A Post-Mortem for Kingsmouth

[mietze]

Yes, I can't wait to see what folks come up with. I just really don't think "be the systematic change on an existing place you wish to see" is very appropriate on a existing MUSH. RP and PrP stuff, sure. But more than that I think is pretty disrespectful (unless it's with invitation) of the staff that is hosting you--and I do know that people who have asked about political/downtime/influence changes elsewhere have been met with hostility. (granted, they could have asked in a very snotty way too)

But if I decide to play on a place, as a player I feel that to be be a good guest and asset to the game, it's important that I try to support/learn/understand the vision of the staff that are running it, and to respect that. If I can't, then I should not be wasting both our time, if that makes sense.

[mietze]

I also understand that everyone has their different peeves. For me it's not people talking about the good times they've had somewhere that tends to irritate me so much as the bashing that happens especially on a new game that opens. "OMG Everything's going to be So Much Better/Drama Free/Awesomer blah blah blah because this time we have eliminated this nasty person or that rule that everyone hated, ect. Oh, the people on X place are just horrible," and the like. I find that to be a different version of the same rose colored glasses, that for whatever reason is far more irritating/stressful to me personally than reminiscence. I guess this is just my crusty old lady musher showing, because as I've mentioned before, since largely it's the same damn people everywhere, I'm always irrationally irritated at other people's irritation a short time later that OMG I'm still not getting the RP I want/there are annoying people here/I can't do whatever I want/ect.

When I decide to play on a place, I'm throwing in my support for the staff there. Don't have to like them, don't have to agree with them always, I don't expect anything done for me personally. But if I choose to be part of that community, then I am going to respect the vision I see there, which means not bitching at staff and trying to change it unless there's someone asking for input. Most places I play I end up running things for folks, both those I know and those I don't, because I like doing that--it's one of the things I truly love about this "age of mushing", that it's no longer forbidden to run plot (within limitations) as a player. If I find that staff isn't responsive/is rude or the playerbase is rude/unresponsive, then I'll drift. I am pretty sure that's what most people do except for the people who like to make a big blowup.

RfK certainly had some glaring problems. It had roughly the same amount of irritations I've had elsewhere, personalities and slowness/ST problems wise. However, the single sphere vampire was a "new thing" (I know it's not, truly, just that the trend in the last few years has been for massively multisphere games), the 1 alt policy, very strong limits on staff PCs policy, the structure that rewarded non-lethal PvP, structure that made mortals and ghouls useful mechanically and not just socially, social skills not demonized or ignored but also made mechanically advantageous while still not turning it into the Rapepalooza people are always afraid of--for me this created a game environment that suited a lot of my personal tastes, and it'd been a very long time since I'd encountered something like that.

There were still dumb people doing dumb things, bitchy people doing bitchy things, cheaty people doing cheaty things (though staff seemed to be pretty good about catching/dealing with those or addressing things as they came up, at least that I saw), there was still some of the same "you only got that because you're staff pet" on both sides of any conflict, still weirdos, still staff calls that I did not agree with. There was, I would argue, the same staff neglect/falling down on plot that happens in almost every game I've ever played on. Maybe more since there were so very few active ST staff. It was not, IMO, Paradise and MUSH perfection.

However, it was the most rewarding time I've had on a mush in a long long while. And the first time in a long time that I actually felt like the headwiz actually truly did give a shit about me as a player, even when she said "no" or made rulings that I strongly disagreed with.

[JustNobody]

This post is deleted!

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@mietze said:

I also understand that everyone has their different peeves. For me it's not people talking about the good times they've had somewhere that tends to irritate me so much as the bashing that happens especially on a new game that opens. "OMG Everything's going to be So Much Better/Drama Free/Awesomer blah blah blah because this time we have eliminated this nasty person or that rule that everyone hated, ect. Oh, the people on X place are just horrible," and the like. I find that to be a different version of the same rose colored glasses, that for whatever reason is far more irritating/stressful to me personally than reminiscence. I guess this is just my crusty old lady musher showing, because as I've mentioned before, since largely it's the same damn people everywhere, I'm always irrationally irritated at other people's irritation a short time later that OMG I'm still not getting the RP I want/there are annoying people here/I can't do whatever I want/ect.

I call this Happy Puppy Syndrome, and it drives me NUTS, personally. No game is ever (or was ever) the Promised Land. They all have problems that were glossed over as you were having fun, or will develop problems once the Shiny wears off and you actually have to train the puppy not to pee on the carpet.

[OrcRiot]

What are you talking about? The God Wars game I ran in like 1998..or so was perfect with the four people who played! PERFECT!

[TNP]

I still look back on CIty By The Bay with a certain wistful nostalgia for when it was in its prime. There was a year there that I had a lot of fun and can't really think of any complaints. And then it went to shit. A slow, inevitable, decline into wanting to gnaw my own leg off just to get away which was the culmination of the also inevitable 'maybe if I just make an alt, it'll get better' and the other standard attempts at trying to salvage something I sunk so much time into and wanted to recapture the fun.

Naturally, it didn't work and I left before I gnawed my own leg off. Would it have been better had it shut down before getting to that point? Maybe. Regardless, I had some of my most fun there right up to the point I stopped having fun there.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said:

@Ganymede Unless the writing was on a +bbpost it's not unreasonable someone might have missed other signs.

Driving with your eyes bound does not mean you are not responsible for colliding with pedestrians.

In my opinion, you basically had to be blind, ignorant, or completely uninvolved if you did not see closure coming.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede It's our responsibility to drive with our eyes open - we're obligated to pay attention. The same doesn't apply to MU* which are notorious for in-crowds, cliques and staff politics. Some people legitimately only log on to RP.

I'll grant you it's hard sometimes to understand that, as I remember chatting with people from Mage@TR back in the bad ol' days who had no idea there was bad blood and drama in the sphere. All they did was get together with a couple of friends and throw plots, maybe show up for an +event once in a while, the sphere was completely fine from their point of view even though entire groups of their fellow players had spent months throwing fits at each other. It happens!

Overall though it's also often not effortless nor fool proof to distinguish the difference between staff upheavals and general bellyaching and game-ending curtain closing.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel

I'm not saying that the players who did not see the closure had an obligation to keep themselves informed, so I guess my analogy was poor.

What I am saying was that RfK's demise was easily foreseeable. Job times were getting longer. RfK's core staff were begging for people to come on board to staff and assist. They were also making exceptions to long-existing rules in order to allow people to both staff and play. These requests and changes were public.

You had to literally be blindfolded not to see what was going to happen next. My conclusion was based on circumstances limited to the game. Bad blood within a sphere is not always bloody obvious, but RfK's closure was.

[Arkandel]

What do you think was keeping players from signing up to lend a hand?

For a bad game or one thick with drama I can understand it, but RfK - for someone who never played there - seems well loved by the folks who were playing there. Was there an obvious reason no one stepped up?

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel

One issue was the draconian rules for being staff and playing a PC. I don't recall the details well, but the policies made it impossible for staff to have a PC that owned or controlled domain. That's a problem since much of the involvement any PC had with others dealt with their domain.

Another issue was that the staff structure was very top-down. So, while new staff could handle menial duties, the big ideas, plans, and stories rested with older staff, whose time and interest had begun to wane due to burn-out.

I wanted to step up, but I had a PC that was becoming politically-involved. I decided that my PC's value in politics was greater to the game (and my enjoyment) than becoming a staff member. That was likely what others thought as well. Even with some of the policies being relaxed, I could not reconcile the differences.

Other people were just lazy, I guess.

[surreality]

@Ganymede said:

They were also making exceptions to long-existing rules in order to allow people to both staff and play. These requests and changes were public.

Public or not, this is probably the core of the problem. I have no idea how the original setup compared to the changes, or what either set of rules entails, but I'd bet on that being the crux of the problem.

If you're somewhere you enjoy playing? I can see wanting to pitch in. On the time investment alone, that's going to compromise your ability to play (sometimes immensely). Most folks who staff are willing to make that sacrifice. It's been suggested they were asking for a much bigger one than that.

Frankly, I feel it's a well-intentioned approach to a long-extant problem, but it's one that doesn't solve the problem, it perpetuates it and justifies paranoia. All work and no play makes for shitty staff over the long haul. It leads to lots of burnout, considering the way people tend to treat staff (as punching bags or people they're terrified of, often for zero reason in both cases).

Taking the 'distrust by default' approach, which RfK initially did in this case, exacerbates the problem considerably. Why? Because you've already established that you needed rules to prevent staff from playing because they can't be trusted to not cheat or be unfair if they're doing both. When you establish and foster that mentality among the playerbase, you encourage the worst elements of paranoia and staff vs. player dynamics from the top down.

Under these circumstances, when you change the rules, you're essentially announcing that "it's now OK for people in power to cheat", rather than "we would not have hired these people to staff if they were not trustworthy enough not to cheat".

That's a wretched message to send, and it's fucking subtle, insidious, and destructive as all hell.

[Arkandel]

@Ganymede said:

So, while new staff could handle menial duties, the big ideas, plans, and stories rested with older staff, whose time and interest had begun to wane due to burn-out.

This is becoming (has always been?) one of the leading causes of MU* demise.

Maintaining a very small staff with any real authority has some advantages but with no contingencies for their own inactivity it backfires in the long term.

I'm not saying it's good or bad. I get the concept of 'this is my baby' all too well. But it's what it is.

[Ganymede]

@surreality

I think you're being hyperbolic. There was nothing subtle or insidious about the policies, or destructive. They were clear and reasonably calculated to dodge future problems. I had no problem with the decision to implement them.

It is reasonable to want to avoid conflicts of interest. RfK had an active political system that was adjudicated by staff. It is reasonable to not want staff to adjudicate themselves, as this is also a problem over time. The one thing I can respect is that RfK set the line, made it clear, and did not waver from it until it absolutely had to. And the game worked for a long time just so, and there was nothing wrong.

But then, the Reach fell down, and people "discovered" this little game that was totally awesome. And staff did not know when to say "no": to the new concepts, to the requested changes to the influence system, to the changes that were being pushed on the game by outsiders. Staff became overwhelmed and overburdened, and then Shav took on a real job and was no longer around. Her decision to close the game entirely, which I disagree with, was hers alone, and was justifiable.

I'm sure the irony isn't lost on anyone.

[Alzie]

I am confused why we are all making guesses about what happened when at least three staffers have told you in detail what happened

[mietze]

Surr, the draconian policy on no staff alts being allowed to have positions of power or huge influence was one of the things that kept the community (of players who are/have been/probably will be at each others throats and princessing and cutting each other out of play on other games) from doing that on RfK. Huge, glaring You Shall Not Pass CoI demarcation with wide lines. It was fantastic. I think that's what made the politics happen ICly as much as the downtime system. That and headstaff with balls AND a customer service touch.

I agree it's not sustainable on a larger game, and I also agree with Gany that having the huge influx of people suddenly hurried along its demise.

[Apos]

@mietze said:

I agree it's not sustainable on a larger game, and I also agree with Gany that having the huge influx of people suddenly hurried along its demise.

That brings up a question I had that's been eating at me for a while and I hope you guys that played RfK can help me out with. I've been building a game with a really heavy emphasis on political systems to reduce the amount of GMing necessary to resolve things, and friends that have played RfK have told me about similarities they noticed, but none were staff and really saw the amount of work that was generated.

So my question is what kind of work did the players create for stuff that was overwhelming, what made the larger player base unsustainable, what type of jobs did you get flooded with that more automation could have potentially helped with?

[Alzie]

@Apos The most common jobs were investigation and crises jobs. Jobs to capture territories only came about as often as they opened and even then only if people were interested. XP spends were a big one but I managed to semi automate those. Rituals were the other big one.

[mietze]

From a player's perspective:

Pretty much the entire XP award process was done by 1 person (most of the time Shava did this, sometimes others, but I do think it tended to be done by one person for the week, there were no autogains). I understand why, as it gave immense insight into what people were doing--I was often shocked at the level of personal feedback I sometimes received (in a positive way). I know that people were even rewarded XP they didn't report themselves, due to other people's entries. That level of personal touch is awesome--but IMO pretty unsustainable when you start getting over 30-40 people. Though I waffle on that a bit, as I am friends with many Jr High and HS teachers, who certainly grade more essays than that on a regular basis--but then again this is per week. On a MUSH.

Plot slowness. To my knowledge while there were meticulous notes kept somewhat on things like Trello (including by players), I don't know that there seemed to be a lot of staff communication about currently running staff plots. (The real ones, not the "crisis scene" experiment that was tried). So that too tended to get narrowed down to waiting on a single person. (this is a very VERY common thing on mushes though). My entire time playing there I had a devil of a time getting plot jobs coordinated. Eventually I got smart and just asked to have it resolved via job rather than scene. Not my preference, but I had a great deal of empathy to how swamped people were and how much they were getting picked at. But by the time I figured out that was the better way to go things were really really realllllly slow.

Lack of communication between staff and then between staff and players. I personally saw polar opposite things being said by different staffers about even simple rulings or questions. Sometimes I saw the same staffer give two different answers to two different PCs as well, but most of the time it was the former. I suspect there was not very good recordkeeping that was easily accessible about what had been said to what player. This is also pretty common. But it does tend to really throw a wrench into things when you have two groups of people proceding forward on things relying on what they had been told by staff as the ruling, to find out later on that they'd been given conflicting information and then nobody knew how to sort it out because there wasn't really a record anywhere. This happened numerous times. Again, when you have 30 people on a game, that's less moving parts. When you have multi-tiered surges of people that push it higher, who came in at different times/talked to different staffers, and depending on who was on that day getting some pretty different answers, it leads to a lot of snap and snarl between players at each other and at staff at times, as people wonder what the fuck is the problem with these other people (not realizing they'd been told something totally different, until the players sat down and talked it out).

I don't think this as an automation-solved issue (except for maybe the XP), so much as a documentation and staff /team/ diligence issue. What works for a smallish place, which tends to be a LOT more forgiving in that regard, does not translate once it goes large. IMO.

[Apos]

@mietze said:

I don't think this as an automation-solved issue (except for maybe the XP), so much as a documentation and staff /team/ diligence issue. What works for a smallish place, which tends to be a LOT more forgiving in that regard, does not translate once it goes large. IMO.

Thanks, that does help a good bit.

@Alzie

So hypothetical question. In a perfect world where you had infinite time to code anything you wanted for that game, was there any systems you would have had that would have made things significantly easier for staff?