@sab AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I saw your post on the MU Things I Love and was about to reply to it about how I had this awesome scene yesterday where the emotional quotient was super high and meaningful and it was awesome and wasn't it just great when people were awesome.
And then there it happened to be that scene was literally with your char. ALRIGHT THEN.
When someone just goes ALL FUCKING OUT on a particular course of action, and it results in a beautiful thing that happens, deep and rich and meaningful - and then you wake up in the morning inspired to write a bunch of lore and things because of it, and something awesome comes into being RIGHT THERE because someone was awesome and cool and brilliant.
Goddamn.
I'd tag him but as god is my witness, I thought turkeys could... no wait... as god is my witness I cannot remember like 90% of the names-to-characters here. W/e.
He knows what he did.
@arkandel said in What drew you to MU*?:
@mietze said in What drew you to MU*?:
What keeps me in: still the people.
Let's test this. Let's say all of General Your's friends retired tonight; there are still MUSHes around but they're all ran and played by strangers.
Do you start over? Go and make new friends? Or would it be likely you'd float away from the hobby?
I started over already once, I CAN DO IT AGAIN.
Which is to say, a lot of the people I RP with regularly I didn't RP with in other games - and while I staff with my chosen family on Arx I don't get to RP with them often. But I started in Firan, went to TR without knowing anyone, met a bunch of great people there, and then came to Arx.
Before that I was on a couple PbP sites and that was fine too. For me, this hobby is about collaborative storytelling, and as long as I can find places to do that (and the time to do it as well), that's what I'll do.
I like the RP, and getting my RL friends together to do an actual tabletop game is nigh impossible. But I wanted something more than play-by-post, because I kept getting really into these stories and then it wouldn't go anywhere and I'd be sad.
@thesuntsar It happens still, I just don't TELL you about it. I forget, a lot, who people play. Unless I have undying enmity. (Always enjoying GMing for you is no proof that I'll remember that it's the same player, it just sometimes means that two chars played by the same person are on my good list.)
Man about 75% of the time I STILL forget that Calaudrin and Cristoph are both the same player.
@arkandel said in Forgiveness in Mushing:
It's like going to a gym worrying everyone will think you're an out of shape newbie. They won't, simply because they're busy staring at themselves in the mirror. The same applies to gaming - as long as they don't shit the bed completely most people are going to be just fine.
SO MUCH THIS.
Most days I can't remember who players used to play, you'll have to tell me 600 times. The ones that stick in my memory were the really awesome or really toxic players, but even then that's through a filter of my own experiences, not usually the hobby as a whole.
So as any community grows, there is a moment where they (hopefully) become protective of the health of the community as a whole. And when that happens, those who do damage to that community as a whole, either through behavior that affects everyone or through behavior that is so egregious toward a few that it cannot be allowed to stand, are generally banned/banished and sent on their way.
As I said regarding the first person I ever banned in any moderator position ever - the beauty of the internet is that there will always be different communities and different places. Which is to say that when you've done something the community considers heinous enough to show you the door, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
Hopefully in the next place that person will grow and become someone better. Or get shown the door. Or fall in with people who don't care about a behavior that was, for this community, problematic/toxic/awful. There are a hell of a lot of people on the internet. Showing someone the door in an online community isn't sentencing them to a lifetime of misery, even if we would like to believe that being cut off from our amazing, awesome selves is THE ULTIMATE DOOM. It's just sending them to a different place, where hopefully they'll be less of an asshole.
Have I forgiven someone in this hobby? Goodness yes. LOTS of people. There were a lot of people who said and did really shitty things in Firan - both to me as a GM, and to each other where I as a GM saw it. It was a problem. Those people though - most of them weren't bad people, and pulled from a toxic environment I see them in a different light. I've enjoyed RPing with them in other places now (not limited to Arx) and interacting with them in other ways and they're better and good to be around and, in many cases, lovely to RP with. If you've done something to me and I literally can't remember it? I probably am willing to just clean the slate and start anew.
The people I haven't forgiven in this hobby (and really have no plans to) are twofold:
1 - People who took their attacks and their evil outside of the in-game shenanigans, or who attacked me as a person.
2 - People who I had (or have) to deal with on a regular basis for preying on other players.
This hobby has terrible people in it, much like every other hobby. We are not automatically exempt from this because we're geeks or nerds or whatever you want to call yourselves (I'm not the identity police here). But those two above are my biggest rules. I'm more likely to forgive the first than the second, but in both cases you have to be willing to put up with me being suspicious, cold, and standoffish for a while until you prove you've not only given over a decent apology but also you're willing to not do it again and in fact have changed your ways.
This is what makes me crazy about the internet - and why forgiveness is so hard on the internet in general. I believe that everyone can change for the better (and for the worse). I believe everyone should be given that opportunity if they earn it. But that doesn't mean you can say "Sorry, I didn't mean to do that" and we're instantly okay. It means "I hear what you're saying and while I don't believe it I'm willing to extend you enough time to see if you've actually changed your ways." The problem with the internet is that it's a platform of anonymity, so it takes a willingness to drop that anonymity if they're going to show you they've changed. And the internet is an instant platform - instant communication, connection. Which means that people expect that change to happen - that forgiveness, the changing of ways, the wiping clean of the slate - to happen instantly too and that's just not how any of this works in my world.
Oh no. 
I only knew him a little but he was a good guy. My heart goes out to those grieving his death right now. May his memory be for a blessing.
@tinuviel I mean, I didn't require anything and he and I haven't spoken in private.
I think if he'd sent me this apology in private I'd have told him to fuck right the hell off. But he could have put it in the thread - he did, in fact, put an apology in the thread. I suspect the public backlash was such that he felt a separate topic was warranted.
Attacking someone directly and publicly does require a public apology. At least in my (admittedly old-fashioned) opinion. It didn't need a thread of its own though.
@biggles - So here's the long answer I was going to write first:
It's hard to be in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't, and also damned if you compromise" scenario.
I could eschew live-GMing entirely, which is one of the main reasons I became a GM in the first place. It goes against the grain for me to respond to so many things with an @action response, even though they can be beautiful and poignant and amazing - even though sometimes scenes aren't really needed. But I try to live-GM as much as I can because I find it beautiful and fun and collaborative. Despite my sometimes crankypants attitude on MSB, I really enjoy the time I spend GMing for people.
I could just GM for, say - half the people in a crisis who take actions. But then how does one choose? There are people I could GM for every single night. There are others I don't want to GM for even twice a year. But if I pick - do I just pick the people I really like, and leave the others (or the unknowns) out? That's a quick path to cries of GM favoritism, cliques, and the sort of really toxic environment I watched tear Firan apart.
I could GM for everyone, one at a time and either it would take a month where I did nothing in my spare time but GM, or it would take six months. I am sick, I've always been sick, and I need my gym time and my fighter practices and my art to help keep my health (mental and physical) from confining me to a bed (as used to be the case). So the first won't work. But we also don't want to spend 6 months on a single piece of a metaplot arc either.
I could GM for everyone, but then sometimes I miss things, and sometimes I don't respond as quickly as I would if I were single-scening.
So I choose the last, while we bring more storytellers on board. It's a slow process, and a careful one. To tell metaplot stories means you have to have a great deal more information than players have about the metaplot and things that go bump in the night. One scene I'm passing off for example involves unicorns. To an average player, unicorns are beautiful magical creatures that need to be protected for... reasons. To the storyteller, she has to know things like - why are unicorns invisible during the day? What are the things around their horns? How do they function? What's the purpose of attacking the unicorns in the first place? What's the overall aim here? WHY is this happening? Also, what is being sent? What are its powers? From a mechanical standpoint, how is combat run? What level of risk is acceptable?
I'll probably spend more time working through all this than it would take to run the scene - and when you're looking at 35+ scenes to schedule, that's a daunting thing. More than that though, it IS important to bring more storytellers on if we can find ones that fit the rigorous criteria KQ mentioned earlier, because live GMing is fun and it really adds a lot (in my opinion) to a MUSH. Not just in actions - but also when NPCs can walk the grid and engage with players, show up at the occasional event, bring a bit of magic in here and there. It's fun and immersive and that's one of the things we all really enjoy, but it's hard to do that when there are a bunch of actions outstanding and such.
So that's the long answer - there aren't any good answers but there are less-bad answers. I'm not afraid to tell people no. I do it all the time. But in this case I chose the path where the most people could get something special and fun. And these are highly risky actions. Three PCs (and lots of NPCs) have died so far in this crisis. If people are risking actual character death, I try to make sure they have a scene where they can at least have choices and get a good story out of it.
At the end of the day, I'm sorry to hear your friends would rather bitch about it to you than actually talk to me and say something like "hey, I feel like you're not really present here - should we just reschedule?" I'm not sure what night it was that it happened - I'm not sure if it was the night before you posted what you did, or any night in the past two weeks - I've been doing lots of scenes in those times, some singular, others not. Some of them have been linked scenes, and those I've really enjoyed though - where people are close enough to hear what's going on with the other scene in snippets, and I can weave things so that what happens in one scene affects the other, and vice versa.
So now I'm left wondering - is it one of those that made people mad? Are they not enjoying that weaving of a coherent story together, those plot hooks that give them people to talk to about what happened and what will happen? Or is this one of the single-setting ones that was lackluster? There were a couple where I was just feeling uninspired for it not from being overworked, but the chemistry of the people involved was off, and people were going in multiple directions at once - was it one of those?
And who are you? You won't say. Are you the person I suspect you are, who I've spent plenty of time writing story for, who I've worked with on NPCs, and responded to actions, and talked down from ledges? I hope not. Who are your friends? I don't know that either, only that they were so unhappy they just paged their friends about how much the GM event sucked.
So. That's my thought process. It's a glib response to say "better to not have actions at all than to have my friends page me all upset because they are having a shitty time." It's equally glib to say "hire more staff!" Unless you know the details of what we do and how we do it and why, that's not a helpful solution either.
So here we are. I didn't deserve it but it's what was said. I'll be a long time forgetting, because it's particularly hurtful when you're giving of yourself to try to do nice things for other people and the response is "well, but no one really likes it they're just telling you that they do, and I'm here to tell you that you're doing a shitty job and hurting more than you're helping." Kicks in the face like that take a while to heal.
I hope your friends read this and find a little compassion in their hearts for me. If they're really that upset they can always page me and we'll work through it and if I missed something we can certainly talk about how to incorporate that moving forward or a way to make things right. I'm sorrier than I can tell you that they had a miserable time.
So - apology accepted. It doesn't really fix anything, but I appreciate the apology.
GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING CLIFFHANGERS I CAN'T EVEN RIGHT NOW I HATE THEM SO MUCH STAHP.
Love? Love. LOVE! My new Scanpan. @Kanye-Qwest was so right. SO RIGHT.
@pandora He was, as someone reminded me, Basina's brother. Maybe a search on Basina? She was also pretty new out of CG as I recall.
@pandora Oh shit. He was a Hydran, who got killed by Deltha, who was (I think) General or High General or something in one of the militaries. She was disciplining him for insubordination or something.
But I don't remember his name, he'd only been off the roster (and fresh out of CG) for a week.
@auspice Get the bath (bubble?) bars. They're sliiightly more expensive than the bath bombs, but they're meant to be broken into pieces so they last like 4x as long.
Bath bombs. I don't even care if that makes me the Beckiest Becky who ever Becky'd. DON'T CARE.
Lush bath bombs, specifically.
Don't judge.
Or do. My skin feels great and I am chill and relaxed. So you're just jealous if you judge. 
@Cari
Also, if people are threatening OOC consequences for IC choices feel free to let us know. Apos told me there isn't a global cool down on bannings.
Sitting in a clean house, with my dogs quietly laying nearby, sipping a fresh latte I didn't even have to put shoes on to have.