@Nobody-0 Receipt or no receipt, showing up on a game just to fuck with a place is not cool. If someone has an issue with a game, then stay far far away. Logging onto a game maliciously is a cancer to the community.
People taking their grievances to extremes is never okay.
@Polk said in Ruiz Thread:
she’s not in the past been afraid to take action.
Yes, she absolutely has. That’s an outright lie. And he knows that personally.
When @Polk pissed all over the game rules while she was away busy with heavy RL stuff and took advantage of her absence to abuse players he got a complete pass. She traded in her integrity on a silver platter for his help running the game when she couldn’t be there, because in comparison, a few players weren’t worth it to her to do the right thing.
She tried to offer solutions and undo the mess that he made, but the damage was done and @Polk got zero consequences.
So it depends on who you’re complaining about. If Addison is more useful to her game than you are, you will probably be shit out of luck.
Adjust your expectations about complaints there accordingly.
@GF said in Good things in Mushing:
Staff who take action when action is called for.
Especially when it benefits them to overlook at it.
Having a back bone should not be underestimated.
@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
- Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people.
Well, that’s just not true. He very much did unethical things as Director.
Sundance(sun) pages: There’s two elements to this. The first element is 1) Polk should absolutely not have disapproved you on his own initiative. He knew that the moment he did it, and he already apologized to me in page about it, before I sat down. I had him immediately re-approve you, since I’m the only one who can carry out OOC discipline here.
I won’t say she’s just flat out lying. Maybe she just forgot, but he was definitely unethical as Director. Maybe she didn’t consider that situation because, in her view, she fixed it? (She didn’t actually fix it, she just reversed his decision, which still left a host of problems. Not the same thing as fixing it.)
But…
If she did just forget, I gotta tell ya, it sucks to have been so severely fucked over by Polk in the exact same temper tantrum, table flipping way and then forgotten about by Sundance like you never existed and didn’t spend months of your life researching, writing, and on a few occasions driving through LA in order to desc half of her ginormous, unnecessarily large grid to give her 200+ grid spaces and builds so that as many spaces and builds as possible were as accurate to the actual RL locations as they could be, all the way down to neighborhood blocks that had no notable features except for how much graffiti and trash were visible or how many and what types of cars were parked on the street. Granted, I did all of that willing and no one asked me to do the extras, but it is too much to expect that you and the reason you left the game not be forgotten about? Apparently, that might be.
So… hopefully it wasn’t the latter. That would blow.
Every neighborhood in a city to desc the grid, down to Google street view in VR. Done most recently for LA, but previously Chicago, and Manhattan.
Definitely don’t take the player option of of RPS, otherwise there’s no reason to use RPS. That would turn people away.
My biggest issue with character progression is that the only way most characters progress on a game is through xp and stats.
XP and stats should not be the only way a character progresses. There should be other achievables like rank or resources or territory or a combination of all of them that allows a character to progress without simply racking up xp and spending it.
If people had more objectives to achieve besides MOAR XP, then a game wouldn’t need to give out so much xp per week to keep people interested and uber stats become much less of a problem.
But handing out scads of xp is the easy, traditional solution. It takes very little monitoring and is often completely automated. So that’s what most games do.
Not saying that is bad or wrong, just that it really puts the burden of character progression on xp if that’s all the game has.
@junipersky said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:
I feel like one of her most defining traits is the way she talks about her OOC life. She could very legit have all the issues she talks about, but the way she phrases it is very much in a way that digs for sympathy and pity from others. She emphasizes her disabilities as reasons why people, especially those in authority, are out to get her.
I haven’t had much contact with her directly, but her constant RL overshares are one of the most awkward and uncomfortable and unavoidable things about being in the same play space as her.
Before I respond, just remember that this is a Star Wars game with kaiju that eats planets and the Death Star was being built to stop them, but the Rebels blew it up so now the whole galaxy is at risk of being nom nom nommed because of them. The top Jedi is an openly force-lightning wielding darksider (who leads with Luke Skywalker’s blessing) who also leads the New Republic’s military, even though they’re totally separate entities, who is prone to snap and yell at his subordinates for little reason because of the dark side and the brain pains he gets because the entirety of the Jedi Archives was placed inside his head before Order 66 - and everyone knows and is cool with all of it. No one leading things in this SW universe sees anything wrong with any of this. All perfectly fine.
SO. When you ask, ‘Why would they make X decision?’ Just know, that might not even rank of the list of jacked up decisions made at this place.
@Wizz said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:
Works great at a table, but does not translate at all to MU*s IMHO.
How it translates on this game is new players show up and get to that section of chargen and say ‘I don’t know anyone!’ and the staff says, ‘Well you can use my player bit as a connection’ and then all the players have all their connections to the staff’s PC bits who are at the center of everything and everything revolves around them.
@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:
That’s interesting, because I wondered how using NPCs would actually accomplish anything. Are staff going to run these NPCs regularly?
Nope. Not for other players, anyway. For other staff characters yes. Everyone else, you’ll probably never see them again. If you do, do you think staff there will remember your character’s connection to them? Good luck.
@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:
If not, what’s the difference between saying I trained with the one special NPC jedi master, or some other one I invented in my BG?
Absolutely nothing. Well… except that with established NPCs they can tell you how wrong you are about what you wrote and how they wouldn’t do X, Y, and Z and make you go back to change your background to how they view that NPC.
@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:
I feel like “bar rp” picks up a lot of smoke as a bad thing though.
Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?
“Bar RP” is a colloquialism that many people use in the community. It means boring, trite RP without purpose or consequence.
It isn’t meant to be literal. It doesn’t mean that all RP that takes place in a bar is bad. But many scenes where people reach out to random players for RP has taken place in bars, likely because that’s were players thought was the most likely place for their characters, who did not previously know each other, well or at all, to have met. That was usually followed by random small talk that neither party was actually interested in because one or both was hoping the other would bring something interesting to the table and that doesn’t happen. What follows is usually forced or painful or unfulfilling or some combination of all three until the scene finally ends.
That is “bar RP”. And that’s why the phrase has such a terrible reputation.
As many have pointed out, the location of a bar is not the problem. Neither is social RP. It is the content of the RP that is the issue, which some people can make happily interesting, even with characters who do not know each other, and others cannot.
@Warma-Sheen
Thisit won’t work today.
is
But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.
Is it “mealy-mouthed”? You seem to have a habit of leaving off the parts that are relevant to the point you’re trying to counter, as though the posts aren’t all above to be referenced.
Your obvious omission of it shows that even you know it was wrong.
But again, you can be insulting if you need to. That’s how these conversations go on this forum. I just don’t know why you do, instead of just having a conversation with an exchange of ideas with someone who might have different thoughts than you. But you do what you need to do.
I don’t have all the answers. I never claimed to. But I can see when 2 + 2 does not equal 5 and I don’t have a problem speaking when I see people trying to make that math work. If the answer was that simple, somebody else would have figured it out by now.
Rather than looking for a solution that actually has a chance in hell of working, if you want to take a 200 year old solution that takes 50-70 years and apply it to a modern problem that will be irreversible in no more than 10 years absolute max (as if it isn’t basically already there now) and ignore all the very obvious issues between the two so you can pat yourself on the back and get all the upvotes, go for it.
Problem solved. “You got it, dude.”
See you in 70 years when we will all most definitely be AI free of the problem that became ubiquitous 65 years prior.
You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills.
Possibly. But I also think you are overestimating how many jobs GenAI is currently affecting - the key word being currently. Those jobs still exist. Some are affected. But others are not. My mother is a voiceover narrator. She doesn’t make a living off of it but she does make side income. She hasn’t seen much drop off of work YET, because, based on the conversations she’s had with the people she works with, the companies that pay for voiceover narration don’t find that AI quality is sufficient to stop hiring real people. AI can’t get the right amount of emotional range and proper inflections when it needs to. But what AI has done is allow people/companies who were not paying for it before to add GenAI robotic voicerovers to their service or business model for free. But these were people who wouldn’t have paid for real voicever anyway. The worry is that in the future as AI improve, it will get better and be good enough to stop hiring real people. The companies have told her when she’s asked, that more than likely that will be the case. It just isn’t at that point yet.
I think there could/would/should be some kind of graph with a line representing the quality of “creative” work (some creatives produce a more quality product than others, they just do) and the ability of AI to replicate that creative work to a specific degree. And as AI gets better, the more it will eclipse people and the more people will be put out of work as companies cut payroll to make more profits. That’s what companies do.
And I’m not arguing that its not bad and its not wrong. AI was trained on the cesspool that is the internet. The good stuff and the bad and everything in between. But ignoring the realities of it won’t make it go away. Railing about how bad it is for people won’t make it go away. Moar defeatism, I know…
At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.
People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.
It has been said ad nauseam, but GenAI is tool. And the better you can use that tool, the better off you will be. But you can’t get better if you don’t practice with it. There is an art and a talent to using AI and some people don’t understand that. And in the current climate and the foreseeable future, being able to use AI skillfully is quickly becoming a survival skill in the job market. Early adapters will benefit.
Do I think that’s a solution to the problem? No, its just an adaptation to it. And a lackluster one at that. But that’s as much as I have right now.
@Trashcan It isn’t a misrepresentation. Its just a retelling. You’re saying the same thing I did, but with a different, antagonistic slant for no other reason than to be mean and nasty, presumably because I don’t agree with you.
You quoted the first part of what I wrote, then left out the rest.
@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:
In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
But if helps you to give a more detailed picture restating and supporting my points, then insult me anyway, you do you. That is definitely a pretty common response these days.
If your argument is that we should start the march against AI now so that in 70 years we might have a chance of winning the fight like we did during the Industrial Revolution, feel free. As I agreed, regulation is an option.
But the rest of my point remains that this isn’t a fight that will last 70 years and the same tactics won’t work because the circumstances are drastically different and the thing we’re trying to stop is moving much, much faster.
but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.
That’s a tricky phrase. I’m not sure the context you mean it in.
At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.
When has that ever happened before in any meaningful way?
and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.
The artist issue is one that I have an unpopular opinion about, at least on this forum, but that statement is definitely a problematic opinion.
It suggests that the only, or main, incentive for creating art is financial gain. But there are many other reasons that art is created. The trope of the starving artist is a trope for a reason. Many artists do art just for art’s sake, even if there is no money in it, which, in most cases, there is not. Art for art’s sake is the motto of MGM Studios, despite the mountains of cash they make in entertainment. If you’re only creating art for financial incentive, you’re not being displaced by AI, you’re just competing with it in a market that’s historically been brutal for artists. It just means that your art has to be subjectively better than what AI can produce - by any possible metric. You have a soul. AI doesn’t. You can truly create. AI can’t. These are all the arguments made, but at the end of the day, does that make your art more marketable than AI art? If the reason you do art it is financial, you better hope so.
Is it easier to do art when you’re getting paid for it? Sure. But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it. So I don’t do it. The world I live in sets the reality I have to operate within. And AI is now part of the world that we live in.
But on the flip side, there are plenty of venues where computers are better but haven’t taken over. Computers can play chess and beat grand masters, but they haven’t stopped chess tournaments. AI can outplay most people in competitive video games, but e-sports hasn’t crumbled.
Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people. When people value human work/creation/skill, there will be money to follow. If they don’t, there won’t be. There are tons of concern for artists put out of work by AI, but not much for the customer service reps that are being cut at a far higher rate. Hasbro’s Dungeon’s and Dragons tribulations are a battle ground for that right now. They first said they wouldn’t use AI art, then they got caught using AI art, then they pretty much abandoned their pledge to not use AI. There was a big ado and calls for boycotts. But do people still buy their product? Yes. Absolutely.
If people value art made by other people, they’ll find it and pay for it. If they don’t, no amount of regulation or gatekeeping will save it. AI doesn’t kill art. People choosing convenience, price, or novelty does. And because people are the worst, artists suffer.
And copyright law… well, that’s also a joke, like most laws. The punchline here is that the “law” is heavily favored to big corporations and companies with expensive legal teams that make it increasingly easy to steal from individuals who can’t afford to fight back in court. It definitely does not favor the majority of artists, most of whom are forced to sell the rights to their art to some soulless company or corporation “in perpetuity and throughout the universe” in order to make scraps of money from it.
The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.
I agree.
The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys. In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.
Governments are barely able to define what an LLM is, let alone agree on how to regulate it. Meanwhile, companies are training new models, with trillions of parameters, trained on questionable data sources, and putting them out before the public even understands the risks.
So yes, regulation is an option. But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track. They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen. In the absolute worst case scenario, they move their servers to another country with less scruples without missing more than a beat.
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.
It can be both.
I think it is both. Especially since AI continues to grow and evolve.
I find AI exceptionally helpful and useful. It has saved me time, effort, and energy and has allowed me to finish menial task faster (work and fun related) so that I have more free time to enjoy other things. and it has allowed other enjoyable things to be even more enjoyable than they were before. To me, AI has been amazing and exciting.
I laugh at the people who complain about AI’s faults and errors. It is like criticizing a toddler for making errors on the bar exam. AI is still in its infancy and will continue to grow better at everything, for good or ill. Just like a child.
Remember dial up? How is internet now? Remember Pong? How’s that compare to Balder’s Gate 3? Knock it and get your jokes in now while you can. It’s just going to get better at everything by orders of magnitude. (Meanwhile, companies are also improving quantum computing at an alarming rate. Don’t even consider if these two paths meet…)
That being said…
I also think that it will bring more harm than good the more it evolves.
I think this, not because of what AI can do or will do, but because of what people will do with it. I don’t think the problem is AI. As with most things, the problem is people.
We don’t need AI to solve world hunger. We could do that, easily, already if the right people wanted to. They just don’t. The same issues of what people will do with power will only worsen with AI, but that isn’t the fault of the technology.
People are the worst. Plain and simple.
You can argue about the legality of what AI does all day long, but the law is a joke. If anything, we’ve learned over the last decade that the law is whatever the people in power decide it is. Laundering cartel money is a crime. The punishment is paying a fine that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the profits made from it. OpenAI is being sued by god knows how many people. Even if they all win (they won’t), is the punishment fine gonna shut down OpenAI? Even if it did (it won’t), would that even put a dent in the AI community considering how many other AI companies are out there and how many continue to be formed every month/week/day?
Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people.
If AI can solve that problem, the world will be better off.
(And yes, I know that this is not a new conclusion. This is the plot of many a sci-fi movie. And for good reason. I’m just not sure that they got the hero/villain roles correct.)
@chorus Agreed. I hadn’t considered that there might still be places without the ability to jump to a hangout spot directly. Its 2025. 
@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:
I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.
Fully serious question. How do you really expect staff to build a limited number of places people want to go to when you have a constantly shifting player base who all want different things?
I think the grids are there because staff wants to put all possible options out there for people and people can pick for themselves and ignore the ones that don’t. In theory it seems easy enough for a player to pick the places they like and use them, and ignore anything they don’t want to use. If there are 5 places you want to use and 1000 that you don’t, the other 1000 are irrelevant anyway. Just ignored them.
But reading the thread I see people saying that it is a negative if a game has rooms they don’t want to use. I don’t understand that, personally.
@Wizz said in Numetal/Retromux:
a motorcycle that turns into a break-dancing robot, it was kind of amazing.
I agree. That is kind of amazing…
@Cygnus I understand. And I get it. I’ve actually been there myself, probably more times than I can remember. It just kind of sucks at the state of things.
@Pavel said in Liberation Drama!?:
@Cygnus said in Liberation Drama!?:
I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort
How can this be your conclusion after all of the things you just said?
This is just a repackaged request/plea/wish that Sundance come back at her previously level of engagement, done in a way as though she might do so if only she realized the effects that her absence as had.
As if she doesn’t know.
If she wanted to come back and do her thing and was able to, she would. She either can’t or won’t. It is what it is.