Make MSB great again!

[Thenomain]

@wizz

While I like ganymede’s locker analogy, I think it has a major flaw in that this isn’t a locker situation. This is far more like someone advertising a business in the newspaper, and in the next edition the positive reviews are listed alongside the ad, but the negative reviews, any single thumbs down from anyone, is listed in the opinions section.

I think splitting all positive from all negative in this case to be disingenuous. One can have a reasonable discussion like adults and not agree, but if we’re going to split it then let all commentary be alongside other opinion pieces, where they belong.

[faraday]

@thenomain Especially when you split it three ways -- positive stuff here, criticism here, really bad hog pit criticism over there. That's just weird.

[Kanye Qwest]

how about just let people criticize or bring up negative experiences without letting it devolve into a bunch of RL character judgments and horrifying vitriol?

[Wizz]

@thenomain said in Make MSB great again!:

One can have a reasonable discussion like adults and not agree

So...let's prove that. I don't disagree with you that it's possible, but it very obviously wasn't happening on its own.

[Arkandel]

@thenomain said in Make MSB great again!:

This is mostly why I think it’s better to have the advert thread as being only advertisement information, and any commentary about the game, good or ill, in a separate thread.

The reason I don't like that approach is that I like gamerunners having a post in which they can just answer questions - "is this a L&L game or grimdark?", "do you plan to allow <X>?", etc. I think that information can both help others reading the thread decide if that's the MU* for them, but also game-runners who have this information locked in their heads realize that it's not readily available.

However none of this is set in stone. The guidelines so far are meant as an early bulwark against the negative threads we were seeing - maybe look at them as feelers for now.

What I'd like to do is give it a couple of weeks to see how this shapes out to see if there are improvements (or, well, blue smoke coming out of smoldering ruins) and then we can discuss it internally as well with @Auspice and @Ganymede to see what we can do based on our collective ability to shoulder the workload.

[faraday]

@arkandel Agreeing that it's good to have a place for Q&A. But are you only going to allow the game staff to answer? Or only positive answers? Because otherwise I can see the "answers" veering into criticism, and that's where the problem comes in.

"Is this L&L game or grimdark"

Enthusiastic player A: "It's totally grimdark. I love it. The players are so helpful."

Less enthusiastic player B: "Well it says it is grimdark but mostly what I see is just nobles playing house."

Are these reviews? Criticism? Is B's answer somehow less valid than A's just because he's not as positive about the game?

By all means, try it out and see how it goes. Just giving my opinion because, y'know, this is MSB, we like to debate things endlessly

[Gingerlily]

@ganymede said in Make MSB great again!:

@gingerlily said in Make MSB great again!:

The 'MSB effect' is on PEOPLE not games. It is damaging because not all game runners are intensely resilient and sometimes when a person is called useless and pointless or jokes are made about whether they are seeing a shrink, they are hurt, insulted, and no longer interested in running a game or dealing with anything MU* related ever again...or for a few months at least. If people posting on MSB were slightly less vitriolic it would be better for everyone.

I'm going to pick at this for a second.

If people were slightly less vitriolic in general, life would be better for everyone. If we all carefully picked our words, or kept our messages somewhere between Sunny's succinctness and Thenomain's grumpiness, the messages would be clear, cogent, and concise. But we all know this is not going to happen overnight.

There was a time when this place was different, at its inception. It was so full of good feelings and felicity that HelloRaptor felt alienated, old, and useless (although, to be fair, he is at least two of these three things, no matter what). But, the good old hate is on the rebound again, for whatever reason.

Ever wonder why?

Frankly, I think it's because we've stopped caring: not about each other, but about what and how we say things. Or, at least, we aren't taking the time to consider this before hitting that submit button. Maybe if we did that, this place would change slightly.

And then, maybe we keep on taking more and more time to consider what we're saying, how we're saying it, and if we can say it better. And then, maybe this place would change some more.

But you can't legislate that any more than you can legislate Bill & Ted's Prime Directive.

What we can do is just consider it.

I was not suggesting that it could be legislated, I thought I mentioned somewhere that it was a culture issue, not a moderation issue. I did not join MSB from its onset, by the time I was here there was a lot of pretty gross behavior going on already. There were a few discussions that were interesting and where people were conducting themselves like adults, and I did enjoy some of those. Mostly I have enjoyed not the forums themselves but meeting and talking one on one through chat with some really fabulous people who I would not have come across otherwise.

I can't speak to the 'we' who have stopped caring. I've never participated in the nastiness. It doesn't jive with who I am nor who I want to be, and the appeal of being an asshole to someone through the anonymity of the internet was fun when the internet was new, but by the end of college a good 20 years ago less so.

So I've never wondered why hate was on the rebound again because I never saw MSB at a time when it wasn't alive and well. I assumed it was just the nature of the place from the get go.

I've seen the same people talk on threads like these about how all the mean needs to stop who on other threads enjoyed being as mean as possible. So I don't really know what's going on in people's heads. What I do know is that its actually /extremely easy/ to not be shitty to other people. It's not a major challenge. It takes almost no effort. So yeah I mean people can talk about it and consider it. Or they could just grow up and decide to do it. It really is exactly that simple. The rules that applied to us as preschoolers still work, and we have advanced social emotional and executive functioning skills...if they can manage to use kind words and think about other people's feelings, pretty sure we can to. All one has to do is bother.

[Arkandel]

@faraday No, these are good questions. I don't know! I think it'll depend, it's hard to make concrete rules and try to match what anyone post against them.

The best way is to probably play it by ear. If a post sounds aggressive we can move it over.

@faraday said in Make MSB great again!:

Just giving my opinion because, y'know, this is MSB, we like to debate things endlessly

That's fine! Just reading through this thread alone I'd like to cherry pick good ideas, because half the posts are like "let's change stuff, this is unbearable!" and the other half are like "change is stupid, leave it the way it is!" - with the same posters sometimes in both camps.

I realize too well that just because something has to change it doesn't mean we just need to do random things for the sake of changing them, but giving stuff a try to see what sticks isn't the worst idea ever.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@faraday said in Make MSB great again!:

Enthusiastic player A: "It's totally grimdark. I love it. The players are so helpful."

Less enthusiastic player B: "Well it says it is grimdark but mostly what I see is just nobles playing house."

Are these reviews? Criticism? Is B's answer somehow less valid than A's just because he's not as positive about the game?

This question is pretty much how I came to my "Nobody but the OP and board admins can post in an advertisement thread" idea. There's a really thin line between a legitimate question and the kind of commentating/tangents this is trying to split off and it just seemed easier in theory to draw the line at NOBODY and NOTHING.

This is definitely a start, though, so I'm interested to see how it goes.

[faraday]

@three-eyed-crow Right. "Nobody but the owner can post" is very clear and easy to legislate. "Anybody can post good or the bad" is easy to understand too, because anything that's not hog-pit worthy is valid. The middle ground sounds problematic to me (both from a poster perspective and imagining a moderator's perspective) but @Arkandel is aware of it so -- we'll see how it goes.

[Lithium]

Instead of just saying: Only nice posts. Or whatever...

Why not create a template for people who are going to post an advertisement so that all the general questions are answered from the get go? Then you can make it so it is pure advertisements, and any other threads, we can make. Honestly, trying to say: Only 'nice' or 'helpful' posts is... subjective at best.

Just as an off the cuff example:

Game Name:
Theme:
System:
Setting:
Code Base (Believe it or not, this does still matter to a fair amount of people):
Wiki URL:

Sales Pitch:

That way most the common questions are answered off the back, the

[Wizz]

@faraday said in Make MSB great again!:

"Is this L&L game or grimdark"
Enthusiastic player A: "It's totally grimdark. I love it. The players are so helpful."
Less enthusiastic player B: "Well it says it is grimdark but mostly what I see is just nobles playing house."

Are these reviews? Criticism? Is B's answer somehow less valid than A's just because he's not as positive about the game?

Player B is maybe being a little snarky, but it's still being critical of an idea, not a person. If I'm understanding correctly, I think it works fine for advertisements to also be Q&A, and then if someone wants to expand/discuss an answer or topic they move to the discussion board. I mean, we were kind of already doing that from time to time anyway.

[Arkandel]

@wizz Basically the way I think of this is what we don't want to do rather than try to nitpick every post; we don't want advertisement threads derailed let alone turned into dumpster fires. A stray tangent here and there is probably okay but anything that goes into more depth or requires a lot of debate probably belongs in the Constructive section - I mean that's what it's for.

As for locking ad threads after putting some very basic information in them... we could do it, but would they be read at all then? The oldest ones would be at the bottom, too, which might affect their visibility, and there'd be no immediate way for newcomers to see which ones are active unless they wanted to delve into their child threads (not that this would be necessarily a bad thing - just saying).

[faraday]

@wizz Depends how you read the guidelines I guess because several players have read them and thought that it said "no criticism" aka nothing negative. Which is a different yardstick from the "criticize the idea not the person" guidelines in Mildly Constructive.

[Wizz]

@arkandel
So, for example:

ADVERTISEMENT POST: "Hi, we're a supernatural game with wherewoofs and spoopy witches and vampirinos."
1st Poster: "What's the tone you're aiming for, Twilight or Interview With A Vampire?"
OP: "Super grimdark! Fuck everything amirite, these wounds won't seem to heal, this pain is just too real"

1st Poster: .oO(What does that even mean...BETTER START A TOPIC: WHAT DOES GRIMDARK)

2nd Poster: "MY TURN! Let's get down to brass tacks: do vampires fuck"
OP: "You know it."

2nd Poster: .oO(Gross. BETTER START A TOPIC: VAMPIRE SEX, GROSS OR REALLY GROSS???)

[Arkandel]

@wizz Right! We don't want a WHAT IS GRIMDARK REALLY LET'S TALK ABOUT IT smack in the middle of your precious game's ad thread which you were hoping to bait people into giving your MU* a try with.

It's not just negativity we want to avoid there, it's just... random shit. Maybe. I say this after having derailed every thread ever since 1996 with random tangents.

[Wizz]

@arkandel
No, I get you. I think the wording in the rules is a little confusing like @faraday is saying, but in my opinion you really have to try to ask a question about a setting or theme that is just super negative right off the bat, and keeping it sort of "Call and Response" format would really limit the ability to go too off the rails.

[Salty Secrets]

@arkandel MSB doesn't have a place for me to TS so I'm leaving.

More on-topic: old ad threads will end up at the bottom of the list regardless unless you allow people to bump their thread once every week. The problem with this is that you end up seeing a thread that's five pages of the owner bumping it in-between which might be nestled one or two reviews.

Bumping then creates a new problem in that there's an obligation to bump every week if you want your ad to remain visible.

Either way a forum-layout for MUSH ads simply isn't efficient in the first place. No matter what way you choose to handle it there'll be some form of disadvantage.

Ads'll reach the bottom by age, or they'll reach the bottom because someone isn't dedicated to bumping it to the top every week. Someone's losing out either way, so don't think about this aspect when making your choice. Instead focus on the pros and cons of locking an ad thread as regards feedback.

[Wizz]

@salty-secrets
As it stands, by page 4 of our current advertisement board almost all of those games either never opened, closed, or have re-opened under new management/with new themes/etc. I think your concern only applies to a volume of games that hasn't existed in the hobby for a long time.

[Salty Secrets]

@wizz It can go either way. If there aren't enough games putting an ad here to have to worry about the bottom then it's doubly irrelevant whether a game reaches it or not. My point was, focus more on what locking a thread means for feedback than what it means for its position in the ads section.