Liberation MUSH
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Just want to lend my voice to those saying this isn’t surprising. For as many times that Polk’s behavior was made into public spectacle, or brought up to Sundance privately; there are probably twice as many incidents where people just decided to avoid him as best they could, not wanting to get dragged into exactly this sort of drama. So no matter what sort of gas lighting now goes on; or what sorts of apologies are made later (whether they are by Polk, on Polk’s behalf, or by someone to Polk to smooth things over) none of you are crazy for thinking this is bad behavior.
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I agree with Pacha, Sundance’s overarching theme has been putting drama from other games aside and it fostered a solid game for a long time. That Polk can’t even operate within an environment of blanket amnesty for past drama is on Polk, and literally no one else.
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Lol I mean. It’s not Sundance’s fault that Polk is an ass, but a person does bear some responsibility for who they give power on their game.
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I thought about this some more, and the whole idea that anyone other than Sundance had that level of control over the technical infrastructure of the game and wasn’t considered staff just seems ridiculous.
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@MisterBoring said in Liberation MUSH:
I thought about this some more, and the idea that anyone other than Sundance had that level of control over the technical infrastructure of the game and wasn’t considered staff just seems ridiculous.
I think the move to ask him to step down from a staff role and lose access prompted the meltdown and shutdown or whatever action Polk took.
If I’m reading the situation right, that is.
I don’t think it’s been said what prompted the desire to make that happen and what made him act in the manner he did instead of just stepping back and taking a beat to process how to move forward without causing all the chaos.
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He was staff - he ran WtA, but has never read any of the books and players complained until he was removed. He offered to take over Mage, then boosted a couple of players while ignoring everyone else, and players complained and… he got removed… and then he was sorta vaguely background staff, running his ‘PC’ (the father or son or something of his previous PC, whose entire purpose was to get revenge for that PC’s death) like it was a staff bit by gaslighting and lying to people.
And eventually I guess he was asked to fully step down and transfer control.
But the instigating event of his hissy fit was him being asked to step down from staff. So he definitely was staff.
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Didn’t Sundance make a whole scene about the game not having staff though?
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No?
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@MisterBoring No. It has staff. It just doesn’t have a lot of staff. Whereas most games this size would have dozens of people on staff, there is only a handful.
Reality is, yes, it could use more, but Sun likes to keep the narrative and it’s easier to do with a few hand-picked people.
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There was a lot of back and forth on the old MSB thread about who counted as “staff,” and the idea that Sundance didn’t consider “Directors” to be staff exactly, etc. It was mostly about semantics, tbh.
she/her | playlist
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@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
It was mostly about semantics, tbh.
We never have arguments about semantics.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@Pavel said in Liberation MUSH:
@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:
It was mostly about semantics, tbh.
We never have arguments about semantics.
I feel like NEVER is doing a lot of HEAVY LIFTING THERE, maybe more like ALMOST never, or RARELY, or–
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I wouldn’t use the phrase “arguing semantics,” I think it’s more “debating definitions” –
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I mean are we talking connotation or denotation here?
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While we’re on the topic of semantics let me move some goalposts in such a way as I hope you don’t notice and set up some straw men for later.
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Game is back up.
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Hello folks! As Alamias has said, we are back up! It happened much faster than I thought this morning. Folks are beginning to connect in.
5.161.78.92:2020
This may be temporary, and we might need to shut down for a short time to migrate, but for now, you can hop on in.
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LiberationMUSH: Announcements
Message: 1/30 Author: Sundance Thu Oct 12 2023
We’re Back 17:42:21Hey everyone,
I’m sure all of you realize now that we had some difficulties. And since you were all impacted by it, you all deserve answers. A big question I’ve been getting is how someone like Polk was able to bring the game down. And the truth is that while I knew he could bring the wiki down, I did not think he could bring the game itself down until right towards the end. So how did we get here?
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In the greater sense of things, I am wholly responsible. The buck stops with me. I had opportunities to deal with him before. I didn’t. Why? That’s what I’m going to do my best to answer:
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Polk was here from the very beginning. And while other members of the team often had life events or professional responsibilities and live in different timezones, he was pretty much available 24/7. There was a mad scramble in the beginning, with different members of the team (myself, Ambrosia and Phantasmvore) responsible for different things. I focused mainly on the player-side. Phan got the website, Ambrosia did the coding, etc. At some point in the process, Polk took on responsibility for the wiki and website maintenance. He did a few clever things. He coded a way for the game to interact with the wiki, so accounts there could be activated or deactivated from here, and he coded a web login thing for the directors to manage +jobs from afar. He wouldn’t have been kept around as long he was, without bringing something to the table.
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He generally behaved himself OOCly. No one is perfect, but we all know how this hobby goes. Surprisingly, there were only a small handful of complaints about him over the years, and he was very remorseful each time. Plenty of people here get into fights with fellow players, who then express remorse and we all move on. There was never anything serious, until just two months ago. And those specific complaints (which had more to do with him in his capacity as a player, along with several others) were unfounded. It’s true his social IQ issues made this more difficult than it ought to have.
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Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people. His only official responsibilities here recently, has been the wiki and website maintenance.
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As far as I was aware, Polk was only paying to host the wiki and website. I let him do this, since he put up a bunch’ve referral links on the site (directing to DriveThruRPG - which I didn’t even know about at first, although I asked him to make sure everyone knew they were referral links when I found out). He assured me that they were only going towards server expenses. That, combined with not wanting to give my personal information (since he was the webmaster), was enough for me to leave it alone. I had many other responsibilities here. I assumed if there were any other significant costs, I’d be informed.
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It did annoy me, when I learned recently he was bragging about ‘keeping the lights on’. I told him to not say things like that. And he apologized to me for giving that impression. Since he’s not the one that ‘keeps the lights on’ here. The people that keep the lights on here are you guys. The players who make it worthwhile for the rest of us to tell you stories. Your positivity and your creativity, are worth vastly more than the teeny-tiny amount of money required to run a server. Your time, patience and involvement is infinitely more valuable.
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I could have done more to look into all this, and consolidate more information. It was my responsibility to double check and make absolutely sure. The rest of the team depended on me to be thorough. Ambrosia and Phantasmvore did some truly heroic work to get us back up and running again. And I could have saved them a lot of trouble by dealing with Polk earlier.
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This isn’t completely out of the blue. There’s been conversations about unwinding his involvement here behind the scenes for a while now. I could have forced it last week. Instead, it ended up happening while Ambrosia was asleep half a world away. Again, I’m grateful to her for saving the day, for the umpteenth time. As I’ve told many of you I would not be doing this without her.
Where do we go from here? The domain will be back up as normal in a few hours so even those who don’t know the IP can still log back in. Hopefully the website and wiki by this weekend. It’s going to make us all double down on our commitment to getting things fully back on track here. And Polk will never be involved with this game, or any project of ours ever again. I hope at some point in his life he finds peace, because he burnt a lot of bridges with a lot of people, who did their best to help him.
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Please excuse me entirely ignoring the point to grumble “that’s ‘bunch of’”
But anyway, good for y’all getting your game back.
