For whatever reason, Charlotte decided she doesn’t like James. That’s fine, these things happen more often than we’d like in this hobby. Just don’t RP with that person and have fun with the people you can have fun with.

But no. Charlotte can’t just leave James alone. She continuously pursues storylines that place her in conflict with James and then cries when conflict occurs. She feels the need to constantly rant and rave about how much she hates James. Everything James does or didn’t do is new evidence for how awful he is, no matter how insignificant the issue. In fact, everything awful going on right now must be because of James.

Today, my peeve is people who simply can’t take a chill pill and stay away from people who bother them.

This scenario is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

My least favourite encounter in stories/plots is the Main Character Syndrome player. The one who rushes ahead without bothering to wait for anyone’s emote and grabs the MacGuffin to take home and try to interact with the plot to the exclusion of all others. The one who gets up in front of everyone and “volunteers” to be the most important person who shall charge forth alone to solve all the problems and actually expects a pat on the back for this behavior. Basically constantly looking for a way to elevate themselves above the rest of us peons who showed up to participate.

I’m dealing with one in the current game I’m playing and I’m so fucking done with it. A decent amount of plot licking means they’re somehow constantly in the center of everything and there’s very little to do that doesn’t require going through them in some way. And they have a history of OOC aggression towards people trying to get involved in plots they’ve already licked.

Like, have friends if you want, put them first if you want, I consider this all fairly normal behaviour. But if you can’t stop acting like a monster to everyone else that’s where I draw the line. Fuck off with that shit.

I think if people are gonna use gen AI to write their poses they should instead drive into a lake.

You know, I kinda don’t care if anyone leaves a PvP game without giving it a chance. At least they know what they want out of their RP experience and are mature enough to recognise it. A PvP game absolutely won’t benefit from a population of players who don’t like PvP and hope desperately it’ll never become a factor.

I like competitive gameplay and all, but I wanna be playing with people who also want that. Let’s allow people to curate their own experience and move on if it isn’t their thing.

If it feels like someone is constantly on a hair trigger waiting to flip out about the smallest thing, I wish them well and get the fuck out of there. Life is too short to walk on eggshells. And as already stated, the goalposts always seem to change.

IMO the ballsiest and best thing a game can do for community health is to ban alts. I’ll die on that hill.

My unsolicited verdict-

@Cygnus, you really should learn how to communicate your grievances in a way that doesn’t make an enemy out of literally everyone, and also figure out which of them are valid and which need to be let go.

Others should be a little less mean towards people with characters that are too special, unique, edgy, whatever. Because those encompass a lot of people. Most people want to be special in some way, sometimes tactfully and sometimes… not. I think we all get to have more fun when we’re not veering aggressively away from being “cringe”.

The game has been running for a while now and while new games tend to fizzle out and die I’d just like to give kudos to Silent Heaven for going strong and continuing to mature.

In particular I think the gamerunner has done a lot of work addressing and removing negative influences, and the community has never been such a welcoming and chill place to be.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Juniper Do you think that helps compared to just alt transparency? (I really mean it alt-transparency, the name of every PC you play or have played on that MU is in your +finger, no exceptions.)

Yea.

1. People are busy and can’t be online 24/7. Splitting time between characters means that they are online even less 24/7. Gameplay slows to a crawl because the people you are waiting on have plots on 4 other characters to get through or simply aren’t willing to admit they’ve lost interest in half their characters. Leaders don’t lead because they are on their alts.

2. Making judgements on whether something is metagaming or a conflict of interest between alts is complicated. It takes up gamerunner time. You don’t have to spend time and energy on this if there are no alts.

3. Even if you determine no abuse occurred, the perception that abuse occurred is almost as bad. It stresses the fuck out of players. Good luck convincing them that thing you cleared wasn’t favouritism.

4. I have seen people plant an alt in every organisation just to keep tabs on what is happening and it gives an advantage even if they are careful not to blatantly act on it. I have seen people plant multiple alts in the SAME organisation to sway opinions in the direction they want. IMO no matter where the alts are distributed, it gives an unfair advantage.

5. If a player wants to avoid another player, it’s way easier if everyone only has one character and isn’t spread across the whole game.

6. Limiting to one character results in a more equitable distribution of roles in plots & leadership positions.

Also I fully admit I am lazy and don’t want to process and familiarise myself with 3x the quantity of half-baked characters. I feel more willing to give people my full attention when I know they are giving me theirs.

I found out where everyone went basically today. I wouldn’t be surprised if posting an advertisement got you banned though.

Also feeling super awkward rn because I didn’t know the name Juniper was already taken, I just used my name from MSB. This isn’t some kind of mindgame, sorry @junipersky

Yeah, I don’t think this is about the low xp cafe worker who is in the correct faction.

Can you please clarify this and maybe give it an example? It doesn’t seem inherently toxic to either play a non-combat character in a conflict org or to refuse to give Mr. Big Fighty their ego ups in beating on a weaker character. I can actually think of several ways this would be intriguing.

In good non-toxic PvP environments, the game is designed with a lot of built in conflict invitation flags so players can signal to other players what they want. The health of the environment absolutely depends on players using these flags accurately.

Someone who joins a high-conflict faction is signalling that they want to participate in that conflict and should not do that if they can’t OOCly handle it. Pacifists don’t just sit out, they tend to belittle everyone participating and take a revisionist approach to the faction’s raison d’être. Just hope they weren’t given a high value macguffin to protect, they might just hand it over because fighting is wrong.

If your game has an area called Murder Alley and it’s well known that going there signals that you are interested in being mugged… sometimes pacifists will wander up and down and snap OOCly at anyone who steps in front of them, and eventually it stops being a reliable signal to find RP.

It’s absolutely infuriating for everybody trying to participate in the game’s design as intended. It would be SO easy for the pacifist to join the kittens and hugs faction and avoid Murder Alley.

Not to mention that standing there condemning violence while someone punches you in the face is something only video game characters can do. Please… don’t.

@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:

One system I’ve been thinking about which I’d like some feedback on:

Would you play a game where:

1. Ordinarily, character death requires consent. Your character can get into serious fights and someone can even try to assassinate them in theory, but the setting’s magic prevents them from falling into the red without prior staff discussion/approval from both parties.
2. Players can permanently toggle a setting that makes their characters killable when they roll in; the flag is publicly visible and is intended as an “I’m up for anything do your worst” signal. In exchange they enjoy slightly accelerated XP gains (think in the realm of 10%), but obviously it means staff won’t rescue them from open PK unless there’s a very obvious/overt sign of OOC-motivated abuse.

I’m mainly interested in how people who wouldn’t turn it on would feel about this sort of system. Would it make you feel like a kind of second-class citizen that some people are getting more XP by being more willing to risk their characters? Would you feel pressured to turn it on even if the idea of open PK makes you uncomfortable? Do you think it would create a toxic subculture within the game’s wider community?

I wouldn’t turn it on. I’m the kind of player who is up for basically anything except death. I’d definitely be interested in some kind of flag to encourage people to enjoy some conflict with me, but the story abruptly ending because ganked ain’t it.

On staff side I immediately foresee people turning it on for XP gains, insisting they are cool with it, but then being so unpleasant when targeted that everyone steers clear and they essentially get that +10% xp for free.

Well, I’ve done weirder things to keep things fresh. Let the skulking commence.

No ERP? What in the fuck is the point then?

You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.

So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.

I don’t like them. There’s no real reason RP should be invisible to the room simply because it occurred at a table, and it ends up being used so people can have their secret conversation while also being able to see everything else that happened in the room.

It’s a hugely requested feature on games that don’t have it. But if a scene is so busy that you need to split it up, just do that? Move to a different room. Take your friends onto the balcony. Actually commit to moving far enough away to experience some quiet. Don’t just move to a table and listen to everything anyway.

I’m not going to crawl up someone’s ass for being illiterate but I’m also not obligated to put a lot of time and effort into somebody who isn’t my match. If it gets bad, I’ll just politely excuse myself and bounce.

Imo hard standards are useless because 1) people will twist any kind of written rule, do the bare minimum, or get extremely loud and teary about their disability or personal circumstances, and 2) you can’t force two people to hang out together ANYWAY, so it’s a problem that solves itself as players suss each other out and pick their partners.

People attract people of similar ability. They’ll find someone who enjoys their monkey-keyboard-smashing or they’ll move to a game that fits that culture better.

All of this hinges on whether the person actually is guilty of poor behaviour or not.

Without that crucial context, all this reads as a bunch of people vagueposting past each other and probably not even imagining the same people as they do so.

乁⁠(⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠Ĺ̯⁠ ⁠⁰͡⁠ ⁠)⁠ ⁠ㄏ

Standard/live for me. I don’t mind waiting for an emote that has some weight to it, but I expect my partner’s full attention. If I am waiting around because you’re trying to seduce Bridget in another window, that’s just disrespectful.

I have been known to do some novella in various forums. I fell out of it mainly because people would get bored of a story literally by the time everyone had finished doing their introductions and just bounce to the next thread. I’d started plenty of stories but god, I wanted to finish a single scene with all the people I’d started with.