NotSanni

@Shygaming said:

@somasatori said:

@Shygaming said:
Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.

Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.

I get what you’re saying. However, given that there are bad actors who have attempted to masquerade as other people in this hobby for years, and who will often use the same language about privacy to justify said masquerade, I think one is liable to be a bit suspicious, no? Fool me once and all that.

I do not care. I am rapidly beginning to understand why Tyr barely spoke to anyone.

Nobody has asked me anything about the game. It feels like people are far more interested in the possibility that there is some scandal to uncover or in repeatedly telling me they disagree with a design decision than they are in Paroxysm itself. Nobody seems particularly curious about the systems, the setting, the direction, or what I am actually trying to build. The only things generating sustained interest seem to be who I might have been on some other game years ago and whether there is some design decision people disagree with strongly enough that we can spend another three pages telling me they disagree with it after I have already acknowledged that they do.

The code is open source partly because I sincerely hope somebody eventually forks it into the hugbox version of the game. Then they can have that and I can keep making the game I actually want to make without having this same argument until the heat death of the universe.

That is why I am finding this whole conversation increasingly difficult to care about. If people want to talk about Paroxysm, I am happy to talk about Paroxysm. If the real attraction here is trying to unmask me, reconstruct some ancient hobby drama, or repeatedly relitigate design decisions because my answer did not change after the first three times, I genuinely have nothing useful to contribute to that.

I’m going to take a break before this thread gets split into a fourth thread.

You’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t care much for what people think or believe with regards to design when you’re convinced you’re in the right (which is a flaw you share with Tyr).

Maybe if you did care, people would assume you’re making a good faith attempting at building a good, interesting, cool RP space instead of assuming you’re making a weird PvP S.A. game.

Instead, you’re just being incredibly shady, and when confronted with the criticism of “this is just Haven, Again”, what you did was use an LLM to brute force remove every direct mention of Haven, without actually changing much of the real content of the game outside of like… Getting rid of the Order, changing the Temple to the Scum, and changing The Hand to Cortex or whatever.

I know because I made a character to check things out, and when you said you’d removed the references to Haven, I went to check things out again. So it was just a somehow more generic game than Haven already kind of was.

Except now you can kill and maim people without Sanctuary stopping them (which basically makes the fact that Sanctuary nullifies S.A. a moot point, because people can now just threaten to do bodily harm to someone who doesn’t say they agree to sleep with them - which is STILL r*pe, so you’re being pretty disingenuous and evasive when you suggest Sanctuary protects people from that).

Maybe if you cared, you’d be making a cool thing instead of getting upset that people are saying the project doesn’t seem very good, or cool, or interesting, or for their tastes.

You can’t even get the people in the Armageddon shadow boards or whatever they call it these days interested (your admitted target audience), because at least those losers realise “hey, hard coding and allowing non-consensual S.A. stuff is a bad idea for the community and will make things bad”.

@Pavel said:

@Pyrephox said:

Is it that surprising?

I suppose not. There’s an old adage about drawing the ‘acceptable/not acceptable’ line directly underneath wherever we’re currently standing. I can tolerate or understand a whole bunch of adult-based weirdness in RP around me while child characters doing the same repulses me to the point of incomprehension.

That said, though, a lot of times there are rumours of hinky shit happening, so it’s a little different to “I was fully aware of what was going on.”

There’s an adage that I really like, that took a long time for me to really take to heart outside of literally TTRPGs, which is

“No D&D is better than Bad D&D”

And this is probably a fair amount to do with why people kept around Haven as long as they had. People love D&D. Or lots of people say they do, except for Thing X, or Thing Y, or Person A, but they can’t stop playing because of This Reason or because There’s Nothing Else, and then they just get stuck in the same cycle over and over again, and refuse to try branching out for whatever reason.

I dipped out several years ago because I came to the realization that it both was just a poorly run community creating harm on the internet and it just wasn’t fun, and that I shouldn’t spend my time participating in either of those things frankly.

But, Haven just also typically caters to a pretty specific, niche subset of the MUD community.

And I expect for many people, they’re able to compartmentalize because aspects of the game scratch very specific itches. If you want a “crunchier” game that feels like it has some amount of tactics behind it, Haven (during the time I played) was good for that. There’s lots of Number Go Up chasing in the Haven codebase during the times I played. You can go out and mindlessly kill supernatural boogens in the woods between RPing and Events, there’s PvP elements, there’s a Money stat that gives you money.

Just lots of ways to enact any number of power fantasies.

People (myself included, in my earlier time there) also just spent (and probably still spend) a whole bunch of time complaining about the game, and the creator, and some of the complaints are super valid, and others are people being Terminally Online And In Their Feelings, but almost all of these people continued to play despite all of the badness, because in the MUD side of the MU community, there just aren’t many modern, urban fantasy (likes to brand itself as horror, but grimdark urban fantasy would be more appropriate IMO) MUDs that have what many people on that side of the fence want.

And what that seems to be (based on my experiences Post-Haven, trying to find games that do have more mechanical crunch to them, and checking out other communities within the RP Enforced and RPI side of MUDs) is they want an MMO or Skyrim Style experience where they can also just write long emotes (or just ignore vast chunks of the MMO side of things to do Their Own Thing).

@Tez said:

I don’t expect shy to come back and engage with the thread. I feel like they’ve stated their position and dipped.

But what I’m not clear on is if people will actually know what they are potentially signing up for when they join the game.

Not knowing is wild to me. I don’t think you can responsibly engage with SA, *isms, etc. as content in RP without people fully knowing what they are signing up for and consenting to engage in it. That is so foundational to how I engage with games. Even in PVP games. Even in Limited Consent games. Even in Non Consent games. You know what you are signing up for.

I don’t think you can responsibly RP about these things without that.

I’m pretty sure you get some kind of warning about how bad things might happen to your character when you create a character, but I don’t recall how explicitly it’s stated.

My gut instinct (mostly because Shy posted this to an Armageddon forum, and just refused to answer the question someone posed about if there’s S.A. in the game) is that it’s probably not explicitly written out that your PC might get assaulted like that, and that you have to make the connection based on a general “this is a non-consent game” policy and the coded capability to do the thing.

@Shygaming said:

This is probably where I’m going to bow out because, yeah, you’re right about the fundamental disagreement.

What I’m going for isn’t really collaborative storytelling in the sense you’re describing. I don’t want every major outcome negotiated between the players involved. I want a game where the world, the mechanics and other characters can impose outcomes on you that you didn’t choose.

That is not going to be for everyone. I completely accept that.

I think collaborative RP where everyone is making sure everyone else gets the kind of story they want can be lovely. It just isn’t the experience I’m trying to build.

What you want is PvP. You can just say that.

@Pavel said:

So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.

technically still exists as the developer constantly reiterates the game, with two spiritual successors currently (duskholm i think, and then this paroxysm one now) done by people who aren’t the OG dev

@Yam said:

Guys what the HELL happened on this haven game and is this why you’re all vaguely fucked up regarding RP? I’m told there was a huge documented thread about this elsewhere but now it’s lost to the ether forever.

It was just a PvP mud (which the owner would tend to call a “collaborative storytelling MUD, with horror themes”), with lots of methods by which to make gameplay less fun for other people and little to no actual community management or moderation, and so it attracted a good deal of people who tended to want to win REALLY badly, and would go from 0 to 60 with regards to escalating conflict. Or people who really wanted to do Sexy/Romance RP and wouldn’t take it well if you weren’t super receptive to that.

That plus lots of just weird systems that probably should have been red flags to me at the time, but we live and we learn (some of us, at any rate).

@howyadoin said:

Was Haven the game that forced you to specify tit size and had code-timed menstruation?

Yes it was, and I imagine it still is, wrt to Haven.

I can’t speak to the breast size thing because I made a guy to take a peek, but the latter half does still apply to the Legally Distinct From Have game.

At a glance, this does just mostly look like Haven, with someone starting to file off the serial numbers. The game still references Haven multiple times, there’s still the frankly kind of weird sex code (I didn’t check to see if there was still hard coded S.A., but I can only assume).

I think calling it “early alpha” is a bit of a misnomer, and if this intends to be in any way, shape, or form different from the game who’s engine you’re using, you should probably take more care to make more changes to differentiate it before saying it’s “online and playable”, given the history and reputation that precedes Haven.

@Pavel said:

@Nelly said:

Another difficult topic are the characters who have quippy one-liners or otherwise unserious comments in serious scenes.

It would be one thing if it were occasional, but it’s very much the MUing equivalent of having something scan as the wrong price at the check-out line and saying “Must be free!” Like, it’s great for you in that moment but that’s just one moment in five hundred thousand that cashier has had to deal with.

I partially blame the MCU, though I can’t really say whether their quip-per-scene quota is an originator or a symptom.

I blame Joss Whedon specifically.

@Kestrel said:

I’m super unconvinced by the term CvC, tbh. Just seems like a company marketing themselves as “ethical capitalism”, I’m not sure the verbal rebrand makes any kind of difference.

if you’re competing against a player, it’s no longer a cooperative game