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Liberation Drama!?
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Getting this shit L I V E
============================= LiberationMUSH: OOC ============================
Message: 4/42 Author: Gwendolyn Sat Jan 4 2025
State of the Game? 17:44:05Happy New Year, all. Welcome to 2025. I hope it goes well for everyone.
In the spirit of fresh starts, I wanted to ask if there could be an update on the state of Liberation? We all know the game has been basically frozen from the top down for a while now. Many of us genuinely sympathize that RL can happen and take us away from our beloved hobbies.
But it’s been a long time now. Confusion has grown into concern and that concern is now turning into unrest. I know several players who have already left and several more who are looking to leave. Not because they don’t like this game or the people in it, but because we’ve been left in the dark for so long with no clue if the game is abandoned, on hiatus, rebooting, coming back…anything.
Some official word from on high would do wonders to help answer the questions that have been floating around since this past summer. I hope everything is okay…but I suspect it isn’t, and my heart goes out to anyone who is suffering hard times right now.
We don’t need personal details, either. Simply the answer to this burning question: “Is Liberation going to reopen to activity anytime soon?”
Then, swiftly after
[Public] Siren says, “Hello folks. I was the one who removed Gwendolyn’s post from the +bb board. While I understand where she was coming from, and empathize with (and adore) her as a player, I didn’t think it was going to lead to a particularly productive discussion. It also minimizes the work that myself, Reverie, Wormwood, and Ceres – as well as all of you players – have been doing to keep things moving and fun around here. Though I do know that she was not alone in her sentiment of a feeling of slowness lately. I’ll refer to Sundance’s post (1/47) about the slow moving jobs until the New Year, which we have only just turned the corner on. Thanks everyone for continuing to stay positive, and have fun on this game we all adore.”
This might get real spicy.
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Is Liberation the one where all plots have to come top down? And there’s only predetermined characters allowed in every sphere?
Yeah, I’m not surprised that place has basically become deadlocked and slowly dying. That sort of top-down play went out in the 90s because it’s completely unworkable in MU*.
I am surprised it lasted this long, though.
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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.’
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We do have a long-running Liberation post over here, for reference.
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@STD said in Liberation Drama!?:
Is Liberation the one where all plots have to come top down? And there’s only predetermined characters allowed in every sphere?
Not entirely, re: plots, but in the practical, seems so.
Not sure what you mean about characters. They’re not pre-made characters, nor is there any sort of list of specific concepts that are the only ones allowed.
That sort of top-down play went out in the 90s because it’s completely unworkable in MU*.
Over here at the hyperbolic cynic’s bench:
The current state of WoD MUs is somebody who wasn’t playing in the '90s running a game in a very '90s sort of way, as an attempt to solve problems they had with what they think of as ‘traditional’ WoD games. The problem is that the ‘tradition’ was once an innovation to solve the problems created by the methods they’ve reinvented to solve the problems they see with the ‘tradition.’
@Warma-Sheen I am pretty sure everyone there knows that everyone there is going a bit nuts about just what the post says. I don’t think taking it down is at all the thing to do, but I had a very different style.
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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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This post is deleted! -
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 dad has cancer, so she’s awol. 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.
