MU Peeves Thread
-
I’m going to stop using descs and just use ascii art of my PB.
-
I wonder if games would accept a photo of a mashed potato sculpture of my PB?
-
With much of the cancer stuff behind me, except for one lingering surgery that I still need to have, I want to help tell stories. . . but I am not playing anywhere to help tell stories because I haven’t had the energy to play games for the last 6 months. Blargh.
I miss GMing.
-
Really enjoying the new MU I was able to join and start playing again. A very welcoming and enjoyable environment.
But it really sucks that I have to live on async scenes due to my job. Feel like I’m missing every relevant plot thread to get involved in because I can only check in a couple times a day.
It makes me wonder why I got back involved in RPing again. It’s definitely a ‘my life’ kind of issue. But I also just kind of sigh.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
-
Constant unremitting sex jokes just make me so tired.
-
@Snackness do they make you as tired as my penis. budamcha.
-
@Meg No because they keep it up for longer.
-
@Snackness hey, i come and go quickly. that’s what they in the business call efficient.
-
@Snackness said in MU Peeves Thread:
Constant unremitting sex jokes just make me so tired.
It is a rare talent to be able to be horny on main, but also not annoy people with it.
Do I have that talent? I dunno, I try to be tasteful with my lewds, but also probably mess things up trying to be funny.
-
@Testament My inability to enjoy async is the primary reason I’m not playing much of anything outside of in person tabletop groups once or twice a month. I can kind of sympathize with your frustration.
-
speaking out against abusive players is difficult
-
@Artemis and if nothing happens you feel even worse. Been there a few times. But we have to do it.
-
I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.
But.
Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?
she/they
-
@Tez Because VPNs are disposable connections and the icky individual can just swap to another VPN server or use their normal IP to reconnect and start over on a new bit, or claim their old roster bit again and start over.
I’ve been on a few games that tried to deal with that by just wide-banning entire domains and it caused multiple players who weren’t icky at all to suddenly be unable to connect.
I’m all for online privacy, but too much online privacy can protect people with bad intentions. It’s a tenuous balance at best dealing with icky folks while still being respectful of good players’ privacy.
-
@Tez Ick people ruin things for everyone
-
@Snackness said in MU Peeves Thread:
Constant unremitting sex jokes just make me so tired.
Okay, WHO SQUEALED?
j/k I don’t really think anyone said anything specifically on my behalf but someone said something because IT STOPPED!
Thank you, gentle hero.
-
@Snackness i mean, you could be squealing whenever you want, iykwim.
-
@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.
But.
Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?
Probably because MUs don’t collect the browsing infomation you might want to keep private. They don’t collect your credit card number or your social insurance number or your medical records or data about your pr0n-viewing habits.
I have only encountered two reasons for a person to use a VPN to connect to a MU. 1: They have it on for other reasons. 2: They have an ‘illegal’ alt.
Certainly stalking on and across MUs is a thing. But unless it’s an unlikely situation where somebody like Faraday is stalking you, the only stalker a VPN is likely to protect you from is a wiz-level staffer, who probably only has that power on one game. Nobody else is seeing your IP info. “Don’t play MUs where the game-runners are stalking you,” is a pretty obvious rule for protecting yourself, and a VPN isn’t enough in that situation anyway.
Using VPNs to do the stalking, however, can be effective.
I had somebody make a dozen alts to attempt to play with somebody who didn’t want to play with them. This poor player was having a weekly experience of finding out that NewPC was, in fact, AnnoyingPlayer. PoorPlayer would then ask AnnoyingPlayer to leave them alone. Not complying with such a request was a bannable offence. AnnoyingPlayer would abandon NewPC and make a new alt, EvenNewerPC, and pounce on PoorPlayer.
I made registering alts mandatory, and regularly looked for matching IPs. People using VPNs would regularly forget to turn them on, so yeah, I could see that a PC was logged on from Davenport, Iowa, and then again from Anchorage, Alaska, less than two hours later, and knew that the set of alts associated with those two IPs were probably all the same person. So, I’d ask them to register their alts and they’d either do it, quit the game on their own, or get banned for being bad at lying to me. Easy-peasey.
I felt hesistant about this because of the idea that ‘alt privacy’ is and should be a thing, but it didn’t take me long to feel confident it was a good choice. SO much, so very much, fuckery simply disappeared when the players themselves could spot stalkery shit, and conflict-of-interest shit, and cheaty shit. The game was empowered to police itself. And it allowed players more freedom – I could allow people to have alts in potential-conflict-of-interest situations and trust that they wouldn’t cheat in that way. Because if they did, it’d be obvious to everyone.
-
I know I connect to places through a VPN from time to time, but only really when I’m out of the house and checking in from public Wi-Fi or doing something else that requires a VPN. Using a VPN just to connect to a MU seems needlessly expensive.
-
We had a player who was using VPN to break our alt rules.
I’ve encountered players elseMU who have used VPNs to shield their identity when connecting to a game to violate non-contacts.
I’ve also had players that use a VPN because having it active is the best way to preserve their connection. Or because they are connecting from a work computer (I always recommend against that for any number of reasons, but what people want to do is their own thing).
I have a number of IT friends who run OpenVPN on their router at home. One is a crazy paranoid nutjob, another uses multiple devices to watch things in a buccaneer style.
VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.
We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.
The short answer, like with anything else - running a game is hard.
