Empire Discussion Thread
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@Pyrephox said in Empire Discussion Thread:
If Ada removes a lot of people, or removes people who aren’t, uh, pretty well already established as being Problems across several games, then the game will die and the problem will self-correct.
I don’t even think it’s that. It’s consistency. Staff needs to be consistent with how they respond to problems. The player in this case was being rude and pushy in Ada’s opinion, so they got a one and done ban. This needs to be consistent going forward. If other people are rude and pushy to Ada on the same level, they should also get a boot.
I can’t count the number of games I’ve seen with inconsistent staffing.
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@Pavel said in Empire Discussion Thread:
@Ominous While I disagree with the whole philosophical underpinning of what you’re saying here, we can unpack that at a later time.
You disagree that people in positions of authority should be clear in their communications to those they have power over?
I do want to suggest one thought: They both thought they were being clear and the other was being confusing (at best) or intentionally obtuse (at worst).
That’s fine. It’s on the person with authority to make sure that the discourse is clarified. “I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse about this and are conversing in bad faith. What is it you are having issues with, so that I can clarify and we can move forward? Be verbose if you need to.”
@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:
No they don’t. Let’s not be super ridiculous here. That’d be like saying Pyre has power over us because they are mods of the forum.
Pyre does have power over us. They can ban us without recourse, and we can’t ban them. It is not a two-way street. This isn’t a ridiculous statement. If Pyre were to ban me right now, it would have a negative effect on me. It would be embarrassing, it would hurt my ego, and it would deny me the ability to communicate with a community I enjoy having discussions with. Just because a forum for discussing a very niche topic is trivial in the grand scheme of things doesn’t mean that losing access won’t have a psychological effect. Obviously I have a desire to be here, since I am here posting. You all also have a desire to be here; otherwise, you wouldn’t be posting in reply. Hell, this forum wouldn’t even exist if people had just shrugged their shoulders and never gave MU* forums another thought after getting banned from MSB.
And while we’re on the topic of being super ridiculous, we’re going off a log that was clearly copy-pasted instead of screen shotted so we have no idea what happened. Literally everything could be editted.
Yes, it could have been edited. Warm Sheen could be talking out of their ass. But it’s all I have to go on right now. Based on what is presented, my feelings are that Ada should have communicated better.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:
You disagree that people in positions of authority should be clear in their communications to those they have power over?
No, I disagree that staff and players aren’t equal parties and that staff is the only one with responsibility for clarity in this or any other situation. Any power staff has is miniscule, as I am an adult with other things to do than worry about what an internet person thinks about me. Staff are just players with a job, worthy of no more and no less respect than anyone else.
But this seems to be a fundamental disagreement between us, so we’ll just agree to be ambivalent about it 'tween us.
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@DrQuinn said in Empire Discussion Thread:
@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:
I cancelled a bunch of others cause having a bunch of actions open that we’re being addressed was really making me feel a kind of way.
This is the key bit of that log for me. It seems like this person was already being kind of passive aggressive and establishing a bad behavior pattern over waiting five days for a response from the lone staff member running the game. And it sounds like the other characters hadn’t even weighed in on the action yet for the staff member to even respond.
I don’t think log/no log was the real issue here.
This may be the key to my not understanding why people think Warma Sheen was being pushy. I do not read that as being passive aggressive at all. I read that as “I am uncomfortable having a bunch of requests in the queue that are all related and are potentially creating needless work, wasting your time, and delaying other players’ requests being acted on, so I deleted them.” But I am an incredibly anxious person who thinks he is a waste of space and needlessly wastes people’s time, so that’s automatically where my mind goes when reading that because I can see myself writing something like that and that’s what I would have meant by it.
@Pavel said in Empire Discussion Thread:
No, I disagree that staff and players aren’t equal parties and that staff is the only one with responsibility for clarity in this or any other situation. Any power staff has is miniscule, as I am an adult with other things to do than worry about what an internet person thinks about me. Staff are just players with a job, worthy of no more and no less respect than anyone else.
You may not be personally bothered if someone ends your access to an internet server, but it’s still a power over you that you do not have over them, a monopoly on the power of coercion. You will adhere to whatever they demand, or you will not be there anymore. That is power and that is authority, even if it is on a silly thing as a MU server.
But this seems to be a fundamental disagreement between us, so we’ll just agree to be ambivalent about it 'tween us.
Apparently. I almost said “clearly” but that’s come up a lot.
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@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:
But I am an incredibly anxious person who thinks he is a waste of space and needlessly wastes people’s time
This conversation has not been a waste of time and even though we disagree I am grateful to have had it. We’re all glad you have occupied space here.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, anxiety.
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@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:
If Pyre were to ban me right now, it would have a negative effect on me.
Respectfully, this is you perceiving Pyre’s power and giving them a great deal of power over you, vs them actually having power over you.
If Pyre banned you right now for doing absolutely nothing except responding to a post, there would undoubtedly be backlash and it probably wouldn’t hold (although half of us would say you deserved it, then another half would say Pyre’s power-tripping, and there’d be a ton of back and forth about the perception of your tone and what you SHOULD have said vs what you DID say along with a disseration-level deep dive on what you implied with your perceived tone like we are literary scholars … sound familiar?)
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@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:
Respectfully, this is you perceiving Pyre’s power and giving them a great deal of power over you, vs them actually having power over you.
Hey @somasatori are you qualified to supervise PhD candidacies yet? I’ve got a few ideas from this thread…
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@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:
If Pyre banned you right now for doing absolutely nothing except responding to a post, there would undoubtedly be backlash and it probably wouldn’t hold (although half of us would say you deserved it, then another half would say Pyre’s power-tripping, and there’d be a ton of back and forth about the perception of your tone and what you SHOULD have said vs what you DID say along with a disseration-level deep dive on what you implied with your perceived tone like we are literary scholars … sound familiar?)
It’s about time for a spin off. Let’s go.
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@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:
@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:
If Pyre were to ban me right now, it would have a negative effect on me.
Respectfully, this is you perceiving Pyre’s power and giving them a great deal of power over you, vs them actually having power over you.
Perception doesn’t figure in. I’ll believe perception is reality when a crazy person jumps off a building while flapping their arms, and they actually fly. How much you let someone’s power affect you psychologically is under your control, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have power over you. If someone can keep you from doing something then they have power over you whether you care a great deal or not at all. It’s like people saying “You can’t fire me; I quit.” Regardless, your employment is over, security is showing you to the door, and you’re never getting hired by them again whether you care or not.
If Pyre banned you right now for doing absolutely nothing except responding to a post, there would undoubtedly be backlash and it probably wouldn’t hold (although half of us would say you deserved it, then another half would say Pyre’s power-tripping, and there’d be a ton of back and forth about the perception of your tone and what you SHOULD have said vs what you DID say along with a disseration-level deep dive on what you implied with your perceived tone like we are literary scholars … sound familiar?)
Maybe. Until the decision is rescinded, if it gets rescinded, their power is keeping me from the server.
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@Ominous I think there’s two different meanings of the word ‘power’ at play here.
There is, of course, the authority to do something. Pyre can ban you or me or anyone from this forum (or well, collective staff can, whoever actually controls the keys to the kingdom). My boss can fire me tomorrow. Definitely all power.
But if Pyre bans me right now, she really has no power over me other than that. No influence over my life. If my boss fires me right now for not doing the work I should be doing and instead replying here, I won’t be able to buy a number of things I want to buy, and probably pay bills, and I will probably be very unhappy.
Even beyond that, my boss has a lot of influence over my life in general. He has power over me.
This is more like a peer-to-peer interaction. Your friend could stop hanging out with you tomorrow, and effectively, there was some amount of ‘power’ there in that they chose a thing and banned you from their presence, but that wasn’t them exerting power over you versus choosing who they want in their life.
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Staff on games, and mods on forums, have power over the space they’re running. They have power to make the space as they want, and let who they want in and kick out who they don’t. They do control whether a person can interact with their specific space.
But this is different from having power over people.
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@Pacha said in Empire Discussion Thread:
My assumption (perhaps false!) is that when opening a game one wants to develop a large and diverse base of players. So for me, banning people who don’t necessarily need to be is kind of a negative thing, because it is then a player (and perhaps their friends) that I don’t have.
I fully believe that you can ban people who are more trouble than they are worth (cue Prue Leith’s “Not worth the calories”), and still maintain a large and diverse base of players. While there aren’t a ridiculous number of people in this hobby, there are plenty to have a nice, large, healthy database while removing the people who make staffing not fun.
@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:
@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:
one clearly has power over the other
No they don’t. Let’s not be super ridiculous here. That’d be like saying Pyre has power over us because they are mods of the forum
Anyone in a position of power (and staffing a game, or a forum, is that) has some measure of power over those who partake of whatever gives them that power. Can a player always just quit to take themselves out of the staffer’s power? Absolutely. But while they are on that game, the staffer has some power over them. This is just an integral part of positions of power.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike said in Empire Discussion Thread:
Anyone in a position of power (and staffing a game, or a forum, is that) has some measure of power over those who partake of whatever gives them that power.
I think you are wrong, and it’s going to be an ‘agree to disagree’ thing here for me. An admin or staffer may have authority over the game, but they do not have power over a person playing it.
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What would qualify as power over a person? Or is it just different interpretations on what power over a space and power over a player is?
I would think that banning a player they do not want on their game is power over a player in their space since they are removing the player from the game against their will.
Enforcing ICA = ICC would be power over the player too because even if the player disagrees with the judgement, admin is the judge and their safe is final. This could even result in the player losing their character against their will.
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@KDraygo I’m probably being a little pedantic on the word usage here, because to me it just sounds like you have the authority to control someone. IMO the ability to decide you can’t play here is not the ability to control someone, it’s just making rules for their space.
Plus I mean to be honest saying a game admin has power over the players inevitably puts the game runner in a position that not a lot of us want to be in. Fuck when I ran Gray Harbor, I hope people didn’t think I had power over them, I barely had power over my own story lol
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@Wizz said in Empire Discussion Thread:
if someone decides to ban lots of very rude strangers, I mean. so what? this is honestly the only medium I have ever played where bans are considered this shocking “nuclear option.” they are actually pretty common on tons of other platforms, and it doesn’t prevent them from being diverse and active spaces, because it’s about creating and maintaining the game culture and they understand that people come and go regardless.
I don’t disagree with you on principle. Obviously people should act like mature adults, and staff should set whatever limits they see fit.
My point is more practical. I’ve run a LOT of games through the years, for the most part with a reputation of them being pretty chill, friendly places. Yet even on games like that - if I had banned everyone who was the least bit rude, pushy, entitled, disrespectful, snarky, or in any other way “out of line” on a single occasion, I wouldn’t have had any players. Many would be banned, others would have left because of their friends being banned, and still others would have left because I developed a reputation where one misstep (even just a misunderstanding) leads to a ban.
But again I want to stress that I’m not criticizing Ada in this specific instance because I don’t have all the facts, and even if I did - it’s still entirely their call.
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@Roadspike said in Empire Discussion Thread:
I fully believe that you can ban people who are more trouble than they are worth (cue Prue Leith’s “Not worth the calories”), and still maintain a large and diverse base of players. While there aren’t a ridiculous number of people in this hobby, there are plenty to have a nice, large, healthy database while removing the people who make staffing not fun.
Absolutely. I don’t think anybody is disputing that.
I think that what the calories are worth for whom and for what is up for discussion though. Obviously some people might think that donut is worth the calories, others will not.
I tend to agree with Faraday here:
@Faraday said in Empire Discussion Thread:
if I had banned everyone who was the least bit rude, pushy, entitled, disrespectful, snarky, or in any other way “out of line” on a single occasion, I wouldn’t have had any players.
But everyone has the right to choose their own diet. Perhaps I will eat the donut, and Ada will limit herself to a green salad. It is individual choice!
