|
On the other hand sometimes a system or way of doing things really is just archaic and preserved for the sake of "well it's always been that way" and change would be a positive thing. UL's application is a prime example of this, and staff has been vehemently opposed and incredibly rude at any suggestion that it actually keeps new players out of the game as opposed to their weird delusion that there are legions of trolls beating at the gates that the application somehow keeps at bay. Reene fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Jul 8, 2014 |
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 05:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:08 |
|
|
I looked at that application form and it's just... Offputting, and also trivially easy to just go hit up a name generator for a new "real name" and get a new email from somewhere and there you go, it's not doing the job of keeping out previously banned users or whatever! They're using the honor system to keep out people they expect to break their rules. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 05:24
|
|
|
I refuse to play games I need to fill out an application for. The MUD is auditioning for me to spend my time on it, not the other way around.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 05:41
|
|
|
If it's not too much trouble if you could actually send emails to cs@unwritten.net to that effect that'd be awesome. I got dismissed really snarkily on the boards by staff with a remark about "invisible throngs trying to join the game" so if they actually start getting emails from prospective players they might be able to see just how many people they're turning away.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 06:04
|
|
|
As a goon, there is nothing I love more than having an opinion and then telling it to people.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 06:59
|
|
|
I'm tapping into your built-in desires to bitch at someone about elfgames. 
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 07:02
|
|
|
FordPRefectLL posted:I refuse to play games I need to fill out an application for. The MUD is auditioning for me to spend my time on it, not the other way around. I don't know how this is much different than paying  to post on an internet forum. Bullshit or not, it's a way to help keep the community somewhat under control (or at least to ostensibly help provide some in-universe quality control). For the few MUDs/MUSHes/whatever I've played that require application, it's seemed to work pretty well for them, and the wait times were never ridiculous. I submitted a character application to one on Saturday morning and got auth'd like 6 hours later.But it's not everyone's cup of tea.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 07:08
|
|
|
Bullshit. You get 1-2 troll or insincere players every couple of years. It's the sort of thing that, when it happens, becomes an anecdote for the ages, not a barbarian horde raging at the gates.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 07:13
|
|
|
There are ways to segregate new players from the population gracefully and allow them to start getting going and learning the game without requiring a bullshit application that asks for your real name and location and poo poo. I mean I love UL sometimes it's just a couple of things that stick in my teeth and make it frustrating and the sheer chore involved of getting new players started is one of them.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 07:23
|
|
|
I'm active on a few more roleplaying-driven MUDs and used to be a fairly big presence on HellMOO. I generally find the grindy sort of combat and systems of MUDs to be fairly gruelling but as areas of roleplay, honestly, you can't beat a good MUD community. My current one, which I've been active on for a few years, is called Multiverse Crisis and is basically a MUD where people go 'Well, what if Optimus Prime fought a Pacific Rim Kaiju'? It's dumb, in a way, but no one takes it particularly seriously (and there's coded combat if people can't agree on things) and it is very, very active. The writing and roleplaying is very well done, too. It's like if you got a hundred people (116 active right now) together who wanted to make the best Saturday Morning Cartoon ever. Best of all? Flat out: no cybersex rule. In my experience, if text-sex is allowed it becomes the defacto norm for RP and generally kills smaller MUSHs or MUDs. I joined up entirely on a whim and found them very welcoming. So, if you just want to have a bit of goofy fun, it can be great for that. I like Star Wars: Rebirth, too, as it is also roleplay focused and based around the D6 system. Very small but most people on it are active.
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 07:24
|
|
|
Reene posted:There are ways to segregate new players from the population gracefully and allow them to start getting going and learning the game without requiring a bullshit application that asks for your real name and location and poo poo. Oh yeah, that poo poo is inexcusable. I've never seen/played a MUD that goes that far.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 07:51
|
|
|
Reene posted:On the other hand sometimes a system or way of doing things really is just archaic and preserved for the sake of "well it's always been that way" and change would be a positive thing. Yeah. It's a matter of attitude, coming from either direction. I once wrote a document to help MUCK-familiar players adjust to MUX, because while the interfaces are similar they can be vastly different under the hood and that was a real frustration for some people. Drone posted:I don't know how this is much different than paying For me, it depends on the game. I can see it on a serious business WOD-style game, where you've got quotas on character types, and games where there's a tightly defined back story or multiple people wanting to play Steampunk Captain America. Glorified talkers and wholly social games, or the sort of MUD where you're doing nothing but logging in to hunt mobs or other PCs, not so much. If you're doing it simply as a barrier to invasions or trolls, you're probably better off familiarizing yourself with the commands for IP bans and nuking characters. Asking for RL information is a throwback to BBSes demanding mailed photocopies of driver's licenses in order to prove you were old enough for the adult downloads, as far as I'm concerned.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 10:15
|
|
|
I can't see myself having enough time to really play a character anymore, so even though UL sounds intriguing I think I'm going to pass. However, when I was active (maybe 5 years ago?) I only played on RP-enforced MUSHes (like Otherspace) and supported the idea of an application for those. Not necessarily to keep the barbarians away, but as a sort of quality control. If someone just rolled a character without an application, there was a good chance they wouldn't have read any of the fluff and would have no idea what was going on in the universe. Therefore it would bring the quality of the RP down considerably.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 14:39
|
|
|
So I've been playing Icesus pretty heavily the past few days, and it's reminding me of LOTJ in a very unfortunate way. In fact, let's make a topic out of it: What the gently caress is it with MUDs that produce thoroughly toxic playerbases? DR has it. LOTJ had it. UL has it to a limited extent. Icesus' chat channel makes me want to become a feminist to balance the loving karmic flows of the universe. I want to play a MUD with cool people, or at least in a game where "The only thing girls are good for is raping" isn't treated as good fun humor for all.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 15:18
|
|
|
In my experience? It's because MUDs are home to a lot of really insular nerds. I mean, it's a text-game based on old technology and copious amounts of writing and reading, what else could you expect? You add that to small playerbases who, for the most part, all know each other or otherwise don't want to rock the boat in cases of big disagreements, so, there's very little healthy discussion because the loudest names get the most say which ends up normalising their opinions. A lot of the times, staff members have been there for years and are completely set in their ways, so, the behavior has been kind of condoned for ages as well. Bandwagoning and trends tend to be really, really popular, too, which only leads to more little cliques which only leads to more players thinking they're the best thing ever which leads to feedback loops and people thinking that their opinion is normal etc. So, basic sociology stuff, but the people involved don't exactly have much life experience.
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 15:28
|
|
|
SquadronROE posted:I can't see myself having enough time to really play a character anymore, so even though UL sounds intriguing I think I'm going to pass. However, when I was active (maybe 5 years ago?) I only played on RP-enforced MUSHes (like Otherspace) and supported the idea of an application for those. Not necessarily to keep the barbarians away, but as a sort of quality control. You're right about it working as a gate to make sure people have read the background. One thing I've noticed it encourages, however, are these seven page backgrounds that explain how the character was born to blacksmith/adventurers who were murdered by orcs (that's why they hate orcs and have blacksmith points) and after seven pages detailing their past of slavery, escaping slavery, working as a thief, then a barber, then a space ninja, they're finally ready to start a new life in the city of Townlandius. End with an ellipsis for effect. And then you get into the game, and the roleplay goes something like this: code:Roleplaying concepts like Mouse Guard's asking a few questions and supplying you with four or five short solid hooks (Friend, Enemy, Mentor, Belief, Goal, Instinct), and letting stuff emerge from that, or 13th Ages One Unique Thing, FATEs making your skills/attributes non-ubiquitous roleplaying qualities, or even a system that's straight up like Fiasco--these systems of not writing a lovely long stuipd bio in isolation and then trying to jump in with a fully realized (and most often poorly conceived) character would probably be considered by most MU communities as 'watering down' the RP environment, and a way to bring in the barbarian hordes who will roleplay in all caps with lovely grammar. Which is just reason number 50 that I should make a MU*.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 15:56
|
|
|
I've mostly stuck with ROM2.4 muds, although I played (and was staff for a very short period) on Dragonstone which was heavily modified EOSII. I played and staffed on Bad Trip (the owner was psychotic evil and thankfully eventually gave the mud to someone else), and also on A Temporal Rift. The head coder stole the Bad Trip code and started A Temporal Rift, it was hugely popular for awhile, mostly everybody who was sick with Bad Trip's heavy-handed bipolar management. Bad Trip was casual, and I had a lot of fun. One thing I really liked was that it had a lot of color. Here's a random low quality screenshot I found online that gives you an idea: 
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:05
|
|
|
That's the one thing I don't like about SWMud, it's very hard to play casually because there is so little color. I just can't get over how good the combat is though, it's very active and engaging.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:11
|
|
piL posted:You're right about it working as a gate to make sure people have read the background. Yeah, as far as gated applications though, if you're a heavy RP sort of game, I suppose you want to make sure that people can either play their character with a good degree of knowledge and care (if it's say Goku on a DBZ game) or they've put enough thought into them so they are less likely to suddenly drop them. I don't think there's any feelings as disappointing as the sudden, unexpected departure of a good RP partner that you click with. People who do big 12-16 line paragraphs generally just want people to fawn over them and their needless purple prose. I usually sit about seven lines using the basic settings in MUSHClient, enough for a nice paragraph with a bit of detail and dialogue without needing you to pull out a thesaurus to show off your vocabulary - and it's something you can knock out in like five minutes if not less and gives all players involved the opportunity to shine. I kind of see it like a TV episode or book - the camera probably wouldn't follow my character for longer than that period of time, unless it's something pivotal or amazing. Even then, it might just be two paragraphs. And even so, sometimes one or two lines is all you need to really sell an action. Sort of like how in Gatsby, you get these paragraphs of a party and then one line of: "And then Tom broke Myrtle's nose" or something. But I think this is more thought than a lot of people put into their roleplay.
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:26
|
|
|
I am purposely minimal in my role play and it fucks with people. I play a lot of characters who don't speak in long sentences just because nobody seems to be any good at laconic characters. Someone will belch out a monologue at me and I'll respond with: Ford's expression doesn't flinch as he's dressed down by Arthur. When Arthur finishes, he holds his arms out in a helpless shrug, then shakes his head. The giant emoters have almost no idea what to do with physical action like that, I've noticed. They'll sit there and wait for me to yell back. I have to add "he doesn't respond." or ugh even display my character's thoughts to get people to respond. Body language is a perfectly acceptable response to being yelled at 
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:40
|
|
|
I've gotten more minimal as time has passed. My first few years MUSHing I'd write paragraph long uberposes, but as time has gone on I've valued keeping the pace of the scene moving more than telling you about the flinch in my grin as I stumble over my fifth word while assessing the Prince's artwork. Maybe I just got impatient, but I rationalize it as it's not about my character or your character, but about the story and I want to pack as much story into a scene as I can.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:44
|
|
|
Also re: application characters My guys usually have good home lives with living parents and very little strife which is why application only games are hard to me. I'd rather most of the character development happen in game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:45
|
|
|
Conskill posted:I've gotten more minimal as time has passed. My first few years MUSHing I'd write paragraph long uberposes, but as time has gone on I've valued keeping the pace of the scene moving more than telling you about the flinch in my grin as I stumble over my fifth word while assessing the Prince's artwork. I tell my rp partners to imagine reading a novel comprised of mush style monologuing and people for the most part get it and start trimming the branches a little.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:49
|
|
|
I recall one application only game where they put an arbitrary minimum on the -file size- of your submitted email. If it wasn't at least 10K of text you weren't trying hard enough.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 16:50
|
|
|
Unfortunately when people think "RP hooks" and character development, for some reason 80% go straight to "lost my parents as a kid" or "was abducted and raped by orcs" or whatever. After playing a hack-and-slash type mud like SWMud for like ten years, it took me a long time to get comfortable with places that do enforced RP, and it was largely because of that lack of originality (both on my end and with a lot of others). That being said though, since I've been getting into RP-heavy MUDs, I have been blown away by a couple rare people who've created some seriously cool, deep, interesting, and original characters that have been an absolute blast to play with.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 17:01
|
|
|
I usually bang out five to ten lines, because it's expected in the places I usually play and most people don't perceive a lot of range between 'X blinks' and 'And thus X performs a perfectly mundane action with bells and whistles and creaks of his too-tight jeans, taking upwards of a thousand characters.' I agree though, the majority of longer poses are basically peacocking or stacking a lot of activity into one moment of time. Christ. I've had people approach me for play not necessarily because of what my characters do, but because I posed a bit longer than usual. Once, one guy even suggested we find a room to 'enjoy each other's long poses'-- not what they were about, just that they were. Criminy. FordPRefectLL posted:I tell my rp partners to imagine reading a novel comprised of mush style monologuing and people for the most part get it and start trimming the branches a little. This. It's fun, do what you like, write however gets you and your friends' rocks off, but remember that these are basically chatlogs with an unusual stylistic convention, and not deathless (and heavily edited) prose.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 17:41
|
|
|
FordPRefectLL posted:Legends of the Jedi. I don't know if I can recommend it at this point but it is the largest one out there. I guess YMMV. Decided to give Legend of the Jedi a try, haven't played many MUDs before.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 17:43
|
|
|
Milky Moor posted:It's because MUDs are home to a lot of really insular nerds. I mean, it's a text-game based on old technology and copious amounts of writing and reading, what else could you expect? Which makes me boggle at the idea of requiring an application to weed out players. Getting into a MUD and learning how to play is already a colossally high barrier to entry relative to other, more easily griefable games.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 17:50
|
|
|
I've played maybe three MUDs and two MUSHes. The latter were World of Darkness games, and thus required an (in-game) character application before you could go on-grid just to make sure you did all the math right and weren't playing some secret serial killer grim goober, and maybe a brief talk with a wiz ("interview" is too strong a word) if they were curious/confused about your history. I never saw it as a big deal, really, it was just part and parcel of playing in a MUSH. I guess I'm just not really worried about UL's application. I mean the only thing it asks is for a name you can just make up and an e-mail you'd add for password recovery anyway. I just signed up and didn't even have to half a day before the acceptance. Like someone said above; it's just a gatekeeper. Not even a one. Is this a big deal? Maybe I'm just biased because I had no problem waiting a week to join MUSHs, but seriously, this doesn't seem like a big deterrent.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 22:07
|
|
|
It's totally OK to think the application isn't a big deal, the Dramas came about because one of the UL staffers was snidely accusing Reene of making up the issue that a considerable number of people were turned off by it. In both cases it's easy to imagine that the number of people affected are greater than zero.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 22:29
|
|
|
MUSHes, I think, are a different beast than MUDs in terms of applications, simply because the vast majority of what you do on a MUSH doesn't involve interacting with the game code in any meaningful sense; there's no real way to 'solo play' on most MUSHes, at least in my experience. So it can be worth requiring an application simply to ensure that a player has a firm grasp on the setting and the English language, because it's not like they can say 'none of that crap matters I'm just here to kill mobs.' There are no mobs to kill. World of Darkness MUSHes especially had (have?) a reputation for being social sandboxes - often to the detriment of actual gameplay - so making sure a player can type and whatnot becomes awfully important... not that that doesn't bring up its own special set of issues. (story time!) The last MU* I played on was an oWoD MUSH called Denver By Night, and I was playing a Son of Ether linguist. because I thought it would be interesting to play a character with the typical Etherite approach to SCIENCE! who applied that approach to what are usually called the 'soft sciences' rather than, say, particle physics. Now, the game code supported a +language system, where you could say things in a foreign language and any character that didn't speak that language in-game would get the message 'X says something in a language you don't understand.' The code supported a list of something like 150 languages or something equally ridiculous; the way the oWoD Linguistics skill worked, even capping out your skill at a max of 5 points let you know sixteen languages (32 if you had the Natural Linguist Merit, which of course I did). This was somewhat disappointing to me, given that my dude's whole concept was effectively 'if I become fluent in every language spoken on this or any other planet I will achieve complete and total understanding of the human mind and the consensual Reality that it generates and I'll basically Ascend;' 32 languages wasn't going to cut it. So after some consultation with the game staff a mechanic was implemented allowing anyone to spend 3 XP to pick up a new language off the list. The reason I bring this up is because XP on that game worked by the +vote system. If you roleplayed with someone, you +voted for them; each +vote you got gave you a fractional amount (0.1, maybe? I honestly forget) of XP. Some games also capped the number of XP you could receive per week; Denver either had no vote cap or had a high enough vote cap that it hardly mattered (5 XP/week, maybe?). If you were really impressed with someone's roleplay, you could recommend them for additional XP (with the +recc command), but by and large, it should become quickly apparent that the way to get lots of XP was through quantity of roleplay, not quality of it. Now, I tried to keep my quality levels high, don't get me wrong, but simply by virtue of hanging out in the common room of the Mage Chantry - the place where all the Mage characters could hang out without having to worry about spilling secrets or being monitored by outsiders - I would regularly earn double-digit amounts of +votes daily. Note - at no point did this require 'engaging with plot.' I did try to engage with plot - especially since sometimes other players simply wouldn't - but I got the same amount of XP for sitting around drinking coffee and talking about random crap than I would have gotten going on daring raids against the Technocracy. Hell, in some instances I got more XP for sitting around talking about random crap, because even though game staff would regularly dole out bonus XP for actually going out and doing poo poo, Game Events were infrequent enough that on the whole it was actually a more effective XP-gathering tactic to sit around bullshitting and/or discussing who's loving who and/or making plans to possibly at some point in the future consider engaging with plot. I played Denver for... I don't even know. A year and a half? Maybe longer? A while, anyways. By the time I quit the game (some people are just not at all cut out to be game staff and it turns out I'm one of them; I feel bad for some of the players that got left in the lurch but then I remember some of the other ones and I abruptly stop feeling bad) I had spent over 150 XP on picking up languages alone. I'd gone through the list and picked out all the ones I thought were interesting or significant and I was just going alphabetically by this point because gently caress it, I have the XP. Had I opted to pursue goals that were less central to my character's roleplay conceit and more central to stats that would make him actually effective in-game, I could have been the most overpowered son of a bitch on the planet, but as it stands I was just 'ridiculous' instead of 'holy poo poo.' (This is leaving aside the issue of how, when I first arrived, there was a plotline being basically ignored by half the mages, so I decided I'd just shut up and fix it, so I took a few weeks off and became a Doctor of Microbiology, because gently caress it, why not) So, yeah. Point is, an app isn't always a bad idea if your game is going to be roleplay-intensive, but it doesn't solve every problem, let's just put it that way.
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2014 22:43
|
|
|
I liked the way Star Conquest handled apps, by basically letting people play as somewhat limited novices until they submitted one. It let people get a feel for the game and the world before making them write an application which is a lot less annoying then having to read lots and lots of poo poo right off the bat. With UL, it isn't really a RP app, it's like just an added annoyance to account creation which is really nonsensical to me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 00:40
|
|
|
Gorelab posted:I liked the way Star Conquest handled apps, by basically letting people play as somewhat limited novices until they submitted one. It let people get a feel for the game and the world before making them write an application which is a lot less annoying then having to read lots and lots of poo poo right off the bat. Not to mention you tend to die in 30 seconds if you feel like exploring or being a thief
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 03:53
|
|
|
Gorelab posted:I liked the way Star Conquest handled apps, by basically letting people play as somewhat limited novices until they submitted one. It let people get a feel for the game and the world before making them write an application which is a lot less annoying then having to read lots and lots of poo poo right off the bat. It took me two hours to get my star conquest application approved and nothing significant about my character, "Swampdog MacKenzie" was changed. I tried many of the activites such as drone mining, battlesuit, flying a ship, and after all this having made very little progress I set up a debris salvaging trigger to buy the first tier hauler. That's bannable, although with an appeal I reduced it to a penalty of more industry points than were earned by the salvaging
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 04:27
|
|
|
Vadun posted:Not to mention you tend to die in 30 seconds if you feel like exploring or being a thief In UL, they did nicely put an extremely lethal high level maze area within about five rooms of the newbie starting point on the route to the main city. I'm not even sure there's a hey-don't-go-here signpost before you get eviscerated by the super-orcs of the entire game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 04:43
|
|
|
I was wondering about that, really. I know in DR, there were some dangerous places, but the areas right outside of Crossing tended to be fairly safe from what I remember.
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 05:44
|
|
FordPRefectLL posted:I am purposely minimal in my role play and it fucks with people. I play a lot of characters who don't speak in long sentences just because nobody seems to be any good at laconic characters. Someone will belch out a monologue at me and I'll respond with: Conskill posted:I've gotten more minimal as time has passed. My first few years MUSHing I'd write paragraph long uberposes, but as time has gone on I've valued keeping the pace of the scene moving more than telling you about the flinch in my grin as I stumble over my fifth word while assessing the Prince's artwork. I see it kind of like improvisational theatre or theatresports. You have a few actors (the players) who are gathering for a scene with their characters. Ideally, you won't steal any spotlight for longer than anyone else and you'll also give people hooks in your poses. It's really just being fair - fair to their characters but also fair to your own. I don't see my characters as 'mine' - they're for the service of the scene as a whole. I know some people, for example, really dislike it if they think they don't have complete control over their character at all times. Kind of like, how, in a recent story, my character's rival picked him up and hurled him across a chasm all of a sudden. Some people might freak out but I love that. To me, online roleplaying is just improv. theatre and the trick is finding other players who share that belief. And, y'know, who really wants to be waiting twenty minutes for your partner/s to respond?
|
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 05:56
|
|
|
I've been forcing people to be rebels on LOTJ and they are not enjoying it. I am ruining their RP.
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 06:11
|
|
|
FordPRefectLL posted:I've been forcing people to be rebels on LOTJ and they are not enjoying it. I am ruining their RP. When i finally finish my grinding we can crush some RP nerds and bring the light of the Empire to all.
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 18:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 00:08 |
|
|
I wonder if my character is still floating around UL somewhere, that was a nice game. I will check!
|
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2014 20:37
|
|