MU Peeves Thread

[Cobalt]

@mietze God, I saw this so much on xWoD games. It felt like every time I had someone as an admin to my sphere who wasn’t already a friend of mine that was male I had to fight with them one everything. Back on TR there was a staffer who literally quit working in spheres if there was a female spherewiz. I was out right told once “blah won’t work with you because you’re female, and he doesn’t work under females”.

I get that staffing for MU is a volunteer gig and not the same, but image saying that to your manager in an RL work place?

[Cobalt]

@Wizz said in MU Peeves Thread:

Common peeve but I kinda wish there was a paradigm shift and live scenes stopped being such a focus on most games. I just can’t do three hour blocks anymore, for a lot of reasons, and it’s hard not to feel like I’m somehow being rude when people ask for them on channels and I can’t jump in.

Meanwhile, my peeve is when I do carve out time to do a “live action” scene and people take an hour to pose. I don’t have a lot of time and my attention span isn’t great anymore.

I’m 100% ok with async or slow pace scenes.

But if I’m trying to actively storytell and there is a person who its their time to pose and the last person hasn’t posed in half an hour I start to think about all the other shit I could be doing and start to get antsy.

[Wizz]

@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:

I was out right told once “blah won’t work with you because you’re female, and he doesn’t work under females”.

What a dick, I’m sorry.

[Polk]

@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:

@mietze God, I saw this so much on xWoD games. It felt like every time I had someone as an admin to my sphere who wasn’t already a friend of mine that was male I had to fight with them one everything. Back on TR there was a staffer who literally quit working in spheres if there was a female spherewiz. I was out right told once “blah won’t work with you because you’re female, and he doesn’t work under females”.

I get that staffing for MU is a volunteer gig and not the same, but image saying that to your manager in an RL work place?

Sheesh. If someone like that were on a game I ran, I’d excuse that person from playing on the game entirely.

Straight To Jail.gif

If you can’t be respectful to women in authority, then I don’t trust you to be respectful of women as peer players or STing you, either.

[Snackness]

At this point, I’ll play at whatever pace someone wants to play.

[tsar]

I left my job of many years for a much better job but holy shit am I tired all of the time now. I just want to not be tired. I want to feel like I’m not scraping the bottom of the barrel for my creativity. I want to feel like I’m not falling into the FOMO pit.

I know it’s temporary and that by September I’ll probably be in a good groove and things won’t be as draining, but GD. I have so few hobbies and this is one of them, lol.

[Cobalt]

@Polk Back in The Reach times people weren’t as willing to call others out on their bullshit. Or maybe it was just he was someone’s friend? idk.

I much prefer the games we have these days, where shit like this doesn’t fly anymore.

[Faraday]

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

I feel like games have to do more expectation management about this with players and I’m not sure what the best way to do that is. Beyond clearly stating whether real-time or async play is the norm/what’s done by GMs in staff scenes, but it takes a while to internalize that even if people read it.

I don’t really see why this is on the games or game-runners.

Players just need to communicate. If you like live, quick scenes - say so. Find like-minded players on the game. If there aren’t any, that’s probably not the right game for you.

It’s no different than people liking different kinds of RP. If the majority of players on a particular game like big bar scenes and I prefer one-on-one, that’s not a problem with the game - let alone the game server.

Async RP on MUSHes has existed for as long as MUSHes have; it just wasn’t as visible because it was happening in Google docs, across livejournal posts, emails, etc.

[Dreampipe]

I just don’t know what to do anymore. That’s pretty much the whole peeve.

[Nala]

@Faraday said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

I feel like games have to do more expectation management about this with players and I’m not sure what the best way to do that is. Beyond clearly stating whether real-time or async play is the norm/what’s done by GMs in staff scenes, but it takes a while to internalize that even if people read it.

I don’t really see why this is on the games or game-runners.

I feel like this can be directly influenced by the game runners. There was a game I was playing on that, at the start, had a good mix of live vs async scenes. However the vast majority of the “plot” style scenes by the staff were async. This was fine at first, but over time live players stopped logging on and the game slowly became more async focused.

I don’t think it was intentional and it looked to me like staff was trying to support both styles. It just became a case where if you wanted plot, asyncs were largely where it was at, and if you didn’t do async, it felt like you were missing out.

I do agree the majority of players on a game tend to define the style of scenes available, but I think there are ways game runners can make their intentions felt in a way that can influence where the majority ends up at.

[Faraday]

@Nala Sure. But what you describe is no different from game-runners only running plots for a single faction, or only running plots involving political RP, or only running plots on a different timezone. There’s nothing magically different about async RP - it’s just another axis of preference that people need to align on if they want to play together. Staff certainly can influence this, but generally plot scenes are only a small fraction of total RP on the game.

[Testament]

@Faraday The only influence I ever put in on how I’d like scenes to go for the players is during scenes that I would run as a GM. Would almost exclusively be live and on grid. And I still got pushback for live scenes being exclusionary because not all players that wanted to be there could. I came to conclusion, quite quickly mind, that no matter the format that a scene is run on, someone is going to be left out, my attempts at juggling everyone’s schedules be damned.

As for everything else? The players are adults who know their own preferences and do their scenes as is their wont.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Testament That. You can’t accommodate everyone, it’s simply not possible. You can try to accommodate as many as possible or a specific segment. You’ll need superhuman staff to get them -all-.

[Polk]

@Testament Yup, you can’t please everyone, and it’s a bad idea to try.

[RightMeow]

@tsar
This has been me this whole year. I quit my toxic job of many years and it’s like all the pent up tiredness and emotional stuff and mental toxic drain has finally hit me this year and wiped my creativity.

I have full faith you will get yours back and write stories you enjoy and we all enjoy interacting with.

Also, congrats on the job.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

I feel like games have to do more expectation management about this with players and I’m not sure what the best way to do that is. Beyond clearly stating whether real-time or async play is the norm/what’s done by GMs in staff scenes, but it takes a while to internalize that even if people read it.

I don’t really see why this is on the games or game-runners.

Players just need to communicate. If you like live, quick scenes - say so. Find like-minded players on the game. If there aren’t any, that’s probably not the right game for you.

It’s no different than people liking different kinds of RP. If the majority of players on a particular game like big bar scenes and I prefer one-on-one, that’s not a problem with the game - let alone the game server.

Definitely not a problem with the game! I think what @Third-Eye was talking about wasn’t so much forcing the game to be the right one for everyone, but helping to establish what a game considers its own culture and default expectations. Not to exclude everything else, but to help manage communal expectations around “hey what’s the overall norm around this particular game,” because if you know the baseline expectations of a community, it makes individual communication around those expectations easier and smoother. Because, from various experiences over the years, sometimes people are defining even the same words differently, and it’s not necessarily things people would expect to need to clarify. So I do think having baseline default expectations for a game can be helpful and beneficial.

And, tbh, it seems moreso like something that benefits staff, rather than labor they’re doing just for the playerbase. If you have a staff who largely want to RP async, you’re gonna want a culture that supports it, and vice versa. I definitely see live scenes and async scenes on pretty much every game, but the ratios can vary widely based on that particular game’s culture.

[Faraday]

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

but the ratios can vary widely based on that particular game’s culture.

We just see it differently is all.

I think the ratios vary wildly based on the individual preferences of the individual players.

As a game runner, I might say “I mostly run plots on evenings EST.” Or “if you don’t play a pilot or a marine you’re going to have a hard time working yourself into the big action scenes I run.” Or “big events are mostly live/synchronous because I don’t want to drag them out.” I don’t personally see any of that as the “culture” of a game. It’s just logistics.

The game could be enjoyed equally well by a handful of like-minded players who meet up for synchronous RP on Euro time, or a handful of like-minded players who start their own hospital drama in the medbay, or a handful of like-minded players who do asynch scenes stretching over a week, or a couple of like-minded players who just show up for their small group interpersonal drama.

The key in all of that being “a handful of like-minded players.”

[Roz]

@Faraday said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

but the ratios can vary widely based on that particular game’s culture.

We just see it differently is all.

I think the ratios vary wildly based on the individual preferences of the individual players.

The preferences of the individual players dictates what games they stick around. Like you said earlier, if a game most largely tends to have one type of scene pacing, those who prefer others will tend to move on, as it’s not the game for them. The players who stick around on a game define the game’s culture with their preferences.

So it can behoove a game runner to cultivate the overall culture they want to encourage in their game.

[Faraday]

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

So it can behoove a game runner to cultivate the overall culture they want to encourage in their game.

I think we’re mostly on the same page and just splitting hairs over wording.

If a game is mostly run in EST and you’re in Euro time, it’s going to be hard for you to find RP and that’s probably not the right game for you. I personally don’t consider that the “culture” of the game. Mostly because it could change on a dime if just a couple of Euro players turn up and suddenly it’s easier to find RP.

That said, I understand your point, and apart from quibbles over terminology I largely agree.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

So it can behoove a game runner to cultivate the overall culture they want to encourage in their game.

I think we’re mostly on the same page and just splitting hairs over wording.

If a game is mostly run in EST and you’re in Euro time, it’s going to be hard for you to find RP and that’s probably not the right game for you. I personally don’t consider that the “culture” of the game. Mostly because it could change on a dime if just a couple of Euro players turn up and suddenly it’s easier to find RP.

That said, I understand your point, and apart from quibbles over terminology I largely agree.

Wouldn’t be a forum conversation without quibbling over semantics!