What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?
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@Prototart I mean…I think that’s a pretty reasonable setting on a ‘Het-meter’. I’m overwhelmed just reading it let alone living it so you have nothing to apologize for.

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Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.
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@Prototart said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
oh hi
there is no “good” Age of Heroes game
the “good” one is run by Chaucer from HAM, an abusive, self-obsessed weirdo who has spent years enabling creeps like everyone’s favorite Randian misogynist furry, Vorpal, who once tried to Power Word me in DMs using the wrong name and bullied someone off of HAM for liking a comic they hated
I’ve heard of Vorpal before and not good things, but to your point it looks like Vorpal has come over to the game https://superheroesmush.com/char/vorpal
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@Purplelamia said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
I’ve heard of Vorpal before and not good things, but to your point it looks like Vorpal has come over to the game https://superheroesmush.com/char/vorpal
His presence anywhere should be taken as a massive red flag. I don’t think he plays anywhere but Chaucer games now cus nobody else will put up with someone going on an hour long rant about the supremacy of the free market when someone complains about their health insurance.
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@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.
I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.
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@Kestrel said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.
Populations of players follow a genre, even if individual staffers are new and don’t know what they’re getting into, so I think this is realistic rather than cynical. Sometimes you can attract new people but mostly if you want to play in a particular pool with a MUSH history, you have to tank dealing with the people who’ve been on these games for decades and possibly contributed to their problems.
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@Kestrel said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
@catzilla said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers.
I know of one in the works, but I honestly think there is something about the genre. I largely agree with Alan Moore’s perspective on it.
There’s always been a thing where games were basically the same staffers and the same players, usually holding the same characters. And the past, whatever, fifteen years it’s basically all been the same theme, too. I miss actual Marvel games and DC games and like places that had canon cutoffs but I don’t think anybody’s even tried that since I was a teenager.
With Great Power is Ares and it’s very Async-focused but I really like one of the heads there, Grackle.
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@Kestrel Which is the one in the works? Is it a standard mu* or one of the new Ares ones? The only standard one that seems active at all seems to be HAM, which is unfortunate.
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SuperMUD. It’s a DIKU-codebase MUD with a heavy focus on storytelling. (I know a lot of people on these boards tend to be sort of anti-MUD and more pro-MUSH, but the core community waiting on it tend towards paragraph RP.) They have a Discord as well, I’m not personally in it, but if people are interested I can nudge a friend who can invite. They currently have a test server up that people can poke around on, and I believe are planning to launch some alpha RP events within a few months or so.
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Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers
That has been the case for a while. HAM was founded by people who left UH over the abusive staffing and has been pretty much okay on that front. HAM’s own staff split was considerably more amicable and was provoked by creative differences and disagreements with certain aspects of policy. To be entirely accurate one of the policy disagreements was that some of us felt that HAM was too slow to react to and too willing to overlook “borderline” problematic behaviour from players, but I at least never saw any evidence of major staff misbehavior during the time I was staffing there. The occasional nothingburger interpersonal squabble that’s always going to happen in these spaces, but nothing abusive.
Superheroesmush.com is run by the group of us that split away from HAM’s staff. That’s not going to be a place anyone who thinks they get special favors by staffing is going to do well in.
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@Colette said in What's up with the two Age of Heroes games?:
Maybe one day we’ll have a superhero game not run by abusers
Superheroesmush.com is run by the group of us that split away from HAM’s staff. That’s not going to be a place anyone who thinks they get special favors by staffing is going to do well in.
Apparently this is one that is run by Chaucer? I don’t remember exactly what his deal was but he was known bad actor? Maybe?
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@catzilla
Chaucer is one of the two headwizzes along with myself, on the principle that only one headwiz makes for a staffer who can’t be called on their shit.I’m not sure if “sometimes gets a bit grumpy” counts as being a bad actor? Like anyone who has been around a community for a while there are people who have a personal beef, but that’s it. I wouldn’t take personal beefs too seriously.
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@Colette How about “actively promotes cliquish and exclusionary behavior, like focusing on his one preferred group of players, who get RP while everyone else gets ignored.”
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Good lord, I haven’t heard HAM in a while. But yeah everything stated is true.
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@Starr-Saphyre
I’m not going to get into a big thing here 'cos if he wants to defend himself he can, and to be honest any discussion like this is about 90% likely to devolve into dredging up of ancient dramas over who slighted who in a game I probably never heard of a decade or more ago, which I have zero interest in.Briefly though, perhaps you’re referring to something before I met him though? I dunno.
Every player has other players they tend to gravitate to playing with because they know they get a good scene with those players, but I got to know him on HAM where he was most active in the Titans. A team which had about thirty five members despite that being pretty ridiculous because of a conscious choice to offer opportunities for new players to get involved specifically as a counter to cliquishness elsewhere. So in my experience at least? No.
Is he perfect? Also no. Nobody is. That’s why you have multiple staff making policy decisions.