Why is Pack closing?

Pavel

Honestly, in no circumstances would I recommend you share anything.

I can only think of one real purpose, given the relative ease of building things with Ares, and that’s archiving.

I’ve often considered setting up a modest archival setup of dbs I have or acquire, just for nostalgia’s sake.

IoleRae

Nope, I wouldn’t recommend that. Even if the initial host of the archive is trustworthy, you have no guarantees that the person who inherits it will be, and splits of that sort of service happen a LOT in our community. There’s way too much PII involved for my comfort levels, and a wiped DB is useless for archival purposes.

Polk

@SpaceKhomeini said in Why is Pack closing?:

“Don’t just let players write theme wiki.”

I agree with this.

I don’t like having a mish-mash of game staff voice, ST voice, and player voice with no way to distinguish.

I get why it happens: it’s cheaper and easier just to set up one Mediawiki and throw absolutely everything on there.

But if you can do otherwise, do it.

Polk

@Snackness said in Why is Pack closing?:

Thirding, from a data safety perpective. Don’t give away any version of the db.

Anonymizing data is hard!

Pavel

@IoleRae said in Why is Pack closing?:

a wiped DB is useless for archival purposes

Depends on what you’re archiving.

sao

FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE

Testament

I’d never give away copy of a DB. I’d give away my theme GDoc files, I’d write out the settings I had used in the creation of my game.

But no way on this green earth would I be willing to give someone who I don’t know access to player’s IP or their logs or pages or anything. There might be two people in this community I’d trust to do that.

Anyone else is an unknown quantity and it’d just be better for them to make their own game.

KarmaBum

@Pavel @Testament Ares has a built-in archival function for essentially everything public-facing. https://gh.texthibitionism.com/ <-- GH archive someone made. It includes all characters, logs, wiki pages. It’s available to anyone who can login to your portal. You just download it as a zip file.

So banning someone nukes their access.

(You both have logins; see what it looks like - https://la2043.aresmush.com/wiki-archive)

Pavel

@KarmaBum Mmm, I do have to keep reminding myself that Ares probably doesn’t do things the way I’d expect from another codebase.

CuriousGamer

@Cobalt Most people have already covered everything for Macha/Mackenzie here. I will only add that I’ve found out that some of my circle of friends knows some of hers, or are in the same circles, etc.

She does have her friends in the community. And for the person that was the intermediary, she likely has more. And they have friends. I’m told she ran Marvel: The 80’s.

There’s also a new game spinning up on ares, harvest moons - it has lycans, witches and such. Some people are checking out this new game - https://harvestmoons.aresmush.com/

There is something out there now of similar genre.

Tez

@CuriousGamer Does it have farming tho?

CuriousGamer

@Tez Probably not in the gameplay, but you could probably be a farmer. It might be less work than an actual harvest moon game.

If it’s a game that has at least 50% less Macha, and good coffee - isn’t that what matters?

KarmaBum

@CuriousGamer at least one of Macha’s buddies is already playing there, so just keep your eyes up

Cobalt

@IoleRae said in Why is Pack closing?:

@KarmaBum

Seconding this. Honestly, in no circumstances would I recommend Cobalt share anything. Given who it is that wants it, no.

You have no responsibility to facilitate her abusing people.

Yeah, I’m 100% not going to give any copy of the database away. As a gamerunner people put their trust in me to keep their person data safe. I do take this very seriously.

I was willing to give my configuration files to people. If folks want the way I had chargen setup. But I’m not sure about even that at this point.

TNP

Back when Empire State Heroes was a thing, Macha was literally in the middle of any drama that happened. If it didn’t involve her directly, she had to jump in and often bitch on MSB. Staff never believed a word she said but she had her defenders and sympathizers. Definitely a very toxic player. and as manipulative as the best (worst) of them.

mietze

I have seen a few “handovers” and every single one has been a shitshow, especially when it involves people who have an entitlement problem that they hide behind “Well i’m just upset over the game closing.” I’m sure there has been successful ones too–but not when the people who contributed to the game closing in the first place are involved I’ll bet.

Roz

@TNP Yeah, she had friends back on XMM a decade ago, too.

But honestly, I think the thing that bugged her the most was that there were just – plenty of people on the game who didn’t want to play with her. I don’t think we ever saw a log from her as awful as the one Cobalt shared, but that’s primarily because of the specific content/subject. She would very regularly try to revise history throughout her RP to make herself appear better, cast others in a bad light, make her PC the victim/wronged party in any given situation, etc. Revisionist history is one of the biggest, most primary issues I associate with her.

By the time we closed XMM all those years ago, she was pretty much the number one person I never wanted to be on a game with again.

IoleRae

@mietze

I took over somebody’s game once when the gamerunner wanted out, having not even played there previously. It went awfully. I didn’t have the emotional investment required to generate the energy to do it. I think the circumstances when handoffs work are…minimal, for many many reasons.

Def do not recommend in any circumstance beyond passing from game lead to game staffer who has already been running the game or at least is a- invested, and b- reasonably prepared for what’s involved.

Meg

This post is deleted!

Scissors

I don’t want to distract everyone from the Macha hate, but @Cobalt when you get back, can you also elaborate on the OTHER Bad Actors? I know you said there were a number of them that you were about to take action on, Macha/Mackenzie was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back.

With The Pack closing, these Bad Actors are going to be fleeing to other games. People need to keep an eye out for more than just Macha.