@Wizz This also meshes with my own experiences there, up to the present day. Hadrix Kora is a heavy contributor to the uncomfortableness on Pub, as is the general clique he belongs to that basically seems to control the game.

@kalakh Speaking of… this just hit the boards last night.

=========================<* 8: Game Updates - 199 *>=========================
Message: 8/199 Posted: Jan 20 2023 Author: Discordia
Timejump XP Updates (Non-FS)

As we approach closer to the timejump, post-time jump XP and Sheet adjustments going forward will be:

For all Non-FS, 1000 XP base award
PLUS 150 per 5 years of a 15 year age-up.

Thus:

0 years: 1000xp
5 years: 1150xp
10 years: 1300xp
15 years: 1500xp

FS Characters will be handled separately. The goal with the XP award is to allow our Non-FS characters to come to greater parity with their level of skill after a fifteen year increase.

All XP adjustments will be handled by hand and annotated per character so that if a PC is shelved and their XP is rolled into a new PC, it will not include the XP gained by the time jump. Only their normally accrued experience points, as has always been the case.

Any Non-FS who wish to change their decision on whether or not they will be aging up and by how much, please either add a reply to your existing job or submit a new +request if you have not done so yet. Anyone who does not submit a +request will be assumed to be aging the full 15 years.

If you have more than one alt, you may include your decisions for all of them in one +request, just make sure to note each alt and your choice going forward.
------------------------------< +bbread 8/199 >-------------------------------

The original ‘awards’ were 0 XP for not aging, 150 for aging five years, 300 for aging 10 years, and the full 500 for aging the full 15 years, just so nobody has to scroll back a mile or two. Quite a difference, don’t you think?

Sound like damage control (to the tune of, ‘Please stay! We’re handing out oodles of goodies!’) to anyone else?

(Note: Edited to fix the message header.)

@Narson What was that motivation? Just 'cause I’m morbidly curious…

FWIW, not a fan of AoA, and likely never will be. Even if the subject of this board weren’t an issue (which I’m sure it is), there are too many sketchy things and flying monkeys for my taste, and too many good players run off by blatant favoritism, and a slightly less blatant habit of ignoring their efforts to contribute to the game. Who could blame them? If nothing you do is ever allowed to have any effect/meaning, why stay?

Skipping ahead 15 IC years and letting the Sith Empire have the galaxy, ostensibly to get the game back to ‘Star Wars’s best vibe, rebels vs. the empire’ is just the most recent sketchy decision, and I still wonder if it’s not another attempt to create A Game of Thrones IN SPACE. I also wonder which Sith Empire staff alt decided they wanted to win the game…

But I digress. The ones who have quit have the right (and healthiest) idea.

@CuriousGamer These things remind me a great deal of a Rollins Band song I used to play on the campus radio station. Think it was just called ‘Liar’. This isn’t nearly the whole song, but these are the words I remember when I think of abusers like Cujo and Hadrix.

'I’ll hide behind a smile… and understanding eyes…
And I’ll tell you things you already know, just so you’ll say, ‘I really identify with you, so much!’
I’ll come to you like an affliction. I’ll leave you like an addiction.
You’ll never forget me! YOU WANNA KNOW WHY?!!

‘CAUSE I’M A LIAR!!! YEAH! I AM A LIAR!!!’

‘I DON’T KNOW WHY I FEEL THE NEED TO… CAUSE YOU SO MUCH PAIN!
MAYBE IT’S SOMETHIN’ INSIDE, MAYBE IT’S SOMETHIN’ I CAN’T EXPLAIN…
‘CAUSE ALL I DO… IS MESS YOU UP AND LIE TO YOU!!!’

‘I LIE! I LIE AND LIE AND LIE! OH, I LIE…
I’LL LIE AGAIN! AND AGAIN!
I’LL LIE AGAIN AND AGAIN AND I’LL KEEP LYIN’!
I promise… HAHAHAHAHAHAAH!’

Groomers and cliquesters are a lot like this. Other players are just a disposable thrill to them, or a place to hide when the whistle is blown… or even the flying monkey squad that squashes all criticism of them, so they can continue to prey on vulnerable people.

In what little experience I have with this kind of abuse on games, ones in which staff have near-total control of the information flow, things tend to simmer just beneath the surface, invisible to most of the player body of the game, for a long, long time. Most players go out of their way to avoid the clique the problem player is part of, if there is any warning at all. It’s only when the incidents begin to pile up, and victimized players begin to talk to one another outside of the game and discover patterns in their own experiences, that things come out, and usually it’s in one big rush. The game may or may not die as a result of it.

On the game I was on when I first saw this (a Fallout game run by the infamous Kat), a large part of the playerbase disappeared over the course of a month, and most of the players found out through paging one another, or talking to fellow players outside the game via emails or places like Discord. The game slowly withered and died for six or so months afterward, and by the time Kat actually banned the predator in question, it was much, much too late to save the game or what little credibility she had as a staffer.

Given that Cujo refuses to even acknowledge that any abuse occurred, let alone ban the player/staffer responsible, I don’t know how long it will take AoA to wither away, if it ever does. Remember that SerenityMUSH stuck around for a long, long time in spite of having similar problems, and an equally toxic staff culture. The same may happen here.

@Jennkryst Why does it not surprise me that AoA would waste time and effort on a kinks code system?

They wasted plenty of time on working elevators and trams, some of which eat coded money, in some locales, to say nothing of ‘balancing’ the coded weapons and ammo, most of which doesn’t begin to match old or new canon… and adding modifications that tend to be very rare (except for the garbage-grade versions that clog up the vendors everywhere) and cost many, many times more than the weapons themselves, just to turn those weapons back into something besides useless junk. Mostly what they managed to do is turn the gap between newbies and dinosaurs into a huge gulf, which I doubt was accidental.

Starship mods are treated much the same way, though the stock ships aren’t nearly as junked-up as the weapons (even if they are far more rare, since only a small number of each ship model exists on the game at any time).

And if you want anything modded, you have to find someone with the skills and coded equipment to do it. While this makes some sense, a staff member has to be available to adjudicate the actual modifications, just in case the tech succeeds wildly or fails; in the latter case, the mod is lost and the item being modded can be permanently damaged, reducing one or more of its base statistics. Needless to say, it takes very high skill levels in the necessary skills to generate consistent results. Like automated cargo running code, this is supposed to ‘encourage RP’. I don’t know about RP, but it certainly encourages frustration, as scheduling is the worst enemy of using coded mod systems.

There’s also pricey color codes for armor, weapons, etc., and something called ‘screambucks’, relatively recently added, that are supposed to be gained through RP, and can be used to purchase other coded rarities, like beskar metal for making Mandalorian armor. This is great for large groups and orgs, who have a habit of nomming one another heavily, but not nearly so useful for less active and/or ‘well-connected’ players, which are usually newbies; usually by the time the dinosaur groups finish nomming one another, they’ve run out of noms.

All of this code and coded objects may explain why the game suffers from persistent and often severe lag. Just typing +paycheck or +bbnew guarantees a wait of several seconds, minimum.

@SqeakyClean This confirms a LOT of things I’ve suspected for some time now.

And I can confirm that the playerbase emphatically did not want the time skip; that was a staff thing all the way, and Cujo admitted that he had been steering the metaplot of the game toward the Sith winning for a good while before deciding to announce the time skip. The playerbase was not even asked if they wanted this; they were just told ‘this will happen, and unless you figure out a way to opt out, you are aging 15 years’ (BTW, it’s a lot harder to opt out than go with the flow). And while noises are being made about the Sith Empire faction ultimately losing, the faction is recruiting heavily, much like the First Order back before that faction was made NPC. So I’m of the opinion that even if the Sith Empire loses, it will be a very long time coming, and even then I’m sure Aryn will fight it every step of the way.

Just one more chapter in the long-running ‘Imps win, LOL,’ side of Star Wars.

@Jennkryst It should be noted that most of the original Koras used to be First Order PCs, who started chargen with the best stats and gear on the game. Except possibly for Sumi Kora, who is head of the Bounty Hunters’ Guild and built to a standard at least equal to the First Order PCs, none of the Koras started life as Mandalorians; they were all First Order PCs who somehow adopted the Mandalorian way of life after the First Order ceased to be a PC faction, so they didn’t have to retire their overbuilt PCs, or go totally Civilian.

It’s probably no coincidence that Clan Kora first popped up within a month of ‘The Mandalorian’ first airing.

@Wizz I suspect more newbies than we will EVER know about had a similarly horrible experience there, whether immediately or much later.

@Popes Or maybe they’ve just learned that they have to hide their bad behavior better, since the word’s out about it and the playerbase is a lot smaller than it used to be (because the word’s out about it).

Time will tell.

@Buttercup Hopes, love, best wishes, and prayers for you and yours. Hope you not only pull through, but get better faster than anyone expects was possible.

@Pavel I wish you the best of luck in your recovery, and I deeply appreciate your candor. It’s possible that some abusers, if caught very early, and either helped quickly or slapped down hard, might not devolve into problem players.

But the line between toxicity and predation is neither thin nor easily crossed. The difference is between irritation/impatience with other people, and total and outright contempt for them, or a total disregard for their worth as fellow human beings.

And while a toxic person can come back from the brink, it’s usually too late for a predator. Much, much too late. Assuming any opportunity to intervene ever existed. The term sex pest seems far too mild for them.

The part about scenes that are nothing but fight scenes and the way those scenes were conducted sounds exactly like Fanty from SerenityMUSH (another DSS failfest, like AoA). Her scenes were rushed, no planning to speak of was allowed, only a hare-brained charge into the situation, whereupon everyone involved largely got shot full of holes and was stuck in the infirmary for days waiting for the ‘doctor bed’ healing device and a PC who could turn it on to become available (those same ‘doctor bed’ devices are strongly reminiscient of the bacta tanks on AoA, and are not the only code on AoA that sounds a lot more like SerenityMUSH).

The nom farming reminds me more of Inara, from the same trainwreck, but Fanty may have done some of this, too. It was a common thing among the worst of SerenityMUSH’s staff.

I have it on good authority that a lot of SerenityMUSH players and staffers flocked to AoA when Mal abandoned the game some years back, and the bulk of his abusive staff friends left with him. No sense hanging around if the gravy train’s left the station, I suppose.

@Pax Well said. Not least because newbies have to grind a LOOOOOOOOOOONG time to get a halfway decent character (mostly due to the whole clique let’s-all-nom-each-other tactics). This AoA DSS shit is even worse than D20 Star Wars.

Nice to know where Cujo’s priorities lie. Not that it’s exactly news at this point, but at least it’s in text, where new players are sure to see it.

But ‘Abandon all hope, ye who app here’ seems more appropriate.

@Popes I think they did have a program at one point that provided bonus XP for players who played with newbies, but I don’t remember if that was for +nomming newbies or just playing with them, nor do I recall if the newbies got a matching bonus. I also think that program ended a month or so ago. If I get a chance, I’ll check the bboards and see if I find anything.

Also, that gulf between dinos and newbies is by design, so don’t get your hopes up about catchup mechanics. And be careful in events run by Sumi Kora, Poe Dameron, Aryn Cortess, and any of her other alts, or by Hadrix Kora, unless you want to be used as a blaster sponge for the NPC opposition while the clique dinos do literally everything important/meaningful.

Above all else, get some armor of some kind. The way DSS is designed, it’s just about impossible to avoid getting hit in combat, even with your Dodges maxed out, so you’ll want protection. The stronger, the better.

Good luck out there.

(edited for typos and clarity)

@Krautistanian Very likely, though I very much doubt you’re the only burned-out, bored player hunting for RP that doesn’t require you to become a blaster sponge in Sith- and Kora-run scenes, no matter who is shooting at who, or to be a target for known sex pests.

For what it may be worth, there is a weight system in play. However, calling it a system is ludicrously generous; since the numbers that go with each item are never explained, it’s no more effective than having no weight system at all.

@Krautistanian True in both cases. On-grid RP is so rare that it barely exists at all, and the little that IS available is centered around bars. I catch a scene every once in a while to get a +nom or two, so I can collect my paycheck for a few weeks, but what’s out there isn’t exactly motivating. Though knowing that my continued presence annoys some long-term asshats there is reason enough for me to ensure I remain at least slightly active.

@Buttercup I salute you for doing a job I can’t do, and for injuries received in the line of duty. Deeply sorry it had to happen to you, but glad you’re on the mend. Hope the recovery is very swift and smooth, especially given how rocky the road thus far has been.

@Pavel Indeed. Abusers are like criminals in this regard, zeroing in on a specific type of victim… because they ARE criminals, as often as not. They are certainly predators, even if their abuses only occur in text (though it is not impossible that some of them are predators IRL as well). Patterns of abuse of others always seem to carry over into other areas of their lives, whether that manifests as habitual mild mistreatment of family or friends, or becoming a serial rapist/murderer, and everything in between.

And I’m saying this as one of those people who regularly fights land wars in my head.

@Pavel I’ve heard that about the code, and it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve played on several SAGA games, and that was the number one complaint among staffers; tweaking the code.

But even without that, d20 Star Wars, SAGA or otherwise, is a giant, steaming mess. The system is governed too heavily by numbers, classes, and builds. Even if it’s heavily house-ruled to make chargen and advancement more flexible, characters still tend to have a cookie-cutter feel to them, and the play-a-card system for both The Force and starship maneuvers provides endless frustration. You’ll never get to play the character you actually wanted to play, just whatever you can kludge together with what the classes, races, feats, talents, and attribute points allow.

And when the dice enter play, everything slows to a crawl! What fun I had on those games was usually in spite of the system, not because of it. Good players tend to be the only thing that keeps these games open.

@Narson I played there for roughly five years, which I still count among my biggest mistakes ever. The experience came very close to ruining Firefly/Serenity for me.

And a lot of things on AoA remind me of SerenityMUSH, including some of the coded objects (I believe Banshee used to be a coder on SerenityMUSH) and a lot of the staff behavior. Like Cujo, Mal was obsessed with remaining the biggest and most popular Firefly game out there, to the point of connecting regularly on all competing games and bringing along a handful of his favorite staffers, then roaming around the games in question generally being annoying and making sure it wasn’t getting bigger than his game. I think I recall seeing Mal connected under that name on a competing game, meaning he had created a playerbit and connected regularly enough that it didn’t idle out. I don’t know if they were attempting to lure other players to SerenityMUSH, but I could see them trying it, having seen staffers on other games trying such recruiting tactics on games they had quit, or on competitors to their own games. The whole thing was as creepy as it was annoying.

I have yet to personally hear about Cujo doing anything like this, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.