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This kind of mobbing behaviour where a couple of people choose a victim to isolate and corral a bunch of flying monkeys to harrass them (because they “deserve it”) is such a classic move in this hobby that I could name a few players off the top of my head.
I think I’m safe though, because WoD isn’t something I play in.
@Evilgrayson said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
Having watched them kill a game in that fashion and gain more friends and more enablers in so doing, I joined a freshly-opened game and created a Garou there in a brand new sphere. A week or two ago a new pack joined - the only pack - with characters that were rewrites of the werewolf and vampire player’s oWoD wolves in it. I battened down the hatches and waited for the attacks to start, because my character was an obvious target and I expected they knew he was my character. Two nights ago, the attacks began, and over the course of the day after I realised what the whole pattern was and where I’d seen it before.
Me on a newish opened game where a big werewolf pack just joined in the past week or two:
@bear_necessities said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
o continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single locatio
Why wasn’t this person banned? I mean, instead of catering to someone, just ban them. Sounds like a lot of this could be avoided with liberal usage of the banhammer.
The two of them were both early alpha players on the game and one of them ended up on staff. Like EvilGrayson said, there are a lot of good things about these players. They’re friendly, they’re engaging, they write well, they’re helpful. I wouldn’t have fallen for it otherwise. It’s only once they get a modicum of influence or control that this behavior comes out–just like VASpider.
I repeatedly warned the gamerunner that the Ares community is pretty collaborative, so it wouldn’t look great for them if it got around that they were letting people very publicly dunk on another game and their staff, that it might cause problems if they ever wanted help, but like…
They only seemed to take me seriously after I left and warned them that these two were swiftly turning Song of Blood into ‘Shang with Plot’, which I’m sure would honestly be a very popular game! But it also seemed like it wasn’t what the gamerunner was going for re: game culture, and by then I think it was too late.
@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
o continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single locatio
Why wasn’t this person banned? I mean, instead of catering to someone, just ban them. Sounds like a lot of this could be avoided with liberal usage of the banhammer.
So I’ve been on the games that EvilGrayson is referring to in regards to this players, which means I’ve witnessed their behavior, I know who they are, and I can vouch for all of it and more.
Why?
Because I’m embarrassed to say that I was stupid enough to fall for it for a little while.
I saw these people utterly smear someone in what I believed to be a just campaign against a sex pest who was getting away with it, because said pest was (perceived to be) female and their target was (perceived to be) male, only to watch them turn around and cozy up to that player IC and OOC on the next game. Initially, I was happy to see them do it not only because I was one of the recipients of the pest’s weirdness, but because the pest’s primary target was a character with far less social standing by the theme of the game and would’ve had a very hard time pushing back. I later realized that they weren’t trying to use their standing to help someone who had less influence then they did. They were relishing making a public display of their own influence to people they were trying to impress at the time and anything that vaguely resembled taking a stance was little more than virtue-signaling, something to be discarded as soon as it was inconvenient.
I have personally asked one of these players to stop accosting me for TS because it was making me uncomfortable, an act I felt obligated to apologize to them for if I somehow misled them, only to have them respond by telling me that they were so proud of me for setting a boundary and then promptly make a “joke” about how I can’t control what goes on in their head and they’d continue imagining us in IC threesomes. I played this off as something funny to minimize my discomfort in the moment, a tactic that anyone who has been harassed or abused will be familiar with as way to end the encounter as quickly as possible. Every woman who’s ever been harassed on the street or in a bar knows exactly what I’m talking about.
I watched these people out staff alts without their knowledge or consent and, while most of these alts don’t seem to be a particular secret on the game in question, they also weren’t public. The entire point of providing this list? Proving how many staff characters they were connected to and even romantically involved with as a means of not only influencing the sphere IC, but the game OOC. As someone who supported corporate executives for more than a decade, I can only describe this as the digital equivalent of standing in front of a shelf lined with pictures of shaking powerful people’s hands. It’s not subtle and it’s not supposed to be.
I listened to complaint after complaint from one of these players about an entire sphere on the game, all centered on how the entire playerbase was not only toxic, but specifically homophobic and ableist. While I won’t deny that are problematic players and behaviors in that area of the game, I later found out the majority of the people they were naming and shaming were actually their former TS partners, who they were now turning against for committing crimes as egregious as distancing themselves from the player, setting up boundaries, or–and this is my personal favorite–paying more attention to their other partners in a scene that was specifically about celebrating said other partner. As someone who is both non-binary and neurodivergent, I find this one particularly repugnant. There is a vast difference between ‘people being prejudiced’ and ‘facing the consequences of repeatedly being an asshole’, despite this player’s insistence that any animosity they faced was purely them being victimized and never the result of inappropriate behavior.
There’s a laundry list of other issues that I can point to, from spilling character secrets about people from one game in open spaces on another, to repeatedly claiming that no less than three people were obsessed with them in alarmingly direct parallels to Regina George, to continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single location. It is, frankly, somehow the most spectacularly insidious yet overwhelming set of behaviors that I’ve seen since VASpider and DownWithOPP. Worse yet, they now seem to be expanding out of WoD MU*s and into the world of Ares, where I expect them to only continue behavior I’ve now seen them engaged in on three different games. If you’re a game admin and you’re concerned? Reach out. I’ll provide the details that I can.
What do you do when the present echoes back to nightmares of days long gone? What can you do, except ring the alarm bells and hope that someone can recognise a subtle sort of danger?
Hi, Brand MU Day. My handle is EvilGrayson. Many of you have encountered me over the years; I’ve rarely been shy about who I am and who I’ve been, and I’ve been on this board and its predecessors back to around 2000. I’ve seen any amount of shit go down in that time, and while I might not be much good at dealing with people in RL, I am a professional when it comes to spotting patterns. And yesterday I was able to put a name to a pattern that had been slowly revealing itself for months.
One of the people I’ve been - the one most relevant to this particular topic, at least - was Judge Dredd, Shifter staff and then Wizard on Denver: Dark Destiny by Night. Or was it Dark Destiny: Denver by Night. I don’t know, it’s a long time ago and it was a very silly name even back then.
Denver died a long time ago, in large part because of the actions of two specific people and those who enabled them - and because those of us who should have stopped it didn’t have anything specific to apply the hammer for.
VASpider and Seanan McGuire would lure people into friendship by offering great RP and an in to the in crowd, while making it very clear to the rest of their spheres that there was an in crowd and they weren’t in it (but if they were good enough, they could be!). But. There was always at least one target - someone who’d drawn their attention, and had to be removed at all costs. They’d spin up rumours IC and OOC, take things in the worst possible lights, and turn their followers on them as well. And then when one was gone, another person was declared anathema, and forced off the game through similar tactics. It was subtle and it was vicious and outside their cadre it wasn’t really noticeable until you were the target - and one of them was staff, which meant they had a much easier time of covering it up and excusing it. And if that target happened to be someone who had been part of the in crowd, it was even more vicious as all their friends turned on them for no apparent reason.
How does this bear on now? After staffing for the death of Arx burnt me out for months, I finally felt up to RP again. I created a new character on an oWoD game, a sidekick for an OOC friend I’d made on Arx - a ghoul, called Grayson. If you know me you know I play archetypes, and I was easing back into RP so who else would I play? So. Said ghoul encountered a werewolf, a great RPer and friendly sort of player who promptly decided this ghoul was the best thing since sliced Bane - but the werewolf wanted the ghoul all for himself. When the werewolf tried to get between Grayson and his domitor I started getting suspicious. When they tried to isolate me from my domitor’s player OOC as well, I was annoyed. When they tried to isolate my domitor’s player and character from his whole coterie, I was upset. When I started setting boundaries and disentangling my character from the werewolf, everything changed. And when the first time the werewolf’s new vampire alt met Grayson it was with a vicious and entirely unwarranted insult, only just stopping short of the r-word, I was angry. And through it all, the werewolf’s player’s partner was playing a senior vampire of a different faction, and making life harder as well. Overall I was left feeling that I didn’t particularly want to be anywhere that either of them were, and as soon as that became clear I dropped a note to staff that I was distinctly uncomfortable.
Soon after that, I and a few others were invited to a closed beta for a new game. Song of Blood was being started up by a player from that first oWoD game, and they’d invited a few core people to help them get the game up and running. Among those were the two problem players. The vampire player ended up in a position of power IC and with one of her allies in a staff position, and half the playerbase were her associates and reinforced her every whim - which just so happened to align with the werewolf player’s, who was in this case playing her ghoul. My OOC friend from the first oWoD game was made to feel entirely unwelcome and effectively driven off before chargen, and the game swiftly became the vampire player show. I ended up retiring my character because I’d seen the problem but had neither the energy nor the position to do anything about it, and on my way out I laid out for the head wizard the nature of a problem that they’d seen but not truly understood until it was too late. After that conversation, it seems that the head wizard vanished on that game and on the oWoD game, and Song of Blood - and possibly that staffer’s entire MU* career - appears to have ended. I hope that’s not the case, but it’s another loss to lay at their door.
While Song of Blood was active and my OOC friend was still in chargen, the problem players were discussing the oWoD game on the Public channel, including comments and complaints about staff there - and bragging about friendship and contacts, knowledge of alts and oversharing of private details, just to reinforce their connections and their power. My OOC friend and I - and the head wizard on Song of Blood - repeatedly told them that this wasn’t okay and they needed to stop, but they carried on regardless. We know all sorts of details about IC relationships on the oWoD game that we didn’t want to learn, all because they wanted to persuade the undecided to join their growing powerbase and be brought along as the vampire and whichever alt the werewolf’s player was on this week rose to power. This also served as notice to my OOC friend that their character was utterly powerless against them. That character has barely gone out in public since.
Having watched them kill a game in that fashion and gain more friends and more enablers in so doing, I joined a freshly-opened game and created a Garou there in a brand new sphere. A week or two ago a new pack joined - the only pack - with characters that were rewrites of the werewolf and vampire player’s oWoD wolves in it. I battened down the hatches and waited for the attacks to start, because my character was an obvious target and I expected they knew he was my character. Two nights ago, the attacks began, and over the course of the day after I realised what the whole pattern was and where I’d seen it before.
If you’ve never heard of VASpider and Seanan McGuire, they were notorious in days gone by. Their tactics involved being brilliant players and seeming trustworthy, friendly and outgoing, and obvious candidates for power IC and OOC. However, the only people permitted in their orbit were those who enabled them. They thought I was one of their enablers, although I wasn’t - much as the werewolf thought I was one of his enablers, although I wasn’t. VASpider invited me to their private MU*, and I still didn’t see what they and Seanan were really doing until Denver was in its last throes and it was too late to save it.
Why am I bringing up all this? Because it’s way too late for Denver and it’s too late for Song of Blood, but it’s not too late for the games these problem players are on now - and because the community needs to know this shit is going on again in new (and slightly less subtle) form. I lost my game to the very behaviours I’m seeing in these problem players; gathering a group of enablers to persuade everyone this is fine while they remove their target’s desire to log in or even play MU* again? That’s not normal and it’s not right and it needs to be stopped, pronto. The enablers are usually too caught up in a storm of charisma and lovebombing to notice; I wasn’t caught by it, but that’s because I saw this shit done by the best decades ago and didn’t quite fall for it then either.
I’ve spent more than 25 years playing on and staffing MU*s. I think of the game before myself - and I feel duty-bound to bring all this to the attention of the community. And perhaps the worst of it is that I don’t believe that their intent is to bring harm to the game, but in reality their intent doesn’t matter. Their actions - and the results of those actions - are absolutely detrimental to any game that allows them.
There is a pattern, and that pattern kills games, all without treading over any of the usual firm lines that lead to a banhammer. I don’t want to see more games die to the same old patterns. But I’m also being very nonspecific right now, because I don’t want to kick off one of the witch-hunts of old either, or get my arse banned from here in what would be a first time for a MU* forum ban in all my long existence in this hobby. If staff want to check the identity of someone they’re welcome to do so by DM, or if the admins here grant permission I’ll be able to share more then. In the meantime, stay safe and look after each other.
In sorrow, I am
EvilGrayson, once known as Judge Dredd of Denver
deleted. more research, he’s an asshole.
… You could have all the names meaning something to do with impermanence: TransitoryFruitBat, HarkingVagrant, GoogleProject.
@Redbird Awesome to see you! I enjoyed your creepy and gross (in the best of ways) infected (I think that’s the right term?) mortal!
I was Seven the pyrokinetic mortal!
@Jax I mean, there WERE some very fine JexCo Products to be had.
