Shadows Over Reno
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Hell-oooh. I am Golgotha, via Reno. I have been dodgey due to fucking travel due to a fucking firestorm fucking up my company's fucking awesome resort. Anyways. Reno 2.0 seems to have a good bunch of folk, lots of misunderstandings of late, but I think it is due to everyone getting their bearings. 2.0 is, honestly, fucking weird.
The Center Cannot Hold.
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Also, side note: I had no idea how to properly desc my Lygos. I put something there, but part of me HATE HATE HAAAAATES IIIIIT. Ahem. Yeah.
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“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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Was.
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I'm in the process of trying to build an Invictus, Nos/Galloi. I'm on there as Lucien. I may, if/when approved, start putting out hooks for a fraternal twin sister to do the 'creepy twin Nos Galloi' thing.
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Am working on -- I build slow, OK? -- a venue for up-and-coming, small time, or weird performer character concepts. This is not a glitzy showplace for the fame 3 crowd; it's more like a crazy vaudeville/sideshow/circus acts/burlesque• joint full of kitsch and quirky weirdness, in a more 'dinner theater' club layout than a traditional theater with assigned seating. Pretty much everything from musicians to singers to sword-swallowers to acrobats to magicians to fan dancers and---
...I think y'all get the idea.
There are always a handful of characters like this around and sometimes it's not real easy to find a place to do your thing, so I'm working on a place for all the creative kooks to be made welcome to do their thing.
This is basically a zero obligation gig -- no minimum requirements for being around/etc. -- just a place to perform if you're in the mood to do it, when you wanna do it. The character running the place is a vamp, but she's fuzzball/mortal-friendly and I have no intention of making the place a vamp-only sort of thing; everybody's welcome to join in to whatever extent they'd like, no required thrallings and no casting couch. If there are enough folks interested, events of whatever type are definitely on the table as an option.
Hopefully it'll be done relatively soon. Poke Anais (alias: Ana) on game if interested. Stage hands/bartenders/bouncers/etc. also welcome.
• NO full nude, it is not a modern strip joint -- think Dita von Teese (youtube it but not from work if you aren't familiar), classic showgirl burlesque, bellydancing, and the people who do acrobatic pole-dancing here as the furthest extreme in that direction.
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So tempting.
I do miss vampire. -
@mietze And Vampire misses you?
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I just want to get approved. There's been enough good about the game to make me want to play and greater than 72 hour turnaround on a fucking /note/ is getting to be bullshit. The note was set within a couple hours. This is stupid. I'm watching people who applied after me get approved before me, in my sphere.
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
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@Lithium said in Shadows Over Reno:
I just want to get approved. There's been enough good about the game to make me want to play and greater than 72 hour turnaround on a fucking /note/ is getting to be bullshit. The note was set within a couple hours. This is stupid. I'm watching people who applied after me get approved before me, in my sphere.
Yeah, my Werewolf waited for 11 days in CGen and the last 3 were mostly comprised of going back and forth with stuff like "anything else missing?" "no, I'm good, except maybe a staff note for <X> as we discussed?" "Okay, read the note and tell me if it's okay?" "yep, it's okay, thanks", "anything else?" "nope!" when they could have just approved him and done the back and forth on minor details afterwards.
But they are very understaffed in general so expectations have to be managed.
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@Arkandel said in Shadows Over Reno:
But they are very understaffed in general so expectations have to be managed.
Definitely true.
At the same time, there are also a number of things that could be streamlined much better to eliminate a lot of the back and forths, which would save time for both staff and players. Understaffing can be partly compensated for with consistency and efficiency. There are also some things that I've seen people ask questions about repeatedly that take time away from staff to answer, but which could be fixed in a way that would eliminate most future questions in about the same time as it would take the answer the next person who asks.
One example is the last page of chargen, which says (or did when I was in there, anyway) to put your XP spends into the job when you submit, which isn't what you're supposed to do. There is a bbpost that says what you're supposed to do, but fixing the @desc in the room would take about the same amount of time as a bbpost, and would mean less confusion for people and less time having to answer questions about what to do. People are more likely to notice the directions in the chargen room than a bbpost mixed in with a hundred others.
Plus, the room @desc will have to be fixed at some point anyway, so not fixing it triply compounds the issue; you have to write a bbpost, you have to clarify what the right process is when people ask (which just takes up more time the longer the @desc is unfixed as more people ask), and you have to update the @desc anyway. Just fixing the @desc first saves the extra work of those other things.
As for the example you gave (the back and forth conversation), in my experience it ends up making things faster for everyone if instead of saying "anything else missing?" you approve the job and say "if anything else is missing, just put in a request and we'll be happy to take care of it." The job is then closed, the staffer doesn't have to spend any time coming back to it to check if there was something else , and the player knows that the situation is finalized and they're okayed (or denied) for whatever the job was about without wondering if they're set to go or not, which can happen if the job isn't actually approved yet. If there's an issue they can just put in another job, which is really just as easy as adding a comment to the previous job is.
There have been some other things that have generated extra, unnecessary work for staff that could have been negated by taking a brief extra action earlier as well. For example, a post by the Prince got pulled down, but that was after people had seen it and started RPing about it. I understand (and agree with) the reason it was pulled, but a quick note saying 'ignore that post, pretend it didn't happen, sorry. nothing has changed except that the post never happened' would have meant people knew what was going on. Instead, multiple people ended up putting in jobs asking what was going on and needing clarification. Did it still happen, and it's just not there for new people to find out about? Did it get retconned? Nobody knew.
I'm sure that a lot of this is growing pains, and that things will get sorted out and squared away and all of that. I've been having fun, and none of this is really meant to be complaints, just my observations of ways that the staff has been making their own lives needlessly harder (and sometimes their players, but more often their own).
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I'd like to remind people that Wendigo has had two deaths in the family over the past month.
I understand that other Staff could pick up that slack, but it's not a perfect world. Let Wendigo recover and get everything back in order with RL. Let her find people to fill empty Staff slots (there's been at least one bbpost regarding that).
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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Yeah. I remember even before the deaths she had put in a call for people to help out with administrative stuff in Werewolf. I like the game and like Wendigo enough that it was, for the first time in close to fifteen years, I was tempted to break my rule of never staffing ever again just to help her out. Things have been going rough for the staffers in general, and the game is much larger than they probably expected it to be given how dead Reno 1 got in the last few months.
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@Auspice Yeah, I'm willing to cut a lot of slack for RL things.
I don't think there's a game out even in the planning stages that could get me back on a staff roster. I'm happily running plot for Reno but that's it.
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I've pointed this out before and will again: there is always a crush of apps in the beginning. By the first or second idle reap, often about 1/3 of that population seems to drop out. This is because people are willing to give a new place, or a rebooted place, a chance.
It means the doorbuster opening is a huge stressful workload on staff -- which would be great if it meant things calm down after that initial wave of people who are willing to give it a shot thins out as the people who like what they find stay, and those who do not, idle out.
Unfortunately, instead of looking at that pattern we've all seen on a zillion M*s by now and recognizing for what it is, when the people who decided it simply wasn't for them fade off, as they always do, instead of people realizing: hey, this is a thing that always happens, not every game is for everyone, the people who remain instead put even more pressure on staff because "OMG PEOPLE ARE LEAVING! THE GAME IS DYING! YOU ARE NOT DOING GOOD ENOUGH! YOU NEED TO FIX THIS!" which is shitty, and ultimately incredibly unfair to the staff and remaining players who are endeavoring to contribute in whatever ways they are able.
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@Arkandel / @Killer-Klown
I had the same thought. And then I remembered I work full-time, am in school full-time, and have been traveling lately. Staffing is not in the cards for me.But it additionally vexes me. That people are complaining about the slow turnaround on a game that is seeing it's initial flood, like @surreality says. Fallcoast went rapidly down the shitter as if it were thrilled to see the sewers. Other places floundered in their own ways. People want a place to play nWoD and I get that; I was one of the very first apps submitted when they first opened.
The only mistake I really think has been made? They should have waited longer to allow alt applications. I think a week was too short a window: it should've been more like a month, what with the RL issues.
But I will definitely call out people bitching about slow turnaround when the HeadWiz has had to go through two deaths in the family during the holidays.
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@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
The only mistake I really think has been made? They should have waited longer to allow alt applications. I think a week was too short a window: it should've been more like a month, what with the RL issues.
I agree, but I thought it was just my personal views on it coloring my perception - I'm notoriously low on the alt-importance idea; usually only play one character per game, and the most I've had anywhere active has been three. It's not because I have anything against them so much as I don't usually have time to devote to more than one.
Also, definitely yes. People do tend to forget that people on games - players and staffers - do tend to have outside lives. The game and their responsibility to it tends to take a back seat to RL, as it should; so sometimes stuff gets pushed to the back of the line. So long as staff keeps people updated as to why things are going slow <which, to my observations, they have been> it's all good.
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Agreed, on both counts. I do often end up with a 2nd character on games, but it's because I either want to try out an idea (I plan to eventually have a werewolf on Reno, for example) or to prevent burnout on my main character. I don't think it'd have hurt the game at all to wait longer to open up alts; esp. with that initial flood. But, I also know that there'd be just as many people complaining about the wait.
It's the eternal rule of life: it's impossible to make everyone happy.
And yes, Wendigo has been very up front about what's going on. I've seen posts regarding what's up IRL as well as posts about what hours/days she's best available for the game. That is more than a lot of Staffers do these days.
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Yeah, I had a vampire on Reno1 that I literally did nothing with. I had been kicking around a vamp idea for 2 in case my Werewolf concept stagnates. I just tend to have a harder time getting into Vamp than most splats.
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@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
The only mistake I really think has been made? They should have waited longer to allow alt applications. I think a week was too short a window: it should've been more like a month, what with the RL issues.
It would probably have been better if they held off on that,I agree.
As for all the other things I commented on, as I said then, none of it was really complaints, just observations about things that have been done that staff has done that have likely made their work load harder, rather than easier. None of them really hinderme, and I've had no issues personally with things being slow, so I'm just making observations/offering unsolicited advice.
I have been tempted to offer to help out temporarily with some of the drudgery like updating news files/room descs/wiki pages/etc, but I really don't want to staff permanently, and I'm not sure how useful or desired a week or two of part-time help would be. I also find myself happier just being a player, and only seeing one side of the curtain.
