I almost hesitate to say this, and it’s not aimed at specific people, but it’s fact that there is a heavy Shang/Pen element to the occasional influxes that keep boosting AoA and the tolerance for sexual harassment is almost certainly higher within the “new community”.

The community that built back up on AoA in 2017-2018 was not largely drawn from sex mushes. There’s a reason so many people left in 2023, many of whom likely had not personally experienced harassment. The old community and new community have very different characteristics.

@Jax I’ll be honest, beyond the pest aspect and the obnoxiousness of it all, I never ceased to be amazed by the sheer variety of ways, means, and methods she used to lose her pants. Never the same! lol

@Lemon-Fox

Every single person here who has railed against AoA’s toxicity had the same experience you did. That toxicity doesn’t always make itself immediately known, even if it’s pervasive just beneath the surface. Some persisted for years, trying to wall off the bad in order to be creative with their friends. Some even staffed there. There is a cabal of absolutely shit people at the heart of that game, and that will never change. AoA is their game. It wasn’t yours. It wasn’t ours. It’s a hard-won lesson that still stings for more than a few people who left or were forced to leave when the tipping point was reached. Just remember the good times, the cool people you were able to meet, and the stories that you were able to tell. Those individually unique memories may be the only good thing about AoA, but they do have value.

@Lemon-Fox

I think most everyone here is glad you haven’t had a problem. The continued forever-problem most of us here have with AoA (those of us that have strong personal opinions about it at all), is that some of the game’s current staff members are the very people that made the game a problem. That problem that said staffer reassured you, “but it’s not like that anymore”. The prisoners have control of the prison, and they’re telling you all’s well now.

Here’s the problem: These are not, by and large, stupid people. And it may be a bit publicly better than it was 2, 3 years ago, because Cujo may be embarassed about this thread… but leopards don’t change their spots. And some of the game’s most problematic players are among its monst powerful (and are staff).

You may never experience it. There have been high hundreds of players that gave the game a shot during the past eight years alone, and the percentage of people that were directly preyed upon by these people is not high in that context. But higher than is ever healthy for a mush, and the real problem…

Protected, at cost of expelling players that cared and wanted a better game.

I don’t think you deserve anything to happen to you because you decided to check on a game that has bad publicity, and if you continue to play on AoA I, for one, wish you fun stories.

@Meg I assure you it was not “silly” when it derailed meaningful RP, due to people simply leaving out of frustration and exasperation. Was it NC-17? No. But it was someone’s personal kink thrown in people’s faces on an at least a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis. If you were active on any grids I’m sure you can see how disruptive that is, even if you personally wouldn’t have minded someone losing their pants in every scene.

AoA is not billed as an ERP game. Most players didn’t play for that reason (at least then, not sure about now tbh). And don’t overlook the fact mentioned above, that this player was banned for the behavior on a game not exactly known for taking these sorts of things seriously.

@Meg The panty flashing was pervasive, constant, made people uncomfortable, was never relevant to and derailed scenes, was complained about routinely, and whether or not it rises to the level of other complaints it was unwanted, voiced to be unwanted, yet never stopped. I was in several scenes where this player lost their pants where the scene immediately died. It was notorious behavior in that this player had a reputation for it. Bringing your kinks to the public-facing grid is not usually healthy, and it contributes to the sort of community rot that makes the writing experience less fun for those not into it.

@Third-Eye

I imagine for some its simply the fact that it’s been nearly two years since everything went down, and they’re taking a look. We all know that itch can be strong at times, and distance can sometimes put a sort of haze over trouble we saw more clearly in the past.

I doubt it will result in any new long-term players though. The number of new player logins that were still logging in 3-4 weeks later was always very low (and has always been low on almost all games, of course), but in the absence of a community capable of pushing daily RP it’s probably even lower now.

@Noraaa said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Maybe we’re all just annoyed at how good it could have been.

I totally get the impulse in thinking this, but I really don’t think AoA could ever be a great game. Having been mushing since the mid 90s, one observation that has seemed to prove itself over and over again is that great games are a beautiful dance between great staff and great players. There were some great players on AoA, but its staff situation was always a detriment.

It rode a wave after Ep VII because there was nothing to viably compete with, rising to become “the only game in town”. Looking at its numbers from 2001 to its first death in 2012, the earlier years being some of mushdom’s most popular as a hobby, AoA was never able to compete (~6-7 average connects, mostly staff). It never took off because it was an objectively bad game in comparison to other options out there.

We players sometimes take what we can get, though, and Star Wars little corner of mushdom has been in a very sorry state for the better part of the past decade. That’s what enables AoA to even have a single non-staff login, tbh.

I’m not really trying to argue, I do understand your underlying point, I just wanted to make mine… that AoA’s staff are the weakest link on that game and that has consequences.

@Jumpscare Thanks!

@Jumpscare said in Elysium /MUSH:

I’m proud of all of you for not even attempting to log in.

Where do you see this? Most of the popular mush tracking sites I used in the past are long gone.

@Krautistanian

I’m sure this happened for two reasons.

The first being that they clearly chose to punish inactive players rather than view them as possible future/returning players. A huge mistake that completely ignores the fact, and it’s been a fact for decades, that most players cycle in and out of activity. Also a huge misstep because so many aoa players value the things they’ve collected, and losing them raises a pretty big barrier to ever even wanting to come back to begin with. Forcing people to mush never works, and that’s more or less what they’ve decided to have as their policy. Play, or else.

The second being that you are here, and you’re very identifiable, and aoa staff have shown themselves to be petty enough to forcibly remove people from the game simply because they’ve commented in this thread.

It is sad.

@Zephyr
Also I believe March and April, with that spike, are when they shifted the game’s timeline. There was a brief surge in events and player activity, and no small number of people who had decided to leave the game chose to make their exit during that time for reasons of closure.

@Popes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

So my friend talked me into coming there to play with them. I have yet to be sex pested, there’s events and stuff going on, and besides being small and convoluted, I haven’t had much issue.

The sex pestering wasn’t ever universal, it was targeted. And all of these people can be welcoming and helpful, and they can make you feel welcome. And it’s not 100% an act, as in addition to the bullshit that’s been described for almost a thousand posts they are also narcissists of the highest order and YOU loving THEM, and seeing them as higher beings, makes them feel good about themselves. Historically people have ended up in their orbit, and only over time did they see the real people, and the real (serious) issues beneath that facade.

Like others have said, they’re also probably much more careful now that they’ve been called out so loudly, and visibly. So I wouldn’t expect as much trouble out of them, at least not right now.

The best advice I think anyone could give you is to enjoy your RP and just be aware that these problems have existed, and people don’t radically change overnight. So be careful. Enjoy your RP, but be careful. Hopefully you’ll never have a problem and all of this will just be noise.

@icanbeyourmuse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Arethusa Did the events say only Kora types can go? I would go to scenes to get rp that are not my thing if they are open even if the focus is specific people. I don’t know who Discordia is or anything and only loosely following this thread. Is she someone who has shown to be one of the bad people on the game? I try not to paint all staff with the same brush even if they staff on the same game.

Kora events are almost always exclusive to Koras, or their few non-Kora friends. It’s a highly elitist and exclusionary group (go figure, with who the players are). Unless you’re a hot female, then they make an effort to bring you in because Kora is basically a big brothel.

Getting anything on this game sounds complex. I assume the reason for limited ships relates to trying to get people to rp together. I don’t know if that is true. Though, Getting attached doesn’t necessarily mean ‘physical’ things. I have seem people invest in the characters stories and the people around them. I know I have stuck around on a game for people I enjoy talking to/telling the stories with. It sounds like it is a lot of hard work invested into achieving anything on this game, though. So, I don’t entirely blame some people for clinging to their character despite everything said about the place.

Ships aren’t limited. Cool ships are. Everything of value is hoarded, including good ships (fast, good for cargo, prestigious), leaving crap for the average player. At least that’s been the case, a whole lot of ships have probably been recycled with all the bannings and exodus.

throws some red meat, to get things back on track!

AoA staff just wiped the nom counts of most of the banned players, so that Hadrix & Co can bask in the glory of being best. They must feel so proud of themselves.

(The point being the players that were ousted were the game’s best, with the nom counts that went along with that).

Suck it, aoa. You’re a dying game.

This should be more than enough evidence for mu* staff to take this shit seriously. To take people’s desire to play in a healthy sandbox, where they are treated as human beings first, and WHO padding second, seriously.

As of a couple minutes ago aoa had roughly 26 actual players connected (actual players, not just alt count).

Star Wars MUSH had roughly 15 (again, actual players, not alt count).

This is WEEKS later, that this shift in games has been sustained. SW Mush is an ancient game with semi-functional systems and an antiquated grid. It’s an imperfect and troublesome site, from the point of view of it being a coded mush.

What it does have is a staff that has shown they actually give a shit, and understand what it means to caretake a community. AoA has lost about 40%, on average, of its players. And realistically about 75% of its active storytellers. All because its staff refused to take sexual harassment seriously.

SW1 deserves all the attention it is getting. A game’s coded systems don’t matter if that game’s culture is poisonous. And a game’s age and partial functioning can be forgiven if staff try their hardest to make it a welcoming place where people are treated well.

@mietze said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

If people want to play sex workers on a game, and it’s allowable (it’s not on a lot of games) and there’s a place that it can be done so that people seeking to RP in that environment (which doesn’t need to involve explicit TS, or at all, honestly) can go to place where they know it is a welcome area of RP, it’s hard for me to understand why people have a problem with that.

Just me personally: I don’t have any sort of issue with it, so long as it’s done in private. It’s a pretty integral part of mushing for many people that are not in any way problematic. My issue is more with the game as a whole, and my pointing out earlier that all these things exist just beneath the surface is more to highlight that it’s a much bigger part of the game than aoa tries to let on. Cujo acts like some kind of moral high ground holder when it comes to erotic RP, and a lot of players think he’s actually hostile to it when we know he protects his chosen few as they turn the game into their own wild fuckin’ kingdom (no pun intended).

@Artemis said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@SpilledBeanz said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@BloodAngel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@SpilledBeanz

Yeah, my thought when I first learned. It’s not very visible, and from what I was told the usual suspects (and not talking Hadrix here because I never heard his name connected with this, but the known sex pests on the game) were the “clients”, but it was there. Also Nar Shaddaa is the drop-off point for almost all noobs, so the sex pests kind of congregate there to intercept new female characters and see if they can maneuver them towards their ships and eventual nakedness. It’s a Sex Panther thing for them, “60% of the time, it works every time!”

What the fuck? This is exactly like the MUD i used to play, i thought mushing was better than this.

I think it is, just not there. What we’re seeing is the hobby’s low. I can kind of half respect the XXX mushes out there, at least they advertise what they’re all about. This is more like the lair of a trapdoor spider.

@BloodAngel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@SpilledBeanz

Yeah, my thought when I first learned. It’s not very visible, and from what I was told the usual suspects (and not talking Hadrix here because I never heard his name connected with this, but the known sex pests on the game) were the “clients”, but it was there. Also Nar Shaddaa is the drop-off point for almost all noobs, so the sex pests kind of congregate there to intercept new female characters and see if they can maneuver them towards their ships and eventual nakedness. It’s a Sex Panther thing for them, “60% of the time, it works every time!”