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Old 09-19-2009, 06:36 PM   #43
prof1515
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Re: RPI, RPE, and Roleplay

Well, there's more wrong with the community than simply public disagreements. The root of the problem really seems to be an excess of competition without a similar degree of ethics as well as a lack of any real community organization or standards. A simple check of merely a handful of games in the listings typically reveals one or more that lie about their features or playerbase size. Then you've got Locke showing up every few months and claiming he invented OLC, YouTube and probably oxygen as well. You've got games arguing their own personal definitions of everything to justify calling themselves "free" or "RPI" because they think it'll bring in more players or that they're simply entitled to do so. You've got a community where people view clicking a voting link as some measure of quality but kick and scream in opposition to the thought of peer-based review. You've got a community where every game wants to call themselves "the best" but under no circumstances do they want to put that claim to the test of comparative analysis. You've got a community that doesn't want to hold liars and thieves accountable for their actions whether it's falsifying their playerbase figures or lying about their features or violating code licenses. Is a public argument any worse than all of that?

I for one am sick of it. My breaking point was many years ago after years of numerous incidents. One time I came across a game that called itself RPI and as I enjoy playing RPIs, take an interest in the history and status of the RPI community and have spent the last decade playing or creating them, I checked it out. Simply put, the game wasn't even close to being RPI. Jesus, it was stock right down to Midgaard and the beastly fidos. They claimed they were RPI and that I had to RP and yet I spawned without any clothes in Midgaard with the beastly fidos chewing up abandoned swords and corpses. Role-play as what, a nudist in a stock-code world?

About that same time I was going through TMC's listings of "level-less MUDs" and logged into one only to find it was filled with levels. A bit annoyed to have wasted my time on a game that wasn't listed properly, I informed their staff of the error. They argued that they were "level-less". I pointed to the fact that according to the score command, I was a level x this and a level y that. "We ignore those," was his reply. I pointed out that I couldn't use a particular weapon though because I wasn't to level z so it was clear that the levels couldn't just be ignored. Yeah, silence from them on that one.

In late 2006 I was working on several reviews for Wade's rpimud.com and one of the things I did was document playerbase activity. With one game, I found that while they claimed that they typically averaged 10-20 players online, only twice in the 2-3 week period I evaluated them did they have more than 10 on (and even then it was only 11 and 13). The other 99% of the time they averaged between 2-3 (or 1-2 if you excluded me). For about a third of the day I was the only player on the game. Under no circumstances is that an average of 10-20 players. And thanks to the fact that their code revealed their "most users online" via the "who" command, I knew that the most they'd ever had was 15 about a month or two earlier suggesting it's very unlikely they were averaging 10 or more prior to the period of my evaluation.

Over on the old rpimud.com there were H&S and pure PK MUDs that occassionally listed themselves. The question of whether they were RPI or not aside, they weren't even Role-Play MUDs. Hell, the last one I deleted from the listings said on their website that they weren't a role-playing MUD, simply "a pure PK MUD". Nevertheless, they chose to list themselves on rpimud.com anyway. And don't get me started on the vote tampering that occurred with the old rpimud.com clicky voting. Aside from games exploiting loopholes in the vote code (possibly accidental exploitation), we had people deliberately creating multiple accounts to circumvent the one-vote-per-person policy. A few months ago I accidently discovered that one of the vote cheaters was an admin on a game whose owner swore up and down for weeks that no one on his game would ever, ever cheat and if they did he would have known (we were fairly certain someone from their game was cheating since deletion of the bogus multiple accounts had an impact on numerous games' vote totals the following week, including theirs). Lies, exaggerations, cheating...it's wasn't confined merely to that site. It's symptomatic across the MU* community.

WoW doesn't claim that they're a first-person shooter. Halo doesn't claim that they have 62 billion players. But left and right, MU*s make outrageous claims and present false information. Why? Because this community doesn't hold them accountable and thus they can. Sometimes it's because the people here are lazy, sometimes it's because they're apathetic, sometimes it's because they're lying about their own games too. Whatever the reason, they do little or nothing and that is far, far more damaging to this community than anything else. Personally though, I refuse to be one of those people.

I will point out errors, exagerrations and outright lies. I will correct people when they use incorrect terms and I will call people out when they deliberately attempt to mislead. It's who I am. When someone calls a dolphin a fish or a spider an insect, I correct them. When someone points to a chimpanzee and says, "monkey" I explain the difference. When someone lies, I call them on it. I realize that doesn't make me popular with some people. I almost got kicked out of college when a crooked administrator that I was publicly exposing as such tried to claim an accident, one I reported myself, was deliberate as well as exagerrate the damage in the hopes of getting me expelled (fortunately I documented the details of the incident and was able to prove I had not meant to do it as well as refute his exaggerations as to the extent of the damage). Despite the incident, I did not stop pointing out his shady behavior (or that of his superiors). Last summer when I was preparing for my departure to Europe, an employee of the hotel I was staying at mentioned something that sounded a lot like human trafficking, I got as many details as I could and called the FBI. I never met the girl in question or the couple that "bought her" and I've never been back to that hotel so it has never had any impact on me since but I'm not the type of person that doesn't act when I hear of something which just doesn't add up. If that makes me a jerk, that's something I'll take as a compliment.

My attitude is that if MUD owners want to attract more players, build a game that players will want to play. If they don't like what you've built, change your game to suit their needs, don't simply claim it's something else. If you're happy with your game the way it is then learn to accept the number of people that are interested in it. Don't exaggerate your playerbase figures, don't lie about your features, don't call yourself "RPI" or "free" or anything else unless you really are. If visitors to this site come in and see discontent, it's because there's cause for discontent and maybe the community needs to do something about the source of that discontent rather than complaining about the disagreements that result because of it.

So yes, I'm going to point out misuse of the term RPI. There's plenty of other terms for role-play MU*s that don't have a distinct historical reference to a particular type of game. I don't care if MUDs like the sound of it or feel they can call themselves anything they want. For players who have used that term since its creation to identify the type of game they play and prefer the use of the term, whether as a result of ignorance or deliberate deceit, it is an inconvenience and a disservice.

There's a helluva lot more for this community to be embarassed about than disagreements on the forums.

Later,

Jason

Last edited by prof1515 : 09-20-2009 at 06:18 AM. Reason: P*ssed is flitered? LOL
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