Part of the issue I have with ever staffing again is that I’ve had such bad experiences with other staffers on TR, FC, HM. It can be a very weird, very cliquish experience where everyone that gets a sliver of power thinks they have a say on every little thing that happens. This always gets compounded when players are also staffers and have IC problems with other staffers.

Headstaff in particular has a problem with this, and also the disappearing for months at a time thing only to come in and give a swirly to the staffers outside of their TS/Discord groups before poofing into the aether once again for six months and not approving literal years-old jobs before doing so.

Or worse, the dreaded system of HR approval in some games where every staffer was able to add input even outside of their spheres. I am very glad for games like Liberation who don’t even let other staffers outside their spheres see unrelated jobs for this reason. These kinds of jobs become grudge matches where reason goes out the window and people fight because their character bits had a spat a decade ago.

It’s really quite annoying and not conducive to a good experience as a staff member especially when ‘job monkeys’ and ‘general staff’ become a thing; doubly when those staff members don’t pull their weight and only get online to talk shit on staff channels and post negative stuff on jobs that they have no business reading at all. This combined with obvious favoritism killed most of the games I staffed. In actuality, this problem is exacerbated when spheres and games have TOO MUCH staff, not too little.

Too many cooks, and none of them are actually cooking–just standing on the line, judging the way you cut your onions.

Why would anyone want to be a staffer after OOC experiences like that?

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

its policy of permitting underage characters (and sexual scenes involving them)

@Arkandel said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:

My twenties back.

/thread lol

Thank you for sharing this, Cobalt. LAMush was the first World of Darkness game I ever played, and the first MUSH. I was 17 when I first signed in. There were bad things that happened there which I have heard about over the years, including the infamous meetup. I experienced a few borderline things myself in pages and scenes. I thought it was just how things were, like hazing or I was just new to the MU* scene, and since I was too young and didn’t want people to know I was too young I made the mistake of not speaking up.

I’ve often had an overly rosy view of that place which I may have shared with you on occasion later on other games, and now that I realize how oblivious I was, I feel awful. I’ve been out of the hobby a long time, but I’ve always liked roleplaying with you when we’ve come across each other over the years. So, I felt compelled to say thank you for your courage and screw LAMush. And thanks for making the scene a safer place.

My dream MU would have…

-Large staff and playerbase that is active 24/7
-TinyMUX / PennMUSH / RhostMUSH
-World of Darkness / Pathfinder / DnD
-Both self-starter RP and storytelling encouraged
-Complex ASCII maps because I’m a nerd
-OOC Masquerade: I’ve always preferred games with this ruleset
-Large and descriptive setting/grid with character
-Player-buildable rooms and objects
-Full PvP of various kinds with rewards for respectful play
-Controllable grid squares
-Obfuscated players, room sweeps, door locks, and other stuff to encourage spying/intrigue
-A cool rumor code that is sorted into spheres. I’ve only seen this once and it was awesome
-Good old fashioned retro +bboards and +events
-Danger zones / Peace zones, Night zones / Day zones
-No discord, I’m in like 50 of those already
-MediaWiki for player pages / game info
-Generous but balanced homebrew content
-Lots of colors and QOL bits and bobs from ye olden days

I’d settle for the top 3, everything else is a bonus

@SuspectHound it’s hard to blame Sundance for trying to catch a falling knife. After years of terrible staff leads that caused myself and many of my friends to leave MUSH for several years, the way Sundance runs things is a breath of fresh air and the way Liberation is set up is the main reason I’m back in the hobby at all.

I feel that the childish actions of one person is a hard lesson learned, not a weakness on Sundance’s part. She stepped up to get him out of the situation once and for all and made the right decision, and the destructive actions were 100% on Polk, no one else. It would have been fair to expect someone with such ties to the game to be an adult and hand it off responsibly, no matter what kind of personal problems between the two, but that is not what happened. Few of us can truly know what happened behind the scenes but I suspect that this was a slow burn of bad behavior that finally reached a peak.

One of the tenets of Liberation is to leave baggage from other games and situations behind, and she must have extended that to Polk. That he chose to prove everyone else right is his cross to bear. The game be better off for losing the short fuse.

@Pyrephox I’ve been fiddling with Rhost in my spare time, I do have a cool concept for a game like this. But about halfway towards amping myself up to learn Rhost’s finer details, I started learning Unity for a video game and have put my creative juices there for the moment. This has been a constructive conversation about what is needed in a MU* with pvp though and I’m thankful for those that helped me notice some of the stuff I may have missed; I’ve scribbled various house rules trying to tackle many of the issues that were brought up today.

Maybe the ease of newer systems comparatively is why so many devs go towards those languages, or maybe from the various reasons Ashkuri posted. I do get the pain of doing it from the ST side of things, been there as a staffer and it’s not always fun and sometimes outright painful.

I do completely agree though that the game I want to exist cannot exist unless I make it a reality. I’ve basically given up on most games at this point because they don’t hit the way they used to. There are no turn-key solutions, I just have to get my hands dirty with the code and challenge myself past what I’m comfortable with code-wise. And making games is challenging no matter what it is you’re making.

Great game when it was great. One of the best IMO, but Sundance stretched herself too thin. She’s quiet quit for well over a year now, and without others to make decisions, things sort of fell apart.

I had a few bad interactions with Sundance, many in my group also did and most left because of several things that sucked –

1. Unkillable NPCs/unwinnable plots – these took the wind out of everyone’s sails, and make the game feel like a novel. Granted they were great NPCs with great plots. But in this medium sometimes you gotta let that stuff go when there’s player fatigue. A prince that never actually held court but no one could question this? A Sabbat Ductus who was able to kill players freely but couldn’t be defeated? An ancient and racist evil character that even bringing up in RP could get you ganked? Yeah no, that stuff isn’t too fun.

2. Uneven decisions – This was more part of Sun not being available IRL; in the beginning, she’d go through backgrounds with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that things fit the game’s narrative. Later, random and conflicting things were approved. When confronted with these mistakes, it tended to be a gaslight type of response. Sun was very rigid in her decision making, often at the expense of players over her carefully crafted plot.

3. Slow jobs – I’m not talking one month, I’m talking 6 months no response and sudden closures; full year open jobs with no answer or explanation as to why they aren’t getting answered, plots with no resolution, and more. Just overall not the best in terms of actually playing the game.

4. Entrenched cliques – this isn’t something that’s directly Sundance’s fault, but I do feel that it’s the job of a game owner to at least try and break these up a bit and foster crossplay. That said, Sun had her own clique which also happened to be part of the unkillable bloc, so good luck attempting to do anything plot-wise that involved those NPCs.

5. Power imbalances – WOD games don’t put people on equal playing ground, this is true of all WOD games. But approving some players with 300-500 XP and others with 50 with no regard to how much effort or activity they bring to their sphere always felt like a kick in the teeth to people that Sun didn’t like. What was felt and what was true are two different things though, and it was likely more of a ‘too long didn’t read and I’ve got shit to do IRL’ kind of thing, though this doesn’t explain the XP differentials.

There were some really great things about the game too, like awesome plot, great writers, and truly a large amount of nice players that were fun to be around. One of the things that Sun was best at was conflict resolution between players, and I truly loved the way she set up the MUSH in terms of job privacy and overall OOC masquerade.

Even with all the negatives, I think the good outweighs the bad. If and when she gets her RL resolved I’d love to see her write up a new game or refresh the setting with a plot that was a bit more malleable and collaborative, learning from the mistakes she made the first go. I would absolutely play it, doubly so because truly a lot of these issues stemmed from Sundance just not being able to give the game the amount of attention it needed the first time. But she would definitely need to delegate way, way more. Running a game of so many people just isn’t feasible with one person. On top of this, she’d need to distance herself and her own RP from the plots, and be willing to let players win sometimes and enact some changes to the setting with their RP or else things will return to the same static problem.

I WISH I had a game to play like Liberation was at it’s best. But it’s just not there at the moment. I hope that changes, and if anyone can do things justice, even with everything that happened there, I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort.

@MisterBoring Most are or can search it up no problem. Better yet, they don’t pressure you for RL pics or out trans people they don’t like. Probably more fun to RP with a bot than be on most of the WOD games these days

@MisterBoring In my own experiences, I’ve never encountered a ‘job monkey’ that didn’t have access to everything and all the same powers as other staff. Occasionally these job monkeys can grow to become as big of a problem as VASpider. This is not always the case, but hard-coded limitations on what they can see + what they’re able to comment on could potentially help this issue.

Really, when the issue becomes paramount is when Headstaffers are absent for months at a time and then rely on job monkeys/VASpiders to be indispensable so they don’t have to do things, and corruption starts to run rampant.

It has real potential to turn a job monkey into Planet of the Apes if you don’t put hard lines in the sand.

@Wyrmsign said in Numetal/Retromux:

You behaved badly when you didn’t get what you wanted.

Show receipts like I did. I’ll wait.

@Wyrmsign But yeah, go off about my CHARACTER being an asshole IC, which you are using as a justification of the continuous harassment and lies about me the PLAYER. Ignore the super secret discord where staffers go to talk shit to their favorites, the favoritism, and the unyielding platforming of an abusive player that all happened OOC. That’s all fine because my character didn’t want to play nice, I suppose.

@Wyrmsign Sephiroth lied about how I got the character, lied about how I chose to leave the game, lied about Eddie’s mass reports, lied about how I introduced myself in multiple spheres, (and so did you, by saying I was a self-professed spy), lied about his OWN IC/OOC conflicts, lied about trans people getting outed, lied about extra XP, and so much more. These were all lies about OOC things.

I’m fully aware Vincent was a jackass. But I didn’t deserve the harassment, or the lies.

@Wyrmsign You’re deflecting all of the OOC bullshit that happened because you didn’t like what my character did ICly. Sorry you didn’t like him, but I literally do not care about what you think about Vincent the PC.

I guarantee you, for every player that ‘came back when I left’ (I wasn’t even playing outside casual scenes for the last three months because I almost kicked the bucket), there are 10 who left because of awful staff and the platforming of OOC harassment.

@Wyrmsign Sephiroth said with his full chest that Eddie has never been reported as a sex pest. I showed, with a receipt, that this isn’t true. Other people in this thread have also mentioned their issue with Eddie.

I also went point by point and showed receipts that proved otherwise for each of Sephiroth’s lies. So what you are saying here doesn’t mean squat to me because unless you have receipts of things that don’t exist, you’re trying to protect a problematic game, and protect problematic players. That shit is gross and is why RetroMUX is a bad place to play. And judging from the stories about RL, game jumping harassment by OTHER posters – and including the harassment on the discord I experienced – I am not even close to alone in this.

@Wyrmsign TF are you on about? You just insinuated that you saw all this as it was happening. You did not have the full context, full stop – unless you did, in which case staff was sharing it as it happened in real time to players inside your clique while ignoring the bad behavior of players like Eddie et all. Which yeah, that’s a super deep and problematic thing if it did happen.

@Wyrmsign said in Numetal/Retromux:

Wasn’t like I saw all this myself

Oh you saw all the DMs and plot pitches I sent in, all the receipts, the whole true story I posted? Damn if you’re NOT staff and are privy to that information, maybe there’s other, deeper issues at RetroMUX.

@MisterBoring Honestly, I wish someone did. It was such an awful experience all around.

@Wyrmsign Then why’d you say you’d pull the character? Maybe you have such a self-aggrandized view of yourself that you think your opinion changes who does and doesn’t get approved?

Also, all I did was talk a little shit. Then Sephiroth posted an unhinged rant of lies. That’s when I brought this up, but as we’ve already figured out, reading comprehension and situational awareness aren’t your strong suit.

@Wyrmsign TBH, I don’t really care who you are. But you are staff since you apparently ‘would have pulled’ my character. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter – hopefully anyone who sees this thread will avoid RetroMUX like the plague and it will wither into non-existence as it should. Any game which platforms this kind of harassment needs to die.