“Yes, And” doesn’t mean you agree to do things, it means you agree with the narrative as presented so far AND are moving forward with it in this way. It’s about not negating the story people have already told.

A character can totally encounter something that results in them beating feet or whatever to get out of the scene. Scene exits are fine in improv (which is where “Yes, And” was originally given an identity as a concept), and they can be in RP. The RP can indicate that the PCs are going to the stable to defend the horses from the giant mutant wolf, and a player can “Yes, And” by totally posing, “Ser Gobles suddenly gasps at the mention of giant mutant wolves, his armor chattering in fear, ‘I… I am not yet ready to face the menace of the mutant wolves, I must away. You have my support in this task, but I cannot face them myself.’ He quickly runs away, not wanting to be confronted by the source of his phobia.” In that case, you’re not denying anything that’s already happened, you’re just exiting the narrative without derailing it.

@Babs said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Chances are no one will notice.

This is the exact phrase that lead my best friend to copy pasta a chili recipe into his US History final essay and still somehow get a B on the assignment.

@Faraday said in "My Guy Syndrome":

Yeah, that can be fun - but I still think there’s nothing wrong with politely bowing out of a scene where your character just doesn’t fit.

I agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of instances of this causing disruption just comes out of people not understanding how to bow out politely. In cases where I do it, and this might be a tiny bit shady, I simply say something along the lines of “My RL responsibilities require me to hop offline for a while.” and then I just log off.

@Trashcan said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

That being said, I absolutely prefer a shorter application process and endorse doing the absolute bare minimum to get an app over the line. GET ON THE GRID and start playing.

I agree with this, and in my opinion the bare minimum should be:

• Application Coherency: The application should be coherently readable and make logical sense. I’ve read enough offenses to the written word in my time in the hobby that bad apps will haunt my afterlife.
• Lore Knowledge: The application should indicate that you have a basic understanding of the MU’s setting. Most games these days have a loredump summary type document somewhere that contains all of the information that literally every character in the world would know, and the application should reflect that.
• Mechanical Knowledge: A large majority of MUs have some sort of mechanical system for conflict and task resolution. Some of these are based on TTRPGs with their own published book lines. Your application should reflect that you are familiar with the core mechanics of the game, and possibly note if you are new to the specific system being used. (Being new to a system shouldn’t be cause to deny an app, but should be brought to staff’s attention so that they can help you learn it until you get up to speed.)

There are some optional additions to this as well:

• Acknowledgement of Responsibility: If an application is for a position of IC power or responsibility (and yes I am aware that allowing PCs as IC leaders is often fraught with peril), then the application should include an acknowledgement that said position requires you play your character in a way that generates positive RP experiences for others and not just yourself.
• Roster History Acknowledgement: In games where the application is for a roster character that has already seen play, the player should acknowledge to the staff that they understand the IC storyline already written for their character. If a character has already developed rivals in game, then the character is dropped back to roster and picked up by someone else, their first scene in the game shouldn’t be one where they are suddenly best buddies with those rivals with no logical reason.

@Juniper said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

If I have to apply, I’m already gone.

While I understand this and can sometimes agree with it, I’ve also had the experience of playing on games with no application process whatsoever and watched as the game filled up with random trolls and ended up shutting down pretty rapidly.

Another factor to consider that I just remembered is that if a player is applying for a role that is of considerable IC power or will have a significant immediate impact on the current plots in the game, a lot of staff (rightly) require a more detailed and lengthy application (and sometimes an interview) to approve the character.

@Pavel said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Which isn’t something I deal with at work RL at all.

If I had a dollar for every required piece of documentation that didn’t actually help me at my job, I’d have retired to a nice estate a decade ago.

@Pavel said in Long or Short? Application Process!:

Such games should, then, have those requirements explicitly detailed somewhere. What mechanics need explanation, what needs to be explained, and why, etc.

Agreed.

I’m weird. I’m for however long it takes a person to write an application that shows they have a functional understanding of both the mechanics and lore. Additionally, a player should have notes for any mechanics that need explanation. If your character has a Mild Phobia on their sheet, you need to explain that in your stuff. For some people that can take 30 minutes. For some people it can take days.

I’m more worried about how the coded systems of a given MU interferes in a persons ability to both build their sheet and write out all their background details and any notation they may need for specific stats on their sheet.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

That’s where you get the people who stop logging in before they even know they got approved.

Slightly tangential, but a long long time ago, I was part of the staff for a whitelisted Minecraft server. For various reasons we had two tiers of whitelisting, one to give people basic access and the ability to claim a chunk and build for themselves, and the second to give people access to several mods we were using that could be dangerous in the hands of trolls. To get to the second tier of access, you simply had to be active for 60 days without being a troll or jerk or whatever. We had this clearly lined out in our server rules. I shit you not, one in four people would apply to be whitelisted, and then vanish, only to get the whitelisting while they were gone and return 60 days later to find out their whitelisting was removed for inactivity.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

I now understand the jokes about how this game is single handedly holding up SquareEnix financially.

Yep. FFXIV is really keeping them in business. Prior to that it was the Dragon Quest series.

@Kestrel said in Numetal/Retromux:

I’ve played on games with lengthy chargen processes, and games with quick/painless chargen process.

The games that really bother me is the ones that have lengthy chargen processes because their coded chargen forces it to be that lengthy because of bugs and various archaic command processes.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

There’s nothing about being a MU staffer that makes a person more honest. I don’t know if I’ve dealt with @Wikibara before. I have been told that one of the Retro staffers is a person I have dealt with whom I find untrustworthy.

From your history of posting here, I have assumed you find 100% of staff on 100% of games untrustworthy, so that doesn’t surprise me.

@bear_necessities said in Numetal/Retromux:

I don’t disagree but also it is very very very clear from the wording of that post that there’s an expectation that an inappropriate amount of time is spent on applications.

I believe that inappropriate amount of time is subjective. What one person sees as inappropriate is appropriate to another. So in this case, the amount of time was inappropriate to you and @Wikibara, and probably at least some other non-zero number of people out there.

So if we’re normalizing that, whose subjective opinion are we using to set the baseline?

@bear_necessities said in Numetal/Retromux:

But also if 1-2 hours spent on an application is considered minimal effort and not good enough for a game then woof, probably better to move on. We all have lives, right? RIGHT?!

That really depends on what the 1-2 hours produced. I’ve ran into players who take 2 hours to write two unintelligible sentences in a pose, so it’s feasible that what was written, even though it took 2 hours, was awful.

Amount of Time != Quality

@BurnNotice said in Numetal/Retromux:

I got no dog in this fight, I’m mostly around here for entertainment value these days when some idiot like a Wikibara pops up and almost nothing ever gets me to post but holy shit, reading that ban announcement for some reason made me so thankful that I don’t mess around with these long-winded, Biblical Length Style application process WoD games anymore.

From what it sounds like, RetroMUX wasn’t looking for a biblical length application, just an application that reflected a basic understanding of written English alongside a working knowledge of the WoD universe.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

@MisterBoring Yeah, or they could have been, as they said, asking for clarification on incomprehensible feedback, or pointing out catch-22 feedback, or pointing out that they corrected as the feedback requested but the staffer is still giving the same complaint. (Indeed, I’ve been made familiar with the experience of changing what’s asked and having staffer continue to complain about the thing that isn’t there now, and of having staffer complain bitterly that I don’t just say “okay,” and do things that aren’t really possible.)

Well, based on the post before yours that you I guess didn’t read, it looks like the reasons for the ban were, and I’m sort of summarizing here:

• Overly defensive when responding to staff feedback
• Writing of such low quality that the AI question came up
• Causing staff an imbalance in their workloads due to all of their OOC activities interacting with other players.
• Begging players to help with the application, being told by the players to go ask the staffer in question, and then going deer in the headlights.
• Showing signs that they weren’t actually familiar enough with WoD to write a cohesive background.

So yeah, maybe you’re right.

@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:

Sounds to me like they’re trying to “avoid headaches” by having unclear requirements for apps and going by the vibe, and then fucking with an actual person by pretending that it’s a problem with the app instead of admitting that they just don’t like @Wikibara’s eyeliner or something.

Or it could be that staff continued to provide feedback to them which they then ignored, on repeat, until staff could not deal with it anymore and handed down a ban. It could also be that they themselves said something untoward to a staff member and got banned. It could be that they plagiarized giant portions of a known work of fiction for their backstory.

Until someone from staff or close to staff deigns to post some sort of ban message or otherwise, we won’t know the whole story.

@Wikibara You could easily just share the Discord name of the offender and if they happen to be here, they can defend themselves. People who are associated with RetroMUX would invariably be able to confirm whether that person plays on RetroMUX.

And you can avoid sharing racist screed while still identifying broken stairs in the community.

@Wikibara Let’s return to the issue then. It sounds like you weren’t writing in a way that jives with the Staff there in the way that they’d prefer, so they showed you the door. I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you, but at the same time, if they had approved you, it sounds like they’re just trying to avoid headaches all around and you’re slightly upset by it.

ALSO, please for the love of god turn on your PM privacy on Discord, you’re just asking to get hacked or have more random racist nonsense sent to you.

@Wikibara said in Numetal/Retromux:

Clearly, I’ve found the apologists - perhaps it’s required that I share the specific message that I received, because there’s otherwise no cause for any person to receive antisemetic messages, ever.

Edit: Clearly you could not possibly have done anything to cause them to give you a cold shoulder, and since we don’t have those PMs / the logs from the game, we have to just trust that you were 100% in the right in this situation.