Managing Player Expectations
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@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
That shouldn't be an issue. For starters you can create any character you want, including vampires, and since it's statless and there's no CGen process you can literally hit the grid in minutes. As for searching for others wanting sexy times, I don't need to explain why that would be easier on a game where +kinks is a coded command, right?
I think one issue you are missing is the scale, I mean back when I regular checked log in numbers (like 2013 or so) Shang was right around 700 every night, now If I am looking for vampire loving (I never am since I don't care for vampire in general but that is the example in use) there is a lot of crap to sort though simply because any character can be made, I might be looking for vamp on vamp action but you have to short through a lot of comic book characters, elves, Giant penises in wheelbarrow, chick made out of ice cream etc (all those examples come from shang descs posted to the old boards) to find the other vampires that takes work.
Now the Vampire game tops out at around what 50 (that would be a fairly large one sphere WoD game) oh which nearly all would be vamps and so you just have to find the ones that are open to romantic play which given the rate at which my char was hit on by vamps (none did it excessively or creepily to their credit) on RoK is not an insignificant percentage. And by shear weight of numbers shorting through 50 would take a much shorter time than sorting through 700.
Now maybe it would be best for the person whose main concern is finding vamp love to try Shang, expecting people to go with best over easy is going to lead to disappointment in right around 90 percent (90 percent is a rough guestimation based on personal experience not a statistical analysis) of the time on line or off. -
@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
My only explanation (other than accounting for jerks) is poor self awareness. I.e. players who want mainly TS but tell themselves they're after metaplot, depth and all the other trappings of a non-TS game so they log on those to look for the former anyway.
Why is it so hard to believe that someone might want BOTH types of RP?
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@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
There is some real incentive for them, and future others, to go into the genre and work even if they need to turn social networks off since it pays the bills.
Absolutely true. I was merely commenting on the common sense of entitlement that drives the negative comments in the first place. I think that attitude is alarmingly pervasive these days.
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I played Fallout 4 expecting a Fallout game. My expectation was they called it Fallout, but it ended up being a very different experience to the previous offerings and I felt kind of lied to. I agree that people complain too much, but I try to see if their criticism has merit, too. That’s just how I’m wired.
This segues into what @Arkandel was asking: Why play a game that isn’t quite what you’re looking for? Because it’s close. Friends and popularity too, yes, but choices aren’t so flush that someone can find precisely what they’re looking for.
So it’s a mix of a lot of things. I think players should play the game that was created, but as a lot of players are asked, and sometimes demanded to create on the fly, the need for give and take is critical.
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@sunny said in Managing Player Expectations:
Why is it so hard to believe that someone might want BOTH types of RP?
It isn't. In my example though I was referring specifically to someone who wants mostly TS, and doesn't intend to play the overall game either way.
Let's not let TS distract us here though (since it tends to take over conversations - perhaps I shouldn't have used it at all) since it was just one example.
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@thenomain said in Managing Player Expectations:
I played Fallout 4 expecting a Fallout game. My expectation was they called it Fallout, but it ended up being a very different experience to the previous offerings and I felt kind of lied to.
You’re entitled to feel however you feel, obviously. But hypothetically if you were to go off on a cruel rant to the devs about how the game didn’t meet your expectations, I would say you were wrong. We can vote with our wallets (or in the case of MUs with our feet). There’s no call for raking creators over the coals because their vision was different than yours. Because at the end of the day, what defines “a Fallout game” or “a Star Wars movie” is for them to say, not for us to say. It is, in fact, their world/game/franchise.
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@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
@sunny said in Managing Player Expectations:
Why is it so hard to believe that someone might want BOTH types of RP?
It isn't. In my example though I was referring specifically to someone who wants mostly TS, and doesn't intend to play the overall game either way.
Let's not let TS distract us here though (since it tends to take over conversations - perhaps I shouldn't have used it at all) since it was just one example.
It feels like to me that it was an example of a false principle to begin with, though. Managing player expectations is one thing. Dealing with the VERY SMALL number of people who are interested only in X type of RP is another. Managing healthy expectations is one conversation. Dealing with a tiny population of problem players is something different. I don't really feel like focusing on people who are only after one kind of RP is productive, as they aren't the problem being discussed here. They are SO RARE as to nearly be unicorns, really. But they're often trotted out all the same whenever 'player expectations' comes up, as if these specific people are what the conversation is about.
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@sunny said in Managing Player Expectations:
Managing healthy expectations is one conversation. Dealing with a tiny population of problem players is something different. I don't really feel like focusing on people who are only after one kind of RP is productive, as they aren't the problem being discussed here.
I concur.
I follow the principle of not catering to the lowest common denominator. I'm concerned with the vast majority of the players I have to deal with, not the occasional or rare ass-hat that I cannot deal with. When those players arrive, I quietly show them the door, regardless of whether they have caused problems or not.
Devoting my time to the players I can deal with consistently is a more efficient use of my time than devoting exorbitant amounts of time to those I cannot.
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To try and bring the question back around: how do we deal with mismatched expectations between reasonable players and reasonable staff?
You have laid out your policies and your game, and you are set up to play the game in a certain fashion. You want to tell epic sweeping stories and you're really just not interested in providing any support for extensive gear differences. To some of your players (who are otherwise reasonable!), it seems to be common sense that if you're telling an epic sweeping story, you have GOT to have epic gear to go with it, right? Like, how do you kill a dragon without a dragonslayer sword?!
What are some tricks and tips people use to try and bring these things together? Do we post posts? Have individual conversations to try and bring everyone to the same page? How can we deal with this sort of misalignment effectively, and how do we minimize the appearance of this problem in the first place?
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@sunny said in Managing Player Expectations:
Managing player expectations is one thing. Dealing with the VERY SMALL number of people who are interested only in X type of RP is another.
I agree with the general principle but with this caveat; it's usually the edge cases who represent a lot of the work needed to put those expectations at ease, so by bringing them up we can perhaps discuss the traits that make them edge cases, and whether they have a point or not.
Or to rephrase with a non-TS example, the number of players who complain about STs not custom tailoring plots for their specific needs, or who go to staff to protest they're not allowed to invent the asphalt and lay roads on their fantasy game, is small. However those are often still the ones who cause headaches and burn people out, so I thought it was fair to bring them up even though they're a minority.
Does that make more sense?
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I understand your perspective, I just don't agree with it. It makes perfect sense, but I also think that it's wrong.
Problem players -- actual problem players -- should be dealt with as such. The things that you're describing need disciplinary actions, and cannot be solved by addressing the problem of mismatched expectations. Their problem isn't mismatched expectations, their problem is that they're jerks, so while they might occur in the same fashion, they are two very different things with very different solutions. Addressing the edge cases in this scenario ends up meaning you don't actually address the real problem for the reasonable people on your game.
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@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
I agree with the general principle but with this caveat; it's usually the edge cases who represent a lot of the work needed to put those expectations at ease, so by bringing them up we can perhaps discuss the traits that make them edge cases, and whether they have a point or not.
My experience tells me otherwise.
The cases that require the most work are the ones involving a very active player demanding many things that would be considered reasonable, individually, but, in the aggregate, require a lot of time from the staff end. These players represent a huge workload for staff, but you cannot reasonably refuse them because they aren't asking for any individual thing that is egregious. These are the players that want to investigate every news article, every plot thread, everything, and everyone.
The edge cases may be easily dismissed.
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@faraday said in Managing Player Expectations:
@thenomain said in Managing Player Expectations:
I played Fallout 4 expecting a Fallout game. My expectation was they called it Fallout, but it ended up being a very different experience to the previous offerings and I felt kind of lied to.
You’re entitled to feel however you feel, obviously. But hypothetically if you were to go off on a cruel rant to the devs about how the game didn’t meet your expectations, I would say you were wrong.
O...Kay? That kind of goes against my point, but sure, because my point was that some complaints about expectation are reasonable.
So yes, I suppose if I were unreasonable, you could call me unreasonable.
...good?
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I think we're talking about a few different things and they are getting a little conflated.
When I think of reasonable players and staff having differing expectations. Sometimes it's just a lack of clarity in what a game should be, where it's hard to present detail that would clear up misconceptions without overwhelming someone looking at the game. But sometimes it's just players wanting to add something that the owner never thought of, or considered, or take things in a different potential direction.
And if everyone's reasonable, then either the staffer can decide it's something they'd like to see and expand it, or it's not something they'd want to see or aren't interested in and decline to add it to the game, and then a reasonable player also doesn't badger the staffer, and is polite and courteous in bringing it up, and the staffer is polite and courteous in hearing about it, even if 20 different people have also suggested it 20 times before and it's getting really, really old.
The unreasonable ones are disciplinary stuff, and I think a different scope of discussion. But I think the, 'people after different kinds of RP' is an entirely different discussion from either of those things.
As a hobby, I don't think it's any secret we have a whole hell of a lot of introverts or people with social anxiety, and I mention this because it is not exactly hard for someone to just not get invested in a game. Someone plays, they get one RP partner, that RP partner quits, and maybe that player logs in once a week ever after and just idles in their room for forever. They just aren't engaged, and a lot of them linger forever kind of hoping someone else engages them, because going out and creating that engagement is very challenging and frankly scary to a ton of players. And more often than not, someone stuck in that position, of maybe finding a single thread of RP they value... those people are going to be written off by other players, generally unfairly.
I'm not like, a brilliant storyteller or writer or organizer, but I do think I might have a knack for engaging with people that are having trouble finding footing, which loops back to that other conversation about social scenes, and people's differing value in them. I think more often than not, a lot of players that are written off by other players as having niche interests just need to be engaged with, and they will respond accordingly and get invested in the game. I strongly think that the 'person that plays a game not meant for that kind of RP and refuses to engage' is so rare it might as well not really exist, but the 'person that has no idea how to get involved' is overwhelmingly common, and probably one of the biggest single issues that any game runner deals with.
It's super, super important to not mistake the latter for the former, in my opinion.
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@apos said in Managing Player Expectations:
And if everyone's reasonable, then either the staffer can decide it's something they'd like to see and expand it, or it's not something they'd want to see or aren't interested in and decline to add it to the game, and then a reasonable player also doesn't badger the staffer, and is polite and courteous in bringing it up, and the staffer is polite and courteous in hearing about it, even if 20 different people have also suggested it 20 times before and it's getting really, really old.
I think this is why we keep going off into the weeds. If everyone's reasonable, then having mismatched expectations is simply not an issue at all. A player might be mildly bummed or even leave the game if it's not what they expected. A staffer might sigh at having the same thing asked 27 times and having to patiently explain why that's not in their vision. Sure it's nice if you can avoid this by clearly stating expectations up front, but it is, quite simply, not a problem.
The problem, to me, is what @Arkandel said earlier: It's the people who aren't reasonable who take up the majority of the effort. I disagree that this is a clear-cut disciplinary issue, because it's usually not somebody screaming at you. More often, it's somebody who is making your admin life perpetually difficult because they just can't seem to reconcile their tenacious expectations of how the game "should be" with how the game actually is.
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@faraday said in Managing Player Expectations:
The problem, to me, is what @Arkandel said earlier: It's the people who aren't reasonable who take up the majority of the effort. I disagree that this is a clear-cut disciplinary issue, because it's usually not somebody screaming at you. More often, it's somebody who is making your admin life perpetually difficult because they just can't seem to reconcile their tenacious expectations of how the game "should be" with how the game actually is.
I think I shouldn't have used the word 'disciplinary'. Since it conjures image of someone screaming and them being thrown out the door while flailing about, and that just doesn't happen very much. It's someone vaguebooking about a point a few times, or mild acts of passive aggression, or even less than that, just someone bringing up the point in a well meaning but ultimately really obnoxious way after it has been politely declined.
Those are frustrating, and I think most people that do it have no idea how taxing it is, how exhausting it is for a game runner doing something for fun has a sore point prodded over and over. Being the bad guy and feeling disproportionate in shutting it down will often solve it, but it's not fun to have to look/feel unreasonable.
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It's really not too hard to handle for some things; it can be mentioned in a setting file somewhere. 'We don't plan to have any major advances in technology occur within the game, and any major developments or changes requested will be denied.' (And so on.)
This is one you can even make and keep very vague: 'The game we wish to run has been designed as presented in the news/wiki/whatever, and any major developments or changes that would massively alter the world would change the essential nature of the game as intended, and that everyone on it came here to play. Requests that would fundamentally change the physical, social, or technological landscape and reality of the game will be denied.'