Posts made by Arkandel

@surreality I admit my awareness of that situation past my own brief window of involvement is minimal. I was mostly messing with @Ghost, I don't actually know a lot about what happened.

@Meg A story I once read went something like this:

Someone's son walks into the house and goes to his mom. 'Hey' he tells her, 'I'm sorry, I lost my contact lens out in the yard somewhere and I can't find it.

The mother goes out for an hour then she comes in and produces the missing lens.

"Wow", he goes, "how on earth did you find it?"

"Easy" she responded, "you were looking for a piece of plastic and I was looking for $100".

... That's why college kids actually do this.

@Ghost said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

DUDE, I got blackOps'd screened.

That's the badass interpretation for what happened. I can't blame you for choosing to go with that one.

... You could also say it was like highschool all over again and getting a friend to check you out first, but that doesn't sound as cool.

@Z-01 said in MU and Alternate Channels:

EDIT: Not suggesting that @Meg here is one of those people, I have no idea what happened with them.

@Meg has five fucking monitors. She can take anything we throw at her.

@Ghost said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

• A creepy guy used that PB once on another game and I can't trust you arent him, so please don't take offense

I'm getting flashbacks of that chick who flipped out because my posing style was similar to a guy who had stalked her. <shudder>

@Meg How... how does it feel...?

@Monogram No life-quality upgrade in regards to my computer habits has ever been greater than moving from a single- to a dual-monitor setup.

I've friends who claim three monitors are almost as good because of the symmetry, but that might just be more awesomeness than I can safely contain, so I haven't taken the next step.

Although today isn't my last day at my job (that's next Wednesday) it is when my departure was publicly announced. It's nice to feel appreciated and have people walk over to my desk to ask questions and wish me good luck. I'll miss (okay, some) of them, and it's sad knowing I probably won't ever see them again or if I do it'll be extremely sporadically.

C'est la vie.

@Derp I attack no one. Not even VAS. It's your game to do with as you please.

My only objection, which still stands, was in having a hate thread about a specific person.

@Misadventure See, I think of it the other way. I think of niches; when you create a character you know in advance the ability set you're setting them up with won't be unique - that's just not realistic - but you're still entitled to hope it'll be fairly sought after so it can be turned into a reason others look for you.

Specialization is a handy tool in that regard. Sure you can have a character who can fire a pistol but you'll still try to be friends with the gunslinger for when shit goes down, and although you might know how to use a computer you still need an expert to figure out what the bad guys' car license plate is ('enhance! ENHANCE MORE!').

If everyone can do everything well that tool is lost. If my gunslinger is also an academic who moonlights as a world-class hacker there's less plausible IC imperative to go out and talk people into doing your dirty work... since you can just do it all yourself.

@Auspice ... I wish my fucking cats would be mutually exclusive to each other in any given room.

@Roz It's really hard to establish intent. In fact you probably can't unless people own up to it.

Most of the real cases I've seen - not of stalking necessarily but more... people just not wanting everyone to know their secret identity for a while - have been just careless. A guy tells a guy in confidence, and then it spreads like wildfire, but it's not malevolent. It's just gossip.

However most of those cases originated from staff doing the telling, and that's always wrong.

@Ganymede said in MU and Alternate Channels:

This isn't an issue of proof. You have to presume that it is true because the issue is: should staff take action if a player is telling truths to affect another player's RP.

But that's reframing the issue because my - primary - concern with it is the lying part; of course I want to know if a guy is Rex. I wanted to know Max was Custodius when I was told.

Circumstances do matters, but up to a point. For example if I'm stalking you, and you go to a new game hoping to keep a low profile but @Meg outs you to me then it's a nasty thing to do, but I wouldn't say it's an actionable one - unless she's staff, and she abused her position to do it.

Spreading false rumors and allowing the consequences of people's actions to catch up to them are two different things though.

@Ganymede I'd say the onus would be on you to prove this, else it'd be little more than libel.

But I don't know, at some point we're going to end up closer to doxxing than I'm comfortable with. Even if you can actually produce evidence about Rook's dog fighting ring, is it okay that you researched another player's real life to that extent in the first place?

@ThatGuyThere Alright, fair enough. We can disagree about it.

In my book if something's hurting a game I'm responsible for I'm taking steps to fix it. No matter what it is.

@ThatGuyThere said in MU and Alternate Channels:

Now as to the reputation I would not punish someone for spreading lies about non-game matters period regardless of the place they did so.

You are thinking about your reaction, not that of others. You might not care if Bob is telling everyone Jane is a prostitute IRL but maybe Jane does, and if it's making the game unpleasant for her then you just let Bob get away with it. You end up with one less good player who did nothing wrong, and you keep the jerk who just realized he's empowered to do this again to someone else.

Does that sound like a good plan?

@ThatGuyThere said in MU and Alternate Channels:

And yes someone running a RL dog fighting ring would not deter me from RPing with them.

For the record if someone was running a dog fighting ring I wouldn't even want to know they are alive, let alone play games with them.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

These people are also exceeding rare and I think it's really important to draw a distinction between consistently destructive personalities and people who...I don't know, just did stupid shit and were assholes about something. I've done stupid shit and been an asshole on occasion, I'm sure. Most days, though, I think I'm OK. Most of the people I meet through these games are pretty OK most days, even if on some days they're lulzy and dumb, or have problems that make them tough to deal with for a little while. It takes a lot for me to totally cut somebody off, and I don't think random assholery is really what cases like VASpider and Custodius are about.

For starters I'm sorry to hear that about your grandmother.

About the rest, I try to separate who someone is in real life and how they act or behave online. It's as much for pragmatic reasons - the anonymity and lack of empathy from being able to look at someone else in the eye makes most people simply act differently on the interwebs, which is more or less an established fact - but it's also for personal ones; basically I need to humanize you jerks.

I have to, or you're just letters in my screen, make-belief people whose feelings I don't need to worry about. I don't want to allow myself the luxury of imagining the person who just irked me is a terrible human being, or that the authoritative staff member who got in my face is some nasty basement dweller who needs this tiny bit of authority to make up for his sad life - that's the easy way out of feeling basic guilt for anyone else I encounter while I MU* and I don't behave like, well, I should.

So unless proven otherwise you're all awesome folks in your real lives and you should be proud of yourselves for it! It's just that some of you are roleplaying jerks on MSB.

@Derp said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

And that's what I mean by 'it is unwinnable'.

Nothing we do here, A->Z, is winnable.