Concordia Thread

[Pavel]

@Tez said in Concordia Thread:

@Coin I agree, so far as it is possible, to provide what you can – not just for the player, but also for other players, to help define the game’s culture and clarify it for current players as well.

And so that any players seeing that in someone else know that if they report it, it will be backed up.

I’d add that it also demonstrates that staff will clearly communicate things, if they do so.

Whenever we banned people here, even if it was obvious to everyone, we made an effort to explain why they were banned; not because we necessarily wanted to, but because we needed to retain trust.

[Tez]

@bored It’s a big reason I prefer a flexible, meritocracy approach to most game leadership positions rather than who makes it first. Obviously this can be very challenging in a game based on bloodlines and inheritance. For some reason.

I do like the flat-structure approach that they appeared to be taking in most respects, though: opt-in, no leadership in player orgs, IC house leadership being NPC. But I think the fact that there is a notation of people being ‘Founders’ of various organizations is a problem. Also, houses are foundational to the setting. Someone might not be a part of an org, but everyone has a house and a family. Having a named heir and making such a strong thematic point about that being a big scandal if it ever changes is–

I dunno. It just seems against some of the ideas that they are working on elsewhere. They really do seem to be trying to execute a vision where players are at equal seating, they just aren’t all the way there yet.

I will add one more thing: I think Arx did it wrong when they had a billion player organizations. I hope that staff keeps a closer eye on player organizations. We don’t need 6 charities or 3 courtier organizations or whatever. I think the game has already put stronger limits in place than Arx had with how many people need to be involved to create an org, but by introducing the idea of founding members, it is Very Easy to imagine that down the line people will want to be Founding Members of their Very Own Charity. (Or whatever.)

[Anhedonia]

@bear_necessities

Yeah honestly I don’t think any of the player run organizations have accomplished anything other than create themselves. Being a member of an organization, or its “founder” (see: someone who took initiative and asked to do something), has given no one a competitive advantage. People expressed an interest in creating something and staff thought it was neat, so they let it ride. Game has been out what, two weeks? And a lot of the foundation is still being written. Nothing is permanent in an alpha. System’s malleable.

@Tez

agree, player organization bloat trivializes their purpose.

[Polk]

I’d say there’s a mile of difference between letting players run things, and letting players invent entire institutions out of whole cloth, because they want to be superfriends and team up across IC societal lines.

I have no idea if that is or was happening on Concordia, but “Let’s work together, friends!” is a MUSH player impulse.

[Testament]

@bored said in Concordia Thread:

(So, we gonna discuss Levente also being banned?)

I will admit, I did think it odd that Percival was given a forum post of their banning, but Levente was just shuffled onto the Gone list.

Not gonna sit here and jump to conclusions on it, but it was strange, especially maybe it wasn’t even a ban, just really odd timing. For all we know, the player just put in a request and said they were bailing.

big shrug

[Pavel]

@Anhedonia said in Concordia Thread:

People expressed an interest in creating something and staff thought it was neat, so they let it ride.

My only advice would be to take a cue from Arx’s organisations - let no one player be the sole authority, if they’re to be allowed authority in the first place. The last thing you need is an organisation throttled to a halt by one person’s overwhelm or absence.

[Roz]

@Pavel said in Concordia Thread:

@Anhedonia said in Concordia Thread:

People expressed an interest in creating something and staff thought it was neat, so they let it ride.

My only advice would be to take a cue from Arx’s organisations - let no one player be the sole authority, if they’re to be allowed authority in the first place. The last thing you need is an organisation throttled to a halt by one person’s overwhelm or absence.

My only advice would be to take a cue from Arx’s organisations - let no one player be the sole authority, if they’re to be allowed authority in the first place. The last thing you need is an organisation throttled to a halt by one person’s overwhelm or absence. don’t do them

[Pavel]

@Roz Well yes, obviously. But the horse has already bolted, unless they want to hit the undo button.

[Rucket]

@bored Was Levente banned? I only saw the bbpost about Percival and before that the only other person I know that was banned was Katerina’s first player. I had no idea what happened to Levente.

I guess I assumed they quit because the other 2 people that were banned had bbposts made about them.

[mietze]

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

I won’t be surprised if there’s passive or purposeful resistance on behalf of players for awhile at the idea that no, you actually do not get to lord (ha ha) anything over another person when it comes to organizations or even to some degree in families. PC orgs don’t have staff leadership but it’s clear they’ll come down hard on people who try to step over the line even a little bit with the exclusionary ooc behavior. And while there are PC heirs–they’re just that. While lore says it’s usually a disgrace for them to be passed over, it’s not always the case, and I kind of hope that PCs don’t test that too by behaving badly thinking that staff won’t come down hard on an heir player oocly gatekeeping, because i’m pretty sure that they will. i’m sure at some point someone will probably try? For whatever reason, it’s really really really hard for certain folks to feel secure in the position that they feel that they have in a game without gatekeeping.

[somasatori]

@mietze All I want to do in the scholar group is soliloquy about the price of linen in Eldervale, blink owlishly, eat hot chip, and be an awkward bookworm.

[Rucket]

@somasatori Sir, there’s a trade org in the works for discussing the price of linen and such.

But no, I get it and I do like they are limiting people to 2. Since I recall seeing quite a few people respond to every post that went up.

[bored]

@Rucket I don’t know what happened to Levente. I logged in to 10+ notifications about all my messages with him deleted/purged and Percival banned. Someone mentioned a post by Percival but maybe it’s been deleted by now? So maybe he quit as part of the banning incident, but it feels not-coincidental.

Also re: group ‘founders’ I think that’s part of t he rub, and why I would prefer a more thematically-coherent approach. What if someone takes a 50 year old scholar off the roster 6 months from now? ‘Sorry, bud, you weren’t really involved in the scholar world like those plucky 18 year old pillars of wisdom who founded our community!’ It’s just weird.

[Tez]

@bored said in Concordia Thread:

‘Sorry, bud, you weren’t really involved in the scholar world like those plucky 18 year old pillars of wisdom who founded our community!’ It’s just weird.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from L&L games, it’s that plucky 18 year olds can do anything.

[hellfrog]

@Tez said in Concordia Thread:

@Faraday said in Concordia Thread:

That said, I disagree that on top of game-runners’ already overwhelming duties we need to add “help misguided people to better themselves”. If they wish to do that, great. I applaud them. But they should not be expected to do so. Some of the most toxic people in this community will cry “I’m just misunderstood / I did nothing wrong” till the cows come home, so telling the difference between a serial predator and someone who doesn’t know better can be super tough. I don’t fault anyone for just drawing the line at “you’re not a good fit for this game.”

Big this. The last time I banned someone, it was probably something that they could have worked on and corrected, but damn if I have the bandwidth for that. I’m sorry, buddy. I just do not. I hope you grow and learn. Elsewhere.

man every time, Apos said this. But like, when you are staff there are six billion things awaiting your time and energy that are to the benefit of the people playing your game who are NOT being troublesome. Choosing to spend that time and energy ‘training’ someone is not the best use of it

[Rinel]

@Polk said in Concordia Thread:

I have no idea if that is or was happening on Concordia, but “Let’s work together, friends!” is a MUSH player impulse.

well

it’s called Concordia

“let’s work together, friends” is actually one of the more sensible actions to be taken given the setting (not unlike Arx, which generally did a pretty fantastic job of having people put aside important differences in the face of existential threats)

[Pavel]

@Rinel said in Concordia Thread:

not unlike Arx, which generally did a pretty fantastic job of having people put aside important differences in the face of existential threats

Which is not at all unlike real life. All the railing against ‘superfriends’ seems to conveniently forget that all kinds of disparate groups of people unite against a common/existential threat all the time.

[somasatori]

@hellfrog said in Concordia Thread:

@Tez said in Concordia Thread:

@Faraday said in Concordia Thread:

That said, I disagree that on top of game-runners’ already overwhelming duties we need to add “help misguided people to better themselves”. If they wish to do that, great. I applaud them. But they should not be expected to do so. Some of the most toxic people in this community will cry “I’m just misunderstood / I did nothing wrong” till the cows come home, so telling the difference between a serial predator and someone who doesn’t know better can be super tough. I don’t fault anyone for just drawing the line at “you’re not a good fit for this game.”

Big this. The last time I banned someone, it was probably something that they could have worked on and corrected, but damn if I have the bandwidth for that. I’m sorry, buddy. I just do not. I hope you grow and learn. Elsewhere.

man every time, Apos said this. But like, when you are staff there are six billion things awaiting your time and energy that are to the benefit of the people playing your game who are NOT being troublesome. Choosing to spend that time and energy ‘training’ someone is not the best use of it

sounds like it’s time to

KILL SIX BILLION THINGS AWAITING YOUR TIME AND ENERGY

But yeah, hellfrog has good advice here. Training rarely works. Take it from me, I thought I trained people on a game I ran (or at least I talked them through how to be good and ethical to players). I thought I could trust some people. I was very misguided in some people in whom I placed trust. People will usually tell you exactly what you need to know about them. Often it is best to just see people where they are and let them go. You’re not their therapist; you can’t make them see the consequences of their actions in a meaningful way if they choose not to engage with that themselves. Maybe they’ll grow from the experience, maybe they won’t. You present the facts of why they are no longer allowed there and then it’s up to them to internalize it or rail against it.

[Faraday]

@hellfrog said in Concordia Thread:

But like, when you are staff there are six billion things awaiting your time and energy that are to the benefit of the people playing your game who are NOT being troublesome. Choosing to spend that time and energy ‘training’ someone is not the best use of it

Yeah. And also - if the person is being that much of a disruption, what happens to the rest of the game if your ‘training’ doesn’t work? (Spoken from the bitter experience of a person who thought that a player could be guided, but ultimately had to ban them anyway.)

@Coin said in Concordia Thread:

I’m saying it’s best practices, and it’s worth striving towards those.

I don’t disagree that in most cases it’s good practice. I was responding to what I saw as absolutism in various posts (not necessarily yours - I’m too lazy to look them up now) about players being “entitled” to that information or staff having some kind of moral imperative to try to rehabilitate people before banning them.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in Concordia Thread:

staff having some kind of moral imperative to try to rehabilitate people before banning them

From what I understand of the original utterance of this point, it wasn’t so much that staff had to rehabilitate or train people, but that supplying some information during the ban (like a reason, or general gist of complaints) would better enable good-faith players to correct behaviour they hadn’t otherwise realised that a) they were doing, or b) was wrong.

ETA: And I’d say, personally (since morality can only ever be personal) it would be a moral imperative to communicate that information if it can be done with the safety of others in mind, where it would be reasonable to assume that the behaviour was inadvertent or from a good-faith player.