugh. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

I can’t and won’t tell you what to do or what to think, that’d be disrespectful. I say the below because it’s what I experienced over eight years, and I got off pretty lightly compared to others. I will always do my best to provide clarity but with a disclaimer that I might not avoid bias, since I’m still a bit crispy from my time there.

Crap is being applied to the wargame system because it is another over-tuned Thing in a long line of additional over-tuned Things to be rolled out without any real consultation, consideration, or internal testing. This’ll be interesting to the player-base for about a month or so, then GMs will get either bored or frustrated and start doing it their own way.

Then the resultant hostility from Cujo will follow, because now he has been slighted by the ungrateful players that don’t want to use what he worked so hard to create. The issue with this is that he didn’t create it. Hadrix/Reverberate did. It follows his normal pattern of doing nothing until the demands are too loud to ignore.

It’s elicited a mass groan of “oh not again” because over the decade or so that a lot of us experienced AoA, the above happened time and time and time again.

@Lemon-Fox said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Someone disapproved of someone coming in without starting from the bottom of the ladder, and I was flabbergasted that they would care since the org had very little activity.

…yeah, that happens. You’ve encountered AoA’s tall poppy syndrome. If you try to rise up above the dinosaurs, you will be pulled back down unless you have powerful friends. The fact that you needed staff fiat to start in a position where you can actually play with this new system (which is otherwise locked only to dinosaurs) is both common and unfortunate.

Many players tried many years to inspire positive change only to run headlong into brick walls, to the point where the advice given to GMs was often “run what you want as long as Cujo doesn’t care”. Change must come from the top as well as the bottom to meet half-way, and the majority of the current staff are corrupt and disinterested in little more than their own egos. And that’s not even starting on the sex pest problem, which is the original impetus behind this whole thread in the first place.

I wish you the absolute best on that grid. I really do, and I say it genuinely, without a hint of sarcasm, condescension, or irony. Nobody should be forced to stew in negativity and I pray for your sake and the sake of all the other folk that came after us that you and they are allowed to play the game that you want. Never lose sight of what you want to do and strive to do it with the people you enjoy.

And good luck with Aryn.