@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

I’m pretty hyped for this game. The physical game is pricey, but it seems like you get a bunch of stuff in the boxed set. Also worth mentioning there is still a PDF level you can pledge at, and $30 seems pretty reasonable if there’s as much game-content as I assume there is (especially since I’ve heard each of the 7 playbooks is pretty hefty).

This has reminded me to back it

@hellfrog said in AI In Poses:

@NotSanni ok but how are people in this hobby deluded into thinking anyone else will think LLM writing is good? The game in question is not a minecraft server, it’s a real MU with real MUers who have been writing for years.

Sometimes I wish I knew, other times I’m glad I don’t have intimate insight into the minds of folks who enjoy LLM generated content. I imagine the most truthful and accurate (and unfun) answer is something very sad about people’s overall mental states and the way their lives are going, especially in relation to the things they enjoy (most people I’ve met don’t spend time examining the media they consume, and tend to assume “If I like X, that must mean X = Objectively Good”, instead of embracing the idea that we can enjoy things that are shitty or mediocre, or that we should take time to think about what we consume).

Brennan Lee Mulligan said something in an interview, which I’ve come to appreciate (and see as fairly accurate) that I’ll paraphrase: “Most people don’t think. And when they do think, they’re probably not thinking about you”.

So they probably just aren’t even considering the people they’re engaging with - either (as muscle said) not considering them “real” enough to bother to care about, or just not thinking even a LITTLE BIT about the possibility that other people move through this world and that they should maybe self-examine the way they move through this world and around other people.

To finish off, I’ll paraphrase Douglas Adams however… “if we knew exactly why the LLM enjoyers had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

@Yam said in AI In Poses:

HOW ARE YOU NOT INSANELY EMBARRASSED ABOUT POSING VIA LLM, WRITING IS LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT OF RP WHAT IS GOING ON

they aren’t embarrassed bc (in my experience) the kind of people who would use an LLM to write their pose thinks LLMs “writing” is good, and they’re seeking out the quick hit of Good Brain Juice from feeling like they’ve accomplished something

@Roz said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

NGL, to me RPIs are just a subset of MUDs that are particularly RP-heavy/focused

Largely agreed. My experience with most RPI focused players is that many (not all, but a WHOLE bunch) essentially trend towards wanting what amounts to a simulation sandbox game where they can go grind things and progress between fun little RP sessions.

I think the hard-line division likely comes from some form of elitism (RPI-ers going “well mine is more SERIOUS”, and “normal MUDders” trending towards “RPIs are full of toxic drama”), coupled with the human desire to generally put things into distinct categories.

Because even across the spectrum of RPIs, they don’t all agree with what makes a game an RPI. Ask the people who only or mainly played Armageddon, and you’d get a wildly different answer to the people who played only or mainly Atonement, or whatever.

@Tez said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

Now, questions for us:

The largest sentiment gap is by preferred game style – MUD fans average 3.53 while MUSH fans average 2.85 (49.2% vs 19.5% happy) (Table 10, Figure 10).

Why so unhappy, fam?

I imagine it’s just easier to make people who want to play an MMO happier than it is to make people who are primarily after narrative/story happen, lol. No hate on either genre or game style one way or the other, but I suspect that’s a big part of it.

I fell off of MUs a couple of years ago. I keep up on this forum to see if anything catches my attention (and for the hot goss when I need a mental palette cleanser at work lol). I’ll occasionally give something a try for a few days, but so far, nothing much has managed to keep my attention long enough for my limited energy and time to go towards it.

@ham said in When is the last time you played?:

Something could be the coolest, best, most interesting theme in the world, but if someone doesn’t engage with it, they’re going to be disappointed. I’ve had some of the most fun on games with themes that aren’t my favorite at all.

We’ve all seen the “waves” come and go, and honestly it comes down to the fact that a large amount of folks don’t take initiative to engage beyond “oh hey this is new and everyone’s here.” The amount of fun we have on these games is really pretty largely up to us, and it doesn’t require newness or hotness. It requires effort.

Of course if things don’t grab us, there’s no reason to force it, but this take has always been weird to me. Even in the “heyday” of MUSHes, you had to engage. Maybe we had more time or more energy or whatever the case may be (I certainly understand that for my own self), but the way to hook in has always remained the same.

Bolded for emphasis, but I think this is probably largely the problem, and it’s something I’ve seen in RPE and RPI MUDs, as well as Tabletop RPGS - the expectation that the vast minority (staff, creative players, GMs/DMs, etc.) will exist as load-bearing structures for the entire cognitive workload that goes into creating cool stories.

Which I understand.

Folks (today and historically, in my experience) want to consume content, but they don’t necessarily want to create it (or they don’t think they can). Players won’t play an RPI if it’s “dead” (ie, doesn’t have more than 10 people on during peak hours) or unless there’s "Metaplot: (ie, Staff creating plot and events) to go alongside their MMO grinding. Players in TTRPGs frequently won’t try anything but the standard “Spoonfeed Me A Story” games like D&D, unless you drag them kicking and screaming into a more collaborative game.

I don’t really know of a way to accommodate for that besides pushing for cultural change. I’ve seen people mention incentivizing this behavior, and that might work. But I also think people will tend to see it as “unfair” that someone “gets an edge” over them for creating plots, or will see it as a form of gatekeeping. Which is fine, it just means you have to be willing to tell the people who complain about that “hey you are welcome to play here, but we aren’t changing this, so you probably should either learn to adjust to this, or find a new game”.

I never had any real trouble finding fun on games, because I make my own. It’s moreso that very little draws my attention in anymore, or feels worth the time investment to get involved with, in an increasingly stressful and exhausting to navigate world. So I’d rather just do a little one shot for my friends, or work on a campaign, or something.

@Wikibara said in Numetal/Retromux:

@MisterBoring
The message came in from Discord. I don’t know to what extent, if at all, they’re connected to the game. The message’s content, beyond being pretty unpleasant, wasn’t specific enough. I just blocked and moved on with my day. I’ve no plans to dox anyone involved, though - that’s against house policy.

you clearly didn’t move on with your day. you brought up the message in your complaint post here. no one here is establishing or inventing a link between the admin message and bigoted junk, besides you in your original post by referencing them together.

that’s weird.

@Roadspike said in Non-toxic PvP:

@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:

That was literally the statement that kicked off this entire tangent. A proposed zero-tolerance policy towards pacifist characters in high-conflict factions.

Looking back to @Jumpscare’s original post about zero tolerance for this type of player, I want to know that they are describing an archetype that they’re calling “the pacifist,” not players playing pacifist characters at all.

Here’s the actual description.

@Jumpscare said in Non-toxic PvP:

The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict. Then, when they get backed into a position where they’re called upon to resolve a conflict by fighting it out, they’ll agree to the fight but refuse to fight back, letting the opposing side win, in order to give the other players the most unsatisfying resolution possible.

@Juniper then clarified with:

Pacifists don’t just sit out, they tend to belittle everyone participating and take a revisionist approach to the faction’s raison d’être.

Again, referencing the character archetype, not anyone who wanted to play a character with pacifist beliefs.

@Kestrel kept up with the idea that this was about a character archetype who uses their character’s pacifism as a bludgeon to wrongfun people playing characters who fit with the purpose/vibe of the faction.

I admit that I lost the thread a little bit with the specific example mentioned later, since it refers to some situations and mechanics specific to a game that I don’t play, but I don’t believe that there was ever an intention to ban people from playing pacifist characters, just characters who fit the archetype of a character who is (irony intended) a militant pacifist who uses their beliefs to demean and socially bludgeon characters who engage in violent IC actions within the designed theme and setting of the game.

People seem to be largely ignoring the brunt of the argument (that is, "there is a specific brand of OOC troll that weaponizes pacifism in a game designed and built around conflict and violence), so that they can instead fixate on an argument that isn’t being made by anyone as far as I can tell (that “pacifist PCs shouldn’t be allowed in PvP games”).

Deeply frustrating, and frankly doesn’t seem like the folks doing this are arguing in good faith, but are instead letting their own anti-PVP biases or whatever get in the way of an actual discussion. Goalposts, at no point, have been moved. Multiple people have gone to great lengths to point out they’re talking about broad archetypes, and then citing specific incidents.

@Juniper said in Non-toxic PvP:

You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.

So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.

As I often say whenever the topic of “how do we do character conflict good and fun?” comes up within the MU discussions, the answer is literally this. Community management.

That’s not a skillset that every (maybe even most?) folks who want to run a MU have or want to develop, which is understandable. But willingness to have to be “the bad guy” and take a rep hit, and deal with reports, and investigate claims, and all that sort of thing.

IMO player-driven conflict as a focal point to a game doesn’t really ease the cognitive burden on the staff running the game. It just shifts it from “THE METAPLOT” to “watching out for jerkwards”, which inevitably leads people to complain about the lack of Metaplot anyways.

Not even just slice-of-lifers who want to stake up a part of the niche game that clearly isn’t for them. But tryhards that focus entirely on winning conflicts over creating cool stories. “But that’s what my character would dooooo” types who justify crummy behavior via “IC logic”. Escalators that go from 0 to 100 (both in reacting to conflict, and in initiating conflict).

There’s many pain points that arise when it comes to running a game w/ PvP (tho I prefer Jumpscare’s rebranding of it to CvC personally) as the main drive, and after years in this hobby I just don’t know that I believe it’s worth all of the effort, given the variety of dillweeds and trashbag people you have to sift through to get The Cool People Who Just Want A Lil Bit of Spice In Their RP to stick around.

@Jumpscare said in Tales of Zalanthas:

What surprises me is that they say they use AI in their code development process, and their code is over 120,000 lines. As a direct comparison, the code for Silent Heaven is only 44,625 lines, including comments. Both projects use Evennia. Something feels off, like their AI character that has a hand coming out of its leg as it rides a hotdog that has a second skin.

I’m not calling them out or anything. It just doesn’t line up with my experience.

I don’t have any coding experience, but they’re trying to recreate a diku derivative, simulation (and combat specifically) heavy game, so that may have something to do with it. It’s likely going to be a pretty crunchy game, as RP games go, with a focus on combat and mechanical capabilities vs storytelling (no matter what they say). Probably not enough to explain this exact margin, but it can probably explain a bit of it.

I never played Armageddon, I was always put off by the community and the tagline talking about murder and betrayal (and I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read a single story about the game that’s ever made me go “wow I want to play this”, even as a person who does like a crunchy, lots-of-levers-to-pull sort of game at times). But I read over their weird not-official forum sometimes, and the community doesn’t seem great. So I’m assuming that even if the code is well done and good (which doesn’t seem likely, if the gap between a pretty technically slick game like Silent Heaven and their unfinished game is so wide), the game will probably either eat itself alive, or just devolve into desert PVP, or chud finding ways to make people’s lives more difficult without technically breaking any rules.