Numetal/Retromux
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@Wyrmsign But yeah, go off about my CHARACTER being an asshole IC, which you are using as a justification of the continuous harassment and lies about me the PLAYER. Ignore the super secret discord where staffers go to talk shit to their favorites, the favoritism, and the unyielding platforming of an abusive player that all happened OOC. That’s all fine because my character didn’t want to play nice, I suppose.
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@Cygnus No but I will go off about you continuing to try and deflect away from the point: You behaved badly when you didn’t get what you wanted. And now there are cookies waiting for me, and I am out of fucks to give for one day.
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@Wyrmsign said in Numetal/Retromux:
You behaved badly when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Show receipts like I did. I’ll wait.
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@dvoraen The problem is everyone here is sorta right, at least a little bit, from what I’ve seen of Vamp staff over there. There’s just a whole torrent of sewage around any decent points being made that it’s hardly worth looking into it.
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Is it normal to view unpleasant, controversial or “dumb” in-character behaviour this negatively? If a character causes trouble, is that considered subversive to the community or even rude? Is disruption and conflict not the bread and butter of telling stories together?
I’m seeing why this character might have been a problem to other characters, but I guess I don’t see why that means the OOC actor was a problem. Seems like a lot of bleed.
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@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:
Is disruption and conflict not the bread and butter of telling stories together?
Yes and no. If all your character does is cause trouble and act like an unpleasant dumbass, that’s boring. Which is honestly the worst kind of thing a character can be.
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@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:
Is it normal to view unpleasant, controversial or “dumb” in-character behaviour this negatively? If a character causes trouble, is that considered subversive to the community or even rude? Is disruption and conflict not the bread and butter of telling stories together?
I’m seeing why this character might have been a problem to other characters, but I guess I don’t see why that means the OOC actor was a problem. Seems like a lot of bleed.
There’s an issue, particularly with themes that have behavioral expectations that should be commonly understood among characters, where someone who plays a character who is relentless in breaking those expectations (especially in big, public events that are typically used to create touchbases for the IC group and convey plot) becomes disruptive and unpleasant no matter how pleasant the person is OOC.
Because everyone is forced to stop doing the things they came to the game to do and deal with this character’s bullshit. Once, that can be an interesting change of pace - a character having a genuine dispute or hard moment pushing against expectations of conformity. But when someone does it every single time, and particularly when it’s the same character every single time, it becomes clear that the player just desperately craves being the center of attention and holding the rest of the game effectively hostage until they’re satisfied. Or until they receive those “IC consequences” they usually claim to crave, only to then shift their temper tantrums to how they didn’t expect the consequences, the consequences aren’t fair, how no one understands their deep and complex character, and how if someone had just taken the time to understand the character everything would have been so good, how none of this is their fault, and usually some parting shots about ‘snowflakes’ and ‘roll players not role players’ before they go sulking off into the wilderness…or make a new character to try and pull the same shit again.
It’s just something that a whole lot of MU* players have seen over and over and over again. So as soon as someone says, “Oh, I’m playing a difficult character,” or “I’m playing a character who will spark a lot of RP for others,” there’s sort of a full-body shudder and a lot of us think not this bullshit again.
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@Pyrephox IT’S WHAT MY CHARACTER WOULD DO!!1
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I think my favorite part about all of this is how this person’s character couldn’t be a Mary Sue because he’s a MAN WRITTEN BY A MAN!!! or something. IDK, this is all ridiculous.
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@Pyrephox said in Numetal/Retromux:
So as soon as someone says, “Oh, I’m playing a difficult character,” or “I’m playing a character who will spark a lot of RP for others,” there’s sort of a full-body shudder and a lot of us think not this bullshit again.
It’s an immediate source of bleed for a lot of people even without any actual RP, especially the difficult character thing. The sparks RP people are probably 30/30/40 in my experience with the first 30 percent representing characters that actually do spark a lot of enjoyable RP for others, the second 30 percent being people who say that about their characters and then nothing happens at all, while the 40 percent are characters that basically create RP that nobody enjoys other than themselves, which I believe this Vincent that @Cygnus created falls into.
That said, from all of the stuff said over the past few days, it feels like the staff that were directly involved in the situation mishandled it so badly they basically had no choice but to pull the character because they missed all the chances to work with the players to repair the situation while that was still a possibility.
The staff also seems to have mishandled a situation with a harasser because the target of the harassment was another player that had built up a lot of bad blood (whether intentional or not). One player’s bad situation does not validate another’s bad actions.
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@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
That said, from all of the stuff said over the past few days, it feels like the staff that were directly involved in the situation mishandled it so badly they basically had no choice but to pull the character because they missed all the chances to work with the players to repair the situation while that was still a possibility.
Honestly, it’s the kind of character that should’ve had some intense scrutiny during the approvals process. “It’s a character who sits between two groups who usually actively murder each other on sight? Let’s poke at it a bit more and get the measure of this person before we allow it.” It’s the same, or similar enough, as making a character designed to be a spy on the faction they’re in – I just straight up wouldn’t allow it, and neither would most games I’ve played on lately.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
Honestly, it’s the kind of character that should’ve had some intense scrutiny during the approvals process.
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Dude can we just appreciate how mans is trying to slowly create an Abomination out of scotch tape and silly putty but it’s not a Gary Stu
An abomination not as in my opinion but as in the official term for what you get when you make a werewolf a vampire
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@Pyrephox said in Numetal/Retromux:
But when someone does it every single time
For what it’s worth, I didn’t have these issues nearly as much with the Werewolves. They were actually way more accepting of the situation, Niall (Eddie’s alt) and Pika (A mage alt with spirit or whatever who was similarly unique) not withstanding. While Pika would whisper massassa or something at me, and Niall would do his general OOC/IC harassment, you know who was coolest? The full moon auspice shifters, bear shifter, and surprisingly, the viking wolf dudes who generally seemed to be killers in general. Had great RP with them and lots of the shifters.
I distinctly remember a super awesome and frankly emotional scene I had with the Sept leader where she cleansed me in the lake and accepted me, which was the first acceptance of my character on the game. Bringing people to the Garnet Spring that I trusted was awesome. Sparring with the Ventrue Primogen in the basement of the mansion was badass. Any one-on-one scene I had with Gangrel were likewise awesome.
The ‘bad scenes’ in question were generally Court, where the cool girls club would rally together and do their best to make me feel unwelcome and talk shit and expect no pushback whatsoever. It got so bad that eventually, I just started taking wolf form and literally saying nothing in court. But I’m sure those scenes where I had zero interaction are still on the list of how every scene I did I was ‘disruptive’.
My character was not always a jerk at all. I just didn’t bend to expectations, and made no apologies for who or what I was. THAT is what made people mad more than anything, and those reactions weren’t entirely in my control. For instance, how is a Tremere and Brujah Primogen (Eddie) demanding my blood for tests during the very first scene–and saying if I don’t, I’m not in ‘their’ Camarilla–my fault? Of course I said hell no. These people were immediately and violently confrontational and exclusionary.
But you know how it is. Do things that some people don’t like IC, and they say everything I did and the very fiber of my being of my character and me as a player is bad and should be harassed, I guess.
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@LeeRoyBatty Literally who cares? What, do I need to play the same Toreador that’s been apped a thousand times, with an occult bookstore or a bar, who just social RPs all the time about nothing? I play games like this for interesting and unique stories.
By these terms, any character who isn’t a cookie cutter app is a Gary Stu. I didn’t self insert a self-dealized version of myself into this shit, which is my understanding of a Gary Stu/Mary Sue. Generally those are like romance authors who make main characters that are sad, lonely authors who also know kung fu without training, but just want a man/woman to love them, or whatever.
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@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:
Is it normal to view unpleasant, controversial or “dumb” in-character behaviour this negatively? If a character causes trouble, is that considered subversive to the community or even rude? Is disruption and conflict not the bread and butter of telling stories together?
I’m seeing why this character might have been a problem to other characters, but I guess I don’t see why that means the OOC actor was a problem. Seems like a lot of bleed.
It was an immense amount of bleed. I’ve never seen it so bad at any other game, and I’ve played or staffed at most if not all of the big WoD MU*s over the years. It was bad enough that this game made at least 5 of the people I RPed with on that game quit MUSHing for good. RetroMUX is filled with people who think they can decide how you should RP, with whom you should RP, and staffers who don’t do anything when this sort of browbeating continuously happens.
Not to mention, if you spoke up about the bad behavior of staff, god forbid, you’d get instantly site-banned. Like what happened to the person who was outed as trans by Chaos. For those who say it didn’t happen, I’m sure he even mentioned it to me in pages, not just in the super secret shit talking discord they had. ‘Oh, by the way, this character who is female is played by a guy and I don’t like them, so don’t listen to their complaints’ is what I remember.
It’s not normal, it was an inordinate amount of abuse and toxicity, and in my view, people like Wyrmsign here are blowing how bad I was -way- out of proportion. I still fail to see how me sitting in court as a wolf for the majority of Courts, standing by the door looking angry, and walking out when it was done, is somehow so extremely disruptive.
