@Nobody-0 Receipt or no receipt, showing up on a game just to fuck with a place is not cool. If someone has an issue with a game, then stay far far away. Logging onto a game maliciously is a cancer to the community.

People taking their grievances to extremes is never okay.

@Polk said in Ruiz Thread:

she’s not in the past been afraid to take action.

Yes, she absolutely has. That’s an outright lie. And he knows that personally.

When @Polk pissed all over the game rules while she was away busy with heavy RL stuff and took advantage of her absence to abuse players he got a complete pass. She traded in her integrity on a silver platter for his help running the game when she couldn’t be there, because in comparison, a few players weren’t worth it to her to do the right thing.

She tried to offer solutions and undo the mess that he made, but the damage was done and @Polk got zero consequences.

So it depends on who you’re complaining about. If Addison is more useful to her game than you are, you will probably be shit out of luck.

Adjust your expectations about complaints there accordingly.

@GF said in Good things in Mushing:

Staff who take action when action is called for.

Especially when it benefits them to overlook at it.

Having a back bone should not be underestimated.

@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:

• Up to now, he had chiefly been someone who could save me a little time (which adds up considerably) by managing the wiki and website updates. Polk’s social IQ problems were not unknown. It’s why he only became Mage Director when Tris stepped down and there was no one else. And it’s why he was removed as Mage Director a year ago, and was relieved of any player-facing responsibilities as sub-director a while after that. He never did anything unethical (as a Director anyways) - but he could not deal effectively with people.

Well, that’s just not true. He very much did unethical things as Director.

Sundance(sun) pages: There’s two elements to this. The first element is 1) Polk should absolutely not have disapproved you on his own initiative. He knew that the moment he did it, and he already apologized to me in page about it, before I sat down. I had him immediately re-approve you, since I’m the only one who can carry out OOC discipline here.

I won’t say she’s just flat out lying. Maybe she just forgot, but he was definitely unethical as Director. Maybe she didn’t consider that situation because, in her view, she fixed it? (She didn’t actually fix it, she just reversed his decision, which still left a host of problems. Not the same thing as fixing it.)

But…

If she did just forget, I gotta tell ya, it sucks to have been so severely fucked over by Polk in the exact same temper tantrum, table flipping way and then forgotten about by Sundance like you never existed and didn’t spend months of your life researching, writing, and on a few occasions driving through LA in order to desc half of her ginormous, unnecessarily large grid to give her 200+ grid spaces and builds so that as many spaces and builds as possible were as accurate to the actual RL locations as they could be, all the way down to neighborhood blocks that had no notable features except for how much graffiti and trash were visible or how many and what types of cars were parked on the street. Granted, I did all of that willing and no one asked me to do the extras, but it is too much to expect that you and the reason you left the game not be forgotten about? Apparently, that might be.

So… hopefully it wasn’t the latter. That would blow.

Every neighborhood in a city to desc the grid, down to Google street view in VR. Done most recently for LA, but previously Chicago, and Manhattan.

Definitely don’t take the player option of of RPS, otherwise there’s no reason to use RPS. That would turn people away.

My biggest issue with character progression is that the only way most characters progress on a game is through xp and stats.

XP and stats should not be the only way a character progresses. There should be other achievables like rank or resources or territory or a combination of all of them that allows a character to progress without simply racking up xp and spending it.

If people had more objectives to achieve besides MOAR XP, then a game wouldn’t need to give out so much xp per week to keep people interested and uber stats become much less of a problem.

But handing out scads of xp is the easy, traditional solution. It takes very little monitoring and is often completely automated. So that’s what most games do.

Not saying that is bad or wrong, just that it really puts the burden of character progression on xp if that’s all the game has.

@junipersky said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I feel like one of her most defining traits is the way she talks about her OOC life. She could very legit have all the issues she talks about, but the way she phrases it is very much in a way that digs for sympathy and pity from others. She emphasizes her disabilities as reasons why people, especially those in authority, are out to get her.

I haven’t had much contact with her directly, but her constant RL overshares are one of the most awkward and uncomfortable and unavoidable things about being in the same play space as her.

Before I respond, just remember that this is a Star Wars game with kaiju that eats planets and the Death Star was being built to stop them, but the Rebels blew it up so now the whole galaxy is at risk of being nom nom nommed because of them. The top Jedi is an openly force-lightning wielding darksider (who leads with Luke Skywalker’s blessing) who also leads the New Republic’s military, even though they’re totally separate entities, who is prone to snap and yell at his subordinates for little reason because of the dark side and the brain pains he gets because the entirety of the Jedi Archives was placed inside his head before Order 66 - and everyone knows and is cool with all of it. No one leading things in this SW universe sees anything wrong with any of this. All perfectly fine.

SO. When you ask, ‘Why would they make X decision?’ Just know, that might not even rank of the list of jacked up decisions made at this place.

@Wizz said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

Works great at a table, but does not translate at all to MU*s IMHO.

How it translates on this game is new players show up and get to that section of chargen and say ‘I don’t know anyone!’ and the staff says, ‘Well you can use my player bit as a connection’ and then all the players have all their connections to the staff’s PC bits who are at the center of everything and everything revolves around them.

@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

That’s interesting, because I wondered how using NPCs would actually accomplish anything. Are staff going to run these NPCs regularly?

Nope. Not for other players, anyway. For other staff characters yes. Everyone else, you’ll probably never see them again. If you do, do you think staff there will remember your character’s connection to them? Good luck.

@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen:

If not, what’s the difference between saying I trained with the one special NPC jedi master, or some other one I invented in my BG?

Absolutely nothing. Well… except that with established NPCs they can tell you how wrong you are about what you wrote and how they wouldn’t do X, Y, and Z and make you go back to change your background to how they view that NPC.

@imstillhere said in Social/Bar RP:

I feel like “bar rp” picks up a lot of smoke as a bad thing though.

Why’s it got such a terrible reputation?

“Bar RP” is a colloquialism that many people use in the community. It means boring, trite RP without purpose or consequence.

It isn’t meant to be literal. It doesn’t mean that all RP that takes place in a bar is bad. But many scenes where people reach out to random players for RP has taken place in bars, likely because that’s were players thought was the most likely place for their characters, who did not previously know each other, well or at all, to have met. That was usually followed by random small talk that neither party was actually interested in because one or both was hoping the other would bring something interesting to the table and that doesn’t happen. What follows is usually forced or painful or unfulfilling or some combination of all three until the scene finally ends.

That is “bar RP”. And that’s why the phrase has such a terrible reputation.

As many have pointed out, the location of a bar is not the problem. Neither is social RP. It is the content of the RP that is the issue, which some people can make happily interesting, even with characters who do not know each other, and others cannot.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

My problem with backgrounds is that I constantly do the thing where I put all the interesting bits of a character’s life in the background, and leave very little room for interesting stuff to happen on the game.

I don’t think that’s only your problem. Its a problem built into the system that you have to self correct for. You’re told to make a background and usually told that you have to justify your stats. So you come up with whatever ridiculousness you need to to justify the stats, then after approval, you’re not actually allowed to do half the interesting stuff that was approved in your background for various reasons, many of which are completely valid. So you end up in this weird twilight zone of having this very cool character who will not likely accomplish anything near as interesting as what you had in your head. As a result there’s more than a few people who have made characters they really liked, but then have done little to nothing with them before fading out completely.

My two cents is that not all NPCs are created equally. The purpose behind an NPC determines what that NPC needs to make them impactful. An NPC with multiple purposes needs that much more work, but more work makes for a more vibrant character (usually).

However, you have to know when making them that they may not be used for whatever purpose you design them for. Players will interact with them as they choose and things generally spiral off into crazy directions. Sometimes we spend a lot of time and effort into making NPCs then get really disappointed when players ignore/dismiss/misinterpret them.

Anchoring a character to your game world is an easy way to make sure that your NPC gets the attention it deserves. Making them important enough that the world doesn’t work right without them is a surefire way to anchor them. This is easily done at the start of the game. It is much harder to do after the fact.

It is important to remember that every institution exists for a reason ICly. Too many times we create institutions and NPCs for those institutions just because the book says it exists. That waters down any NPC if they’re only around because the theme says they should be around, but we ignore the reason behind it. An impactful NPC changes the world around them not only with their presence, but with their absence.

I had high hopes for the game. Too bad it went down so quickly.

But games need stories. When the stories go away, the players will too. There have been a few Ares games like that lately.

Oddly enough, the ease with which you can open a game on your own also tends to lead people into doing so more often, unprepared for the burden they’re taking on. It used to be that in order to open a game you needed a team. You needed coders, STs, admins. You looked around got the team together and then, eventually, opened a game. The team was there to support each other and carry the burden as a group. Now, people just go it solo, get quickly overwhelmed and then have to bail on the responsibility.

Just because you can open a game on your own doesn’t mean you should.

@Mourne said in Liberation MUSH:

@Pavel I am so confused by this statement. The whole discussion, such as it is, is about people modifying the rules and hamstringing some people while giving other people free things arbitrarily.

Creating a complete lack of fairness within the same sphere or splat or however you want to say it.

Offering incentives is part of MU*s. If you consider it a “complete lack of fairness”, that’s totally up to you. And I’d agree. It isn’t fair.

Neither is the fact that different players will earn different XP amounts every day.

Neither is the fact that some people will play 5 characters on a game while some only play one or two and are privy to much more of the game plots.

Neither is the fact that some characters get more scenes from the ST than other people.

Neither is the fact that some characters have been on the game longer than others and have more XP.

Neither is the fact that some characters have been on the game longer than others and have more IC connections.

Neither is the fact that some characters have sphere STs that are more present and responsive than others.

The list goes on and on, but the point is that there’s a ton about MU* s that are a complete lack of fairness. Some things can be controlled, others cannot. But the goal of a MU* is not ‘complete fairness’. It is the full and complete game world that people are playing characters in.

If an ST sees that people are consistently avoiding a breed because the mechanical benefits of choosing something else are more appealing it is more that okay to offer incentives to balance that. Is it fair? No. But so much on a MU* is already unfair that it hardly merits consideration.

Are there better ways to go about it that could cause less absolute panic in particular players? Probably. That stuff should go on an incentive board somewhere, but their lack of proper/updated documentation has always been a problem on that game.

To each, their own, though. Personally, in terms of being problematic, I’d give this a 2/10. And only because it wasn’t identified as an issue and placed properly in an HR or on the website. There are far bigger issues with that game to be concerned with.

@helvetica said in JKER Temporarily Banned Discussion Thread:

Listen, Darkest Timeline @Pax - I don’t think it’s constructive to cry foul on @Warma-Sheen rn. You’d have my upvote if it weren’t for that.

“Creepiness” is a moving target and I think @hellfrog has an excellent take on that in the other thread.

@Tez was talkin rules, and Warma answered in rules-speak to demonstrate a point. Using an exaggeration to express concern about where a line is drawn =/= malevolent intent.

Yeah, it wasn’t an argument that he didn’t do anything wrong. Or that he was right about what he said. He made a very personal attack for seemingly no particular reason so I’m definitely in agreement that he should be held accountable for inappropriate actions.

At the time, I posted, this was in the other thread wherein the definition of ‘creepy’ was being discussed. I didn’t find it to be behavior defined as ‘creepy’. That was all.

@GF said in JKER Temporarily Banned Discussion Thread:

This doesn’t rise to my personal standards of being creepy. The word I’d use is… actually, the word I’d use is probably not permissible under the terms of service, so let’s stay polite and stick with “unacceptable.”

Yeah. That.

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

People MU for all kinds of reasons.

This. There’s no one magic bullet to MU success, 3 month or otherwise. It takes a number of things. There are a lot of things to be handled to address all the many reasons people join a game, some of them mutually exclusive. It is a delicate balancing act. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone wants to do it. Some people want to and can do it, but not forever.

A lot of the games that get trashed often handled all this better than others. People tend to focus on their complaints about a game without acknowledging all the things done right and the reasons games keep going strong for years, despite the problems. I’ve been guilty of this as well, especially when it has affected me personally, negatively, or unfairly.

But it doesn’t take away from the fact that running a successful game is a daunting feat, however one defines success.

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

I understand the ‘must have proof’ mindset, though. Sometimes (rarely, but still) bitches do lie. After all, this board was founded after people were falsely accused of something and punished without any sort of transparent investigation.

Yep.

Sometimes people lie.

If everyone could just trust everyone else to be good, upstanding citizens of the community, this wouldn’t be a discussion in the first place. The medium used in this hobby makes it overwhelmingly, exceptionally, infinitely easy to verify your experiences. To ignore that in favor of blind trust of everyone at all times is unnecessarily short-sighted.

It is bad enough to have to experience a sex pest on a game. How much worse would it be to have to experience harassment and also be swiftly booted from the game because the harasser false reported you first and was believed without question so that you got banned and couldn’t report him? No thanks.

And at the end of the day, if you’re reporting said behavior you’re already sharing your experience. Verifying it is a valid part of that, especially on a text medium.

Is it ideal to have to go through that? No, but none of this situation is ideal.

ETA: But also, if you’re on a good game with a good community and good staffers, do those staffers a solid. Don’t put them in a position of having to trust one anonymous name on a screen over another anonymous name on a screen. You don’t really know them. They don’t really know you. There’s really no reason to blindly trust anyone. Make it as easy as possible for them to do the right thing.

If the staffer is bad, your report, verified or not, probably won’t do anything anyway (see this thread). If the staffer is good, then have their back so they can have yours.

@Bessarion said in Why is Pack closing?:

Yes and no. Some themes draw more people with more problematic behavior. WoD-like games will draw more of the people who never stopped being Those Creeps From WoD Games. Like, Rex/Sovereign can and will (and has) come crawling out of the woodwork, and god knows who he might drag with him.

Its true. Creeps want to be able to creep. So certain themes help them justify their creepiness. If a game encourages animalistic predators characters, animalistic predator players see an avenue where their preferred poison of creepiness might be tolerated or accepted.

Most “dark” themes apply to this which is why World of Darkness games tend to draw these types. But it isn’t the game itself. It is the creeps who try to use the theme as justification to be inappropriate in their interactions with others.

Five.

I don’t think most games or advertisements intend to lie. They just rarely match the experience some players are having. Usually, people running the site have a vision of what they want to do with a game, then there’s varying levels of how far they missed the mark, for one reason or another.

But I never think the ads are a lie. Even if they don’t match the experience the ads can still let you know if what the game is going for is something you might like to involve yourself with. So it still can be helpful.

ETA: Every person on every game is going to ultimately come away with a different experience so it is nearly impossible to advertise a game that is exactly correct for every people that tries it.