Posts made by Arkandel

I always feel so dirty upvoting @Ganymede. Damn you people for making me do this.

Funnily enough the MU* I feel 'safe' doing anything I like in scenes is Shang. Who's gonna spy on me and to see what? The TS? There's TS everywhere, you can walk in public and see people (and animals, and things...) going at it. Spectating it is such a common commodity its value is reduced to just about nothing at all.

So if you need to get some private RP done - and I don't necessarily mean RP of a sexual variety - you can just log on there since making alts only takes about a minute and you don't have to wait for approval, grab a room... done.

You shut up. White males are a disadvantaged group. We... I mean they, they need all the help they can get.

Ohboy.

http://news.yahoo.com/star-wars-mens-rights-group-claims-its-boycott-122341832.html?nf=1

There's no such thing as a "perfectly-ran" place. There're only "perfect-ran place from where I stand" games.

I've been in MU* where I had RP flowing right in my direction others were leaving for lack of things to do. Recently even, Eldritch stands out. Sometimes the stars align, sometimes you get to sit on your thumbs.

Think of MSB's most designated shithole of a game - TR/FC. Even when I was there with drama explosions everywhere there were people the shitstorms simply didn't happen to touch who thought it was all a great collaborative experience, because from their points of view it totally was.

@ThugHeaven I wouldn't consider being dark in a public room to be a security violation if you actually intend to throw plot at them. If it's in public it's more or less fair game (although staff should still be mindful of disrupting a scene people are already engaged in and seem to enjoy).

@Entropy said:

No one person should really be the end all say all. Maybe not like... the full on "everything needs to be voted" thing like mentioned above. That does seem like it's taking things too far, and looks as if it led to the logical result. But simply put, stuff like denying a player something that's within reason... or giving a clique of lackeys priority over everyone else... that kind of stuff should be checked.

By whom? Who'll be checking it? If a clique becomes powerful enough (and usually one does, very quickly) then they are in control... sort of. In a democratic environment no one has the authority to do anything about it.

Your fallacy here is assuming you have a group of mature, intelligent people able to work with each other. Compare the likelihood of that with assuming one person - or a tiny group - is sane and you might see the point. It's easier (not easy, mind you) to find Head Staff who fit certain characteristics than basically a majority of your entire staffing team.

As a community we resort to high school tactics way too often as it is. I can't claim democracy can't work on a MU* because that's a ridiculous assumption to make and I can't prove it, but I've never seen it happen, and I think the reasons why it didn't are common enough to make it an inefficient way to run a game. If you can prove me wrong I'd happily eat my words, though.

@Thenomain said:

@Coin

I'll take a batshit game dictator as long as they are benevolent.

I value stability, so I wouldn't. I'd take a competent dictator though even if he/she was a jerk - at least I'd know what to expect, and that they wouldn't screw their own game just to serve their ego.

Maybe.

Once upon a time a dark staff member (I couldn't even see their name) complimented me on my RP in an intimate scene.

Uhm, thanks!

@Entropy said:

Right. Either way, this entire thing is taking away from the topic at hand, which is talking about my desire to help create/run a freeform game with a more democratic/fair staffing policy, so that people can enjoy the things that make MU*s fun, and not have to deal with as much of the stuff that makes them not so much fun... because even looking over this site... most of the complaints I see about games are about crappy, self-interested and thoroughly corrupt and/or malicious staff.

The most corrupt, drama-laden staffing experience I've ever had was on a democratic MU*. And I mean by far.

Every decision had to go through voting, which led to multi-hour meetings where everything was being broken down and bickered about endlessly. People would try to arrange for their friends to be present just to cast votes by placing staff meetings at the most inconvenient times according to who they wanted present, and staff politics were basically a game-within-a-game in themselves.

Cliques formed almost immediately so communication between 'spheres' had completely broken down and in some cases was passive aggressively withheld between opposing staff factions, an effect which spilled over to players as well. In some cases important issues couldn't be decided on either way because the 66% consensus wasn't present so we were all bottlenecked, and I don't even want to go into what recruiting new staff was like ('do I want @Entropy to be hired? Are they a friend or foe?').

Man that was a mess. Yay for democracy.

@Coin said:

So you're basing this on sex MUs that are failing based on MUDstats? Becuase you could just look at Shang and have that entire reasoning fall apart. I also think Shang is freeform? Anyone on Shang wanna corroborate?

Shang has no +sheet, dice system or, for that matter, CGen per se since you basically make a character who can literally be anything you want (a college student, Wolverine, a ghost, whatever) and simply pick match-making preferences for them. There's no staff approval stage either, you just write up anything you like and hit the grid if you like.

The only limitations are legal ones, i.e. age restrictions, and that your character's power is capped by the game's theme. Then roleplay itself is consent-based.

@Coin said:

Going back to work this morning. On a Monday morning. When it's going to be the hottest day of the summer so far.

I'll trade you.

Also, more frownies:

@Cirno said:

• What will be compromised if someone spies on me whilst I engage in Pretendy Funtime Gameplay? It's not like they're going to make off with my insurance information, my Social Security Number, and all my credit card numbers. What's at stake here?

• How will they fuck with my life? Go somewhere and post, "Ha ha! Cirno plays on a trash game for garbage people!"? People already do that here. Slit my throat in a dark alleyway? What could they possibly do that would impact my real-world life so drastically that I should consider it a grave concern?

It depends on your level of engagement, for starters. Doxing is an issue for instance if you trust anyone on a game enough to disclose personal real-life details of yours for someone else intercepting all that stuff to deduce where you work. Do you really want some of the borderline sociopaths in MU* contacting your boss with made up stories? I don't.

It's also about what you find unacceptable. Staff watching TS invisibly might bother some people, for instance. And even in-game information can be frustrating when it's taken through unfair means if you cared to keep an IC thing secret but it leaks out through OOC means.

Privacy is important. It's also not a big priority for many MU* runners - in fact for some it's forfeit the moment you log onto their game. If you're lucky they'll make the fact known in advance at least.

Going back to work tomorrow. On a Monday morning. When it's going to be the coldest day of the winter so far.

... They are making @Cirno admin. I knew it.

@Thenomain said:

However, without a statement of privacy you should assume the worst and demand an official statement. Don't let staff hide practice behind obscurity or ambiguity. If they continue to do so, assume they are purposefully unethical.

I quite agree. My worst case of privacy violations though (mentioned earlier in this thread) wasn't necessarily due to staff policy.

We - staff members active at the time - had no idea about the command even existing, so whether it was simply put in place by a well-meaning but unthinking coder (not at all an impossibility) not realizing the consequences of a game-wide snoop, a rogue coder actually trying to pry into everyone's affair or even former Head Staff having put it into place so it was inherited down the line as one function among tens of thousands badly written lines of code... we never knew.

What I'm trying to say is, even with a statement of privacy and assuming the best intentions by head staff, all it really takes in the end is one coder no one catches at it. So having no expectation of privacy, ever, seems like a sounder policy.

@Thenomain I don't know what the implementation of snoop is on MU* but on CircleMUD it actually gave you access to everything someone saw on their end, including pages, channels etc. Talk about massive violations of privacy.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

Pretty sure Shang staffers do make the invisible rounds, to see if their ageplay policies are being followed. How else would you catch people at it?

It'd be a very inefficient way to do it. Unless they're right on it from the start it'd be very difficult to determine the exact age.

But man... staffing and trying to enforce policies on Shang, that must be a nightmare. The things they must have seen.

@Roz said:

Me. I downovted the damn masturbation post.

If we're talking about @Cirno, which one?

@Tyche said:

Martin should ring up Brian Sanderson. He'll have the series finished in three months and be halfway through a prequel and sequel by the end of the year.

It's not fair to compare a human being with an A.I. specifically developed to write novels, though. Come on.