Best posts made by Coin
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RE: Neitherlands
@somasatori said in Neitherlands:
I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.
Not only that, but someone saying "you’re lucky [this thing] is not as bad as [this thing before]’ is some of the worst type of justification tactics for abuse.
“You’re lucky I only open-hand slap you, my dad beat my mother with a bat.”
I mean, yes, extreme comparison, but that’s essentially what it is: ‘I’m not as bad as what you would have had to deal with, so don’t complain’.
Fuck that, lol.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
Losing players and not knowing why. Like, it’d be nice to just know if it’s personal, if the game isn’t jiving, if if if if if…
Also, the MU player trauma that makes them not talk to staff. Holy shit. It is really hard to convince people you want to help them out and aren’t annoyed or mad that they misunderstood or misinterpreted a scene set or something like that. Players will 100% delete a 500-word pose to write a “standing in the background” pose just to not incur some imaginary wrath.
Some people have been treated like shit and it shows, fuck.
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RE: Predators and Roleplaying Communities
@mietze said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:
I do not know if this will help. But my experience with predatory people is that most of the time they don’t hone in on one/their group of targets right away, but cast a wide net. They actually don’t always go after the easiest targets but the most rewarding personally for them–which for a lot of the worst means breaking down people who say no or express discomfort. I think a lot of people like to believe that the only people who get targeted are those who have signaled something, but I don’t think that’s true, especially in what happens in our community.
Are there some that seek certain markers (like age, people who don’t shut off inappropriate communication the first time, ect)? Yes. But there are so many for whom that’s actually not a barrier and just adds to the excitement of breaking down someone who isn’t the stereotype and especially if they can get that person to fear that other people are going to see them as that stereotype and that they ‘deserved’ this sort of transgression. Those are the sick fucks and they rarely are manipulating and hurting just one person at a time, or the same type of person at a time either.
I think this is why destroying slutshaming and ‘well you shouldn’t have given that contact info’ type of shit is so important. It makes the collective us feel better to be able to feel “well, that wouldn’t be me, because I’m not 16/I don’t do discord/I draw the line with others all the time” but the truth is I think a lot of people are vulnerable to the the right manipulator. You see it all the time even outside of our community.
I think it’s also important to remember that just because they’re vile human beings doesn’t mean they’re stupid or unskilled, a lot of them are very socially apt and very smart; being a victim of them doesn’t make you stupid or easily manipulated, and believing yourself “too smart” or “too savvy” to ever be victimized by those people is a great way to find yourself a victim when they take advantage of that overconfidence.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:
I have realised that from years of playing in WoD MUSHES, I am so conditioned to staff wanting to breathe down people’s necks about every little thing that I get incredibly anxious when I see other people RPing about something my character did—even something super innocent. It brings me out in hives that someone is about to send me a shitty job to tell me I am WRONG and BAD.
I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.
@Sillylily said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Pacha I feel this so much… (incoming rant to commiserate not detract)
I try to play ‘off the radar’ i.e, ‘As little contact with staff as possible’ with the idea staff is only there for paperwork and banning. This includes being extra careful around staff alts and their packs/coterie/club/org/cults. If they make a ruling: I accept it as if I were sitting at their GM table. Arguing doesn’t serve anything but to get me on a shit list… and that’s no fun. (I don’t want to leave and lose the quality rp I’ve found in the shit show. I’m willing to put up with a lot for good writing. )
Largely on WOD games it keeps me able to rp and I’m a lot less stressed …
It’s not the best strategy (so maladaptive) on Mu* but its definitely an effective way to exist in a online gaming setting.
Unfortunately that has screwed me on non-WOD servers…
Upside for nonWOD mush: I only rely on me for rp and it has allowed me to rp with as little help from staff as possible. I can rp without touching the plot or npcs. This is nice if not effective for getting involved in plot.
Downside: I literally avoid staff and trip all over myself to make sure I’m not bothering them if i do have to interact… this includes with staff bits and npcs or even just ooc saying ‘Hi’. This makes involvment difficult and anxiety inducing. And I get the feeling that I’ve missed interacting with some pretty awesome people.
The fucking trauma, y’all.
I talk about this with my fellow staffers/game runners alla time. I feel like I have to do triple fucking work to unweave the trauma so that I can actually RP with and tell stories with the players who come to my game.
Like, I understand where y’all are coming from but as a staffer who tries to be as chill and open and friendly as possible… lol, it’s disheartening, especially because the few people who do engage then seem to be “favored”, but no, it’s just they aren’t actively avoiding me.
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RE: Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I fuxking hate people. I fucking hate this society. I fucking hate every molecule of every fucking piece of SHIT that has decided to torch my country to the fucking ground. Fuck
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RE: The Lost Realms Discussion
@Raeras said in The Lost Realms Discussion:
@tighearna
Genuinely curious question. I’m not extremely familiar with Hobbit/LotR lore and I know it’s not D&D soI can understand on some level why your policies say to keep romantic rp between the same species but is this primarily aimed at the physical aspect?
Or is this just across the board because it’s not thing at all in the lore? (Again, I can see other reasoning for wanting to keep things separated on the physical aspect)
This is the one at least a few people are going to deliberately flaunt in private scenes, guaranteed, lol.
It’s a problem created by the nature of a MU.
In a work of fiction, the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists are, a lot of the time, people whose circumstances are somehow special. In settings in which things like cross-species reproduction is rare but possible, that’s an easy way of making a “special person”.
In a tabletop game or a small group, your characters are the protagonists of the story, so them being special is not a big deal; you can play a half-elf because, despite being vanishingly rare (which automatically makes you special) there’s a lot more control over who can and can’t be that specific version of special, as there are only about 3-6 protagonists.
MUs, unfortunately, break this by catering to a much, much larger playerbase. Suddenly, if one out of every five characters is a half-elf, then being a half-elf isn’t special because it ceases to be vanishingly rare.
Do I agree with this policy? Ehn, not really. I think once the characters hit the grid they should be able to fall in love and have the lives they choose (if they are rosters, they should probably be played by the same person for a long-enough period of time before they can do things like get pregnant or married or whatever, just to avoid people doing that and then bailing on the character).
This is especially true given that the game has a policy of one character per player, which means the pool wherein you can find someone to play a romantic storyline with is extremely limited. Even aiming high and saying that you’ve got 50 players, lets say you’re playing a Hobbit… but most people are playing Humans or Elves, there’s maybe at BEST another 9 Hobbits on the game. Let’s say your character is bisexual/biromantic, that’s 9 people – once you start eliminating through schedule, chemistry, RP preferences… yeah.
I personally would bend a little and let interspecies relationships just be more common, but that’s just my take. Clearly @tighearna has their own vision for their game, which is how it should be.
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RE: Ruiz Thread
Yeah. That was def Ruiz. This isn’t an opinion. I just got sources.
I’m like April O’Neil or some shit.
Edited because I’m late to the party due to unforeseen connectivity issues dammmmmmit
I’d say Ghost is showing his true colors but the dude’s always been transparent af
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RE: Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread
@KarmaBum said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:
@Cobalt just jumping on the bandwagon.
Derp’s knee-jerk assumption was that YOU are the bad actor in this scenario, and everyone agreed - right up until you walked into the room, when suddenly they realized they weren’t just talking about someone who couldn’t defend themselves. Then Ghost and Macha did their frantic back-pedaling, and Derp of course ignored the fire he just started.
They’re not there for discussion. They have BANNED everyone who actually wants to discuss things.
Except me. Ganymede missed me the most.
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RE: Neitherlands
@mietze said in Neitherlands:
Yeah I’m stupid and its all ic stuff and all that but…ugh.
I think the point is that it’s not IC stuff. It’s motivated by OOC pettiness and vitriol; it’s an OOC retaliation. It makes sense that you’d have this visceral reaction.
Latest posts made by Coin
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Coin Yeah, a handful. One that was open-to-all and, in my books, a success, and quite large, hovering around 60 players and a couple hundred characters for a couple of years.
I know what you mean, though I’m not sure it’s that big a deal.
I mean, how important an aspect of running a game and its success is, is subjective.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
Have you ever run a game?
I ask because if you have, but you haven’t experienced the worry that if you don’t keep up your player numbers the lack of available round-the-clock RP will slowly erode your playerbase until the game is dead, I envy you.
Some games that subsist on being essentially for a certain group of people “but also open for others” can afford to shut the doors, as they have a dedicated group that they are reasonably sure will hang in and RP those stories with; but for the majority of games, closing the doors to apps isn’t feasible if you want to keep activity up and RP available.
Personally, I limit numbers by running a roster-only game. I’ve also never really encountered this vitriolic “too many players!!!” that you keep referencing. At most, staffers will say, “damn, we got more players than we expected/can handle, what are we gonna do?”
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:
I am, once again, asking for people to stop comparing MUs to any sort of paid work or actual businesses. It’s a bad comparison, the stakes and realities thereof are not the same, and it puts undue pressure and expectations on the staff of games who are trying to provide a medium through which people can experience free entertainment.
Reasonable.
Even so. I invite you over for spaghetti and John Waters movies. You show up. I don’t have enough spaghetti or seating. I make a disparaging comment about having too many guests.
Still not a good comparison. I don’t invite every single person that comes to my game personally. It’s an open invitation, which to me means there’s a reasonable expectation that people will understand if my house is at capacity when it comes to providing spaghetti for everyone, or even space in my apartment.
For your analogy to work every game would have to be a private game that is invite-only, and in that case, I would more-or-less agree. But then the hobby would die. Fast.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
I am, once again, asking for people to stop comparing MUs to any sort of paid work or actual businesses. It’s a bad comparison, the stakes and realities thereof are not the same, and it puts undue pressure and expectations on the staff of games who are trying to provide a medium through which people can experience free entertainment.
I also think that it’s easy to say
And “If you don’t trust staff, leave” is used as a hammer to silence people who ask for evidence of trustworthiness. There’s also a strong tendency for “trust me or gtfo” staffers to also be Police Vultures who show zero trust to players, and that can be hard to swallow
– but the same is true in reverse. As a staffer, I’ve given leeway to people I shouldn’t have because it wasn’t cool to ask for evidence of their trustworthiness. Everyone loves to say “trust is earned”, but that’s minimizing the beauty of actually trusting people. Trust is like Faith: if you have proof, is it really?
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Autumn said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:
I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.
This is more or less how I feel, also; I can’t think of more than one or two times in mumble years when being noticed by staff on a WoD game has led to something positive. Usually it’s at best going back to status quo ante.
So … suggestions for how could staff members behave that wouldn’t lead people to dread getting noticed by them? Other than “interact with players for reasons that aren’t taking things they enjoy away from them”?
- take notice when people do cool things, and tell them
- be a part of the culture of your game, not just its admin
- no, but
- know the characters and offer, unprompted, avenues for development
- react positively and without irritation to pages/jobs asking questions
That’s like, the bare minimum.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Sillylily said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:
I have realised that from years of playing in WoD MUSHES, I am so conditioned to staff wanting to breathe down people’s necks about every little thing that I get incredibly anxious when I see other people RPing about something my character did—even something super innocent. It brings me out in hives that someone is about to send me a shitty job to tell me I am WRONG and BAD.
I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.
@Sillylily said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Pacha I feel this so much… (incoming rant to commiserate not detract)
I try to play ‘off the radar’ i.e, ‘As little contact with staff as possible’ with the idea staff is only there for paperwork and banning. This includes being extra careful around staff alts and their packs/coterie/club/org/cults. If they make a ruling: I accept it as if I were sitting at their GM table. Arguing doesn’t serve anything but to get me on a shit list… and that’s no fun. (I don’t want to leave and lose the quality rp I’ve found in the shit show. I’m willing to put up with a lot for good writing. )
Largely on WOD games it keeps me able to rp and I’m a lot less stressed …
It’s not the best strategy (so maladaptive) on Mu* but its definitely an effective way to exist in a online gaming setting.
Unfortunately that has screwed me on non-WOD servers…
Upside for nonWOD mush: I only rely on me for rp and it has allowed me to rp with as little help from staff as possible. I can rp without touching the plot or npcs. This is nice if not effective for getting involved in plot.
Downside: I literally avoid staff and trip all over myself to make sure I’m not bothering them if i do have to interact… this includes with staff bits and npcs or even just ooc saying ‘Hi’. This makes involvment difficult and anxiety inducing. And I get the feeling that I’ve missed interacting with some pretty awesome people.
The fucking trauma, y’all.
Precisely. I know there are awesome people staffing and running games. I know I’m missing out but…
The tingling dread weasles are conditioned to flail at the first sight of a wizbit …
Insert a ferret freak out gif here I can’t add because I’m on a phone.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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RE: Ares questions!
@catzilla said in Ares questions!:
Since I can’t get the forums on the Ares site to work for me, I’ll ask here!
Does an Ares game need to be connected to a mush/mux/etc? Could everything be done exclusively through the website/portal?
Why would you even want this?
As someone that can only connect via a webclient when at the office (and not the web portal’s clients, because I can’t get on the portals, and even when I can, they don’t refresh and the webclient doesn’t work) it would ban me from accessing the game, despite there being an alternative right there.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Pacha said in MU Peeves Thread:
I have realised that from years of playing in WoD MUSHES, I am so conditioned to staff wanting to breathe down people’s necks about every little thing that I get incredibly anxious when I see other people RPing about something my character did—even something super innocent. It brings me out in hives that someone is about to send me a shitty job to tell me I am WRONG and BAD.
I think it is nice that games are a lot more chill these days, but I think it probably speaks volumes about the general state of WoD games that my most comfortable state is to be completely under the staff’s radar because staff on a WoD game paying close attention to what you’re doing is almost universally bad.
@Sillylily said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Pacha I feel this so much… (incoming rant to commiserate not detract)
I try to play ‘off the radar’ i.e, ‘As little contact with staff as possible’ with the idea staff is only there for paperwork and banning. This includes being extra careful around staff alts and their packs/coterie/club/org/cults. If they make a ruling: I accept it as if I were sitting at their GM table. Arguing doesn’t serve anything but to get me on a shit list… and that’s no fun. (I don’t want to leave and lose the quality rp I’ve found in the shit show. I’m willing to put up with a lot for good writing. )
Largely on WOD games it keeps me able to rp and I’m a lot less stressed …
It’s not the best strategy (so maladaptive) on Mu* but its definitely an effective way to exist in a online gaming setting.
Unfortunately that has screwed me on non-WOD servers…
Upside for nonWOD mush: I only rely on me for rp and it has allowed me to rp with as little help from staff as possible. I can rp without touching the plot or npcs. This is nice if not effective for getting involved in plot.
Downside: I literally avoid staff and trip all over myself to make sure I’m not bothering them if i do have to interact… this includes with staff bits and npcs or even just ooc saying ‘Hi’. This makes involvment difficult and anxiety inducing. And I get the feeling that I’ve missed interacting with some pretty awesome people.
The fucking trauma, y’all.
I talk about this with my fellow staffers/game runners alla time. I feel like I have to do triple fucking work to unweave the trauma so that I can actually RP with and tell stories with the players who come to my game.
Like, I understand where y’all are coming from but as a staffer who tries to be as chill and open and friendly as possible… lol, it’s disheartening, especially because the few people who do engage then seem to be “favored”, but no, it’s just they aren’t actively avoiding me.
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RE: The Lost Realms Discussion
@Raeras said in The Lost Realms Discussion:
@tighearna
Genuinely curious question. I’m not extremely familiar with Hobbit/LotR lore and I know it’s not D&D soI can understand on some level why your policies say to keep romantic rp between the same species but is this primarily aimed at the physical aspect?
Or is this just across the board because it’s not thing at all in the lore? (Again, I can see other reasoning for wanting to keep things separated on the physical aspect)
This is the one at least a few people are going to deliberately flaunt in private scenes, guaranteed, lol.
It’s a problem created by the nature of a MU.
In a work of fiction, the protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists are, a lot of the time, people whose circumstances are somehow special. In settings in which things like cross-species reproduction is rare but possible, that’s an easy way of making a “special person”.
In a tabletop game or a small group, your characters are the protagonists of the story, so them being special is not a big deal; you can play a half-elf because, despite being vanishingly rare (which automatically makes you special) there’s a lot more control over who can and can’t be that specific version of special, as there are only about 3-6 protagonists.
MUs, unfortunately, break this by catering to a much, much larger playerbase. Suddenly, if one out of every five characters is a half-elf, then being a half-elf isn’t special because it ceases to be vanishingly rare.
Do I agree with this policy? Ehn, not really. I think once the characters hit the grid they should be able to fall in love and have the lives they choose (if they are rosters, they should probably be played by the same person for a long-enough period of time before they can do things like get pregnant or married or whatever, just to avoid people doing that and then bailing on the character).
This is especially true given that the game has a policy of one character per player, which means the pool wherein you can find someone to play a romantic storyline with is extremely limited. Even aiming high and saying that you’ve got 50 players, lets say you’re playing a Hobbit… but most people are playing Humans or Elves, there’s maybe at BEST another 9 Hobbits on the game. Let’s say your character is bisexual/biromantic, that’s 9 people – once you start eliminating through schedule, chemistry, RP preferences… yeah.
I personally would bend a little and let interspecies relationships just be more common, but that’s just my take. Clearly @tighearna has their own vision for their game, which is how it should be.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:
I don’t understand what is meant by game ad tone. The conversation isn’t all negative I guess and there is some theory discussion, and game ads as I understand them are more to not have people discussing all the ways they don’t like the game. Though now its dominating a general thread, is that the issue like it needs its own place in R&R?
I really genuinely don’t understand what is meant by this.
I second this.