MU Peeves Thread
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@MisterBoring it’s always about specific incidents. People just don’t own up to them because they don’t want the scrutiny - for a variety of reasons, I’m sure.
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@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@MisterBoring it’s always about specific incidents. People just don’t own up to them because they don’t want the scrutiny - for a variety of reasons, I’m sure.
The conversation started about a specific incident, sure. But we do veer into talking about vague generalities pretty quick around here. Informed by years of actual situations, sure, but that’s literally the same as every other conversation.
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@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@MisterBoring it’s always about specific incidents. People just don’t own up to them because they don’t want the scrutiny - for a variety of reasons, I’m sure.
All patterns are made up of specific incidents, but we can still talk about patterns.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@MisterBoring it’s always about specific incidents. People just don’t own up to them because they don’t want the scrutiny - for a variety of reasons, I’m sure.
All patterns are made up of specific incidents, but we can still talk about patterns.
I’m just a pile of patterns and anticipatory statistics in a waistcoat pretending to be a human.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@Gashlycrumb we sure could
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MUSH Staffing in current year
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Real question: What is staff overworked with in most games?
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@xCroaker From my personal experience both as a staffer and as a player witnessing things:
- Answering questions that are already covered in the game’s documentation. I have been on plenty of games that have excellent documentation both on their wiki and in the game, yet people will still constantly ask questions that have already been answered elsewhere.
- The subgroup of players that exist across all MUs that I refer to as “The Job Mill”. These players will generate more jobs than the entire rest of a game’s players combined, in some extreme cases multiple jobs a day. They are few, and usually just very invested in the game they are playing, but holy cow can some of them clog up a job queue. The frustrating thing is they’re almost always not malicious about this. It’s just what they do to show love to a game. And holy crap is it frustrating. Even more so when large amounts of these jobs require scenes and NPC support. (And now that I think about it, this could almost be it’s own topic.)
- Continuing to work on build / code stuff. A lot of games start allowing players onto them well before their grid & coded elements are actually ready to go, and this will generate a lot of extra work where staff is trying to finish their baseline game and people are breaking things already.
- Dealing with OOC drama. (This one probably feels like the worst even though it’s mathematically not.) Having people get into an OOC argument, or finding out that a player is a sex pest, or is exploiting the game code to their advantage, is rough on staff. It’s 100% guaranteed to require some level of confrontation about it, and that shit is draining.
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@Pavel I wanna hear more about your waistcoat though
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@xCroaker I really was just posting the meme to be a little silly, but I can do my best to give you an earnest answer. Though I doubt it will really be a satisfying one, and it’s really just one person’s perspective. I can’t speak for every staffer on every game.
I think “overworked” is kind of not the right word to describe it. Fatigue is probably the closest I can find. Everything MisterBoring said is true, but I personally find that a lot of players think that the fatigue happens due to administrative tasks. Things like build jobs, xp requests, character apps, etc. But for me, I think the fatigue mostly comes from what I’d call a “creative tax.” When you tell stories for folks, you put your love and energy into it. But you are not drawing from an endless well. Creativity comes in bursts and windfalls, and there are droughts. The ask is that you basically draw from an endless well, though.
I’d also say that point #4 of MisterBoring’s message is very true. OOC drama is probably mathematically rare, but these interactions feel the most weighted because they’re the most stressful. And to continue the metaphor, it draws from the same well as creativity, but uses much more of the water.
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@MisterBoring @Noraaa I get it.
Probably could be forked off into a way to modernize and improve games to be healthy for staff and players
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@xCroaker I think most of us genuinely are just doing our best to accomplish this, while juggling other things specific to our games. In the end I don’t really think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. More of iterative, incremental improvement, or at the very least striving for it.
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@xCroaker said in MU Peeves Thread:
Real question: What is staff overworked with in most games?
For me, it’s the labor of making sure plot/story is happening fast enough, that it’s happening often enough, that it’s accessible to everyone, that it’s still interesting and fun to people, that all the dots are being connected in an at least sort of sensible way, that it’s not too opaque and confusing and not too simple and boring, that it’s kept summarized and with reminders so people stay apprised of what’s happening…
Even with all that effort, people naturally lose interest in the game/story over time. Very few people are stay to the end people, which is the nature of the medium. I think persevering through the fatigue of “does anyone even care?” is another kind of staff work, perhaps one that doesn’t get talked about a lot.
