I haven’t really had a stake in all of this, and mostly I’ve been following along for the hot goss, but this is the thing that’s so wild to me. This specific behavior of “you aren’t allowed to call Ghost a bully, but Ghost can call you a bully” truly boggles the mind.

In any case, if people just stop posting about this on MSB, it’ll probably slowly die off. Ghost and Derp will just quietly seethe and read this forum until someone tries to spark some kind of discussion they think is really, actually quite clever, or until Ghost can’t stand screaming into the void by themselves and rehashes this with some disingenuous post about toxicity or positivity.

@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:

So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.

no

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

@Pax

Lame is not a slur when it is used to describe a thing, only when it is used to describe a person.

It’s a synonym for disappointing, weak or unsatisfying that has been used for most of human history dating back to the early Germanic tribes that first used it to describe an animal with a non-functional of overly weak leg. You would put down your horse because it had a lame leg and couldn’t plow a field anymore.

It’s only considered a slur if you say a person is lame because you are advocating for them to be killed.

I’m very clearly not advocating for the murder of the people who run boring games.

Absolutely wild and inappropriate when someone says “please don’t use a slur” to go on a weird tirade.

All the red flags (no surprise, given your “GAMES ARE DYING BC THEY DON’T PLAY THE WAY I WANT THEM TO” attitude tho).

@icanbeyourmuse said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’ve already said my thoughts on the others. Except ghost. He just gives me the vibe he likes creating drama while pretending he isn’t out to do just that.

That’s almost certainly what he’s doing. He shows up on r/mud to do the same thing once in a while. He’s a dillweed.

I think that there’s a place for games that have conflict between the PCs, but there’s a few things to be mindful of.

Rephrasing PvP as “CvC” and allowing for CvC - Character vs Character - conflict while not tolerating PvP (player vs player) content is a good first step (which is something that Silent Heaven does, to my understanding). But with that, you also need to make sure that the community is well maintained and managed - games with hard coded conflict/competition (especially in the RPI space) tend to draw a toxic crowd, and making sure to get ahead of that with a cultivated community goes a long way towards making sure CvC doesn’t become PvP.

Something else to be mindful of is a “talk shit, get hit” kind of system of CvC can exacerbate problems, as well. Typically, troublemakers do what they do for attention, whether it’s positive or negative attention, so when someone rolls up to a space that has codified conflict, it’s very easy to generate attention by just acting out. This tends to get solved in the “community cultivation” step of things, but it’s one of the things that can crop up with having open conflict between PCs.

The common thread I see with people who support and use LLMs casually makes a whole lot of sense - they consistently aren’t willing to put in the work.

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up

This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.

lmao i can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want you listen to you.

@Yam said in AI PBs:

I’m confused. Is genAI a fun, harmless tool to be more efficient at creating art, or is it the catalyst for the race to the bottom, a “painful and violent” future for humanity? I feel like the original argument deviated a bit.

Because it has. Red rocket is just gish galloping and moving goalposts. Very little reason to engage them seriously, as they don’t seem interested in anything besides bad faith contrarianism (see: their other posts). Walls of weird, miserable nonsense.

If you don’t feel comfortable or safe living in the US and you’re lucky enough to have a parent (or possibly grandparent) that migrated here from another country - look up their country of origin, and see if they have Citizenship By Descent Laws. I was born in the US, but because my mom was born in Germany (and was a German citizen when I was born), I was able to get a German passport.

Obviously this won’t help EVERYONE out - but for the folks that are unaware that it is an option to them, it might be useful.

@Cobalt said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I just can’t even…

I’m more MUSH adjacent than a MUSH player. I mostly like to just be kept apprised of problematic actors that might wander into adjacent places (MUDs, MOOs, etc.), so I don’t really have a lot of stake in any of this. I followed over to BMD because I see value in those aforementioned things, and keeping my finger on the pulse, and didn’t really like the writing on the wall on MSB.

But from a pretty unbiased place (aside from being biased against the draconian nonsense that went down, but whatevs), what it looks like happened is Macha got mad that she got called out, and decided to stir up trouble on the other board (just like she stirred up all the drama over on MSB) to try to obfuscate the situation and discredit you.

Maybe that isn’t what happened, and maybe there IS something else going on, but I’m of the opinion that: if that’s true, it will eventually be outed, because to me it’s MUCH more plausible that a problematic player is obfuscating things than a game dev is obfuscating things to the degree that they would shut down their entire game (and that’s a WHOLE lot of tracks to cover, compared to one problematic player trying to flip the narrative).

Hence all of the mental gymnastics they’re going through to try to justify that major decision.

@Pavel said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

I think we’re all coming at this with a more ‘traditional’ MUSH mindset, when this seems (at least to me) more of a role-play-intensive MUD kind of environ, at least as it’s presented. So our cultural mores and expectations might be off.

My first impressions (having gone through Char-Gen/Tutorial, both of which are very good and like Jumpscare said probably very good indicators as to whether or not Silent Heaven will be a good fit for someone) is that it sits somewhere between RPI and MUSH (maybe more of a MOO, idk, all of the labels get a bit weird and sometimes I think the MU community relies on them too heavily).

It’s live, real time RP, with some crunch, but progression isn’t gated behind repetitive skill-based activities the way it generally would be in the RPIs and RP-enforced MUDs I’ve played in the past. I think the front page of the website says “RPI-Lite” and I think that’s a good way to put it.

My gut feel from wandering the grid a bit and reading helpfiles/interacting with the code a bit is that the systems Jumpscare has in place do a great job of telegraphing the theme and setting of the game.

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:

dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there

I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.

nah i found the “zine” they’re publishing, including the zine’s social media presence on the fediverse (and one of the two main contributors to the zine’s accounts/handles).

there’s a reason they weren’t loud and proud with the fact that they publish IDDQD Magazine and instead did a soft sell (probably trying to find likeminded people here to DM them to grift for money).

@Tributary said in City of Glass - Discussion:

@Apos said in City of Glass - Discussion:

I’m feeling a little slighted, tbh.
I’m still pretty put off by this whole thing tonight.

I… had to check again to see what I’d posted because for a moment I thought you were actually quoting him.

You may recall that I put in my original post that an old mu friend of mine (from Ithir) messaged me on Discord saying that her boyfriend had been banned from CoG and that she was puzzled because none of the behavior he attributed to me was part of her experience with me (like 5 years ago!).

Here’s what he told me:

Shamash — Today at 18:10
fucking gross
I actually feel, like, vaguely violated.
This is new.

Shamash — Today at 18:13
I told a player on that game I didn’t want our PCs to continue seeing one another because said PC was also seeing other men. I was not rude. I didn’t slut-shame. I literally just said “I wish you the best, but it’s not my vibe, I’m genuinely sorry if it upsets you.”
I got banned for “bad vibes”.
I was punished, by what I must now assume is a staff alt, for telling them no to a relationship

Shamash — Today at 18:15
I could get a ban for bad behavior. But damn, this is just gross

Shamash — Today at 20:00
It’s just so angering. The idea I was punished for not giving someone what they want.
Like they were entitled to me pursuing them IC.
ugh. Hour later and it’s still rubbing me wrong. Like grease on my skin.

(Timestamps hers. Also, girl, find another man. This one is a lying manipulative sack of shit.)

someone using the name Shamash (shamash4264) got banned from the r/mud discord for being a dick within like a week or less of joining (he was also a raging, callous fascist) - dunno if it’s the same one, but the name struck me as memorable!

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?

dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there

@shit-piss-love said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

This sounds like HellMOO.

Given how much of the content that could be found in HellMOO is just straight up barred from Silent Heaven, this is a pretty egregious and unnecessary exaggeration that doesn’t serve to do anything but stir up bad feelings and hate. Organ harvesting is a thing that can happen I guess, but that’s about it.

That being said, I think that it’d probably be fine if the “30 minute disconnect protection” that exists was just extended to be “if your client disconnects without quitting for any reason, you auto-pause”. If people start to “abuse it” (disconnect instead of using quit to avoid the Bad Stuff in town), I think that’s probably fine. I think there’s some (valid) concerns that people might use that to avoid consequences (going to mouth off at the Big Spooky Bad Guy and then DCing when they get got), but I also think that can come down to a mixture of bringing that to Staff attention when it happens, and then just choosing to avoid RPing with people who do that kind of thing.

@MisterBoring said in Song of Avaria:

I don’t play Arx, but I’ve read enough of the Arx wiki to ask…

How is this scratching the Arx itch? The wiki reads like the entire game is about a bunch of people stuck on a ship hoping to find a new land that may never come.

My understanding is that the ship setting is just for alpha testing, and that the intention is to move things to a city-proper when things are better sorted.

RE: the overarching talk of RPI vs MUSH - I have limited experience with MUSHes, but from what I’ve seen of Avaria (from playing around in the landing zone for new PCs) is that it’s probably closer to an RPI than a MUSH in terms of the game itself, with more concrete and codified systems. But the focus does seem to be more on storytelling, compared to most of my RPI experiences in the past (which largely have been PvP games masquerading as storytelling games).

One last post before I go back to lurking quietly and sometimes upvoting people.

The Angels v Demons thing sounds like the most fun to me. I think a lot of the problematic issues (re: harmful content) can probably be solved with a sufficient staff-size, an up-front warning about what kinds of content will be unacceptable, and no hesitation to issue bans to anyone introducing that content for any reason (if it’s a weird gray area situation, issue a temporary ban, and if it happens again permaban).

I’d also try to, OOCly, frame the Angels/Demons as being more religiously-agnostic. If people WANT to play Biblical Angels and Demons (whatever that means to them), then that should be okay. But the prior post about having the “Upper Management” (on both ends of the spectrum) be more mysterious and BEYOND MORTAL KENNING would be the ideal to me.

@Gashlycrumb said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I wonder if anyone still cares about The Magicians.

I think about The Magicians as a setting for a TTRPG quite a bit - but I also think that the most people who say they want a setting like the Magicians really just mean they want a slice-of-life urban fantasy game. There’s nothing wrong with this, it just isn’t really what the Magicians is about at the end of the day, and I tend to think that most of the most important themes just don’t translate very well to what most people want out of an RP game.

I also think that there probably needs to be room for (if not a focus on) interpersonal conflicts within the characters of the player-base, which requires both a very mature/responsible p-base and a well curated and moderated community with very little tolerance for people that are taking advantage of the social-conflict heavy nature of the setting. Which is probably why…

@bear_necessities said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

I do but it has made for an awful MUSH every time

The MU attempts have largely been unsuccessful. People, it turns out, don’t tend to want to play in an ironic, “magic actually can’t fix your problems you have to deal with your shit” game that’s high in drama and social conflict. And many of of the people that do end up kind of sucking (or being willing to put up with people who suck, because they have limited options for this particular scope of RP).

@Perfect-Paz said in What happened, man?:

Yo, so I decided to dodge your ban for fun. Turns out, my thread is the only that’s been posted in in just over a week. Before that? Three weeks ago. Even on other boards of this forum, like Rough and Rowdy, you have one thread that’s been posted in recently, and the rest are literally three weeks old at a minimum since being touched. The last time Game Ads got touched was literally months ago.

Your forum is dead, and the only posts it gets are desperate, cockamamie attempts to discredit my (correct) view that you tried to take a hobby and hollow it out, but in reality you ceded it to the people you hate most without realizing it. Oh no, you didn’t like MAP13 from 30yrs ago? LOL!

I’ve been banned for days and you can’t help but cope, seethe, and dilate about how your ilk has been gatekept from everything worthwhile, and pointing it out does brighten my day a little bit considering how fundamentally malignant you lot have proven yourselves to be over the last 15yrs.

lol chill out snowflake

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

@NotSanni
I’m not saying that games are dying because they aren’t being run the way I want them to be played. 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.

Every year your player bases shrinks because people don’t find the games engaging and every year you double down on doing the same things that don’t work.

How many times are you going to make the same mistakes? Creating a new game with a different setting that is basically the same thing as the last game that collapsed with a slightly different coat of paint on it is never going to work in the long run.

You need to do something that works and the only thing with a proven track record of working is letting people play what they want to play. It’s probably too late now anyway. Even if you did stop trying to shoehorn everyone into the same bland box I doubt you will be able to entice enough players to try the text only format.

The whiny bitches won. They got what they wanted. The games are exactly the way they wanted them - and that’s why no one is playing them any more.

What a deeply unpleasant way you choose to navigate through life. I can’t imagine going onto a forum, and then having the audacity to throw a tantrum because “The whiny bitches won”.