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Cybernetics: A fully-formed proposal
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wilde
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Over Emote-tional

Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 11:03 am      Reply with quote

I have to admit, I'm really failing to understand why people are so opposed to cybernetics acquired IG requiring RPP when this would actually be the only thing to stop twinks from being able to just grind their skills/equipment up enough to get cybernetics, bypassing the usual channels (ie. apping in with staff awarded RPP).

Also, it'd create a hell of a lot more RP (negotiations, deals, surgery, debts) than just apping in with a new PC.


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crayon
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Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 11:20 am      Reply with quote

Well, wilde.

It's a complicated and contentious point.

At one end, you're going to get people who don't care about the coded aspects of the game (stats, gear quality, skills, et cetera) and who resent the people who put effort into acquiring those things IG, regardless of whether they do it ICly or through OOC mechanisms.

At the other end, you've got this guy. Me basically. Who thinks that it's perfectly fine to have coded carrots, but that all of the strings you want attached? All of the RP, negotiations, deals, surgery, debts... whatnot... can happen ICly through the coded way in which it's implemented. And that none of it necessarily needs to be tied to an OOC mechanic (RPP).

The thing that should be stopping twinks from getting it for the sake of twinking isn't RPP. It should be ingrained in the very coded requirements for obtaining it themselves. Prohibitive materials. Ideally (in my opinion) an injury requirement in the first place. Risk of failure and/or stat loss. Risk of death in obtaining the sort of injury one would need to warrant it. Those sort of things. Or some conjunction thereof.

I would not propose an RPP requirement AND a failure-chance at once. I think that was mentioned elsewhere and... that was never my recommendation. However.

All of this requires far more codework than grandpa's suggestion. So, for the purposes of realism, and having a way to attain them IG and still encourage RP through that, without getting mired in waiting on prohibitive amounts of work from a staff that's already got more than enough on its plate?

You can go ahead and count me as being fully behind grandpa's plan as an interim mechanic.


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Bartleby
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Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:23 pm      Reply with quote

wilde wrote:
I have to admit, I'm really failing to understand why people are so opposed to cybernetics acquired IG requiring RPP when this would actually be the only thing to stop twinks from being able to just grind their skills/equipment up enough to get cybernetics, bypassing the usual channels (ie. apping in with staff awarded RPP).


+1

Also...

crayon wrote:
The thing that should be stopping twinks from getting it for the sake of twinking isn't RPP. It should be ingrained in the very coded requirements for obtaining it themselves. Prohibitive materials. Ideally (in my opinion) an injury requirement in the first place. Risk of failure and/or stat loss. Risk of death in obtaining the sort of injury one would need to warrant it. Those sort of things. Or some conjunction thereof.


What? Making something require a bunch of grinding for prohibitive materials and making it risky like I don't know, say, combat, is a way to make twinks not do it? o.O Are we playing the same game?

Not at crayon specifically:

I don't really understand why people are so bothered by the idea that something might require RPP. If you actually roleplay through finding this stuff through the proper channels you can hardly avoid coming out with a couple of RPP in the end. Even if you don't have the RPP when you take the injury, you've got the next two months to focus on RP (which makes sense, if you're so horribly injured that you can't carry on your usual activities [thus requiring cybernetics]), so by the time you've acquired the cybernetics ICly, you'll probably be able to afford them.

I think if you make everything in the game achievable purely through grinding, grinding is all anyone is ever going to do. It's not like we need to encourage people to do that more. At the moment many (most?) are at a loss for what else there is to do because that philosophy of the game is so pervasive.

I've never really argued with the traditional wisdom of making RPP only useable in chargen, but it has two major flaws, which are that a) it encourages PC turnover and b) it means that code effort is rewarded immediately and RP effort is rewarded... eventually... That's a good way to encourage code effort (which honestly, does anyone think in general people are insufficiently interested in putting forth code effort?) and discourage RP effort. I can't, for the life of me, imagine why one would want to do that.

Considering that cybernetics (according to the staff, and I agree) needs an RPP requirement to ensure rarity (and to prevent the coded bonuses [which let's face it, is what 99% of people making one are after] from being abused), I think it's perfectly reasonable to impose that restriction on the code-pursuit of IG cybernetics.

My personal feeling is that if cybernetics can be acquired IG it should be through RP, not mat-and-craft grinding. Keep in mind -- mat-and-craft grinding will never keep anything rare, no matter how rare the mats are.

It will just be a matter of time before everyone has everything that's required, particularly given the Family structure where groups of people are working together to supply one another with materials. Then we can all be cyborgs. Yay. Confused


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I would prefer not to.
Brainwright
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Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:24 pm      Reply with quote

hobos wrote:
That's almost guaranteeing five cyborgs, and at the same time, potentially interfering with a sandbox-style approach to Hyperion. It's more like some forced linear storyline.


What's wrong with five cyborgs? I don't see any problem with it at all. And if it does change the way players play, good for'em. Once they have super-cybernetics, they are a walking marvel of Rust technology. People should expect things from them.

And the method applied to Hyperion at the current time is no method at all. It's a static entity. No sand-box involved in the least.

Anyhow, I wouldn't apply this method to minor cybernetics, but serious superpower-type stuff.


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wilde
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Over Emote-tional

Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:41 pm      Reply with quote

Thanks Bartleby, for so eloquently saying everything I wanted to say, much better than I could have done it.

+1000000000


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crayon
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Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 4:09 pm      Reply with quote

That's a rather eloquently put point, Bartleby, but it also gives rise to the question of how accurate of a measure of RP effort RPP really is, which is better (and has been) discussed (profusely) in (countless) other threads.

Which again reverberates back to my point previously in the other thread, where I said that working with the tools available at present, an RPP-oriented system would probably be ideal, in agreement with grandpa et al.

Personally, I still (to some extent) feel that this requirement would be best met by making the need for a cybersurgery a part of the injury code, so that you can be relatively sure that people are at least satisfying that IG requirement before getting something done. This however is an option that would require likely unfeasible amounts of effort and codework by an already swamped staff, so again, wanting to go with something like RPP in the here and now, the tool in hand, is perfectly reasonable.

Alternatively, using in-game cybernetics as another means by which to effectively use the 'upgrade' command (+1 to one stat, -1 to another) without actually adding any total statpoint benefit may achieve the same function by making it less interesting to twinks unless it revolves around changing RP in the first place? I'm not sure on this and kind of iffy. Just throwing it out there because why not.


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Chazz
Cute and Cuddly Coder



Post Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 4:28 pm      Reply with quote

Honestly, I haven't been following this thread very closely. As a personal feeling/peeve, I've generally hated chargen uses of RPP. Not that everybody does it, but there's always those people who roll in a 1RPP family member who's super hardcore and was the old family head's right hand man, etc etc.

That's not something that should be changed, like I said, just a personal thing I dislike about being able to make a character super badass by simply typing a paragraph background and never actually RPing any of it IG.

So naturally, I lean towards RPP being of use after creation, where RP has already been completed and players had interacted.

Would it be more efficient to implement a failure check, and RPP requirement if the RPP wasn't used/taken until -after- the checks? So say, Billy needs cybernetic surgery. After x amount of time, he gets a surgeon, and they do all that crap. Billy dies during recovery (due to failed checks). He would then keep his RPP that would have otherwise been used had he lived.

I'm just offering that as a potential option. As far as actually implementing it into the current injury code, I'd have to read through those files a bit more closely. I'm not -sure- exactly what you are trying to get at by adding cybersurgery to the injury list. Did you mean moreso as a check/balance system on whether it could feasibly be performed? Because that would be a pretty small and relatively painless task.

Anyhow, I don't really have much of an argument for either side, just sort of a personal opinion. Take it for what it's worth.


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Lost
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 2:10 am      Reply with quote

Quote:
Alternatively, using in-game cybernetics as another means by which to effectively use the 'upgrade' command (+1 to one stat, -1 to another) without actually adding any total statpoint benefit may achieve the same function


I like this idea.


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Octavius
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Consultant

Post Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:02 am      Reply with quote

The traditional arguments are about the integrity of a RPP-based system. It goes like this:
You don't get RPP by roleplaying. You get it by roleplaying, being noticed by the staff, and being positively-received enough by them to receive a subjective award. So, RPP-based systems don't incentivize roleplay, they incentivize pandering to the admins.

That argument doesn't come in to play when players have trust and faith in the integrity of the current admins, but there is always the risk of the argument coming up under future administrations. A number of the players on Atonement carried sharp memories of feeling unappreciated in other games and so sought to form a system that averted these pitfalls.

The base code of Atonement RPI, and thus of Parallel RPI, is significantly modified from the SOI code that it originated from. The SOI code used attributes far more in roll resolution; the code here was re-written to emphasize skills. On the older codebase, it was possible to receive bonuses to attributes by RPP that would forever set you apart from your fellow players in ways that skill gain had trouble equalizing. On Atonement, attributes help, but it is the rise in skill through gameplay that separates the average from the heroic.

This principle, that bonuses/things should be achievable in game, carried into a lot of the modifications here. The Upgrade command was added, which achieves incremental growth over time that can outweigh any RPP change. Policy always said cybernetics would be achievable in game, and theoretically were with staff assistance until code / crafts could be added.

I don't know the Parallel RPI staff stance on this issue. I see high trust in them and no grievances being aired about their awarding of RPP, which is always a good sign. Even so, the game code's minimization of the impact of the staff-awarded RPP helps make eventual grievance (there will always eventually be some) be minimized because it can be overcome in game.

I think the conversation here on incentivizing what you want to reward is paramount.

The system described above, where skill-gain in-game is incentivized, means that we have prioritized skill use over a long period of time as the main behavior. i.e. grinding. If the main concern is that people want to be rewarded for RP as well or instead, there are other proposals that can be used to build those incentives:
* Spendable RPP for skill gain or attribute shift on a current character (i.e. staff-rewarded boosts for IG actions that affected other players in a way that was judged positively)
* Use of paydays to give single-use tokens that grant skill boosts according to role (i.e. reward of longevity without grinding)
* Use of an IG token system that rewards collonizing rest-areas where you can be found for RP. For example, it gives an ooc token in Darkside, Bjorks, etc., and if you don't leave the room for an hour, it converts into a single-use skill-boost token to reward you.
* Established a "downtime skill-gain" code system where you flag a skill and the code assumes you're practicing it when offline so you get incremental bumps over time.

All of this is a tangent to the thread, though, and I'd recommend a moderator take this whole string of posts together to a new thread. Smile


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crayon
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Post Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:59 am      Reply with quote

Octabro wrote:
The traditional arguments are about the integrity of a RPP-based system. It goes like this:
You don't get RPP by roleplaying. You get it by roleplaying, being noticed by the staff, and being positively-received enough by them to receive a subjective award. So, RPP-based systems don't incentivize roleplay, they incentivize pandering to the admins.


This is a sound argument, but not the one I would be looking to make, and not one especially relevant here. I've had zero issues with PRPI staff personally, and don't foresee any issues. However. RPP is more of a measure of longevity than of actual RP. Moreover, there are a large number of skilled RPers that have gone without receiving RPP despite having been playing from the beginning. There are also some people that received RPP carryover from Atonement, and others that did not. All of this makes RPP an exceedingly subjective, arbitrary, and inefficient system that, in the end, seems to have little to do with RP. Besides, is a system that relies on an already exceedingly busy staff watching and noticing RP really something you want to encourage? Again, this is really tangential to this thread, but I figured I would address your post here.

Octabro wrote:
The base code of Atonement RPI, and thus of Parallel RPI, is significantly modified from the SOI code that it originated from. The SOI code used attributes far more in roll resolution; the code here was re-written to emphasize skills. On the older codebase, it was possible to receive bonuses to attributes by RPP that would forever set you apart from your fellow players in ways that skill gain had trouble equalizing. On Atonement, attributes help, but it is the rise in skill through gameplay that separates the average from the heroic.


And the SoI-era attribute increase through RPP has accordingly been replaced with starting skill-boost increases from RPP and reduced rates of skill-gain to make getting significantly higher than the rates that can be obtained out of chargen with RPP ludicrously hard! It sounds kind of like some things never change. Though, it should be noted that I was never around on SoI, and barely around on ARPI. At the same time, as a long-time builder, staffer, RPA, and clanlead across a number of MUDs, I'm not unfamiliar with this sort of situation.

Octabro wrote:
This principle, that bonuses/things should be achievable in game, carried into a lot of the modifications here. The Upgrade command was added, which achieves incremental growth over time that can outweigh any RPP change. Policy always said cybernetics would be achievable in game, and theoretically were with staff assistance until code / crafts could be added.


Upgrade doesn't actually result in any growth, it's just a redistribution of the statpoints you had to begin with. Plus one to one stat at the expense of minus one to another. Not that it's particularly relevant.

Octabro wrote:
I don't know the Parallel RPI staff stance on this issue. I see high trust in them and no grievances being aired about their awarding of RPP, which is always a good sign. Even so, the game code's minimization of the impact of the staff-awarded RPP helps make eventual grievance (there will always eventually be some) be minimized because it can be overcome in game.


Introduction of IG-obtainable cybernetics through an RPP-oriented system rather than a roleplay/necessity/resources -based system as a permanent, long-term feature, rather than an interim feature, far from 'minimizes' the impact of staff-awarded, arbitrary, and subjective RPP. In fact, it takes the impact that already exists in chargen skillboosts, chargen racial/cybernetic statboosts, and adds IG cybernetic statboosts to the array of features supported by the system.

Octabro wrote:
I think the conversation here on incentivizing what you want to reward is paramount.


Amen.

Octabro wrote:
All of this is a tangent to the thread, though, and I'd recommend a moderator take this whole string of posts together to a new thread. Smile


Double-amen. Let's take this line of thought to a separate thread to discuss a long-term plan for reworking a system of rewarding RP while being neither arbitrary, nor subjective, nor yet reliant on staff, or exceedingly code-intensive. Because it's really not fair to derail grandpa's thread proposing something on-the-whole beneficial for the MUD on the grounds of one of the tools that he's really effectively got no choice about using being broken.

There might not be a better answer than RPP, in the end. Every system has flaws. But it's worth exploring and considering, isn't it? I mean. Honestly, if I was staff here, I would be sick to death of trying to figure out who's been a good boy or girl every month.


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Featured artwork used on Parallel RPI given permission for use by original artists macrebisz and merl1ncz.