Liberation Drama!?
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@Warma-Sheen said in Liberation Drama!?:
It doesn’t really sound like drama so much as same ol’, same ol’ gripes that a lot of players have on games.
The only thing that adds fuel to the fire is the fact that they just ripped the post down like they had a secret to hide.
Nothing says ‘don’t let all the people in the secret sandbox learn that there are others with the exact same complaints’ like suddenly removing a player’s post on a public board and then announcing ‘Nothing to see here, folks.’
So the thing is, staff didn’t just “rip the post down like they had a secret to hide.”
They did take the post down–including announcing that they were taking it down, why they were taking it down, and having a conversation on Public with multiple players. That convo involved them directly fielding some complaints about the content of the post itself and their decision to take it down and was handled with what was, in my opinion, a lot more grace than I’ve seen most staffers have in the face of public criticism, regardless of whether or not that criticism was justified.
Frankly, I understand why Gwendolyn made that post. I’ve expressed some of those same frustrations myself–privately, including to people who took them to staff. You know what happened when a staffer heard I was upset? I got a pretty quick response reaching out to me to help with the things they could and acknowledging the things they couldn’t. I understand why some people might be frustrated by the post being taken down, but I also don’t agree. Sundance has been very public about being absent from the game. She made a post back in early October that she was dealing with a lot of stuff IRL that was pulling her away and would be back some time after the holidays. Considering that it’s January 4, that was all of… three days ago?
It sucks. I’m not going to deny that it sucks. But we were warned this was happening, I’ve been having some of the best RP that I’ve had in literal years over the last few months even with the slump, I saw staff running multiple scenes in two different spheres just last week (and no, I wasn’t involved in any of them, so it’s not like some vague notion of preferential treatment is skewing my opinion here), I can hop on grid and catch a scene most of the time that I want to, and I’ve yet to run into a staffer that wasn’t willing to help wherever they could.
I do hope the last few months seriously makes them consider spreading some decision making out a little more and adding additional staff to minimize future bottlenecks, but I don’t think anyone should be running around shrieking that the game is dying just yet.
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Maybe this is just the context blindness of someone who isn’t on this game, but aren’t they talking past each other?
The initial complaint claims that leadership has effectively been in long term radio silence and the game has been “basically frozen”. The question is if the game is in hiatus and if there’s plans to bring it back.
But in the removal explanation they don’t seem to acknowledge this, rather pretending it was a complaint about “slowness” and implying that in fact there has been a lot of activity.
I don’t know which of these viewpoints is more accurate, but if the game is open and active wouldn’t it have been better to just say that?
“Hey! Despite [extenuating factors], we are actually not on hiatus. X, Y and I are running the game and here’s a list of plots you can get involved in right now!”
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I haven’t played there in well over a year, but the word is Sun’s awol For Reasons. The sweep it under and talk past is pretty typical - no one wants to actually give any sort of answer to anyone, while making themselves feel real good about cherry picking who they staff for (Siren, in this case).
The real, deeper problem is the steady cycle of putting in a request for something, staff saying ‘sit on this for a minute’, letting the job sit for the better part of a year - even if you poke it - then sweeping in and doing mass job closings.
Then when the plot takes a bad twist for the sphere, telling you that you should have done more, and staff tried… when you were told to wait. By staff.
It’s been swanning 'round the drain for a while. But everyone is silenced with threats of ban, character loss, etc, to keep them from sharing too much with others. And the silence is crippling in it’s own way.
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@Taika It seems like Sun has made effort not to tell the game what’s happening, so maybe you want to edit that? I certainly hope people don’t bring it up with her, given that.
And, yeah. Whatever the reason, jobs don’t get vetted for timeline.
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I mean I understand the complaint and where it’s coming from, but I’ve been the one left holding the bag for someone else’s RL emergency, and it sucks.
Whatever you do is wrong. Whatever you say is wrong. You aren’t enough and you can’t be enough, because what’s needed is the one whose bag this is and you’re just hanging onto it right now.
And it’s their RL, so you either turn into someone unreasonable, or you accept that RL comes first and this sucks.
And in the meantime, when someone puts a post up like this, it’s just pure demoralisation. There’s only one person who can answer these questions and - for whatever reason - they aren’t in the conversation right now.
Sure, the post may be accurate and it may be on point and it may be whatever, but it doesn’t help. And it won’t help. And it can’t help. All it can do is get people talking around in circles about their grievances, while also making the people who’ve been left with the bag feel like shit.
Congrats, I guess?
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@Evilgrayson said in Liberation Drama!?:
There’s only one person who can answer these questions
And there’s the problem.
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did do they put babash yarger in this game yet or
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Great game when it was great. One of the best IMO, but Sundance stretched herself too thin. She’s quiet quit for well over a year now, and without others to make decisions, things sort of fell apart.
I had a few bad interactions with Sundance, many in my group also did and most left because of several things that sucked –
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Unkillable NPCs/unwinnable plots – these took the wind out of everyone’s sails, and make the game feel like a novel. Granted they were great NPCs with great plots. But in this medium sometimes you gotta let that stuff go when there’s player fatigue. A prince that never actually held court but no one could question this? A Sabbat Ductus who was able to kill players freely but couldn’t be defeated? An ancient and racist evil character that even bringing up in RP could get you ganked? Yeah no, that stuff isn’t too fun.
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Uneven decisions – This was more part of Sun not being available IRL; in the beginning, she’d go through backgrounds with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that things fit the game’s narrative. Later, random and conflicting things were approved. When confronted with these mistakes, it tended to be a gaslight type of response. Sun was very rigid in her decision making, often at the expense of players over her carefully crafted plot.
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Slow jobs – I’m not talking one month, I’m talking 6 months no response and sudden closures; full year open jobs with no answer or explanation as to why they aren’t getting answered, plots with no resolution, and more. Just overall not the best in terms of actually playing the game.
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Entrenched cliques – this isn’t something that’s directly Sundance’s fault, but I do feel that it’s the job of a game owner to at least try and break these up a bit and foster crossplay. That said, Sun had her own clique which also happened to be part of the unkillable bloc, so good luck attempting to do anything plot-wise that involved those NPCs.
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Power imbalances – WOD games don’t put people on equal playing ground, this is true of all WOD games. But approving some players with 300-500 XP and others with 50 with no regard to how much effort or activity they bring to their sphere always felt like a kick in the teeth to people that Sun didn’t like. What was felt and what was true are two different things though, and it was likely more of a ‘too long didn’t read and I’ve got shit to do IRL’ kind of thing, though this doesn’t explain the XP differentials.
There were some really great things about the game too, like awesome plot, great writers, and truly a large amount of nice players that were fun to be around. One of the things that Sun was best at was conflict resolution between players, and I truly loved the way she set up the MUSH in terms of job privacy and overall OOC masquerade.
Even with all the negatives, I think the good outweighs the bad. If and when she gets her RL resolved I’d love to see her write up a new game or refresh the setting with a plot that was a bit more malleable and collaborative, learning from the mistakes she made the first go. I would absolutely play it, doubly so because truly a lot of these issues stemmed from Sundance just not being able to give the game the amount of attention it needed the first time. But she would definitely need to delegate way, way more. Running a game of so many people just isn’t feasible with one person. On top of this, she’d need to distance herself and her own RP from the plots, and be willing to let players win sometimes and enact some changes to the setting with their RP or else things will return to the same static problem.
I WISH I had a game to play like Liberation was at it’s best. But it’s just not there at the moment. I hope that changes, and if anyone can do things justice, even with everything that happened there, I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort.
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@Cygnus said in Liberation Drama!?:
I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort
How can this be your conclusion after all of the things you just said?
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@Pavel I’ve seen the game at its best, and it was really great. The question is whether or not Sundance will actually do better or not; I believe she has the capacity for that, but can’t currently recommend the game. I further explained my reasoning for this in the OP -->
@Cygnus said in Liberation Drama!?:
Even with all the negatives, I think the good outweighs the bad. If and when she gets her RL resolved I’d love to see her write up a new game or refresh the setting with a plot that was a bit more malleable and collaborative, learning from the mistakes she made the first go. I would absolutely play it, doubly so because truly a lot of these issues stemmed from Sundance just not being able to give the game the amount of attention it needed the first time. But she would definitely need to delegate way, way more. Running a game of so many people just isn’t feasible with one person. On top of this, she’d need to distance herself and her own RP from the plots, and be willing to let players win sometimes and enact some changes to the setting with their RP or else things will return to the same static problem.
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@Cygnus It honestly sounds as if Sundance needs to hand the keys over to someone(s) else. It seems as if her decisions, and her apparent subsequent burnout (or whatever caused the departure) are at fault for every complaint you have. I’m not going to make any kind of judgement call as to whether her decisions were the right ones or not. It’s not my circus and certainly not my The Monkees, but if she consistently makes decisions that have outcomes you don’t like, then expecting her to change isn’t really sensible.
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@Pavel said in Liberation Drama!?:
@Cygnus said in Liberation Drama!?:
I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort
How can this be your conclusion after all of the things you just said?
This is just a repackaged request/plea/wish that Sundance come back at her previously level of engagement, done in a way as though she might do so if only she realized the effects that her absence as had.
As if she doesn’t know.
If she wanted to come back and do her thing and was able to, she would. She either can’t or won’t. It is what it is.
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@Warma-Sheen I do like the idea that she’s some sort of tempestuous deity: “Fuck the pleas of people on my game… Let’s take a look at that forum full of fuck-asses that I don’t like and see what they say.”
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I know that I shouldn’t be but I’m still always kind of ??? when someone can list all the things they don’t like about how a person ran a game and then be like but if they could just do it better I could play there again.
It’s hard as hell to put these games together and run them, IDK.
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@tsar I imagine that there’s a bit of sunk cost involved, if not outright “I’ve played this for so long that it’s basically be come part of my ritual/routine/life that is difficult to replicate.”
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@Warma-Sheen When the alternatives for WOD MU*'s are such slop, it’s hard not to want to return to the glory days of Liberation. But it’s definitely not a plea, I don’t think Sundance reads or cares about what is said here. It’s just commentary
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@Pavel You’ve got a good point there.
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