Reasons why you quit a game...

[Salty Secrets]

@gilette No, @ThatGuyThere is right, that sort of stuff does happen in the real world too. That doesn't make it right, but it does happen.

Student bodies and clubs are the best example I can think of, as by their nature they'll rotate membership every three to five years as people join and then graduate. The identity and purpose of any given group of students can change entirely based on the agenda of new students joining.

Back when I was still in college, I joined the "Japan Appreciation" committee/group/hangout/student body, whatever you want to call it. It was basically a private room with a TV and a huge library of anime and manga on shelves. When I joined, it was still true to its roots. There were only about twenty of us, so between classes maybe only four or five would ever be in the room at the same time.

One year before I graduated, freshmen showed up with a Nintendo 64 and asked if they could use the room to play Smash Bros when we weren't watching anime. They paid their membership fee and all so we didn't see a problem with it, so long as it didn't disturb the people who came to watch anime or read manga in peace.

Over the next few months, those freshmen lured in more and more of their friends and would spend increasingly alarming amounts of time playing the game. The ones in charge, like me, were too busy with graduation projects to settle disputes and through our neglect the anime and manga club became the Smash Bros club, unofficially. Old members left over it, new ones looking to play the game came in droves.

By the time I'd graduated, one of the freshmen had become head of the club due to there not being anyone else with the drive to do anything left, and policies changed drastically to put a bigger focus on gaming than the club's original purpose.

If they'd followed proper procedure, they would've made their own group/club by going through the school's administration. With their own room and TV they wouldn't have had to disrupt another group. But: the application process for getting a new student group approved and funded was notoriously harsh at the time, not to mention unfriendly to people who just wanted to play video games while at school. It was easier for them to invade the one club that already had a TV.

[ThatGuyThere]

@gilette
the first example I used with the club was the exact same thing that you said doesn't happen. yzou said. "no one has ever walked into a punk club and, over time, attracted more of their friends and turned the punk club into a hiphop club" That is almost exactly what happened in my example except substitute dance music for hip hop.
Another true real world example from where i live now. There was a gay bar my friend used to DJ at. It was the most popular one in town. A lot of straight women would go because it was a nice place to drink and dance and not worry about being hit on. Influx of woman lead to an influx of straight men seeking straight woman, which lead ot most of the original community leaving and starting opening a new place where my friend ending working as a DJ instead. The original gay club is still the main meat market in town.
I am not saying these things are good by any means but they are not unique to on-line. Something gets formed for reason. Succeeds at forming a solid core of people that gets it noticed to a wider audience, the parts of the wider audience that like thing but aren't devoted to it move in causing popularity surge. Popularity surge causes more numbers gains because some folks will swarm to the popular. Original Core loses power or is squeezed out entirely.
This is not unique to the internet this is pretty much humanity.

[Layla]

I've quit games for various reasons, but most people here have hit the reasons why. I will tell one story though, leaving out names.

I played a game at the request of a friend, and I thought it would be fun. Instead it was a series of cliques where finding RP was difficult and sometimes just flat out annoying. I finally did find some RP there with a group and we had a lot of fun, and people seemed to get upset at that. We were having a scene one evening, and halfway through it we were paged by staff to tell us that what we were doing was not in line with the MU*'s story, and we would have to disband our RP. What was the error? We were having a party, late at night, with boys and girls with no parents home. We were not being inappropriate, in fact, all we were doing was eating pizza.

I don't mind being tutted or told not to do something, when it makes sense, but teenagers hanging out at a house where the parents were at work, eating pizza? That doesn't happen? It's not allowed to? It was just weird, and after that I felt like everything we were doing was being watched, in a really creepy way. Left shortly after.

[phatdenny]

Eh well main ones for me is I can't trust the staff or I don't care for the players. Usually it's a combination, but everything seems to be an extension of that more or less.

But there was this one case where they straight up ripped the setting from some other chat, which just strikes me as lazy. Maybe even egomaniacal because you know that dude exported his char to this setting as well, which is weird to me. If you don't mind that, more power to you but I see it as a red flag.

[Auspice]

@phatdenny said in Reasons why you quit a game...:

But there was this one case where they straight up ripped the setting from some other chat

Saw that done just in the past couple years.
Made me especially angry because I was one of the people who worked on the original.

Now I'm mad just thinking about it. Well! Upside! I can burn some of that off on my walk/jog to the bus stop.

[phatdenny]

@auspice Yeah that would have pissed me off to probably. I mean if I homebrewed a setting or something I'd be flattered but just straight up ripping it is terrible.

The worst part is I really liked the old setting. Thankfully they got rid of the guy though so at least there was a happy ending.

[Rook]

@layla
That's.... creepy as fuck. Also? What was the theme of this place? This is just ass backwards from most places, where non-slice-of-life scenes are the 'dangerous', non-thematic fodder that have to be 'watched'. What the fuck? Pizza?

What, was this a historical MU of sailing ships and turkey legs at every meal? No? Then the staffer that paged you just had personal issues.

[Layla]

@rook Nope, just a dark horror setting where the parents are picture perfect. So no child would be left alone after dark or something, not even teenagers. Very weird, tbh.

[Rook]

So.... waita%&$*ingminutehere...

You set up a perfect scene for Something Thematic and Bad To Happen, and Staff tells you to knock it off? Awesome game. Way to go guyz!

[ThatGuyThere]

@Layla
Wow that completely boggles my mind, the whole group of teens having pizza is pretty much a staple of a lot of horror.
Hell I used to watch every slasher movie i could get my hands on and that was a required scene almost. You have the set up pizza party type things that intro the characters and has some jump scares, then you roll out the plot a bit. then there is the second occasion where the group gets together again and then the horror part starts.
I have heard many things in my time but staff complaining about the standard story progression of the genre is a new one.

[Layla]

@thatguythere I'm pretty sure they had a very specific idea for the setting and the rp, but not letting people do social rp while things are being set up..and the whole posting things on the bbs about things that aren't allowed, even something innocent like a pizza party, it was just too weird. So I bailed.

[ThatGuyThere]

@layla
At that level of desired control it seems like they would be better suited to writing a script or novel. My its very nature a MU will have multiple folks each with a slightly different idea of what the setting and genre are. Ideally you have a staff that is firm enough to provide coherency while also giving players enough freedom to stretch creatively. that place sounds limited to the extent that you would be expected to follow a script without the courtesy of being given one.