Kushiel's Debut
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And for fun and kicks, here's the shit I got on Facebook from @Echx (who plays Reynard) after Asherat shared the conversation with her when I was taking a break.
Okay, so. I don't know what you know about what happened on Friday, but Ash showed me the page you sent her about an apology to the player base and I feel kind of obligated to correct some perception you have.
There was no 'Chosen Few' thing. That was not a thing that was done by staff alts, or for staff alts. Liana may have done part of the ritual that was done, but she was the ONLY staff character involved. Everybody else? All the PCs, all of the groundwork, all of the setup... that was all PC stuff. The individuals who got picked to participate got picked BY A PC, to fill slots, because the ritual needed one scion from each Companion.
If people want to be pissed that they didn't get involved in ONE scene that finally wraps up two+ game years of a massive issue, that's ultimately on the people who want to be pissed that they didn't get involved. Not everybody gets to be included in every scene. Not everybody gets to go to every party, not everybody gets to go on every adventure.
Sure, this is the first major plot resolution thing staff has run in a long ass time. How encouraging is it for them to want to do anything else if the reception they get is people stomping off in a huff because they didn't get picked for this one thing?
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/snark
Did Elsa invade KD?
/endsnark
.> Sorry.
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I don't really think I need to refute this shit; the people that play there and the people that know me know how utterly ridiculous this is. But hey, this is how they treat people that DARE to speak up against the bullshit they're pulling. So.
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I would think a plot that long, with SO many people working on it? Should have something neat for everyone that got it there. Breaking it into small groups, whatever it takes, but it just sits wrong to exclude the people that did do all the heavy lifting from getting to be in the end game.
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This was exactly the problem I had with the game that I mentioned a couple months ago in I forget which thread. I'm hardly surprised that one of the very few plots that staff was running (for certain definitions of running) was resolved, with no notice to the player base as a whole either ICly or OOCly, by staff alts and a select few despite many others trying to get involved for the longest time.
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I am now happy I dodged the fuck out of this game.
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Oh, people can still have fun there. They just need to know what to expect. It's a sandbox in the truest meaning of the word. It's all about the staff alts and who they choose to play with. There's good players there and if someone just wants to RP in the setting, there's plenty of fun (and TS) available. Just don't expect to do anything beyond small scale personal drama.
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You would think if a plot was years in the making that waiting one more day to be sure that people who'd worked on it and wanted to help concluded has a chance. Rather than knowingly scheduling it during a time when it would be difficult ICly or oocly to justify not being at the other event (and kind of being rude to that important event's organizer too). Or even if you intended to keep it away from most people, to at least be considerate in appearance.
It costs so little in the grand scheme of things, but it seems to be a super high bar for a lot of people.
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@TNP said in Kushiel's Debut:
Oh, people can still have fun there. They just need to know what to expect. It's a sandbox in the truest meaning of the word. It's all about the staff alts and who they choose to play with. There's good players there and if someone just wants to RP in the setting, there's plenty of fun (and TS) available. Just don't expect to do anything beyond small scale personal drama.
Exactly. If you're into fluff social scenes and TS, the place is tops. There are a lot of good roleplayers and RP to be had. As long as you go in realizing that you won't have any impact on the game world at all or participate in staff-run plots, the game can definitely be a fun and rewarding experience.
I definitely recommend it as a secondary game/game to idle on and pop out for RP on occasion. Some of the social scenes proved to be a lot of fun there. I was already fairly bored and unsatisfied with the game being as bland as it is plot-wise. This particular instance was really just a culmination of events that lead to me feeling like even logging on to RP there was starting to feel like a chore. The timing just seemed right after this.
Sucks that they have some pretty harsh opinions towards the people who quit, whatever their reason. Meh. I'm sure I'll recover somehow.
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Also, Skaldia, you'll be better served to bother to read and pay attention to what is said. It wasn't Sunny that mentioned the situation at all.
Sometimes you're better served to wait. And think. And be sure you have your facts straight, and aren't responding in an upswell of pique.
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The best part is, I never bitched. I never took part in the gossipy crap. I complained quietly to one person when I was frustrated, a couple of times. When Avi and Lanval blew up and quit, I tried to smooth the situation over. I tried to talk to Ash about my problems in good faith. Then I logged off to take a break, and Ash shared the conversation we'd had with somebody else, and that somebody else came after me for it with inaccurate information, off of the game. I still wasn't saying anything nasty about them, just that we'd had a disagreement. Then I logged in and was in the freezer, apparently because I'd pissed off Skaldia beyond reason enough that the thought of me being on his game disgusted him.
I didn't do anything wrong. At no point. I spoke my mind directly to Asherat. There was no toxic anything. What they did was WRONG.
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I don't know the folks on KD, don't have anything against them, but I'll just say I'll always feel the purpose of staff alt characters should be to create story for other people. I think unless you are willing to always make the spotlight on someone else and enjoy telling stories that way, staffing will always end with disappointment for someone. They can be important and fun supporting characters, but they must be supporting characters. This isn't really about KD at all, and I mean them no disrespect, but it seems to be a common problem in MUs in general.
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I believe you @Sunny. It looks like he was conflating what someone else said in this thread with you. Common enough, to do that sort of thing and fire off a nastygram.
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Yeah, Asherat did share one page with me, because she was confused, upset, and hurt by the demand that she apologize to the entire player base because some people got involved in one scene, and a bunch of other people didn't. And yeah, that kind of pissed me off, because the reaction a few of the people who didn't get picked had amounts to a temper tantrum. Ragequits, nasty @mails to people, and a lot of OOC badgering for various reasons.
Accusations of favoritism... because this was a specific scene that had specific requirements and someone didn't pick their closest IC friends to participate. Accusations of abandonment... because people who did get picked were trying to keep it quiet because what happened IC is and will remain a secret, and did things like left their +1s at the party while they went off to possibly die in the snow.
But let me tell you a story.
This scion power plot started some 2+ real life years ago, as a small but critical part of the much larger Black Cross metaplot. A bunch of NPCs were assassinated; murdered in a specific ritual fashion so their blood could be collected. A few PCs were even attacked for that same reason. This went on over the course of several months, so that players could have the chance to investigate and maybe interrupt what was going on. And investigate they did, but at the time the player base was tiny and not enough was done to stop it.
So some NPCs did a magic ritual and severed this magic connection between the peoples and the angels... which had the net mechanical effect of rendering an entire group of 5 point merits completely useless.
In the 2+ years since this happened, resolving this issue has been an on-going THING. It was never set aside by staff, it was never forgotten, they've just been trying to let players figure it out and resolve it.
Hey @Sunny, remember Dark? He had a character on KD who worked on it for a while until he flaked out and wandered away.
One character took a bunch of others on an international treasure hunt trying to find a magic book that had a spell that would help to undo the problem, but for various reasons they were unsuccessful. (Wasn't my plot; I didn't get invited; didn't get involved; don't really know the details other than that it didn't work and staff had to come up with a backup plan.)
In the meantime, we had the Flatlands war arc, which took another bunch of PCs off the grid for about 7 months. Of real time. Which naturally caused a lot of attrition because the pocket realm RP was a bit light and all of the battles were handled via +job for logistic reasons and because nobody ever really requested or showed an interest in RP'd combat. At the end of the last battle (which stomped the army, by the way) we holed up in and around a city and 'found' an old temple. I rounded up every last PC who was still out there, all the ones that had been there from the beginning, and we had a scene where we went and explored it. And, wonder of wonders, found an old book that none of us could read and a weird old bottle that some dude was trying to burn to keep away from us.
There was some combat, but another PC (not mine, thanks) basically jumped into the fire to save the book.
The book and the bottle got sent back as quick as humanly possible to the ONLY character I OOCly/Reynard ICly knew might have any clue what to do with. The only other person with that particular distinction was... scrolls up ...oh hey, that dude Dark, who quit playing over a year previously. Fantastic. (Un)fortunately, this character is... yes. A staff alt. Whose existence as a character predates her player's involvement as staff. (I guess I could have sent it to an NPC instead. Clearly that would have been so much better...)
And then ALMOST an entire IC year passed. (The Longest Night is at the end of December; we got back in February... so 10 IC months.)
In the meantime, a new PC popped up who had the skill set to help with this book thingy popped up. The PC who actually saved the book from the fire managed to find out about that skill set and pointed her at the character who I'd given the book and bottle to.... in spite of me never having told him who it was. Is that PC a staff alt NOW? Apparently. But she certainly was not when she got involved in the plot.
Now that there was another PC involved, not just the staff alt, things moved again. Again, I don't know what they did, or how they did it. Wasn't my thing. I was off hunting Skaldi, killing pirates, whatever.
The treasure hunting group came home, empty-handed, in IC November. Pretty sure nobody really knows IC what they were off doing, just that they were gone for a long ass time.
The Longest Night finally rolled around. It's a big deal ICly; the single biggest celebratory night on the calendar year. The entire city has parties. @Sunny stepped up to run the big ball at the palace, which is technically supposed to be a masquerade - everybody would have been anonymous, in masks, and skulking around the city looking like a duck wouldn't have been obvious.
Unfortunately, it wasn't a masque. And this scene people are upset about was scheduled at the same time as the party at the palace, so it was REALLY OBVIOUS when some people left and went somewhere else. Should it have been scheduled for a different time? Probably. But from the complaints that have been made, the people that are upset that they were excluded would still be upset that they were excluded. Instead of continuing to have their party and getting hit with a wall-of-emit about how their phenomenal cosmic powers were suddenly working again (which happened instead on Sunday, at the other half of the Longest Night party, to the apparent joy of THOSE people) people brought the drama and brought that event down in flames. In the 2 hours it took to do this one specific scene, the ball completely imploded.
Awesome.
TL;DR: people are super upset because they didn't get invited to a scene, because despite all being veteran RPers, apparently we haven't learned that not everybody gets to be involved in everything. When has that EVER been the case?
There were limited slots at that table: one for each Angel. Because it was and is a huge IC secret, because magic. Literally. It took magic to break the connection, it took magic to fix it. In this setting, magic is not very common. Nor is it something you advertise if you possess it. But that's the nature of the setting: people are superstitious and distrustful of it.
You want to know what you missed by not getting to go? Missing parties and taking 3-4 lethal.
You know what you didn't miss? Getting your scion powers back. Getting a whole new tree of boosted scion powers.
The people who have the best claim to being annoyed that they didn't get involved in this scene are the ones who spent A YEAR off the grid on their treasure hunt, and I'm pretty sure none of them ragequit over it. In fact I've RP'd with three of them this week alone and they didn't even seem upset.
Is this the first really public plot thing staff has run in a while? It wasn't meant to be that public, but hey, OOC knowledge and gossip and people crying favorites because they were apparently not special enough. Is this result going to encourage them to run more things like this? My guess is... no.
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@Sunny I'm sorry you had to deal with that. Simone's player here. I have tried KD several times over the years and every time I'm reminded quickly why I never last. Like @Shlappy said, it is a bland sandbox that only allows a chosen few enjoy crunchier RP. The rest have to settle for social play and dodging the OOC behavior of certain other members of the playerbase.
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@Echx Player of the character who nearly died recovering that book (because I took 3 lethal in addition to the 2 I had from combat, with a total health box of 7) here.
I can confirm I did all of these things, because my character's career was built upon the predicament that he is good at investigating and having hunches.
We spent 7 months off-grid, and there was this other party who spent 14 months. They didn't succeed, and I'm sadabout that, but I am buddies with the player of Corbeau who explained to me why they didn't succeed. Yeah, not everyone could get involved with the plot because by the time the ritual was being done, it was already influx. Nevermind some players' brilliant idea of trying to black-ops assassinate the Vralian leader or whatever.
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Nobody sent any nasty mails. I sent a short, abrupt 'I quit' after you,@Echx, came after me on FB with your bullshit. Two other people, the night of, sent short 'I quit' mails that I know of. Everything else that I am even aware of was polite. Respectful. And I certainly didn't have anything to do with the two of them quitting in the first place.
The fact of the matter is, people tried to get involved LOTS. This should have been handled differently, by staff. Staff's job is to promote RP, encourage it, not run stories for them and their friends and leave everyone else out in the cold. It wasn't apparent to me until I tried to get Avi involved and got told, essentially, that they were happy to involve me but wouldn't involve her, that I really started to see the problem instead of it being a series of isolated incidents that I really had thought were just...isolated incidents.
And then during the big 'important' scene where nothing was supposed to happen because all the nobodies were there, staff-alts snuck off with their friends and went and resolved the plot. I use 'snuck' really loosely, because they basically rubbed it in eeryone's faces as they left.
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@Echx This is all something most people wouldn't have had a problem with if staff was just up front and honest about who they did and did not want involved in the plot. Instead of one of them discussing it OOCly as if it were something anyone could get involved in...as should be expected of a plot that effects everyone? Anyways. Instead of doing that, they should have been clear. Not clandestine or opaque about the matter.
It was handled in an extremely craptastic fashion. You can deny this all you like, but this is what reinforced my decision to hang it up. This is why people are upset, Echx. Not because 'wah wah I feel left out'. The fact that you don't get that is disturbing to say the least.
It also doesn't give you the right to harass someone on other mediums after they've expressed a need to take a break from the situation.
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Here is my utterly TOXIC bbpost about quitting the game:
So long, and thanks for all the fish. I am done and will not be coming back; looks like I've already been placed in the freezer, so there's that. My e-mail is (email) if anyone needs to get ahold of me. I wish everyone the best of luck. This goes for Moire and Katarina as well.
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@Sunny I think you know that's not true. At least one of the two people who quit with you blew up at someone in a very unfair way.
