julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 4, 2018 22:52:17 GMT -5
Like 95% of most youtube viewers, I only have the attention span of a few minutes. After minute 4 I'm multi tasking. After minute 5 or 6 I'm kinda paying attention, after that I've no idea what you're talking about as I do something else.
ANyway to chunk the videos into digestible segments?
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delerak
GDB Superstar
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"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
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Post by delerak on May 5, 2018 8:43:21 GMT -5
I've always struggled with the idea of doing shorter videos around sub 2-3 minutes but it's very difficult to do anything story wise that is that short. These aren't scripted videos these are literally videos of me with a notepad and a couple of words on there to keep me on track and then me just talking. Probably not the best way to do it but it's the only way I know how for now.
I have been putting the main points down below in the video description maybe I can link to certain spots that interest you? For instance in my darksun stories and stuff video I wrote out where each thing I talked about was I think if I format the numbers correctly youtube will link it properly so you can click the number and it will go to that point in the video.
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Post by sirra on May 5, 2018 21:52:35 GMT -5
What MUDs suffer from most is three-fold: A) Getting into MUDs is not as intuitive as it is to get into other video games. For such a seemingly low tech hobby, it ironically requires a bit more technical knowledge. MUDs are often more obtuse to understand their commands as well. This is not surprising - there's a multi-billion dollar industry geared around making it as easy as possible for people to get into video games, whether it's Assassin's Creed, WoW or Angry Birds. B) Quality + Management. With the exception of Dragonrealms/Gemstone, etc, very few people have managed to build up a truly professional MUD, that didn't at some point get lost in the weeds of mismanagement. Often owing to the above reasons. The quality threshold is a bit higher for MUDs as well, since they're more of a cerebral than visual experience. There's a lot of people who would be playing Arm, including quite a few on this board, if it wasn't managed by a bunch of jackholes. C) Marketing. There's plenty of low tech games that get exposure and tons of players. Starbound, Minecraft, etc...these are not games that rely on incredible Far Cry 5 -esque graphics, and there are countless other examples. Many people, if they knew about RPI MUDs, would probably find them extremely attractive. Unfortunately, so much of what drives these games is Steam and Youtube Let's Plays. In order to make a really successful MUD, you would need someone to: 1) Have an immense amount of free time to work on it while simultaneously somehow being a normal, responsible and mature adult 2) Have the technical/programming knowledge to see it through 3) Have excellent creative writing skills 4) Know how to promote themselves and how to lead/manage a team They would have to leverage all of a MUD's potential strengths, alleviate its weaknesses, and then find a compelling way to promote it. If they were successful, others would copy them. A great many people like this exist, but they're not developing MUDs. They're developing products that are easier to promote and monetize. People will pay five bucks for a pixel game on Steam with a couple hours of playtime - and if it's funny and well written enough, like Westerado or Five Nights at Freddy's, it will end up on someone's Let's Play, and get a ton of free publicity. ---- Most people will add to a list like this that MUDs aren't successful because they're a time sink and don't provide immediate gratification. I don't find this to be true. There are a lot of popular games that are huge timesinks. What's different about a MUD, is that someone can more easily turn their brain off and grind away at other video games, whereas for a MUD, you have to retain a certain alertness to process typed commands, etc. But essentially, the reason MUDs are declining is that they're more difficult to create and run, than other mediums. This is combined with the fact that those who would be successful at running a MUD, are more often than not, prioritizing more financially rewarding projects. It is vastly more tempting to copy and capitalize what everyone else is doing, at a time when Steam/Youtube has made it easier than ever, than to tackle a project which completely lacks those advantages while having additional disadvantages to boot.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on May 5, 2018 23:01:41 GMT -5
All valid points. I tend to agree with most of your posts. Ironically my video got very negative feedback on the /r/mud subreddit and I am tempted to add another bullet to my list, the community for MUDs is garbage. Honestly the comments over at the mud subreddit are bordering on straight up troll level. People saying my video is stupid, pointless, not needed. It just boggles my mind, I take the time out of my day to make content to bring attention to muds thru video and youtube (arguably the largest source of advertising you can do) and people are literally bitching at me for making the video? Only in the mud community I'm not surprised though.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,335
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Post by mehtastic on May 6, 2018 6:32:42 GMT -5
All valid points. I tend to agree with most of your posts. Ironically my video got very negative feedback on the /r/mud subreddit and I am tempted to add another bullet to my list, the community for MUDs is garbage. Honestly the comments over at the mud subreddit are bordering on straight up troll level. People saying my video is stupid, pointless, not needed. It just boggles my mind, I take the time out of my day to make content to bring attention to muds thru video and youtube (arguably the largest source of advertising you can do) and people are literally bitching at me for making the video? Only in the mud community I'm not surprised though. Very few MUD admins take criticism well. This forum's very existence is living proof of that fact. Further, many MUD admins tend to lean toward code expertise over writing, so they lack skills related to writing as well, like reading comprehension and listening comprehension. There are exceptions, of course, but look at Arm where the Producers are usually a team of three code-minded people if not coders themselves. They also lean toward responding to long requests with one word ("Noted."). I would have to assume that's because they can't read very well and it's easier to just do that. It's either that, or they're complete assholes, which leads back to my first point about being unable to take criticism. That's why people interpreted your point about MUDs being largely a hobbyist effort as an attack, rather than a statement about the inevitability about the loss of interest. It's also why r/MUD can't accept that the MUD community is in decline in general. You said that players are growing up and they're losing interest in MUDs as their lives grow more complex, or they're becoming more casual players. Well, you're largely talking to the people that haven't grown up. The ones that think a MUD that was playable twenty years ago is still playable as-is today. As if 20 years or more of developments in game design theory don't matter and it's still okay to have a MUD with rent and non-saving items. Very few MUDs have a growing player base. Arm has been in decline for over four years. People like to point at Nyr, Noted Liar Nergal, mage changes, and shit like that as the reason why, but let's be honest: people are just tired of bullshit. They log into a game to have fun. They have limited time to play, barring the crazy assholes who play 16 hours a day just to dominate in the in-game social scene. They don't log in to deal with endless bureaucracy. Edit to add that there is only one MUD I can think of that regularly has 100+ active players online and isn't a sex MUD, and I've only heard about it recently by reading posts on r/MUD and TMC.
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julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 6, 2018 13:32:29 GMT -5
There is only one MUD I can think of that regularly has 100+ active players online and isn't a sex MUD, and I've only heard about it recently by reading posts on r/MUD and TMC. which?
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julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 6, 2018 13:47:51 GMT -5
Delerak,
I would like to point out that many folks who play muds, do so from a DND background.
For me, I would like to play with my friends once a week, except our lives are so far apart.
If we could just coordinate, log on a mud, one of us be game master to drive plots, that would be awesome.
But in Arm, the perfect coded platform, we'd have. #1: Not allowed to coordinate. #2: No plots to follow (other than, let's go hunt a gith) #3: There are no game masters, only disciplinarians. And they RARELY play with you except on a blue moon. Imagine if their job is to make the world alive and engage with you how much better a game would be? This should be what karma is for #4: Character advancement takes to much work for a bunch of friends to meet once a week and play for a few hours. In DND you can expect to advance one level per campaign.
Because of this, the DND demographic gets turned off.
Who's left? Mud sexors. Code twinks. Teenagers who have time to play after school. Losers who don't have spouses, kids, or a job, and are therefore angry dicks on Reddit.
Edited to add: and therefore those losers have time to play.
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mehtastic
GDB Superstar
Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,335
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Post by mehtastic on May 6, 2018 21:43:25 GMT -5
There is only one MUD I can think of that regularly has 100+ active players online and isn't a sex MUD, and I've only heard about it recently by reading posts on r/MUD and TMC. which? play.arxgame.org/I've seen a lot of talk about it on Mud Connector and r/MUD the last time I looked. Haven't tried it though, just because I have better shit to do these days than play a MUD.
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mehtastic
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Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,335
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Post by mehtastic on May 7, 2018 10:59:14 GMT -5
Delerak, I would like to point out that many folks who play muds, do so from a DND background. For me, I would like to play with my friends once a week, except our lives are so far apart. If we could just coordinate, log on a mud, one of us be game master to drive plots, that would be awesome. But in Arm, the perfect coded platform, we'd have. #1: Not allowed to coordinate. #2: No plots to follow (other than, let's go hunt a gith) #3: There are no game masters, only disciplinarians. And they RARELY play with you except on a blue moon. Imagine if their job is to make the world alive and engage with you how much better a game would be? This should be what karma is for #4: Character advancement takes to much work for a bunch of friends to meet once a week and play for a few hours. In DND you can expect to advance one level per campaign. Because of this, the DND demographic gets turned off. Who's left? Mud sexors. Code twinks. Teenagers who have time to play after school. Losers who don't have spouses, kids, or a job, and are therefore angry dicks on Reddit. Edited to add: and therefore those losers have time to play. You make a great point and I get what you're trying to say. But Armageddon isn't even the perfect coded platform. It's a bunch of spaghetti code shit piled into Diku. It lacks many modern features that many MUDs have nowadays, like persistent rooms (or in other words, every room is a save room), a building system that is accessible to players, server-only reboots that pause the game for a second or two at most, and worldwide OOC channels. It lacks a community that is interested in complex roleplay and a staff that is interested in supporting players. Ironically some of the staff that have supported player plots the most have been laughed out of the game by the player base because people prefer stability and the status quo. If the game doesn't change, and plots don't progress, your character can live indefinitely. The most vocal players have gotten what they wanted from the most subservient staff. If Armageddon wanted to attract people interested in roleplay, they would stop all code on Armageddon's current iteration, pick up a new code base and rebuild. And actually stick with it until they were done. They would build the game to support a community that is interested in roleplay rather than winning. But there is no interest in that. Not from staff, and not from players.
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faroukel
Displaced Tuluki
What's a story without a villain?
Posts: 201
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Post by faroukel on May 7, 2018 11:20:21 GMT -5
Can you link up the Reddit thread?
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2018 12:18:36 GMT -5
Delerak, I would like to point out that many folks who play muds, do so from a DND background. For me, I would like to play with my friends once a week, except our lives are so far apart. If we could just coordinate, log on a mud, one of us be game master to drive plots, that would be awesome. But in Arm, the perfect coded platform, we'd have. #1: Not allowed to coordinate. #2: No plots to follow (other than, let's go hunt a gith) #3: There are no game masters, only disciplinarians. And they RARELY play with you except on a blue moon. Imagine if their job is to make the world alive and engage with you how much better a game would be? This should be what karma is for #4: Character advancement takes to much work for a bunch of friends to meet once a week and play for a few hours. In DND you can expect to advance one level per campaign. Because of this, the DND demographic gets turned off. Who's left? Mud sexors. Code twinks. Teenagers who have time to play after school. Losers who don't have spouses, kids, or a job, and are therefore angry dicks on Reddit. Edited to add: and therefore those losers have time to play. With this in mind, why play Arm, and not a weekly tabletop game on roll20.net or in person?
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on May 7, 2018 15:07:29 GMT -5
Because you can play Arm whenever you want.
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julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 7, 2018 17:55:20 GMT -5
Delerak, I would like to point out that many folks who play muds, do so from a DND background. For me, I would like to play with my friends once a week, except our lives are so far apart. If we could just coordinate, log on a mud, one of us be game master to drive plots, that would be awesome. But in Arm, the perfect coded platform, we'd have. #1: Not allowed to coordinate. #2: No plots to follow (other than, let's go hunt a gith) #3: There are no game masters, only disciplinarians. And they RARELY play with you except on a blue moon. Imagine if their job is to make the world alive and engage with you how much better a game would be? This should be what karma is for #4: Character advancement takes to much work for a bunch of friends to meet once a week and play for a few hours. In DND you can expect to advance one level per campaign. Because of this, the DND demographic gets turned off. Who's left? Mud sexors. Code twinks. Teenagers who have time to play after school. Losers who don't have spouses, kids, or a job, and are therefore angry dicks on Reddit. Edited to add: and therefore those losers have time to play. With this in mind, why play Arm, and not a weekly tabletop game on roll20.net or in person? Because.... roll20.net sucks and inperson is hard for my friends due to distances. We're at opposite ends of the city after jobs, family, children, move us around.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 7, 2018 18:06:16 GMT -5
Because you can play Arm whenever you want. If you could find enough people, I think you could have a DND style game running 24/7 in an online tool. The big blocker is exactly what I think it is in Arm; there is a multiplier in prep time to run a good plot driven environment with a narrative that specifically includes the pcs in it. I was storyteller, admin, and then head admin on a mud that did as many as seven gm-run rpts a week in its heydey. It suffered from almost exactly the same ratio... that a decent atoryteller needed to spend 3-5x as much time preparing as running events. It still worked for years, but suffered from the same staff tendency to sit around upstairs and socialize that Arm seems to have. I still lay this problem at the feet of Arm staff. I'm just suggesting that a group of six to ten storytellers with a small technical support team would be required to run the dnd game/mud/rp driven checkers game you are talking about. I think the problem is selecting, replacing, and keeping a team like that motivated.
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jkarr
GDB Superstar
Posts: 2,030
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Post by jkarr on May 7, 2018 20:41:35 GMT -5
Delerak, I would like to point out that many folks who play muds, do so from a DND background. For me, I would like to play with my friends once a week, except our lives are so far apart. If we could just coordinate, log on a mud, one of us be game master to drive plots, that would be awesome. But in Arm, the perfect coded platform, we'd have. #1: Not allowed to coordinate. #2: No plots to follow (other than, let's go hunt a gith) #3: There are no game masters, only disciplinarians. And they RARELY play with you except on a blue moon. Imagine if their job is to make the world alive and engage with you how much better a game would be? This should be what karma is for #4: Character advancement takes to much work for a bunch of friends to meet once a week and play for a few hours. In DND you can expect to advance one level per campaign. Because of this, the DND demographic gets turned off. Who's left? Mud sexors. Code twinks. Teenagers who have time to play after school. Losers who don't have spouses, kids, or a job, and are therefore angry dicks on Reddit. Edited to add: and therefore those losers have time to play. With this in mind, why play Arm, and not a weekly tabletop game on roll20.net or in person? because a textual vr coded world with anon ppl is apples to tabletops oranges u go to one for more impersonal book-style immersion and suspension of disbelief and the another to socialize and shoot the shit with ppl u dont have a choice knowing irl
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