Best posts made by 7Wonders

@JaySherman

One of the things I think staffers get snared in is being overly obsessed with the concept of fairness. Fairness as it applies to all players on a game in terms of how you administrate the game is totally what you should aim for. Fairness gets tripped up when staff get overly caught up on what's fair for player A or B due to personal circumstances.

Personal circumstances like 'this player had a medical condition that has them offline at abrupt intervals' or 'they have a weird IRL work schedule' are one thing. Circumstances that are a big barrel of self-created drama llama are totally another.

At the end of the day, your players are grown ass adults who unless they live in a cave know what the acceptable standards of online game etiquette. And if they don't, they get schooled by player pushback and staff feedback. They all generally have offline lives that imply some kind of responsibility to other people and entities, like jobs and kids and family, etc. It's up to them to manage their individual experience that enables them to be productive contributors to the game and have fun. If neither are happening, it's worth examining if they're in a bad situation at the creation of other players or game policy has backfired on its incepted intent (sometimes there are games with really stupid myopic rules). But often, a players bad time is a prison of their own making and they have the ability to fix their situation-- they're just not taking the responsibility to do so.

As a staffer and game owner, you are the ultimate arbiter of your game's culture. You get to set the expectations for OOC behavior and attitude because it's your online real estate. If you have problem players who are unrepentant manipulators and rumor mongers, you don't have to allow them to stay on your game. If you set the standard of expectation about player behavior, it's the players job to meet it or move on. And if they can't do either and won't change, you have the ability and power to call it a bad fit and show them the door. Fairness isn't about individual player experience, it's about shared game culture and morale.

One ultra shitty player can scortch the OOC earth of your game, you don't have to allow them that opportunity.

@Arkandel
Very true. I generally apply medical conditions to circumstances like chronic autoimmune disorders, cancer, etc.. Players with brain chemistry disorders or autism spectrum disorders who are going on and off their meds and/or generally expecting you to overlook behavioral explosions as their primary way of managing their situation? Not so much.

There are plenty of normal seeming players who have various brain chemistry issues. You generally don't know about it because they manage their personal circumstances before it ever becomes an excuse for bad behavior. The ones that use mood disorders or spectrum disorders as the go-to as to why they're constant pain in the ass? Yeah, no.

A significant side of my family is from Linz, Austria. Y'know, Linz: Excellent cheese, excellent locally sourced meats, birthplace of Hitler.

My cousin once made a joke that it would be super awkward if we were related to Adolf. It got real fucking quiet along the side of the dinner table that seated all the people who might know something.

I super don't ever want to know.

Rape fetishes are sexualizing an act that's about power and control but isn't actually about sex. It requires, if we're defining rape here as between a biological male and a biological female, what we generally define as copulation generally set aside for procreation on a strictly non-social basis.

And y'know? That's really fine. It's not my thing but rape kinks if you're doing that right are about consent and negotiation regarding power dynamics and exchange, which is in every way the antithesis of rape. But taboos are titilating, so.

And that's the problem I think with the players who are trying to work through some halfbaked idea of what rape kinks are and equate automatically to actual rape being also about sexual acts because the commonality is the presence of some genitals.

But they don't often tell other players that this is their angle. Taboos being taboos there's no impetus and no social reward to speaking up. So instead, they commit the text version of walking up to someone on the subway and using their shirt to blow their nose. It's a very clod fisted way of dehumanizing and devaluing another player.

But I really wish that many players who favor this sorta thing actually got the important distinctions. You don't need a plot and a scorched earth to explore and justify an idea about power exchange that makes your bits tingle.

@Derp

Sure. You can't be omnipotent as a staffer. You can miss things, people will chose not to be forthcoming for reasons beyond your control, etc. etc. Hopefully, though, you've done what you could and collected logs and Skype chats and anything else that serves as a standard of proof.

And just be as transparent as possible about what happened and why your ruling changed. The players who are reasonable will continue to be reasonable and the tin foil hat wearing crybabies will do what they do, so you can't worry about that after a certain point.

I tried to watch The Imitation Game. I'm pretty sure it was a good movie. Pretty sure. I don't have a lot of coherent recall because the jackass next to me was compulsively checking his phone every 2 minutes. This is long enough to finally settle into what's happening on screen and then BRIGHT LIGHT IN MY FAS! BLIND! ANGRY! RAGE FEELS! RAGE FEELS!

I've never seriously entertained punching some random person in the face repeatedly before. We don't have theaters here that automatically monitor for smartphone usage and then immediately kick people out. I would love it if we got a Roadhouse here. Or something. I would seriously pay 20 bucks for a movie where everyone has to check their smartphone for the entire movie and live without the mystery of what's happening on Facebook for 120 minutes.

@JaySherman

It largely depends, I think, on the situation at hand. Skype logs, in the context of having to consider a potentially sticky situation, cut both ways. Sometimes people are just letting off steam and are saying dumb, in the moment things with the Skype logs. Sometimes they are actually doing something shitty on the game, know it, and are savvy enough not to articulate their behavior to other people while logged in because there's a perception that Skype is like some internet embassy, where you can commit a bunch of crimes on game soil and then run for the neutral protection of a Skype IM discussion about it and never shall the twain meet.

As @silver lays out, arbitrary decisions about what is private, where, and when don't really serve the interest of the game.

If someone cheats on the game and then confirms those actions as cheating on a Skype log, all that's doing is confirming a behavior that was suspected as being disruptive or shitty on purpose. That's a pretty good reason to take the log seriously. The same goes for player v. player harassment, if its spilling over into the game and causing harm or disruption to the game.

If people are getting into slap fights, romantic tiffs, gossiping, or just being crotch grabbing retards on Skype logs and it has no effect on the game, then meh. That's just people failing to get along or acting a fool.

I think one very good example of how Skype can be applied as a selective tool is the case of VaSpider and others whose Skype logs were a collective record of intentional cheating with the aid and full support of a staffer who was colluding with them to disrupt The Reach mage sphere and take a big steaming dump on other mage players in the sphere. She and those who participated in the cheating were savvy enough not to discuss this on the game, whereas somehow talking about it on Skype made it non-admissible as though the expectation of privacy where it harms the game or other players begins when you enter the borders of the Democratic Republic of Skype.