That deal where, of all the people who are involved in a situation, the one expected to do something is the one who is least empowered to be effective? Too realistic.
That PC who is rude as fuck, but also extremely touchy (eg. “How are you doing?” “How DARE you! Suggesting that I might be doing anything other than brilliantly is unforgivable insult!”) is also too damn realistic.
@Roz I was thinking it wasn’t a blacklist, but a situation where Player was innocently being a player when staffer pages them some variation of ‘your IP and so-and-so’s IP match, please explain?’ and things went pear-shaped socially.
@Snackness I dunno. I recall my ex being surprised that I knew he’d been using a website of mine from his work, and when and for how long.
I kinda get it as a thing that everybody really ought to know but it’s still somehow creepy to say, “I know your IP address.” Watch Daniel Radcliffe in Guns Akimbo freak out about it. And anybody can look up a geographical location associated with an IP but I might be creeped out if a gamerunner or forum admin or whatever was to tell me where I live. (I told a “player” who was attacking a game their work supervisor’s email address, but that was war.)
@catzilla said in Active WoD MU*s?:
The Houston one is their own game they started some months ago. According to a mostly dead Discord server, the Houston one is in Alpha?
I don’t know why inuki is pretending to not be chokitypok/jujube/etc.
Is there a reason we care?
Seems like a relief, considering who else springs to mind if I think “WoD, set in Texas”.
@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:
VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.
Certainly there’s no reason to be suspicious about somebody who connects from several different IPs – it’s probably home, work, the library, the coffee-shop. I never looked at the geographical locations unless I was fact-checking a story. No reason to be suspicious of people using VPNs, either. I figure you’re streaming Anishinaabemowin-language television the way one does.
There’s not much reason to be suspicious about two people connecting from the same IP, they’re house-mates or they use the same library or whatever. I’d ask and make a note.
It’s a good thing to keep an eye on, not hard proof of anything. And should be tempered with a good dose of “could I give a shit?” in a lot of cases – OMFG the horror if it turns out my suspicion is correct and Abelard and Bridget are really the same person and not neighbors. If they’re not making trouble, cheating hard, or squashing people’s fun, could I give a shit? Hell, odds are pretty good that Abelard just didn’t want to tell Camille that they really like her but sometimes don’t wanna chat and made the Bridget set of alts to avoid the conversation. I don’t even want to push an admission of this pretty-normal-but-embarassing situation.
We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.
I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.
What’s CoG?
Fulcrum is Metro 4.0, with Escalus, set in Minneapolis.
The London one isn’t open yet and might stay invite-only. I haven’t heard of the Houston one.
@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.
But.
Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?
Probably because MUs don’t collect the browsing infomation you might want to keep private. They don’t collect your credit card number or your social insurance number or your medical records or data about your pr0n-viewing habits.
I have only encountered two reasons for a person to use a VPN to connect to a MU. 1: They have it on for other reasons. 2: They have an ‘illegal’ alt.
Certainly stalking on and across MUs is a thing. But unless it’s an unlikely situation where somebody like Faraday is stalking you, the only stalker a VPN is likely to protect you from is a wiz-level staffer, who probably only has that power on one game. Nobody else is seeing your IP info. “Don’t play MUs where the game-runners are stalking you,” is a pretty obvious rule for protecting yourself, and a VPN isn’t enough in that situation anyway.
Using VPNs to do the stalking, however, can be effective.
I had somebody make a dozen alts to attempt to play with somebody who didn’t want to play with them. This poor player was having a weekly experience of finding out that NewPC was, in fact, AnnoyingPlayer. PoorPlayer would then ask AnnoyingPlayer to leave them alone. Not complying with such a request was a bannable offence. AnnoyingPlayer would abandon NewPC and make a new alt, EvenNewerPC, and pounce on PoorPlayer.
I made registering alts mandatory, and regularly looked for matching IPs. People using VPNs would regularly forget to turn them on, so yeah, I could see that a PC was logged on from Davenport, Iowa, and then again from Anchorage, Alaska, less than two hours later, and knew that the set of alts associated with those two IPs were probably all the same person. So, I’d ask them to register their alts and they’d either do it, quit the game on their own, or get banned for being bad at lying to me. Easy-peasey.
I felt hesistant about this because of the idea that ‘alt privacy’ is and should be a thing, but it didn’t take me long to feel confident it was a good choice. SO much, so very much, fuckery simply disappeared when the players themselves could spot stalkery shit, and conflict-of-interest shit, and cheaty shit. The game was empowered to police itself. And it allowed players more freedom – I could allow people to have alts in potential-conflict-of-interest situations and trust that they wouldn’t cheat in that way. Because if they did, it’d be obvious to everyone.
I dunno. If I, like many before me, write a story about Conan the Barbarian, I am not sure I’d describe it as having outsourced part of the work to the late Robert E. Howard. I mean, technically, yeah, but there’s sort of a fuzzy line there. If I write a story about Robin Hood did I outsource it to Anonymous? One weird drunken night a friend of mine and I wrote a hilarious libretto for an imaginary opera about Robert Downey Jr. tripping on mushrooms and getting shipped to Guam, and okay, this notion was inspired by Robert Downey Jr.'s actual drug-fueled antics in the late 90’s, but outsourced to? Hmm.
If I cut and paste room/area descriptions from a novel and just cut and edit a little to be more MU-desc like and uniform, that seems clear plagarism/outsourcing. But not necessarily a terrible thing if the novelist doesn’t mind.
None of these actions seem equivalent to getting a glorified markov chainer to do the job, but maybe I’m just sour; I have a lot of professional artist and writer friends.
Double standards.
Abelard’s so pissed about what Bridgit did IC, so mean and it messed up his RP prospects. So he does the very same thing to Camille, because she was standin’ next to Bridgit, and accuses Camille of being unable to accept IC consequences when Camille doesn’t like it either.
(Portrait of Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh. An oddly hairless man. Like a monkey ready to be shot into space.)
And their website gives me an error.
Of course, I started this process night before last, it gave me the error then, too. And again last night. So I spend a couple of hours with the text-chat customer support guy. Who gets the same error, and tells me to call a voice number. So I do. And get put on hold and disconnected while on hold three times. And then get told that I will have to pay an extra $5 to have an agent process a payment for me instead of doing it myself on the website. And then can’t do it anyway, because of the same error that stops me from doing it. What is the solution? It’s for me to go pay in person. Which also costs an extra $5, by the way.
I am just gonna go off and wait for death.
And now not only do I need a password that contains thirty-seven characters, at least one umlaut, exactly three upper-case H’s, and Jon Bon Jovi’s shorts size, I also need a six digit PIN.
To pay a bill.
I am so grateful for these impossible security measures that make paying a bill a three-hour process of resetting passwords and answering security questions to do so.
It doesn’t store my payment method, see, so as far as I can tell, only the very worst thing could happen. Somebody could crack my account and pay my bill for me, and I’d be so horrified I’d never recover.
@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:
Oh anything is good/no not that my pc wouldn’t go there.
Oh, mercy, this one. Angels and ministers of grace defend us, it’s like trying to take C.S. Lewis’ mother-in-law out to lunch. She doesn’t want to be any trouble, so she won’t pick a place, but every place you pick will not do, and you need to activate the orbital mind control lasers to get her to express an opinion besides that your suggestion is wrong. Or worse, she agrees and then, when the waitstaff have already wasted their time on you, admits thats she couldn’t possibly order anything in this place. (Ahh, hooray, they finally agreed to meet my PC at the park! Oh no, now they refuse to pose interactively, and are describing their character having hay-fever and apologizing OOC for how they feel awkward and just don’t know what to do in this scene! @whee!)
Still, I am really a lot cooler with this sort of thing than with that exasperating player whose MO is to chan “I am ready to RP now!” but who also responds to people who say, “Anyone want to scene?” by telling them how unappealing such vague offers are, and that they really have to write a 10 page module-adventure and show everybody the Larry Elmore cover and the blurb on the back or of course nobody’s gonna want to come out.
I never played a Dune or Final Fantasy game. I don’t doubt you a bit. I found it very striking that the Game of Thrones IP’s performance had such a profound effect, while Battlestar Galactica and Buffy and Firefly games seemed to maintain interest decades after the end of the show. But, well, GoT’s fall was striking in itself; people in grocery store lines were talking about it to random strangers, two seasons later it was crickets. BSG, on the other hand, was consistently great 'til the last twenty minutes.
What IPs command lasting interest as MU-settings would probably be a good topic to explore. I want to do a The Magicians MU, but wonder if anybody cares now.
And I’m a but puzzled and kinda sad that the creation of The Sandman teevee show has not led to a new The Sandman game, I liked the one that was up, eh, whenever the heck that was.
@mietze
@Coin has some excellent practical tips above.
no matter how hard one tries to be “fair” though there are always going to be people saying it’s not good enough.
This is true. It’s also okay.
Probably part one of the trick is to accept that not everybody will like everything you do as a game runner. In fact. probably every person will find something you’ve done that they dislike. Sometimes people will mention it. That’s okay. Sometimes people will lose their tempers about it and yell at you rudely. That’s not really okay, but it is a sure thing that it’ll happen, so you must try to be okay with it.
Another part is that RPGs are never moment-by-moment ‘fair’. It’s just not how they work. Sometimes you may end up in situations where you ought to say, “I’m sorry, player, I know that my call on this has left you with the short and sticky end of the stick. Thank you for takin’ one for the team, I will try to make it up to you.” Yes, this is tantamount to admitting you made an unfair decision. But it’s also a whole lot kinder and more human – “I’m doing my best as an imperfect person in an inperfect world,” is a lot easier to take than, “Your feelings are invalid, there’s no reason you should think this end is short and sticky.”
Yet another part is to accept that you, yes you, are going to make mistakes. That’s okay too. Don’t lie about them. Don’t hinge your ego on being perfect. Don’t try to hide your mistakes in the belief that players won’t trust you if they know you make them. Honesty counts for a lot. So does honest self-examination – if you can’t accept that you might have screwed up, then you can’t really accurately judge your choices. A lot of games that seem otherwise awesome turn out to be utter crap because of "I am a fair person, so my calls are fair’ type thinking obscuring facts and leading to “player said my call was unfair, so they’re insulting me by calling me an unfair person” interpersonal weirdness.
I tried very hard to discourage people from thinking of me as an authority figure. I am not the greatest, or even a great, GM. I am not a leading egg-spurt on the theme or even the mechanics. I am a middle-aged geek just like everybody else here and I’m not the gamerunner because of any merit other than my willingness to do it.
@Coin said in MU Peeves Thread:
I mean, how important an aspect of running a game and its success is, is subjective.
Well, yeah. By what metrics may we judge a MU successful is another thread. I think GoB was successful because it had as many players as I wanted, or three times as many, but a much lower player-to-incident-of-OOC-drama ratio than most, and because it had two time-blocks in which there were always, every day, scenes going on, and people reported that they were having fun. And because when ‘House of the Dragon’ premiered, like five years later, former GoB players (some of whom I barely remember, I’m embarassed to say) popped emails of GoB nostalgia to me.
But definitely an invididual thing, too – GoB’s popularity was firmly linked to that of Game of Thrones and most other MUs don’t see a burst of new apps every season premier and finale of a television show, or have people lose enthusiasm when the show’s quality falls.
@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.
It’s adjacent but probably irrelevant, but I say, don’t aim for 24/7, but for predictable time-blocks of activity.
@sao You’re almost certainly right and it’s a mistake I keep making. Possibly related to experience similar to what @Sillylily mentioned.
@Coin Oh, I feel that approving my PC constitutes an invitation to play. And an invitation to play is equivalent to the spaghetti night invite – it’s reasonable of me to expect a plate of spaghetti and a chair. And reasonable of you to stop admitting more guests when there’s no more spaghetti, chairs, or space in your apartment.
You might well handle things that way, yourself. I just find a lot of places give you this encouraging “come on in, love to have you, there’s plenty!” until you’re approved and then it’s “too many players” and hostile vibes.
@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.
@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Gashlycrumb That’s fair. But what I mean by ‘the problem is players’ is the problem is quantity of players. I love an ideal where a storyteller has consistent and balanced motivation and creativity to GM for a rotation of all the players in a game with 75 active players. Taking turns IS obviously the correct solution to my stated problem of ‘players’.
Yeah, I know you mean “the problem is (too many) players.”
But this is a technically correct yet misleading statement. Blame shifting.
You’ve got a plane ticket. For this flight and this day, but when you try to board, you’re put on standby and end up waiting around the airport. The person at the counter says, “Too many people wanted to fly with S&M Airlines today.” You probably don’t say, “I feel for you, dealing with such a problem.” You say, “No. S&M double-booked the flight, wasted hours upon hours of my time, and now you’re talking like you’re helpless and it’s the fault of travellers.”
MU runners could close applications when they have too many PCs – Stop giving out tickets. They could organize shit so PCs take turns – arrange another flight.
Instead we get this “the problem is players” line, in a hobby where a great many players struggle with feeling unwanted and unwelcome, and fear being attacked by hostile staffers.
@Coin Yeah – most of the stuff people bitch about as one of the miseries of staffing have never been problems or even all that unpleasant for me. Players being afraid to talk to me because of this history of hostile staff, that has made things hard, contributed to me making bad mistakes. But maaaan. I do not blame them, I feel the exact same thing.
@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:
If you cannot trust the staffers on the game you’re on, consider leaving.
It’s always more complicated than that. You can probably trust them in some ways and not others. There might be other things about the game, such as fellow players, that make it worth staying even with untrustworthy staff. Many games are determined to obfuscate background activity, so you can’t actually know if staffers did something sketchy or if they did something that was totally legit but looks sketchy from your particular point of view.
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.
I haven’t played any of the games mentioned but don’t think I’d need an anchor character.
Something to do during downtime, yeah, unless it was only a couple of weeks. With two teams of GMs, one developing the next ‘season’/‘episode’ and one running the current one it could be minimal.
I wanted to try this, not really episodic the way it’s meant here, but intended to have quick character roll-over.
Call of Cthulhu on The Love Boat.
The cruise ship Starry Wisdom makes various ports of call at scheduled times. New characters can get on and old ones get off. By choosing their destination players can choose how long their PC will be aboard. If they survive that long.
