So I didn't want to clutter up the ad thread of United Heroes with a big tangent, but @Arkandel made a joke about how much drama there was compared to WoD games, and I think it's important to consider why.
When making a game, someone has to ask themselves what design choices they are making that will put any players in a position to feel antagonistic to one another. If they opt into that, if they -want- that, what they can't do is say, 'I expect players to be mature and never get upset' because that will never happen. Encourage it, foster it, but absolutely never depend upon it. So either you take active steps to avoid a toxic, antagonistic environment where players loathe one another, or you ignore it and let it happen, and just hope for the best. I've never enjoyed games that opt for the latter and I swear an awful lot do, because it isn't really fun to think about this stuff for game runners.
So what design choices are resulting in extreme toxicity on some comic or multiverse games?
For games that are essentially entirely PvE and collaborative, they have one of the most antagonistic setups imaginable from an ooc perspective. You have people wanting to play or play with other feature characters as their motivation for playing the game to begin with, put in a position of judging other people's roleplay and whether they are basically doing their job by roleplaying. With not being able to really see what other people are really doing, and motivated to believe the worst about others if they don't get the interactions they want, there is absolutely no way that does not become toxic without extraordinary effort to prevent it. Look at the huge number of posts on UH's ad thread bitching about how people are playing their characters, and I really, really do not think any of those people read that and go, 'Wow, that's a fair complaint, I better spend more time RPing with this person shit talking me. Thank you, @Social-Diseases , I learned a lot today.' Putting people in a position of feeling competitive for either time with FCs or playing the FCs themselves is always going to result in resentment for how they are played- it doesn't really matter if the criticism is justified, just the fact it happens is going to create fights.
Games will usually have a honeymoon period and then a crash, and how violent the latter is depends upon how much resentment is allowed to build. The game opens, there's a wave of a hundred people taking characters. They are having fun, so they ignore the shit that really bothers them. Months go by, they still aren't getting the RP with some FC that is off RPing with his friends mostly, they get annoyed about it, say that FC is always TSing. FC might be spending 50% of his time RPing with strangers, but the larger the game, the less that will be noticed or appreciated. Criticism gets back to him that he doesn't do shit, he is now intensely resentful also, scales back what he was actually doing. Repeat this 500 times, as people become less and less willing to ignore the stuff that they were annoyed at to begin with. Complaints pile up, Staff starts dealing with embittered people rather than making story for people that aren't embittered, resulting in people that were having fun and happy not doing so. Eventually staff quits, game collapses, or there is a mass exodus as staff retaliates in ways that punishes people for having resentment and drives them off.
So what do you do to avoid that?
For starters, create powerful incentives for people RPing outside their circles and not just their friends. This is important to begin with in games. On games with FCs that are why people are there to begin with, I won't even say it's important, I'd say it is vital. Like I disagree with the reserve system to begin with, but if I had to maintain something that checked activity with votes or one ups or whatever, I would never allow the same people to ever vote again, relative to the size of the player base. For something like UH, you could pretty much say someone could never claim the same person again and be fine. On a WoD sandbox, cliques can exist pretty much without incident since no one really needs one another at all, or even particularly wants to interact with them, and a game of 200 people can be more like 50 games of 4 people each. That just isn't true for a FC game, and the dynamics are way different, and each one of those 50 cliques is a recipe for intense resentment. If they aren't playing with one another, there will eventually be a blow up.
Now on the flip side, when I said that staff should not expect players to be mature and never get upset without creating a place that encourages that, staff has to absolutely be proactive in creating the positive atmosphere and pushing back against the kind of behavior that will create long term problems. That sounds basic but very few people want to deal with behavioral problems, and the ones that DO want to deal with it are very rarely the people that should be. This tends to be the default because most staff don't create games because they have a burning desire to punish bad behavior from their friends or from socially dysfunctional members of the community. It is mind boggling that people think that, 'I really don't want to start a fight with the people I enjoy RPing with and police them on the behalf of strangers' is the most machiavellian, mustache-twirling corruption, because I guarantee you that will be the default for almost everyone. If you see problematic players and they aren't talked to, you can be absolutely certain that problematic staff aren't being talked to either, and the place is probably doomed. That is not rare, and that's not special, that's normal, and if a game opens as a lassiez faire, anyone-can-do-anything, that often probably means they have zero desire to police things and you can expect this. Basically, if there's chatter on channels that is snarky and acerbic, and it goes by without being challenged, run. So yes, running a large game is exceptionally challenging, but you either run it, or you let it devolve, and god help you if you set up it up in a way that has players disliking one another for their RP.
