Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.

[Misadventure]

I think we need Q-players. People you can call in to make a character, and explore and investigate the waters around another player, or a topic.

I vote for @Ganymede clones. I trust her, she's intelligent, has a good memory, and is rewarding to RP with.

[surreality]

@misadventure Is it sad that I know my luck well enough to know that if I have an alt logged in on a game, I'm such creeper candy this more or less happens without any intentional plan involved? I'm willing to take 'sad', but I'm also tempted to laugh, though I'm not sure if it's one of those 'have to laugh or you'll cry' sort of laughs.

[Misadventure]

@surreality I hear you have rainbow hair too RL, so you sound perfect. Hired.
I also need you to salt wiki's with typos or errors so I can find the obsessive correctors.

Misadventures Angels is open for business.

[Ganymede]

@misadventure said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:

I vote for @Ganymede clones. I trust her, she's intelligent, has a good memory, and is rewarding to RP with.

Thank you, but you don't want too many of me around. You'd have no one around during normal peak times.

[GreenFlashlight]

@ganymede said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:

Hey, now. Some of us who disagree with you are hearing you.

That's fine, and I'm not trying to be passive-aggressive. I'm being as straightforward as I know how when I say that I am not talking about this thread's topic, so my commentary has been a derail. I dislike derailing, so I'm out of this one. That's all.

[GangOfDolls]

Question:

Much of the time when something is being reported, there's an interpersonal element to it. The dynamics of these things range from situation to situation but generally there is some kind of interpersonal thing happening that is connected to the situation - casual or resultant.

I'm keeping interpersonal kind of nebulous here because it can be a lot of things - but it centers around conflict. And interpersonal conflict is hard to legislate on a game, because there is always an element of they said/they said.

I guess for me the times when I haven't reported things, I've thought that it was my own problem and that no one was gonna care. The times that I have, I was told that 'yes the player who did this is wrong but since it only happened to you or because they didn't harm a game system, then I'm not going to get involved' or some variation on that.

I guess I'm trying to tease out when and where interpersonal situations should be reported to staff, under what circumstances, etc? Interpersonal situations aren't always about cheating. They are in fact often having nothing to do with cheating but its still having a negative affect on player morale, on a very small to large scale.

When its small (a few players affected at most)- does that warrant staff intervention? Should it?

[Thenomain]

@gangofdolls

What is staffs policy on it?

It sounds like you hit an All Or Nothing game. That is, either the situation is bad enough to “fix” the situation, or it’s not worth fixing.

This is a horrible management style. Nobody needs a rule to say, “Yeah, I’ll talk to them about this, see what’s up.” And yet, because this is so often not the case that your typical scarred player is going to assume that staff is going to brush them off.

I don’t think this is enough to say nothing, though. It’s possible that staff will misunderstand, mock, cause problems, but if the worst that can happen is they ignore you then the worst in saying something is the stress coming from putting your trust out there and having it betrayed.

Don’t trust, but don’t avoid the problem. Give all staff one chance to do the right thing. Then I figure it’s okay to give up on them, tho I’ve tried to turn this around when I heard it on my watch.

This is just advice, to try and soften the blows of trying again, and again, and again, knowing that there is a bad pattern that needs to be reversed. I’ve been where you’ve been, again and again. There is a reason I prefer code to trying something new.

Staff need to try again, and again, and again too, starting with understanding the words being given to them, and trying to offer a reasonable response.

[Apos]

@gangofdolls I think you pretty much should always do it, and if you have doubts about whether you should just say, 'Hey I don't wanna make a big deal about this, and I'm not sure this is actionable, but this happened so you know just in case it points to a larger pattern'. It can be decisive if there was larger issues and even something you had that seemed minor was indicative of a larger, worse pattern of behavior.