Dan Simmons

@MisterBoring said in Celebrities We've Lost 2026 Edition:

Robert Duvall, legendary actor and filmmaker.

Gus! Nooooo.

@MisterBoring

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.

I’m gonna just take a guess…

Scheduling is a pain and if you’re doing it through messages that somebody might take a day to answer the proposed date can roll past before you’ve heard back from everyone that it’s good.

With asynch on the game a player is more likely to discover and interact with players whose habitual online-times don’t match their own. This creates RP groups with greater than usual scheduling conflicts. And it meaans that timing-incompatibility problems that you’d otherwise never even know about become evident on an Ares game. Of course, you also wouldn’t know about the player and characters either.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb I think there’s honestly a lot of nuance and discussion to be had on job queues all together

Yeah. The original AnomalyJobs came with the coder as the headwiz yelling at people for using it wrongly and establishing by force of virtual lung-power, a standard for single-topic +requests and what sorts of things you could page about without being told it needed to be a +request, etc, and rode herd on the rest of staff about that, probably unpleasantly. As a gamerunner I had a vetting process for them that was meant to keep pacing more fair but would not have been robust enough for a game with the level of GM involvement and plot complexity I wish for lately.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

some people just absolutely cannot explain what they’re actually asking for in a job request for whatever reason that is

I know I’ve been that guy. Well, my hyperbolic joke about it is that there are those staffers where you ask if your PC can have a housecat and they tell you that a talking green ridable tiger isn’t themely, and you try to explain housecat until they get sharp and you feel anxious and bad about it and still don’t know if your PC can get a kitten. But of course in actuality it’s nothing simple like a kitten, it’s some complicated scheme that I’m explaining badly.

@MisterBoring That’s very true. Honestly, I don’t mind a slow turnaround and can be very patient (all my forum whinging aside). What grinds on me is observing that other characters are getting tonnes more shit done in the same time-period. If you do 'em all in order and some players flood your jobs system, they get to do more shit.

I always felt like it was rude to have too many jobs going at once, just like I wouldn’t send you a bunch of emails one after another without waiting for a reply. I was really happy with the ‘you can only have so many jobs open at a time’ feature. (I would add to it some sort of +request/FIRE function so a player with too many +jobs could make an emergency sort of one, but that’d be icing on the cake.)

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

For players outside that group, this is a frustrating explaination for non-responsiveness. Certianly the unending job-mill could tire a staffer out, but “I am too busy responding to a small extremely active group to get around to you,” just makes people wonder why you don’t do one job from each person who has one open, and get to those second and third and sixteenth ones from Job-Millers after you’ve dealt with the one from the guy who hasn’t made a request in weeks.

@Noraaa said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

This is totally legit. Staffers should say it when it happens. I think players will understand. Of course, if you tell me that you’re just drawing a creative blank on my PC and don’t know what to do with him, I’ll probably want to talk about stuff I’d like the character to do or have happen to him.

I wonder how much resentment of players comes from feeling that creative exhaustion and associating it with the player who just happened to be the one in your queue when the block attacks.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb we sure could

I think you mean, “I” by “we” and forgot the “wish.” As in “I sure wish I could openly accuse Gashlycrumb without anybody finding out that my ‘evidence’ is hearsay, speculation, and affirming the consequent.”

@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.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with

That is so.

Nevertheless, no.

I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.

It’s pretty demoralising and anxiety-provoking to tell people that unresponsive staff probably dislike them personally for probably good reasons. And it doesn’t go well with being compassionate, patient, and willing to extend trust to staff.

Seems pretty off when paired with concern over game-runners feeling discouraged because somebody admits that players can often get a pretty good idea of how active they are and where.

What @xCroaker said just exactly except I suck at video games and don’t play them.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.

I mean this very nearly literally. Not ‘over time Abelard became tiresome to AwesomeStaffer and Abelard didn’t know it’ which certainly does happen, but ‘AwesomeStaffer has not responded to Abelard since they approved him.’ Awesome has no bad experience of Abelard. Little ways Abelard is annoying haven’t built up over time.

@Pavel I think so? I think the deal was supposed to be that a paying player couldn’t tell if another player was paid or paying to be there, but the paid ones would be paid to pounce on the payers and do stuff their finger-files asked for. The scheme really didn’t get far. I expect it was also meant to have, uh, some kind of naughty mobs so instead of running around typing ‘attack monster with sword’ like on an ordinary MUD, you’d go ‘tickle nymph with magetongue’ or somesuch and seek the treasured magical Long Strong Dong With the +8 Double Prong and stuff. Lewd Zork was also a thing then.

Once I was supposed to get paid to TS people on a pay-to-TS-people MOO. I never did, because it never got completed, possibly because the place hosting realised that it would be difficult to be sure all users were of age. That was back when 14.4 baud dial-ups and does not seem viable today.

I used to ask players to donate to certain charities, but also made it clear that I wouldn’t know if they did.

I suppose you might monetise a MU by allowing connections only from a website with adverts.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb Idk how to ask this… does this happen to you frequently? Are you a bit of a chore? I mean I’ve absolutely been a bit of a chore.

No, it does not happen to me frequently. No doubt yes, as all humans are a bit of a chore.

I’ve been playing these games since 1993, and seldom had conflicts with staff, or anyone. In the last handful of years I’ve come up against it/heard about it more. My sample size is small, but I certainly believe @catzilla that this could happen twice in a row. People used to bitch about staff running plots starring so-and-so but never meee, now it’s staff that just don’t answer.

If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

Look. GM attention on a GMed game is a reasonable thing for players to expect. There’s nothing wrong with a GM taking a break, or a GM choosing to interact with the people they particularly enjoy to have some fun and relief from their troubles. But if that is so much of what they do that they never get around to the players they don’t particularly enjoy and leave those PCs unable to act, it’s not “GMs are people,” it’s bad judgement or careless or mean.

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

skipping one for awhile because you aren’t feeling it is an extremely reasonable thing to do.

This is true. But I’m not talking about skipping one for a while. That’s gonna happen.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

discourage all would-be game creators who may now believe that someone is always going to be watching them on the +where to decide whether or not they are stretched thin enough.

I’ve said it before, to the disgruntlement of the MuSB readership: If you run a MU that has more than a few hand-picked players, someone will criticise you. If that is gonna fill you with rage, or shame, or anxiety, you should just not run an open-apps game.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s a lot of stuff to consider on staff side too:

1. Yes, they should honestly be honest with the player and ask them to leave, not waste the player’s time, damage their own temper, or profess that it’s wrong for players to expect GM attention on the same time-scale as other players.

2. Yes, but I’m not talking about that, for as I said, a player can tell how many +requests have been submitted between two of their own +requests, and even if you’re not trying it’s likely that you will notice that the job number went up a lot since your last +request, or didn’t.

3. Yep. I would suggest if they’re having a bad year they should take sabbatical. If they’re having a bad month, week, or day, well, yeah, that happens. But players are also people, and they talk to each other, so if you tell them you’re not responsive because bad week but they also heard Abelard talking about the quick and cool response he got that same week, well. Reasonably, they’ll probably think you ran out of steam after you got to Abelard. But when the same thing happens week after week? They have a point.

4. What? If I have a scheduled appointment, I expect the person to show up. Even if it’s at a weird time. Why the heck is any staffer scheduling something at a time they can’t make?

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

This sounds like something you’ve done yourself. Are you a +where stalker?

It does?

I did once inspire the wrath of VASpider by telling her that yeah, everybody knows from the +where that she’s TSing with Tiny while players are waiting for +requests, and nobody’s saying anything because it’s against MU etiquette, which is how it goes, but for crying out loud, don’t tell the public channel that’s what you’re doing. I am not sure that counts. And it was probably 2003.

@hellfrog Those are valid reasons to ask them to leave, not valid reasons to cheat.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

But you can’t convince me that running plots on a game is the same responsibility as caring for living, breathing beings in a real caretaking sense.

It’s not, but y’know, they want joy and relief from the absolute horrors and it’s not wrong to be dissapointed, annoyed, or hurt at being shut out when it’s working for others and they can’t figure out why they’re not able to reach the top of the queue.

@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:

You’re certainly free to decide this doesn’t match your preference, but it’s not really fair to decry it as a miscarriage of justice.

A miscarriage of justice? Haha.

But really, the expectation that everybody gets a turn and the GM doesn’t skip yours because they kinda feel like it is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in a policy. It’s how gaming works. It is fair to decry it as rude fuckery, which is what we talk about here.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

in the majority of cases

Perhaps so, but this does not mean that the problem I mention does not happen frequently.

I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general, They complain about staffers cheating for their PCs or other staffers’ PCs, or staffers making all plots the Staff-Alt Story.

Hell, there is such a taboo (and likely a justified one) against +where stalking that if a player is waiting for a five minute reply to a +request and happens to see the staffer online 15 out of 16 days and they appears to be spending 5+ hours each day actively RPing their alt with Abelard and Bridget or GMing scenes for Abelard and Bridget, the player still won’t say anything. This is probably for the best, but it doesn’t mean that players don’t know, and lying to them about how busy and thinly spread staff is doesn’t entertain.

@helvetica Not any one specific game, but yeah, I was specifically talking about situations where it’s obvious that staff isn’t spread thin and one really can’t help but notice this.

Of course staff should RP.

@catzilla Yeah, that’s the new innovative method of MU GMing. Respond only to the players you feel like responding to. Get really huffy when someone outside that set asks for timely reponses. Take their request as a hideous accusation. Claim you didn’t mean to ignore them, you’re just really swamped running the game and you’re doing your best. Castigate them for giving you a hard time when you’re doing your best. Don’t actually try to do better by them. Say you will, though. Pretend you don’t know that +requests are numbered and people can do math and figure out that you’re swamped by three requests a day. Pretend you don’t know that people can see you on +where RPing with or GMing the players you feel like responding to for three or six hours several times a week while not providing +request response that will take you five minutes. Punish players who complain that you’re unresponsive by refusing to respond to them. Complain about your inexplicable inability to retain players. Complain to your friends about the killjoy players who destroy the vibe by asking you to be responsive instead of leaving. Blame them for your inability to retain players.

The strange delight I feel when students suffer from autocorrect.

This week, there were a lot of nasty analyses and nasty generalisations.