So, beyond the sins of HAM itself - of which there are clearly many! - I think it’s important to bear in mind that it’s just another link in what is swiftly becoming a chain of games created exclusively to house the right abusive staff and player figures.
Like Prototart said, Heroes Assembled MUSH was the result of the very same people who aided, abetted, and participating in sexually harassing and/or emotionally abusing others on United Heroes MUSH objecting to no longer being allowed to do so with the same impunity, or guarantee of safety from the same treatment they visited upon others. Crucially, its main driver - the aforementioned Chaucer, AKA Halicron around these parts, I believe - was someone well aware of the kind of place that United Heroes before finally leaving in protest-- because years prior to doing so, he’d already left in disgust and protest due to the entirely unrelated scandal in which Ditko’s abusive tendencies, and the rest of the United Heroes staff’s apathy towards the same was initially exposed. In doing so, he began nurturing the seed that would eventually bloom into his beloved thicket of a theme, but not without facing obstacles. Among the moderately sized group of players his morals apparently drove him to leave beside, the sentiment that his theme - which at one point attributed the entirety of the fictional African superstate of Wakanda’s technological prowess and bloodline connection to the special herb that empowers its rulers to the presence of a race of (predominantly white) alien colonizers crashing there in ancient times and interbreeding with the local populace, uplifting them into a hybrid race capable of fully accepting their gifts, alongside a host of other bizarre additions driven primarily by his simultaneously disdain for comic books and blind confidence in his own abilities - was in fact a confusing, unwieldy mess that would prove a detriment to incoming players not already familiar with its bare bones from previous exposure (or willing to overlook its egregious flaws due to kinship or other such factors) almost immediately drove him directly back to United Heroes for the run that would ultimately culminate in-- leaving, in disgust, because the same people who had already proven to be abusive shits were still abusive shits.
The main difference, of course, is that the second time around, he was happy to bring along some of the very same untrustworthy personalities who’d proven themselves abusive or supportive on the first go 'round, because this time they were his friends.
On Heroes Assembled MUSH, Halicron’s ~decade long pattern of being a player and occasional admin characterized primarily by narcissism neatly tucked beneath a veneer of personability reached what felt like a zenith. Beyond the behavior which Prototart outlined - his love of treating people who were interested in taking inspiration from comic books like idiots; his willingness to directly insult the ones he didn’t feel like processing apps from - he made a habit of refusing character claim requests (read: requests for the passwords of previously created character objects, so that players could go through the app process on those objects) from people who he felt ‘shouldn’t’ play those characters for whatever reasons he deemed fit, including feeling that they should ‘branch out’ and try someone in one of the two or three fiefdoms of the game he felt were worth exploring.
His takes on long-established women characters like Janet ‘The Wasp’ Van-Dyne seemed to stem primarily from his own natural ignorance of the source material combined with barely latent misogyny: Janet for example, a character mostly depicted as a fiesty, big-hearted and ballsy heroine with an empathic streak became a bitter billionaire drug addict with sociopathic tendencies under Halicron’s pen, a take which he was not only deeply proud of, but insisted was the only logical understanding of a character who dates back to 1963, despite it not lining up with any version of the character published between then and now.
When confronted - multiple times - with the news that two of his good friends (Vorpal, a player who inspired a generation of comic MUs to ban original characters for the express purpose of keeping him from bringing yet another iteration of the tiresome self-insert he has been playing since 2013 or so; and Wolfs, a player notorious in comic MU spaces for trying to coerce strangers into engaging with their latex fetishes) were responsible for bullying a long-standing player off of the game, his initial response was to get angry at me for bringing it up (publicly, granted); his subsequent response was to close an official complaint on the matter roughly five minutes after its submission with a tepid promise to look into it which was never again followed up on. Whether this is because he’s friends with these players, he disliked me for making A Problem out of it in the wrong way, he disliked the person being bullied, or some other, unforeseen factor, I obviously can’t say; I was never given any indication that he did indeed care, take the issue seriously, or say a word about it to any of the involved parties, though.
Why bring all of this up in a long-ass reply to a long-ass post venting about someone who has already flounced away from a game and inspired his cronies to do the same, poisoning the well as they go? Because like Prototart said, they’re gearing up to do it all over again. If there’s anything you take from anything that’s been said about this game, these people, and their future endeavors, please let it be this: do not indulge them. Do not waste your time and energy on a space that exists to give abusive people a fresh hunting ground. Do not confuse a game with explicit carve-outs…
Each player may have one character on +reserve. When a character opens or hits +idle, reserves are processed on a first come, first serve basis. The first player in line has one week to claim the character. At the end of a week, or if the player declines, the reserve goes to the next player in line. If no one claims the character, they are set Open and are available to app. There is a 24 hour window after opening to allow any interested party a chance to pitch for the recently opened character.
The original player must wait one week before they can put a new +claim on the character.
To +claim a reserve:
*Player must not have any idle characters on their account.
*OCs and NCs have a +kudos in the last 21 days.
*Player must have sufficient space in their roster for the new character.
+Interest
Players may express interest in up to three characters at once. Reserves take priority over interest. Players may check to see if their character has any +interest flags. This means another player is potentially interested in playing the character. If these flagged characters start having issues with their activity or +kudos requirements, staff will approach the player to discuss whether or not the player wishes to retain the character. EFCs and MFCs must submit a plan of action to improve their activity in the next 60 days. This is primarily a tool for Staff to gauge interest among players in writing the character.
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One of the things that will impact this system is how we're going to kind of overhaul the +idle system. Things are going to be handled on a case by case basis, and we aren't going to just reap a list of characters because they've hit idle and have a reserve.
While I can't necessarily give any hard numbers yet, if someone has been playing a character for a long while (or alternatively, have been playing characters plural for a long while) without any issues, we will at the very least want to talk with that player before opening the character.
… to create exceptions to its activity rules for the benefit of staff and staff’s friends to either hold onto their own characters in circumstances when inactivity should lead to losing them, or claim desired characters from others on the grounds of expressed interest for one that is in any way conducive to cooperative storytelling. On at least two occasions, Chaucer has personally seen to it that players who claim characters played by one of his friends when they fall idle under Heroes Assembled’s similar ruleset for activity are banned soon after doing so; in one case, this meant ignoring multiple accounts of a player being a sex pest until they had the temerity to claim a character and post that they were new to that character, and planning to depict her in a gentler way than the previous player did, at which point the sex pestery was suddenly exposed and used as grounds for banning.
These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity, and Halicron in particular has demonstrated a complete inability to serve as an unbiased, approachable, or even particularly useful staff member on every occasion he’s attempted it. I realize that this is not an audience that’s all that high on comic book games to begin with, but for any lurkers, or any occasional 4 color fiends out there: do not go there. Do not go. Break the chain and let it dangle uselessly until it rusts away.
