A healthy game culture
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Yeah, I can certainly see wanting to log on quietly at times. There are certainly times when I just want to be left alone. There are even times when I want to be left alone by a player who I do genuinely like. I am just not in the mood that day.
I am a bit biased on this topic, because I am still creeped out about past experiences with people trapping me with alts or doing pov conflict with me on alt after alt while concealing its them. Would a registry have helped that? Maybe in these cases.
That being said, it certainly won't stop every case like this.
And I also experienced a well known creeper hitting on my alts again as he sneaked on after being banned and that certainly wouldn't have stopped him.
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@tinuviel If someone is harassing you on an alt, you need to say something. Enforce those boundaries, and if someone continues to step out of line, make sure staff enforces them. Secrecy is rarely GOOD for a game. And yes, Arx has its issues, nobody has denied that. But you also can't deny that staff there have at least taken large strides in the right direction. There, if you want to avoid someone, you can list yourself as IC-Only and you can't be contacted OOCly on game. You can also watch/hide so you don't show up as online to folks. You can put in No Contact requests through staff, and if that order is broken, now you have evidence to take to them for punitive action. They've made it harder than ever for stalkers, harassers, and general assholes to last on the game. That staff has actively posted multiple multiple times saying 'please tell us if bad things are happening' is a great step.
This isn't to say there aren't cliques and exclusion happening, there is. I don't think it will be possible to ever get fully rid of them. But mitigation is possible. Creating workarounds helps. This new Story Coordinator thing is a step in that direction. It won't matter as much of Player A will only ST for her friends because now your org's SC can put out a call for an ST of whatever level you need. Things aren't perfect on Arx, but they're heading in a better direction than any other game in the past 15 years that I can recall.
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I love the ic only command. I finally turned it off. But when I had it on, I really needed it on and it helped me immensely. I think it can help to give someone space who feels a bit pushed ooc about things or who just want to log on rp and not deal with ooc. It really helped me during the pandemic when my time was super limited to feel like I could log in with my low energy and just check mail or whatever.
I also appreciate the player storyteller which I think is including many more players and giving people alternate ways to join the storyline. I haven't had time to fully appreciate and take advantage of such as real life is still a bit busy. But Too Old for This makes a great point. There are work arounds. And one of the best work arounds of all is living well, having fun, making your own story, including others, finding rp partners and rping on.
Also, I cannot blame staff for everything that happens on a game - they don't know everything that happens and if things are not reported they might have no idea.
The most important things for a positive mush experiences and environment starts with oneself. There are def some things I had to look at and change in myself to be a better player.
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@silverfox said in A healthy game culture:
I'm actually really torn on if it's vital to have staff who also play. On one hand, it'll keep them happier and more involved. However, it also makes it really hard (speaking from my own experience) to have that distance from the immediacy of a situation/individual that is causing an issue.
Staff should play -- because what's the point of creating the exact game you want, if you don't get to play it? And more so, what's the point of doing all the admin and behind the curtain work if you don't get to have the fun? Even when paid, staff should play, so they have a feeling for what's going on. I remember a friend telling me that as a WoW game master for Blizzard, they had to play, it was literally part of the job, back then -- to keep tabs on what's going on in the player base (it may obviously have changed since, I'm not a Blizzard employee and while they are, they work servers nowadays).
It's also important to avoid the mindset of us against them. When a game turns staff against players, the game tends to get harsh very quick.
@il-volpe said in A healthy game culture:
MU GMs who treat it as the price one pays to get enough control over the game to have your PC (regardless of if you call her an NPC or not) get to be super-cool ought to have learned to do better during table-top games when they were 12.
That, pretty much. GMing is hella fun. But if you never have any feeling of risk or loss, you stop feeling the impact. Someone who only plays NPCs does not.
It's legit to have rules in place to stop staff alts from ascending to the top in a player hierarchy, though. Got to be a limit to how many dung heaps you can be top beetle on at once.
Also, frankly? If staff declares that it's their game and they'll do what they want and if you don't like it, leave -- leaving is in fact an option. Just because a game exists doesn't mean you have to play it.
@kk said in A healthy game culture:
That plot belongs to so and so.
No. No plot should ever belong to any one person. If a game has a mad number of say, homeless urchins, it's legit to close that option in applications for a while. But anything that is on grid, belongs on grid, and nothing is the exclusive territory of one clique or player.
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What @Too-Old-For-This said. As far as I know, setting a rule about not chasing people across alts was more than adequate -- after all, the public alts rule was to make it so that it would be visible to all if you did this, and thus subject to the hairy eyeballs of the community and to being informed upon.
The thing about VPNs being affordable was basically kind of moot. If somebody came to me saying, "Is Abelard an illegal alt of Bridgid's? Can you check?" I'd very often find that yep, they slip up from time to time or are house-swapping across states. I'd also ask the reporter what happened that it was noticed, which was usually alt abuse, so away they go. I did from time to time find unreported illegal alts the same way, and page the player with a "so what's up with that?" and make them register the alts, except one who said "I am being stalked," so I ignored her illegal alts because I'm unfair that way and she wasn't causing any problems with them anyway.
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@too-old-for-this said in A healthy game culture:
If someone is harassing you on an alt
I very specifically didn't say the word 'harass'.
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But, to cap this all off, the mere fact that we have such fundamental disagreements (vis a vis privacy/openness, not to mention acceptable staff behaviour, etc) means we'll never get that one true dreamland.
Which is good. More people doing more things in more ways, rather than just one homogenous "this is the only way to run a game" that many WoD games suffer from - as mentioned in the original post.
What's good practice for one group of people is a violation of some deep-held beliefs for another. Design a game, and culture, based around what you want not "because Arx did it that way."
He/Him
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@tinuviel It works for if you just don't want to be bothered, too. People set themselves IC Only all the time simply because they don't want to be pestered in pages. Or watch/hide. I had a friend set herself IC Only because she was in an important event and didn't want to be getting paged by a dozen different people. She then promptly forgot she had it on for the better part of the week, until she pinged me in Discord about how quiet it had been and I asked if she'd ever taken the IC Only tag off from her event. We had a laugh, she set herself back to 'normal', no harm no foul.
And nobody is saying 'everyone should do it this way because this is how Arx does it'. Arx developed these measures based on response they received from players and to combat situations that kept cropping up with some of the now banned players. It evolved out of the culture of the game. Another game may not have code support for some of these features, or may find they don't need some or all of them. It was just pointing out that all the issues that so many of those WoD games suffered... Arx has been addressing. It's not perfect, but it's forward movement. Absolutely find a game that does for you what you want.
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@too-old-for-this Not at you or, frankly, anyone in this conversation in particular. But these sorts of topics always end up with some measure of One True Wayism going on.
He/Him
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Nah, there's no one true way. There is a set of issues and problems that crop up routinely, and there is a need to decide how you plan to address them in your game (or plan not to). The solutions will be as many as we have players and games, and some will work better than others.
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@tinuviel Understood. But I'm not trying to One True Way anything. I know what didn't work, in my experience, was any game where staff had PCs that they became invested in because those PC's then became more important than the game they were supposed to be running. At best, staff became absentee and uncaring of anything occurring beyond the spheres their characters were in. At worst, staff became blatantly abusive and aggressive. Neither of these are good. But that was my experience. I'm sure there are others who didn't mind, didn't care, or directly benefited that didn't see a problem.
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@too-old-for-this said in A healthy game culture:
I'm sure there are others who didn't mind, didn't care, or directly benefited that didn't see a problem.
Or disagree with your analysis. Keep that in mind, please. Just because we disagree doesn't mean we don't notice, or are apathetic. Or gain something from it. We just disagree or have different experiences entirely.
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@too-old-for-this The type of game is also an issue. The more competitive and/or pvp-oriented, the more hierarchical, the easier it is to lose track of when you are just playing your char and when you are making staff decisions that might benefit your char a wee bit more than necessary.
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@lamp said in A healthy game culture:
@lamp said in The Arx Peeve Thread:
Ban abusers, even if they are good writers
weird you quoted that from the arx thread. everyone knows arx enables creepers
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Although I think the worries about One True Wayism also hint at another thing we can do to reduce toxicity: communication. Be open and honest about the game you want to run or play in. Be honest about the level of pvp you want, the character risk you want, etc. Not every game is right for every player, and people trying to force a game to be the game they want it to be can cause a lot of sourness between both players and players as well as players and staff.
More MUs really need an equivalent of tabletop Session Zero, where staff can talk freely and bluntly about the type of game they want to run.
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@pyrephox A good theme page has a section about what this game offers and what it doesn't offer, yeah. Because no game is for everyone, and no game should try to be. Success is not measured in how many players you get to app in. It's measured in how much fun you and your players have. Better to be on a five person game of awesome than be continuously disappointed among hundreds.
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Just my 2 cents...
I think that the issue brought up by the OP, toxic fuckery in WoD games, isn't a matter of lapses or corrections in MU policies, management, or whatever. I've been casually playing WoD since VtM first popped up in stores, and my opinion is that it's the game itself that attracts and encourages players that engage in toxic fuckery; in MU or TT form. This is especially true on the Vampire side of things, where players are encouraged to develop useful relationships with the other PC's in order to exploit for their own benefit at a later time. Yes, this is a gross oversimplification, and not every player does this. But, VtM, and to a lesser extent the rest of the WoD games, is a game where politics and jockeying for personal gain and advantage is highlighted moreso than other RPGs. Sure, you can play an overly-ambitious character looking to climb some form of social ladder and use the other PC's as steps to achieve your goals in any RPG, but those are the exceptions, rather than the rule outside of WoD. WoD has political conflict and social climbing at the expense of others, even the other PC's, as an integral part of the game universe. And this attracts a greater number of the kinds of players that don't play well with others. And that bleeds over to the MU side of things. In my experience, the two most popular spheres in WoD MU's, outside of single sphere dedicated games like Garou MUSH, are Vampire and Mage. Mage is all about the power gaming, Vampire is all about the social politics; neither of which tend to attract the kinds of collaborative players needed for a harmonious community.
To reiterate, any WoD game is going to have a greater amount of toxic fuckery simply because the game itself attracts and encourages toxic fuckery. There's nothing to be done on the policy/Staff side but play Whack-A-Mole with the players that cross the lines of decent behavior. Just in my opinion, YMMV.
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@runescryer There's something to this, but I think it's largely a part of how the tabletop game has been translated to the MU* environment. The setting was really never designed to be used in a large group, persistent environment - a lot of the toxic elements, particularly rigid hierarchies and cruel superiors out to exploit everyone for what they can get, were designed to be the /antagonists/ to the presumed low-level, new/young supernaturals who are trying to maintain a spark of their humanity in a cruel world.
That's even made more explicit in Blood and Smoke, with the sidebar that points out that the 'inviolable' rules of vampire society get /violated all the time/. They're not supposed to be something that PCs are actually supposed to live; they're supposed to be invasive enough that the typical PC pretty much has to break them occasionally, because that's where plot and drama happens - how do you get out of this, this time?
Similar things are in all the game lines; they have taboos and terrors because it's assumed that the PCs are on the side of having to violate those for the greater good (or at least THEIR greater good) and the abusive hierarchies of authority are usually assumed to be NPC antagonists. But those archetypes have empowered a lot of players who just kind of want to be controlling assholes to feel justified in being controlling assholes.
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@pyrephox said in A healthy game culture:
More MUs really need an equivalent of tabletop Session Zero, where staff can talk freely and bluntly about the type of game they want to run.
I find this sort of thing incredibly valuable as a player (to know if I want to play on a game) and a game runner (to refer back to the stated purpose of the game). I always start a game with a mission statement these days, post it prominently, and refer back to it regularly to make sure that we're staying true to our mission.
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@pyrephox said in A healthy game culture:
There's something to this, but I think it's largely a part of how the tabletop game has been translated to the MU* environment. The setting was really never designed to be used in a large group, persistent environment - a lot of the toxic elements, particularly rigid hierarchies and cruel superiors out to exploit everyone for what they can get, were designed to be the /antagonists/ to the presumed low-level, new/young supernaturals who are trying to maintain a spark of their humanity in a cruel world.
This is in some degree true of any tabletop game. They're designed for a small group of PCs who are all about the same power-level but in different areas and are on the same 'team.' MUSHes usually break all of those things and you've got to adjust for it.
I thought I had good results from trying to make my game more like a tabletop as an OOC thing. This is my place, I'm hosting you, as a good host I want you to have fun, you cannot treat my other guests, or my stuff, or me poorly or you gotta leave. Act like friends and talk about your cats 'round the big pub-channel table please, have a beer, unmask a little.
I wonder if the traditional WoD MUSH structure isn't more akin to that of large LARPs. I don't have much experience with them but many seem to be businesses where if you pay your dues and don't overtly break rules then you play, and you may openly be a dick to some degree, same as you can at a health club.
"... you'll find the story doesn’t end how you think, and the most important characters aren’t who you expect.” - Penny 40 to Derek, The Magicians S04E07 ‘The Side Effect’
