Posts made by Ghost

@Aria Just hang out and occasionally yell "SHUT THE FUCK UP, DONNY."

New Star Trek with Pine in development.

Hope they bring back Jaylah and do a Chekov memorial

I have typed and discarded 2 responses and want credit for having the willpower to discard them instead of posting them.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

Doesn't sound like her, but I suspect there's a substantial number of them out there. People who start out as drama queens and descend into complete catfishes, particularly at the time they begin to realise there's money to be had.

I wonder if it's the same girl I knew. She mentioned being pregnant, dumped, needed to MU from library, dumped again, etc. Was willing to send nudes.

My catfish spotting skills are better than Manti T'eos

@Auspice said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@L-B-Heuschkel

Wonder if it was the same lady I mentioned above.

She supposedly had inherited a ranch in AZ and had rescued over 40 dogs!

....but had no job and thus needed money/donations to support her and her kids and all the dogs.

Reminds me of a guy here in town who told us he lost his job and got a serious medical diagnosis. We put together a drive with our friends to help cover some of his bills. Probably 600 or so was donated.

He used it to get a tattoo. Not sick. Still has a job.

People are dicks.

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Ghost said in Punishments in MU*:

@Ganymede You have properly identified me as the cat.

Oh, then I'm the bed.

And on your birthday? The sandbox.

When we do it the special way

@Ganymede You have properly identified me as the cat.

@Coin said in Punishments in MU*:

@Ghost said in Punishments in MU*:

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Arkandel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

No, your punishment is that you're still here all these years later, talking about the same things with the same people and getting the same answers.

I wish I at least played so I had some kind of excuse for it, too.

@Ghost, someone's taking your line.

Close, but it wasn't arrogantly worded enough

Ark and I will fight to the death about it later. $20 a seat.

You wish people would pay money to see you two slapfight.

Hell yeah I do. Ps5 is coming. Papa gots to keep current.

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Arkandel said in Punishments in MU*:

@Tinuviel said in Punishments in MU*:

No, your punishment is that you're still here all these years later, talking about the same things with the same people and getting the same answers.

I wish I at least played so I had some kind of excuse for it, too.

@Ghost, someone's taking your line.

Close, but it wasn't arrogantly worded enough

Ark and I will fight to the death about it later. $20 a seat.

If I had to define what I think a staffer is, my perspective is this:

What staff think they are: Fellow community members who maintain a playspace that most of them would also like to partake in, but issues of being busy staff-side or difficulties surrounding being "staff-alts" tend to interfere. Games need game owners, and games need staff, so they open and maintain the theme park and keep the hobby alive. A small percentage have the time and code knowledge to do so, so they ultimately bite the bullet.

What players generally think of staff as: Custodians of the playspace, facilitators of character and job approvals, and overall responsible for maintaining the playspace in a way that allows them to have as few roadblocks as possible for whenever they want to utilize the service. Staff participation and enjoyment is generally considered secondary to the above, because staff chose to fill that role, and it's not the player's responsibility to facilitate anything unless they choose to.

@Arkandel I don't. But I also think that dozens of hours of RP that doesn't yield readable logs and said to be story specifically for the 2 characters sequestered off in a room together defeats the entire purpose of MU.

If what people wanted was a place to roleplay privately and not share their character creation outside of that bubble, then go to google docs.

Be it for TSKink, private only RP, or however intriguing the RP may be, the concept of it being "important to that one person" isnt greater than the need for people to partake in the communal efforts of the game itself.

Make it worth something. That's all I say.

@Arkandel My answer remains the same. I don't care so long as it's for story and not for focusing on private RPed kink. I think it would be a serious waste to take on any meaningful canon character only to have 90% of their activity be on the hush.

Clearly there is enough disagreement as to what staff is or isn't that it might help if games, as individual entities, have a statement detailing what staff IS or ISNT.

Define it at the game level.

Head staff states what they're looking for from staff, then posts what staff IS and ISNT to the players. Everyone is on the same page. Boom.

@Alamias said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@Auspice said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

@Arkandel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

Is it okay to create couples out of characters who are canonically with other people? Can (adult) Peter Parker date Captain Marvel?

KIND OF A MANHO

Is it weird that I play someone who is supposed to be kind of a manho (Luke Cage), but I don't flirt or do much of anything in that regard because I feel weird OOCly that if I RP those elements of him I am afraid I will be labeled as just trolling for TS?

Is it doubly weird that this is coming from the guy that played Kaleb (If you know, you know) where I didn't care if that is how I might have been labeled?

It's not.

The MU community can be very paranoid about intentions and very quick to judge. The line between being in canon and just chose that character to hunt for copious amounts of TS is very thin, depending on who you ask.

Starfire, for example, is an amazing character, but it's also widely believed on an OOC level that people tend to play her to troll for TS with everyone.

I dont care whether or not canon characters (in Mu) stick to canon so long as a small number of my biases are met:

1. Try to keep everything else to canon. I literally don't care which straight characters are now gay, or which white characters are now Asian. I just don't want to see Jedi Dr Strange who constantly breaks the 4th wall, has his own iron man suit, and was bitten by a radioactive spider.

2. FOR FUCKS SAKE MAKE IT COUNT. Don't make a gay Wolverine because you intend to just hide in some RP suite having cub, otter, and bear orgies. Make Wolverine gay because youre going to write this character turning over this new leaf in life. I wanna see him confide about it to Storm or Xavier. I wanna see how the character's psychology changes. I could give three fucks whether or not someone thinks it's a neat idea; the whole point is useless if I can't read any of it.

@Derp Counterpoint:

I dont think anyone should be banned from the community or that such a DB should ever exist. People are fallible and bias is everywhere. Having said that there's definitely people out there who have been somewhat "proxy banned" from the community, or are on constant "SpiderWatch" that even if they're now the perfect roleplayer will forever wear that scarlet letter; at least to some players who vow to never forget/forgive.

When you're talking about punishment, public shaming, and how to deal with players, you have to take into account that like it or not some players have vowed never to even attempt to RP on some games if X or Y person has a character bit there, and the casual cyberstalking to try to sleigh-out who is who isn't considered stalking (though it probably should).

When I said that, I wasnt promoting the idea, but simply that there is no "central dbase of worst people ever", and even then it would be highly subjective. The best any game owner could do in my opinion is to dispassionately maintain a whitelist of who is allowed and who has been removed from the whitelist, since public shaming is messy and rife with inaccuracies.

Yet, I regularly see complaints about banned players sneaking back into games, constant hunts for banned players where innocent players can't log in due to using the same vpn service, and the harsh reality that there's really no central database of players banned from the community itself.

This is another argument for leaning towards newer technology, such as IPTables, and creating connection schemes for your MU to operate on a whitelist of "known OK" users.

In theory, getting access to the player zone of a game could involve everyone being forced to user guest-only accounts until approved, and then after approval being allowed into the whitelist of approved connection addresses where only known entities are allowed.

Public shaming is popular because it assumes that if you break the will of the user to no longer want to attempt to partake in the community that they'll stop, but we see some players take the alternate route of stalking and skulking about.

If you had more control over a whitelist like IP tables, you can make people stay away.

One of the issues MU has in terms of "rules" is that the goal posts constantly move, and there's a lot of subjective interpretation in play.

Example:

• Player well within their right to drop/re-cgen charbit as they see fit (generally considered okay)
• Player drops charbit for whatever reason (but not to cheat or break the rules) but it inconveniences a player (still well within the rules, but can result in ooc negativity on either the player's or inconvenienced player's part)
• Player regularly drops charbits to regen new charbits (still within the rules)

Now...

• TECHNICALLY a player who drops charbits when they get bored with an IC relationship, kills the character, then regens with a charbit that is specifically designed to woo a target charbit for an IC relationship is still TECHNICALLY well within their right to do so, but arguably disruptive to the game because it makes other players angry

So, in theory, a player who did stuff like this would suffer RP loss for shenanigans like that, and if they tried to push the issue via pages or ooc pressuring would definitely be in the wrong due to harassment policies, but dropping/rebuilding whatever character they please is well within the rules, so...handwobble. Technically if the player didn't harass and just kept dropping/rebuilding, it might not be popular, but it's not against the rules. The players should handle how they deal with this by simply...not RPing with the annoying player.

I think a lot of "justice seeking" happens for gray area stuff than actual rules/punishment can allow, so staff tend to get a lot of pressure from players to cockpunch other players for stuff that isn't in the rules at all, and if said pressure is not acted on in the way the jilted player feels results in backchannel retaliation against badPlayer and staff.

@Ganymede Well, there a few schools of thought on most MU.

1. IC Authority figures should be either staff PCs or played by staff-approved players to control how plot is driven, but then these PCs always have a crazy amount of plot armor.
2. IC authority figures can be played within each faction, but only factions who support staff-driven plot direction get the most attention.
3. No one's in charge ICly, but staff plot will likely still determine pass/fail on plot-centric actions

In all cases it's still pretty smart to follow along with staff wishes, because there are very few MUs where staff don't have some "plot vision" in mind and will let the chimps determine what happens to the zoo.

It's also very smart in any case to stay on staff's good side via what information is seen by staff. I rarely have seen someone who staff reviled still getting equal unbiased results compared to people who cheerlead staff.

@Derp Conflict of interest is such a weird concept on MUs, or at least the concept of bias and how it affects conflict of interest in ways we don't often discuss. Over the years I have seen bad staff feeding their alts (or alts of their friends) with OOC information to lubricate IC results.

Regardless, I think there's something to "snooping" being related to defending compartmentalization of information for better or worse. Kind of like how people freak out about being seen in their underwear but couldn't care less about being seen in a swimming suit that is virtually no different from underwear "because you CHOSE to be seen in that underwear".

People want to control what scenes are public knowledge because the IC content could be damaging either Oocly or ICly. People also want to control which pages are seen because they're considered (though aren't) private and they don't want their private information or potentially nasty OOC page communications getting back to the people they're talking about.

I think people like to compartmentalize who they make snide remarks or complain to others about based on the intended target of the message and worry about staff being aware of some of the stuff said. Oh, man, have I received some epic bitching about staff in pages...