@crawfish said in Your first game?:

@L-B-Heuschkel Heeey this was my first MU, around the same time too.

Haha, who were you? I was Kae/Tancred/Marcel et all!

LegendMUD back in about 1996 – it had a pretty decent RP aspect back then. No idea whether it does today, I haven’t visited in 20 years.

Long time no see, Jules! Hope everything is well!

Ye gods, DiscworldMUD. So many coded minigames, from crafting to shop running, to actual, literal games – poker? Board games? It was all there.

@somasatori With a lot of international players, we do see discussions that are genuine discussions. But they’re between people who disagree on fairly minor issues – not from either extreme. Frankly, I don’t think that gap is bridgeable anymore, and I’m not sure it should be even attempted.

@Yam said in Strike Systems:

I’m curious if anyone has actually legitimately witnessed a fundamental change in someone with regards to MUSH behavior, perhaps due to some fallout, maybe in the form of banning or lost friends.

Yes. On several games. But to no one’s surprise whatsoever, those people who do learn and reform also tend to keep very quiet about it, in order to leave the past well buried.

@Juniper said in Strike Systems:

@Rucket said in Strike Systems:

At this point if I ran a game and someone spoke some right wing shit id ban them.

Amen to that.

“A-bloo-boo-hoo, freedom of speech, blah blah”
Nah. Go away. I’m tired of playing how far they can boil the frog before there’s a problem.

Not going to lie here: I like to think myself pretty open-minded, but I too object to being slow boiled like a frog. Don’t be pushing around Overton windows on my game.

It’s fine to discuss politics. It’s not fine to propagandize – and while I won’t ban you for being right-wing, I somehow don’t think you’re going to feel very welcome in the general community. Most of us are too fed up with this shit.

@Yam I’m going to venture a guess that at least some of the reasoning is habit from the 1990s when it really did matter how many people were connected.

The MUD I played back then lagged to the molassis and random disconnects point when more than 50 people were online. So the guys standing around doing nothing were not in generally in favour with the rest of us.

However, this is not an issue today as far as I’m aware.

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

It’s also perfectly acceptable for Staff on a game to see players who aren’t meeting their expectations, and approach them politely and discuss the matter, and if they’re not able to reach an understanding, ask them to leave.

It is. On Keys, the requirement is, don’t idle out. Other games have tighter restrictions. Set it up the way you want your game to work. Much as I’m a laidback nature, it is on the potential new player to read your terms and conditions. The social contract they’re agreeing to, if you will.

I’m going to just quickly point a spotlight at another variant that hasn’t been mentioned so far (from what I saw): The player who wants to RP with everyone but can’t.

Whether it’s social anxiety, bad health, busy life – at least on Keys, we have a couple of folks who never or almost never actually RP. When they do, it’s one on one, with only a few chosen folks.

They’re not harming anyone, though. They just want to be part of the OOC community even if for whatever reasons they don’t have spoons to actively play. They hang around and chat, and in that, contribute to a friendly, welcoming atmosphere.

I think Roadspike put it well above; if the player isn’t hoarding plot or otherwise obstructing things for others, they’re still a gain for the game.

I think grids serve a different purpose today than they used to. Today, at least on Ares games, the grid is a showcase – it tells new people what the place looks like, what the atmosphere is like, and what staff thought was important to the stories being told.

My em-dashes, my semicolons, and my words of more than three syllables. Ain’t giving them up in order to write ‘less like AI’. LLMs are mimicking me, not the other way around.

We don’t have storytelling staff in the first place. We have a plot that is very easy for players to tell stories in – and we expect them to do so. They do. There aren’t any rewards besides the joy of storytelling itself.

Of course, this works because no one expected our game to ever become more than a small handful of friends hanging out and telling their stories to each other. Keys is a sandbox, a framework for people to go off playing plots and stories of their own making and then returning to the central hub to interact and catch up. It probably wouldn’t work with a very large playerbase – we’re typically sitting around 30-60 active characters at any given time, so we’re hardly taking over the hobby here.

In short, I agree with others above: Players should help drive story and entertain each other. You don’t have to leave it all to them – but even if you were paid to sit online 40 hours a week, storytelling, you wouldn’t be able to keep up with everyone. It’s not unreasonable to expect people to perceive the hobby as a two-way street.

I need a mix. Depending on my mood and fatigue levels, I may want grimdark horror one day and vanilla slice of life the next day. My preference goes to settings that can accommodate most moods.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

@L-B-Heuschkel said in The 3-Month Players:

Smaller but invested. It sounds harsh, but it’s not those March violets you need to invest in as a game runner. They come with great enthusiasm – and they bail with just as much enthusiasm when the next game opens. It’s the other players you need to invest in – the ones who will stick around for a longer time. Those who came looking for a community to move into and stay in.

I think this is where we see things differently. Of course I can’t speak for everyone, but in my experience–the majority of players want to stick around. MUSHers come to tell stories and build IC relationships. That’s the long game. It’s not like a MMO or single-player game where everyone’s always drawn to “the new shiny”. The biggest reason they move on to a new game is that the one they’re on isn’t meeting that need.

But that’s my point, in a way. If your game doesn’t offer enough for them to become long-term invested, they will bail for the next shiny.

The real issue, as I see it, is how to make your game interesting enough. As BN said above – getting a cool idea for a setting is easy but what will people actually RP?

I don’t have a golden answer, unfortunately. Sometimes, you strike gold. Sometimes, you don’t.

@Ashkuri said in The 3-Month Players:
Then the next Ares game has The Bubble for a couple months… then the next, leaving the old game(s) with a much, much smaller player base of longer-term residents.

Smaller but invested. It sounds harsh, but it’s not those March violets you need to invest in as a game runner. They come with great enthusiasm – and they bail with just as much enthusiasm when the next game opens. It’s the other players you need to invest in – the ones who will stick around for a longer time. Those who came looking for a community to move into and stay in.

That, of course, begs the question of how to tell who’s who so you know where to invest your spoons.

@Faraday The way I interpret it is, the better your thing is, the more players will end up in cathegory three.

@Third-Eye I can relate to that. I used to look for older, established games too. Of course, that’s not exactly helping new games become established.

@MisterBoring said in Why MUSH?:

Is three months the sweet spot for a MU?

Actually, yes. It is. Story time!

Once upon a time when the Earth was young and I first became staff on a MUD (LegendMUD for ye curious) in the late 1990s, Raph Koster was one of the implementors (you may know him as Ultima Online’s Designer Dragon). No, I’m not name dropping here – I think I talked to him twice, it’s not like I know him. (His wife is awesome, though).

Anyhow. Raph Koster did a study on this and reported his findings. There are three cut-off points.

Three months: The average time a player will spend on a game, any game. Once the new shine and sparkle has worn off, many move on to the next new thing.

Eight months: Those who were severely and firmly hooked have now done it all. They start to look for expansions, new things – and end up wandering off to elsewhere in pursuit of those things.

Forever: And finally, there is a core group of players who have found a home. Nothing short of pulling the plug on the game will get these guys to move on.

@Tez Keys did not invent the wheel re: portal, stargate, fanfiction, whatever term you prefer games. It’s a trope because it works: It gives you a lot of creative freedom.

I wouldn’t say that changes to the homebase region or overall story are entirely out of the question. As staff, we do quietly nudge things here and there. But on the whole, players seem very happy with having the peace and quiet (read: not being looked over the shoulder) to create their own storylines, some of which have consequences that can be felt back home too, through how the characters are affected.

There will likely come a time when the status quo begins to feel well tested and tried and maybe a little old. When that happens, we’ll shake the dice bag and pull some rugs out under people. Change is good, at the pace that works.

@Faraday said in Metaplot: What and How:

Can’t speak to LB’s game, but that’s how it was on BSGU. Folks could run missions of their own whenever they wanted. (Also other plots connected to the war, though folks rarely did so.) But they couldn’t affect the overall trajectory of the war without staff approval and coordination. This was spelled out in the game policies, so if that was a deal-breaker for someone, they could decide that before playing.

This. It’s on the landing page of Keys’ website. If not being able to ‘solve’ the metaplot is a deal-breaker, there’s no point in wasting your time with the rest.

@Warma-Sheen said in Metaplot: What and How:

If the metaplot can’t be affected by the players in any meaningful way (or at least work towards being able to affect it), that’s not a metaplot (usually). Its just a setting.

I think that part of this discussion is what exactly constitutes a setting and a metaplot respectively. For us, in the design phase, setting was the where and metaplot was the what. Those are obviously not the only options in design so I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong.