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Comic Games Are Fun!
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See, I never go through with comic games… not because I will go too OP or anything, but more because I will go too WEIRD and horny. Which is fine, because I don’t have time to dedicate to my current characters, let alone extra time to spend on something new.
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it’s for the best, because ‘weird and horny’ is cape games’ stock in trade.
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@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
it’s for the best, because ‘weird and horny’ is cape games’ stock in trade.
like an even split between like housefraus who have never read anything but YA romance and comics, guys badly pretending to be lesbians w other guys badly pretending to be lesbians, guys with basic “alpha male” power fantasies
and then people who know the lyrics to every Genitorturers song by heart
sometimes a small group of gay guys, which used to bring a buuuuuuunch of fujoshis
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
it’s for the best, because ‘weird and horny’ is cape games’ stock in trade.
like an even split between like housefraus who have never read anything but YA romance and comics, guys badly pretending to be lesbians w other guys badly pretending to be lesbians, guys with basic “alpha male” power fantasies
and then people who know the lyrics to every Genitorturers song by heart
sometimes a small group of gay guys, which used to bring a buuuuuuunch of fujoshis
I just want to play sad boys who can only show their emotions by punching dudes in clown makeup.
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@Popes said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
I just want to play sad boys who can only show their emotions by punching dudes in clown makeup.
Slim-line trousers
Facial powders
Flooding my mind
Be sure there’s no lines
Eye me up now
Pamper me now
Please don’t pass by
Or I shall cryi would honestly love a comic game where i could just
do stuff
like
comic stuff
not just purely social scenes with comic characters
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I’ve played Heroes Assembled off and on since late 2020 or so. My activity on it - as well as every other MU* - has been extremely sporadic; energy and moods are fleeting these days, and have been for years. My initial experiences with the game were, roughly, ‘fine’: I knew a smattering of people there; the game seemed inviting and friendly enough; the theme was absolutely hare-brained and ill-considered in many ways, but I was prepared for that, as I’d seen and briefly played with previous drafts of it on other, more private games that preceded HA.
This brings me to what feels like a necessary detour, and that’s the origin story of the game:
Once upon a time, there was a comic book MUSH named United Heroes. It was absurd in its design and infested with creepy, sex pest admins. Over the course of a few years, there were multiple exoduses of players caused by the actions of these admins. Some months after the first of these - caused by an event in which Prototart and some of her friends were brought into a room where the admins proceeded to ban Prototart for saying rude things about the staff in pages, really awful stuff like ‘ditko sexually harassed a player and i was warning another player’ - maybe a dozen, dozen and a half at most people decided to take a stab at starting their own MU*, having been burned not only by UH but by the little sandbox game they’d migrated to just to keep the connections and play going. Among these players was a person who played Captain America and commonly goes by Halicron.
Halicron had also left during that first exodus, and participated in the sandbox we’d all initially landed at, only as a theme admin. In that capacity, he produced the foundations of what was intended to be a comic book game theme; when the time came, he offered it up as the theme for whatever prospective new game we’d end up producing, and proceeded adding to it. Extensively. Aggressively. Haphazardly; the end result was fairly unwieldy and difficult to grok for the kind of crossover comic book game most people were looking for, and upon being told as much, he ignored the complaints and continued on for a while.
Eventually, this project petered out as Halicron quietly returned to United Heroes. At several points, he attmepted to shop his bespoke theme around to others making games, but found no interested takers… until yet another exodus occurred on United Heroes. This time, it happened because one of the admins initially involved in aiding, abetting, and covering for her sex pest buddies went on to be removed from the admin roster and… sexually harassed, by the staff, who were still the same creeps they had been all along. With a knot of players who were willing to put up with a game notoriously infested by sex pests and creeps forming the admin core and player base, Halicron had a place to install his theme, and so Heroes Assembled was formed.
Whew. Okay. Sorry about that tangent; it brings me neatly to my most recent stint on the game, however.
This time around, rather than bounce off of the game in a depressive haze, I’ve stuck around for the better part of eight months or so-- and while my activity remains somewhat spotty, I made much more of an effort to involve myself in things there, especially in the first few months.
Unfortunately, while I could roughly handle working around the boondoggles that an extensive, yet slapdash theme constructed by a person with passing knowledge of, or even interest in comic book narratives to try and come up with things to do and characters to play, it only took so long before I began to notice that - despite boasting hundreds of approved characters and a dozen scenes a day - there weren’t all that many things for a person to jump into without being a member of one of a handful of select groups. This was both because a majority of the scenes posted to the public scene board were specifically locked to members of specific teams (or, in several cases, just specific individuals), and because the scenes that were leftover tended to social gatherings (which I don’t dig), one shot adventures (of which I did a handful), or obvious TP scenes which… were consistently booked up with the same small subsets of players occupying the groups which dominated the rest of the +scenes board. The nadir of this trend was a months long Justice League Dark TP which briefly spent a spell as an all-comers plot, every scene of which offered 6-7 slots, of which 90% were taken up by some combination of JLD members, their alts, their friends, and people who otherwise were signed up for every other scene in this stretch of the plot. Despite it involving a host of Abrahmic angels descending on Manhattan intent on resetting reality, Dr. Strange was, for some unfathomable reason, not allowed to participate whatsoever for fears that he would somehow break the plot.
Similar to Prototart, I had a handful of friends playing the game who I apped a handful of characters to do things with – and by and large, those players have quit. One of them - @Popes, above - cited his reasons. Another was simply fed up with the lack of interesting RP opportunities to pursue, on top of being barred from apping Two-Face as, well, Two-Face because a player two years ago decided to bring him in as DA Dent, only to drop before ever getting anywhere near having his face scarred up; this was, according to Halicron, because it would be so much more fun and interesting for him to write out another person’s idea of a good story instead of the one he wanted to tell.
Most recently, the player of Superman and the Joker who had been fairly steady there for the entirety of my time made the critical mistake of butting into a conversation on Discord in which a handful of Titans players (including Halicron, who’d taken specific care to center his character Caitlin Fairchild as one of the core members of the group in the game’s backstory) were discussing why Raven and Beast Boy being a couple in the comics was weird, wrong, and downright immoral, owing to its obviously parasitic nature which was occurring for the fifth or so time in the span of a couple weeks. For the sin of wondering aloud why these players seemed so defensive and judgmental about something that was not in any way a factor in their RP and suggesting that it wasn’t particularly appropriate to cast judgments on people for liking an innocuous comic book relationship, he was briefly berated in public, then subjected to DMs from the players of Vorpal (a serial OC obsessed with everything Titans, especially Beast Boy) and Beast Boy, in which he was told to ‘stay in his lane’ and ‘worry about why the Metropolis and Daily Planet spheres are dead before commenting on what other teams talk about amongst themselves, on discord servers which are publicly available to the entire MU*’. Several days later, Superman and the Joker idled out because the player stopped logging in entirely.
All in all, my experience with Heroes Assembled has been that despite being the product of a group of people principled enough to walk out on a game infested with sex monsters when and only when one of their own friends were affected, It is a game in which the quality and transparency of admin communication is inconsistent. It’s a game where the most vocal and visible member of the staff can and will tell players that they should, or cannot play certain characters if he personally believes it to be a bad idea, whether or not those characters violate any rules of the game, have previously been played, and so forth. It’s a game which one admin routinely insists is ‘close’ to comic canon in spite of its actual theme deviating wildly in ways which render it actively confusing and/or frustrating to those who come in expecting recognizability – a feature which would be absolutely fine if not for what is, I think, an entirely innocent misunderstanding rooted in few, if any people present on the game knowing, or even particularly caring about the towering Jenga of thematic nuts and bolts thrown together by Halicron over countless fits of manic inspiration.
It’s United Heroes cast in a Vote Blue No Matter Who liberal image: it says all the right words and makes all the right motions to suggest something of notable quality, but under the pomp and circumstance, it’s mostly a clubhouse for a few in-groups of individuals who sometimes throw scraps of consideration to the teeming masses… and what are they gonna do about it, play at one of the OTHER highly populated comic book games?
It’s the fever dream of a man with more time than talent, more ego than genuine concern for creating an environment for others to enjoy. It is a towering monument to hubris and mediocrity, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that I am not PERSONALLY aware of anyone having been sexually harassed by any of its staff members on THIS SPECIFIC game.
Overall: 4/10
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
i would honestly love a comic game where i could just
do stuff
like
comic stuff
not just purely social scenes with comic characters
One of my biggest criticisms of comic book games in general is tied to this, but I need to digress briefly about what comic book stuff is before I can get into it.
Comic book stories almost always follow a formula. Villain does a thing; hero tries to stop them but fails and gets beaten up or suffers a loss which weighs on their conscience; hero regroups and wins the rematch. Typical three-act structure stuff, with the effectiveness of the structure admittedly questionable given that whichever character we’re talking about has been jogging in place for sixty or more years.
I’ve personally never participated in a scene in which the heroes fail or suffer a loss, or even take a hit. I know such scenes and plots exist because I’ve heard people talk about them, but of the scenes and plots I’ve ever gotten to participate in, every fight is a flawless victory. I infer from this that a lot of the reason people play these games is for the power fantasy; sometimes a literal power fantasy, but as Prototart alluded to, also a lot of times sexual power fantasies, moral power fantasies, or any other fantasy of being able to get what you want without resistance or consequence.
I think that’s what’s stopped me from joining the last couple of games I’ve tried to join. I don’t know if they’re going to be the kinds of games where the heroes just win without sacrifice or stumble, but that’s what I’ve learned to associate with these games, and it’s such a drag.
And what does this have to do with HA? Maybe nothing; but I can’t help wondering what kind of power fantasy would motivate the need to dictate the activity levels and possible scene participation of a character as obscure as Miss Sinister who’s apparently sitting in a freezer room collecting dust because no one gives a shit.
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@GF said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
And what does this have to do with HA?
Just a few days ago, there was a lounge convo in which people were agreeing that, OBVIOUSLY, it is a villain’s job to fail and be beaten by heroes in scenes, with the most generous take being ‘well of course I’ll find a way to let them escape… unless they push their luck!’. Months ago, a pick-up scene with Lara Croft and a couple of mercenary villains looking for pieces of an artifact was minorly derailed by Lara’s player insisting that because she’s ‘the hero’, she would obviously have to be the one to end up with all the pieces in the end.
I can’t speak to HOW representative these attitudes are of a game as large as HA, but given past experiences with superhero games, I cannot - as you allude to - help but think that they are fairly indicative of what people tend to expect.
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Tbh I think HA tends to be worse in that regard than a lot of places I’ve been
but - like, when I first started on MUs there was a comic place where a villain team got punished for doing too much and when somebody said at least they were giving people a reason to leave the lounge, the Wizard who punished them - who legit knew nothing about comics she played like some YA fantasy char - said, I will never forget this, “Well, that’s only because nothing fun has been happening in the lounge lately.” And I was like nine when this happened so it’s been, uhm, an ongoing thing w the genre
So it’s not uniquely weird, it’s just I think something that tends to happen when you get people who don’t really understand comics, don’t like comics (which is WEIRD, but it happens, there’s a wizard on HA who vocally doesn’t like OR understand them and will rant about how stupid they are any time something he doesn’t like comes up no matter how inappropriate a response that is to somebody asking ‘can I do Y?’ is) and/or people who really only like that one very specific power fantasy of winning and being popular and lauded
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I don’t understand why someone who doesn’t like comic books would run a comics game.
It would be like me trying to make a football MU*.
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@Pyrephox said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
I don’t understand why someone who doesn’t like comic books would run a comics game.
It would be like me trying to make a football MU*.
The actual not joking no hyperbole answer is that he kind of likes the movies in that he likes anything that catches his attention for five minutes and he thinks he’s smarter and a better writer than absolutely anyone who has ever written a comic. Hates the genre, doesn’t at all understand the conventions and themes it’s written with. But he has spent like 5 years writing literally hundreds of pages of “timeline” and “theme,” an absolute unworkable trainwreck that at best smashes a bunch of stuff together in ways that makes none of it distinct and meaningful and at worst - which is frequent - just makes changes for the sake of changing things. The New Gods aren’t actually gods, they’re all Eternals. Mr Sinister is actually an Inhuman. Adolf Hitler had a Legion of Doom supervillain team with Apocalypse and Vandal Savage.
The only people who seem to actually like it are him and the Titans, because he wrote them into huge chunks of it. Everyone else ignores it as best they can. Shakespeare, who in theory runs the game, tells people it’s a canon place, which makes me think she has no idea all the shit he’s actually done.
Here is my HA update:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm<* Heroes Assemble Jobs - Job 6406 *>mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Category: CONCERNS Due: 07/05/2022
Title: Are there characters I Status: Pending
should avoid?
Handlers: Helpers:Mary McPherran Opened on Jun 21 01:45AM CDT:
I’ve played four characters here, at the request of four people. Of those four people: one never finished their app, two quit (it’s possible that two never finished and one quit, I’m not 100%,) and one has massively decreased their presence here and let all but one of their characters drop. (As an aside, this shouldn’t be read as me saying it’s her fault I haven’t been active. She’s been dealing with RL stuff; so, too, have I. In the time I’ve had Mary my dad has been in and out of the hospital and ER for surgery and a bunch of gnarly post-op complications and he has another procedure scheduled for next month, so it’s not like I can say I would’ve guaranteed been super active with Mary even if she had been a total hummingbird of invitations and responses to my pokes.) Since I have been told that this is indicative of a problem with my interest level and my trustworthiness, and since concept pitches clearly aren’t sufficient to catch problems, I think I need to ask:%r%rWhat characters should I avoid?%r%rShould I avoid villains?%r%rShould I avoid anyone above a certain power threshold? If so, what is that threshold? There are no power caps, and there are closer to two than to one dozen characters who are omnipotent, so I would appreciate some sort of guideline as to what is and isn’t too powerful. Without guidelines you can only go by things that have been approved, and what’s approved is by far the highest power level I have ever seen on a comic game.%r%rShould I avoid outright anything that hasn’t already been placed on the roster, since I’ve been flatly told that my apps waste time and energy?%r%rI’m cognizant that these questions can be read as sarcastic shit-disturbing, but they really and sincerely aren’t. They’re questions I think I have to ask because I still have friends here. I’d like to do things with them. When I first asked to get Mary, I was told no, and that I should try something out of my comfort zone. But a character who was very outside of my comfort zone in terms of power and motivation, if not my aesthetic, was a hard no after it was a yes. Because I probably will not keep Mary - she was somebody I took for someone, a character I like but am not especially enthused about and I had no success finding someone I trusted to play Creel or Volcana - these are questions I do need to ask. If the actual answer is that you just don’t want me here, that’s an acceptable answer. I’m a grown woman. I don’t need to be somewhere people don’t want me to be.Shakespeare Replied on Jun 21 09:48AM CDT:
Hi Mary. I’m sorry you’ve felt frustrations along the way. Definitely is not our desire that anyone feel that way. Glad that you’re reaching out so we can discuss and hopefully help get to a better spot. And no, you aren’t coming across as sarcastic or trying to disturb things.
I’m not aware of your exact history with apping characters, and the ones I do know I’m not necessarily fully up on details of. So I’ll maybe start general with areas you brought up, to help with getting on the same page. But I don’t know how it might apply to your specifics necessarily.
Questions about villains, and power levels are good ones. Villains are more difficult to play than heroes, without ready group RP at hand, and some are not a good fit for social RP (sociopathic, appearance, etc). Villains can be great characters, but often have to drive their own RP far more than others.
With high powered villains the problems magnify. Lesser heroes being out of their league, shrinks the villain’s potential RP circle. High powered heroes, even, spend a lot of time manufacturing reasons their character can’t act fully because doing so would ruin the story for others.
You touch on a very good topic about character power levels, and I imagine there’s a big difference between perspectives. We get looking at the list and saying, “If Dr Strange why not ______?” But from our end, we focus on the difficulty that players have fitting those characters in. And wanting to avoid general power creep which results in people souring on lower powered characters. But some characters, like Strange, Superman, Wanda, really need to be present to achieve our theme goal of feeling like you’re in the comics or movies.
So on one hand “But that character was let in,” while on the other, some are there for theme reasons, and others there was/is apprehension about having included. Some get their status changed after seeing the result. Like with Lucifer. Comparing to him ends up being a net “the character struggled to work, it was probably the wrong call”. I get seeing he was allowed and saying, why not this one? But in reality it dredges back up that it ended up being a poor call, which doesn’t help when he’s a comparison. I do a lot of handwringing about not wanting to say no, trying to be consistent, but still making the best call for the game. And it’s tough to delineate a clear line.
Ok so general stuff there. But I’ll try to focus back in on what should you do. It’s fine to like playing villains, they can be fun. Focusing on their fit in the game might help. I didn’t see Claudine’s sheet myself, but maybe setting her earlier where she’s only developing her anti-social tendencies, has not yet come into her full abilities, etc, might help. And some of those high powered characters out there have had exactly that done with them.
Also, I’m not sure what was done as far as pitching her. We have a pitch before people start creating characters so something like “she’d work best early in her arc, not full power” can be established up front and the details of exactly what that would look like worked out before time is spent on the sheet. I didn’t spot a pitch job for Claudine, though it might be under a title that isn’t catching my eye. But that’s definitely the first spot to start making sure the concept is ok before proceeding into making them.
Happy to talk more though need to go focus on work again for now.Mary McPherran Replied on Jun 21 10:04AM CDT:
This was my specific experence with Claudine:
https://justpaste.it/460o7
While going from concept approval to total, flat rejection was certainly a surprise, my concern is, understandably, more that someone using a voice clearly and intentionally representing staff as a whole declared that I am not interested, not trustworthy, and that even bothering to work on this would be a waste of time and energy. -
To add to his theme, he had white space aliens civilizing an African tribe as the origin of Wakanda and their technology and did not at all understand why Rena and I immediately said it was racist.
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
To add to his theme, he had white space aliens civilizing an African tribe as the origin of Wakanda and their technology and did not at all understand why Rena and I immediately said it was racist.
Yooooooo
What the what?
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@GF said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
What the what?
In his original stuff, the Kherans from Wildstorm - white, Greco-Roman inspired alien superhumans - brought civilization and technology to Wakanda.
I’d hope that’s not still in there, but he’s got space Genocide and supervillain Hitler and a ton of other insane shit so it wouldn’t shock me.
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@Prototart Yikes.
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@Prototart Yeah, I’d tap out.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
@Prototart Yeah, I’d tap out.
Like I swear to god that if anybody talked to me that way rl they’d get to meet security
But I’m curious if she’s gonna take it seriously as the completely inappropriate behavior it is or, like, just ignore it & hope it goes, cus that’s like hands down the single most out of line shit I’ve received from anybody on a game staff since UH.
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After about 24 hours with no response:
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Please let me know when you’re available to speak.’
Idle message from Shakespeare: Currently idle, please try again later!
Shakespeare (S) pages: I’m in my final day of prepping for a coding interview tomorrow, I won’t be able to deal with much mush stuff until after it’s done.
Shakespeare (S) pages: Reminds me I need to put my idle back up.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘So, I’ll speak to you on the day after tomorrow, then? Or would you prefer I just not, and all this goes away until the next time he explodes on someone?’
Shakespeare (S) pages: I made time yesterday to get a response to you so you weren’t waiting longer to hear anything. I don’t have time now. After my interview tomorrow I’ll look at what you’ve sent and we can discuss it.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Works for me.’so, it’s going great!
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Fun!:
After about 24 hours with no response:
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Please let me know when you’re available to speak.’
Idle message from Shakespeare: Currently idle, please try again later!
Shakespeare (S) pages: I’m in my final day of prepping for a coding interview tomorrow, I won’t be able to deal with much mush stuff until after it’s done.
Shakespeare (S) pages: Reminds me I need to put my idle back up.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘So, I’ll speak to you on the day after tomorrow, then? Or would you prefer I just not, and all this goes away until the next time he explodes on someone?’
Shakespeare (S) pages: I made time yesterday to get a response to you so you weren’t waiting longer to hear anything. I don’t have time now. After my interview tomorrow I’ll look at what you’ve sent and we can discuss it.
You paged Shakespeare with ‘Works for me.’so, it’s going great!
Just to be clear - someone who is literally prepping for a job interview took time out of their job prep to write a fairly extensive response to you (in order that you didn’t wait too long on a response), and is now politely asking you to wait a day more until after said job interview for follow-up, on an issue involving a game that is not really time sensitive as there are no deadlines for you resolving your character issue?
I get that the response from the other staff person was not super professional, and the situation itself is frustrating.
But it sounds like this Shakespeare person went above and beyond at first, and honestly did more than I probably would if I were a staffer at a game and I was worried about something in my professional career.
Isn’t almost every motto “RL comes first” ?
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Glorified internet chat rooms always come last. It’s not remotely time sensitive, I just find that “made time” line frustrating - like, what? That just rubs me the wrong way. Nobody talked to me, I responded to a job and 24 hours later, when there wasn’t a reply, I asked about it.
And honestly, it doesn’t really have much to do with a “character issue.” Like - I spent, maybe three hours on that app? It’s an untaken character I was familiar with, with an aesthetic I like, that I could use to do stuff with my friends in the HFC. Not exactly a passion project. The total lack of consistency across apps is definitely an issue that they need to address, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me - like, if I wanted some batshit insane powerful character there’s Blue Marvel, Exodus, there’s a ton of ultra-powerful characters on their roster I could have got approved in under ten minutes. It’s an issue, but it’s not the issue.
The issue is a staffer using the Royal voice to insult and demean me as a representative of the entire game. And it’s not the first time he’s been wildly inappropriate with me - when I requested the character I have now he told me no, that I needed to go outside my comfort zone and maybe do something with the Titans (uhm, no), and then he immediately went Dark when I told him I was in fact a grown woman capable of making my own decisions. Frankly, that this is someone I was on relatively friendly terms with for a decade makes it even more inexcusable and indefensible than it would be on its own, and it would be entirely inexcusable and indefensible on its own.
It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior with him. Every single complaint I’ve heard someone make about staff on that game has been about Chaucer, both in the colloquial sense of “people complaining” and in the official sense of, people have issued complaints. He’s exploded at guests and players for asking if they could do things from comics he thought were stupid, each time prompting lengthy tirades about why the entire genre - and especially, what that person likes and wants to do - is idiotic. He’s made abrupt pronouncements on what is and is not appropriate for someone to play, and on HOW someone should play (IE, the character I apped could never do anything social - like, The Joker was being played until the Titans harassed him into quitting the entire game). He’s made sweeping changes to played characters without ever bothering to speak to the people playing them, which I know for a fact has led to people dropping them outright.
I don’t particularly give a shit about the character. I wiped all of the character’s traits and had Shakespeare take her off of my Account. It’s, whatever.
What I give a shit about is, is this kind of behavior condoned by the person who in theory runs the game? If I stay there, will I continue to get shit on by someone who’s only interest in being there, dealing with a genre he openly sneers at, usually appears to be writing an ever-expanding timeline everyone but the friends he writes into it ignores (including Shakespeare, who I truly believe has no idea how little in common the game has with Marvel and DC) unless they’re forced to drop a character because he rewrote their entire background to fit into it one day and occasionally making bizarre posts about The Right Way to MUSH or proudly introducing rules for stats the game doesn’t even have? If I try to play another character, will I get another tirade about what a piece of shit I am from someone who repeatedly and without prompting went over Shakespeare’s head to my benefit when he liked me?
That’s the issue.
