OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257 
|
Post by OT on Dec 29, 2016 16:22:58 GMT -5
Last I looked, they were gonna shut it down.
The game seemed to be run well enough and had a decent concept for an alpha/beta, but they tried to build it on a codebase that wasn't meant for RPI gameplay so it lacked all the years and years of work that has gone into stuff like the Harshlands-based ones. Skills, combat and crafting systems were extremely barebones and it felt like they were reinventing the wheel for no real reason.
When the RPI codebase is available and does everything you're trying to do, it's hard to have patience with an attempt to do the same from scratch with a codebase that isn't made for it. The gameplay was too primitive because of this. The concept and setting were good, though. Staff seemed reasonable enough. Not sure if they started to quit or if they're shutting it down from a lack of players.
I personally couldn't stand the progression system, though. You got exp based mostly on the length of your emotes, and unless you padded your emotes or played excessive amounts of hours in order to hit the daily cap with more brief emotes, you missed out on a bunch of character advancement. That kind of system has no place on an RPI, in my mind. Padding is objectively bad writing.
|
|
|
|
Post by desertman on Dec 29, 2016 16:50:06 GMT -5
You got exp based mostly on the length of your emotes, You would have to pay me a fair amount, provide a month of flexible vacation time, provide full benefits and a great match on a 401K plan, and something in a short skirt to blow me under a desk daily in order to get me to play this game.
|
|
Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,516
|
Post by Jeshin on Dec 29, 2016 20:21:55 GMT -5
Although it is shutting down the concept of XP per emote was pretty well discussed on the forums of that game. I even mathematically proved the variant between a padded emote and a regular emote was more or less nil. carrierrpi.mudhosting.net/forums/index.php?topic=40.0They even took player feedback on the system and further tuned it overtime. The concept of providing universal XP for progression over the ARM system of rewarding spamming an individual skill is just as valid and it wasn't the only RPI to try a system similar to it. See Burning Post II and the Inquisition. |
|
OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
|
Post by OT on Dec 29, 2016 20:44:48 GMT -5
There's no mathematical proof, just subjective arguments and dubious claims that everything's fine. At the end of the day, it was an advancement system where your character's skill and stat gains depended almost exclusively on emoting, which is a very questionable concept. At the time, it most certainly was not the case that everyone gained equally and nobody had any reason to worry about their emoting habits. Not unless you put in 8+ hours a day, at least.
If the defensive argument is that they ended up changing it so that nothing made any difference, that hardly flatters the system as it then serves no purpose anyway and is just a meaningless irritation. The notion that a 100% OOC factor should be the primary thing that determines your character's stats and skills is fundamentally flawed on a game that seeks to live up to the values of the RPI genre.
It certainly isn't any more realistic than gain-by-use, and although Carrier also had that, its small scope and limited opportunities to apply said skills in its early stages made this method distinctly secondary. Emote length (and, by association, hours spent socializing in sufficient safety to write full-length emotes) was what determined how good your character was at crafting and fighting, how strong and smart they were, etc. That's not something most RPI players will find appealing.
|
|
Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,516
|
Post by Jeshin on Dec 29, 2016 20:52:44 GMT -5
You mean it's not mathematical proof that at the beginning of the game the difference between a 160 character posts and not 160 character posts was only 40 minute a day to reach the soft cap that lowered everything to 10-20 a cycle? Pretty sure at the time of those posts that was a factual representation of how the system worked.
As for defensive argument, it's more observation that they continued to fine tune the system while the game ran. I think it's a pretty wild claim to say that progression via posting is unacceptable for RPIs. While it's not the system I had slotted for the game I was developing, it's not an invalid system. At worst it's not someone personal preference and/or they hate it with a burning passion.
|
|
OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
|
Post by OT on Dec 29, 2016 21:01:45 GMT -5
That wasn't the case. Several players pointed out that they experimented with it and found that they gained noticeably less over the course of their sessions if they didn't take extra time to write emotes that were longer than they intended. My experiences were similar. If I had a couple of hours to play and spent that time doing something where I didn't have the freedom to take time to write longer emotes pretty consistently, I gained less for that day; and I'm sure I don't look like a guy who hates writing.
The fact of the matter is that experienced players from other RPIs came to Carrier and disliked being told that their characters' advancement would depend on how they emoted. If you can't accept that as a valid opinion, I don't see a reason to try to discuss anything with you. It's a topic that should very much be open to criticism when it comes to discussing why a game didn't succeed.
I think it's beyond dispute that the idea of character advancement through entirely OOC factors is fair to criticize, in a genre where the most fundamental tenet is that in-character results should stem from in-character actions. If they had to make it so that people's emotes didn't matter after all, that system was a failure and served no purpose. If emotes did matter anyway, that system is questionable and doesn't match the most common idea in roleplaying: your character's actions determine how they develop.
You wouldn't run a D&D campaign where the amount of exp characters gained depended on how much their players talked during the session. Especially not based on sheer volume of words.
|
|
Jeshin
GDB Superstar
Posts: 1,516
|
Post by Jeshin on Dec 29, 2016 21:06:02 GMT -5
Beginning a point with "You wouldn't run a D&D campaign where..." is normally fraught with regret. You would be shocked the kind of crazy homebrew rules D&D campaigns are run on. But cool I'm to unreasonable to talk to and thus can be ignored. Ignore the fact there were people that had 0 issue with the progression system (even less of an issue than me). Also ignore the fact no one else ever bothered to document or report their issues with it, just said oh no this is bad =(
|
|
seuly
Clueless newb
Posts: 103
|
Post by seuly on Dec 29, 2016 22:48:54 GMT -5
Haven awards emote length and quantity, more if in a room with other PCs or a room flagged with somesuch boosty thing. Quantity is not quality. 6+ lines with multiple sentences wroth with run-un horrors is not my dealio. So yeah no, with Desertman here: hell to the nono.
|
|
Lizzie
Clueless newb
Posts: 199
|
Post by Lizzie on Jun 6, 2017 15:04:52 GMT -5
This was a really cool MUD, but I felt like they didn't do a very solid job of keeping the horror aspects up when that was ostensibly the setting's main draw. I actually really liked the emotes-for-exp thing, especially once it had been tweaked so that you didn't need to write purple prose to stay on par with people. Putting a daily cap on it would have been nice, though (and maybe there eventually was?), since there were some people who apparently could just sit around and occasionally emote coughing or scratching their junk 24/7.
Staff was pretty good about communication. I'm hoping they do another foray into the RPI thing.
|
|
|
|
Post by pinkerdlu on Jun 7, 2017 21:20:22 GMT -5
Yeah, Carrier MUD was pretty damn cool/fun while it lasted.
Not sure how it fizzled out, I stopped playing after a few weeks. But the staff have always been pretty legit.
|
|
