If the reason for the attack is lame

There was so much drivel that I ghosted right past this but jesus christ it’s a hell of a thing to double down, triple down after someone has politely asked you “hey can you don’t?” and admin has already had to use the mod voice.

Honestly, guy, leap into the sun.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings.

And to run a good and popular restaurant, use beef tallow and MSG, make the waitstaff wear funny hats, mop the floor at least twice a week, and

Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck if people like the taste.

I just think that on a game where a core theme of the setting is conflict between factions, making that conflict between players meaningless or even impossible for no IC logical reason makes the game setting just as pointless and boring.

You can have conflict between characters without having PvP. Even if the rule is “you can’t directly harm another PC” there’s a whole lot you can still do to play out conflict. Your lack of imagination is your problem, not a problem of PvE games.

It’s like making a game set in the marvel cinematic universe but no one is allowed to play as the heroes or villains, they can only play normal people doing normal things.

Um… no it’s not. It’s like making a game set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but no one is allowed to play as villains, just heroes – oh wait, that’s pretty much most comic book MU*s out there.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

Putting everyone on the same team means staff takes on the burden of being everyone else in the world.

This is actually almost universally true, unlike most of what you’ve said. A PvE game does require more Staff effort to create all of the antagonists and their actions to frustrate the PCs – but it requires less Staff effort to deal with assholes who are just out to grief other players by killing their characters.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

When the games started being about protecting the feelings of bad actors who instigated trouble then ran to staff for protection it all went to shit.

You have this backwards. Yes, there are some people who do bad things and then complain when they get consequences for those bad things, but those players exist on PvE games too, and they still try to weasel out of consequences. But by closely monitoring or eliminated PvP, you stop allowing the bad actors who instigated trouble by killing characters for OOC reasons – or just to grief the other players. The people who “make it their life goal to ruin things for everyone” aren’t the people asking that their characters not be killed off for no reason, it’s the people killing off other characters for no reason.

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

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.

Huh… sounds like you’re not on the games that are successful right now. Sure, they may not have 100 players at a time, but they’re perfectly happy with 30. It’s almost like MU*ing is an outdated technological medium whose primary players grew up and are now adults with jobs and lives and families rather than being high school or collect students who time on their hands.

Your issues sound like a you problem.

Is it really? I swear. I learn new things from you every day.

you mean we should stop arguing with the guy who’s user name is a euphemism for dog penis? because that didn’t automatically target him as problematic to begin with…???

I also saw the username and thought of this was but I was like noooooo maybe it means something else maybe this is just me

i thought i was crazy that no one else was bringing it up

I was going to, you know me I’m always down to bring up a penis so long as it’s someone else’s, but I didn’t know if it was a common euphemism over yonder.

There are good reasons why PvP used to be more common in an MU environment that have nothing to do with personal preferences, as @Hobbie has repeatedly tried to make the case for.

Factor #1: people do not read or write as much as they used to.

When the internet was new, there was not a whole lot else to do with it other than read or write. These days, you can do anything online. Social media alone accounts for over 2 hours a day on average, of which big chunks are watching video (i.e. not reading or writing). The average (American) person spends more time on YouTube (24 minutes/day) alone than they do reading (16 minutes/day). Reading (for pleasure) is down by 7 minutes per day from 2004, a 32% decrease. Writing is much harder to find stats on but I assume the number is smaller as there are many more readers than writers, and I would expect it follows similar trends.

Factor #2: At the core of PvP is not story-telling, but the thrill of competitive victory. There are much more evocative mediums available for experiencing this thrill.

VIDEO GAMES. On an MU, the competitive aspect is always attenuated through a sheet+gear and dice rolls. In a video game, the competitive aspect is much more nakedly down to player skill. You do not lose a shoot-out in CoD due to a dice roll; you lose because you were slower, less accurate. On top of that, you also get to experience rich audio/visual imagery that an MU cannot hope to provide. The timer to repeat this tension is short, the barrier to experience it with a group of pals is low, the improvement in your skills (not a character) is quantifiable, and the dopamine hits of advancement and reward are lab-engineered to maintain engagement. 25% of all PC gaming time last year was spent on 4 PvP games.

MUs are not waning in popularity because they don’t have PvP.

They are waning in popularity because the things that they are made up of are not what people are choosing to engage with in their limited free time. Emphasizing PvP as a core of a game’s experience will not lead to a meteoric rise in popularity because this aspect of gaming can be done better in other game mediums. MUs exist at a weird confluence of social interaction, creative story-telling, and TEXT, which may better explain why so many games have left PvP out; why invest significant time capital (and despite the laissez-faire presentation of PvP given above, the investment to manage PvP is significant) in something that another medium does so much better?

The timer may be running down on when video games get better at approximating social interaction and creative story-telling. In the meantime, text-based RP remains a compelling hobby because it is the only game in town that can offer those two elements from the comfort of your home, for free, with some of the coordination elements of TTRPGs removed; the increase in options to run Actual TTRPG sessions online is arguably much more of a problem for MUs than too few opportunities to punk newbs.

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.

What are these ghost town games you speak of?

What were these massive PvP games you miss?

Name them. No more generalities.

I’m getting this sense of deja-vu that I can’t really pinpoint.

It feels very much like that “OT The Real” guy finally decided to tone it down to a level that won’t get him snap banned.

But yeah, at this point I don’t buy their story about how they found this board in the first place. I’m getting this sense of deja-vu that I can’t really pinpoint.

Things I didn’t know. Rockets are red because they go vroom fast.

I think we can probably stop feeding this person the attention they’re craving.

you mean we should stop arguing with the guy who’s user name is a euphemism for dog penis? because that didn’t automatically target him as problematic to begin with…???

@NotSanni
I’m not throwing a tantrum. I’m just telling you the truth as I see it. I watched these games that I loved go down the toilet because staff chose to coddle a few troublemakers and change the rules so that they would whine less.

The damage may be irreversible but if it’s not, it’s certainly going to take a drastic and revolutionary new approach. That’s all I’m saying. What people are doing now isn’t working. Try something else. Hell, try anything else. Just stop making the same mistakes over and over and over. That’s all I ask. Stop listening to people who are clearly leading you down the wrong path. Do something new. Do something different.

Look at what worked in the past and what didn’t. Be objective. Don’t listen to people who want to make everything about them. Ask yourself, what can we do differently to attract and retain new players?

Surprise me! Please!
I want the hobby I used to love to be worth playing again.

You continue to mount your weird defense in favor of using slurs and being politically incorrect.

Reevaluate your life.

Just go play Star Wars AOA. I guarantee that it will check much of your list, lol

But I don’t wonder enough to care about an answer.

Is there some thriving hub of young people out there playing some game I’ve never heard of?

Yes, many times over. Even in MUs.

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. Don’t punish people for telling dirty jokes or saying things that are offensive on the non-public com channels or in pages.

Yeah… What? What offensive things, specifically, do you think ought to be allowed?

I think I can guess.

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. Don’t punish people for telling dirty jokes or saying things that are offensive on the non-public com channels or in pages.

All the things you mentioned already exist but this is really where you tell on yourself. You’re not a visionary, guy, you’re just an edgelord.

A whole load of bollocks that tl;dr everyone who isn’t running what I want sucks.

News for you, Rocket: Everything you claim to want is out there. It’s just that it’s so unpopular that it might as well not be.

You don’t need a new game, you need to go back to 1999.

The high-conflict high-PvP players aren’t interested in being reasonable, for the most part; they want to win, and they want to do it over your corpse. And if they lose then you cheated and ye gods the whining.

So when you come and claim that you’re trying to be reasonable by wanting to play with all the people we’ve seen being unreasonable over and over and over for decades, it’s not really surprising that most of us just aren’t that interested.

Been there, done that. Read the book, watched the movie, rolled up characters in the RPG, played the game, wore the T-shirt, ate the meal, even had the branded lunchbox.

We tried this. It sucked. It sucked for the people trying to play a game, and it sucked for the people who wanted nothing but victory.

No thanks.

cringe

• Let people play what they want (within whatever theme you have) even if they are the “bad guys” because those kinds of characters generate IC drama that staff doesn’t have to spend their limited time manufacturing.

• Make Chargen fast and easy to get a basic character so if you want to make an alt or if you want to kill off your character because you have grown tired of it you don’t have to spend weeks waiting to get back in the game.

• Make retirement easier by making it so you can create a bog standard character using a quick CG system then once you kill off your main in a dramatic event have the XP transfer from them to the new guy.

• Make factions actually matter. Give them territories to defend. This gives players something to RP off of outside of everyone hanging out at a doughnut shop.

• Make clear rules about PVP where you need a justifiable reason to be engaging in PVP. Someone entered enemy territory, they attacked you, they attacked someone you are close to, etc. Then if you think they are just being a douchenozzle and attacking you for no reason you can call in a staff member and have them make a judgement call. If the reason for the attack is lame the staffer can just say no, this isn’t happening, both of you go back to your homes and don’t start fights with each other in the future.

If the reason is legitimate and it’s because of your IC actions but you don’t want to deal with it, you should have the right to negotiate the outcome and skip the battle itself. Maybe you have better shit to do?

If you can’t come to an agreement on a reasonable conclusion without the fighting happening then you could set terms, (to the death, to incapacitation, being taken prisoner, etc.) for the battle and do the fight or if you really just don’t want to do the combat mechanics, choose to do a roll-off to see who wins. Say for example, you are playing WoD, you could both add up the dice you would roll for your primary attack and the dice you would roll for your primary defensive roll, pool them all together, then roll them. The other guy does the same, who ever gets the most successes wins the fight.

You can skip hours of combat with one die roll or if you want to make it even simpler, have both people roll 1d100+their total XP spent. Who ever rolls higher wins. Or you can both roll 1d100, see who gets the highest number to see who wins then look at the difference in the numbers and let that determine the severity of the consequences of the combat.

There are a lot of options that don’t involve having to use chunky combat rules. Lay those options out ahead of time and let people have a choice.

• Make it clear that going around picking fights for no reason will get you removed from the game. Also make it clear that just because you and one other person are in the game room it doesn’t mean that you are necessarily the only people in the room of the story. “I was mad and he was there so I picked a fight.” isn’t a valid IC reason for starting PVP. Unless the other player agrees to it you can just have them pick a fight with an NPC.

• Don’t tell people what they can and can not do in the privacy of their own latex sex dungeons. Do tell people they can’t go around banging on the subway without suffering consequences. Make those consequences IC. Have the cops show up at their door step with a warrant for their arrest. Make a post about their public fuck session on their faction board because someone posted a video of it on TicTak so everyone can role play about seeing it.

Make the results of breaking the rules an IC response as often as possible because that moves the story forward instead of grinding it to a stop.

• Do let people make stupid character concepts that you know will not work. Do also tell them why it probably won’t work out well for them. Maybe they are just new to whatever game you are running so they don’t know better? Maybe they want a challenge? Maybe they want to explore the dynamics of love and marriage by playing an ageing shoe salesman with a red-headed wife who he loves but can barely stand and two ungrateful kids? Let them do their thing.

• Do let people innovate. (Within reason) Don’t be such a rules lawyer that you lose sight of the goal of people playing fun characters. Let them try novel things.

• Do let people establish their own places of residence and customize them. Using coded apartment buildings you can rent is cool, but why not have coded houses that work the same way? Then if a player bails on the game, the rent comes due, the game sees they aren’t online for X number of days, then it kicks them off the lease and puts the house back up for rent with a default, fresh coat of paint, description.

• Do let them blow shit up from time to time just for fun and leave it 'sploded until a reasonable amount of repair time has passed then let the owner of the property re-build.

• Finally, and most importantly, don’t give a fuck about people’s feelings. Don’t punish people for telling dirty jokes or saying things that are offensive on the non-public com channels or in pages.

It’s great to have a SFW channel like Public or Chat but for faction chats and such you should do as little forced censoring as possible.

Players should all be adults, they shouldn’t need a staff member to protect them from hurtful words. If you don’t like what someone is saying, tell them so politely.

They should be an adult and respect your wishes or maybe they will tell you to fuck off with your bullshit, and that’s also okay!

You can tell them to go to hell and get ass-fucked with a pinapple then +ignore them because that’s also something adults do.

We don’t all have to agree or think the same way.

They will piss off enough people in your faction that eventually they won’t be able to enjoy the game and move on to a new place to play because no one wants to be around them.

Staff doesn’t need to step in, players don’t need Staff to fight their battles for them. Staff’s job shouldn’t be playing thought police.

Staff’s job should be enforcing the rules of the game system, whatever system that might be, and facilitating play for people who do actually want to be around each other.

This concludes my Ted Talk, thank you all for coming.