Posts made by loke

@ganymede Cool-cool. Thanks for the output. Yeah, sometimes staff just isn't open to feedback anyways, regardless of whether disagreements are personal/taste/preferences, can be presented as objective vs subjective, or not. Thanks for your input!

@tez
Do you think there was a way for those games to identify and get rid of those staffers more quickly or mitigate the damage they could cause while investigating?

I don't want to dictate or lead your response, but I've often wondered if more effort/focus towards staff principles (and accountability) would help mitigate a lot of this. I'm thinking of an atmosphere where staff that come on basically know they have to adhere to certain tenets and they are taken seriously by all staff brought on board. A cultural alignment.

@three-eyed-crow
Totally agree. Sorry if it seemed like I was implying quitting as a bad thing. I guess I'm trying to approach this as, how can I as a staffer or a fellow player, help create an engaging and fun experience for people.

I'm trying to get past the "well it's not the game's fault or the player's fault" reasons so I can get to things that are addressable, or things that people have thought aren't or don't need to be a staffer's responsibility, but change /could/ provide better results for a player. Maybe I should work on framing my thread prompt better.

Lots of great stuff in here. Thank you!

@wolfs
I am inclined to agree with you that the solutions to the mismanagement are pretty clear, but that's basing them on my own perceptions, not how they are received.

As a case to kind of sink teeth into, I'll present a common hypothetical. Say Staff has a policy around anonymity of people reporting things. What if there are people who are more vocal to staff in terms of reporting, whether that's because of personality, they feel more comfortable with staff, etc. And what if because of that, they seem to get more favorable outcomes more often (whether they are or not is not the issue here), what is a good way for staff to combat these perceptions?

These types of conundrums often lead to lots of feelings of favoritism, cliques, etc. Often times Staff may not even be aware of such perceptions since someone is venting in private, etc.

Are there general techniques to combatting this that you respond favorably to? Have seen executed well? How?

@cupcake said in Reasons why you quit a game...:

Sometimes things don't work out how I want to in RP. In this case, sometimes I leave, and sometimes I don't. I'm aware that it may be percieved as selfish, but I also accept the consequences of choosing to remove myself and understand that it means staff will likely do as they like with my character for good or ill.

I think this is valid. Maybe all us egalitarian people might cringe at something not working out in an equitable fashion for all, but it's everyone's right to play or not play a game for their own reasons imho.

On the topic of situating...regardless of whether it is staff or other players' responsibility, do you think there is something that could have been done to help with this? Or is this more along the lines of something like I'm not gelling with the theme, etc.

@ganymede
Per 1., do you think it would be possible for staff to recover from this in any way?
Not like, over time, but from a specific instance. If you had a major problem with a staff decision, how would you like it to be resolved in terms of an ideal way? (obviously, probably past staffers you're thinking of might not have the soft skills to pull it off, so maybe shoot for the beats in a convo you would have liked to have seen or something)

Would you be open to bringing up your grievance with a decision if you trusted the staff? Or do you get the sense that most staffers are MY WORD IS FINAL anyways? Or do you even want that kind of resolution? I know some people prefer to let dogs lie and just better results the next time around.

@sunny You can still provide them if you feel like something can be learned from it. Maybe I was a bit heavy handed in my Dos and Don'ts on how I presented them.

@tnp
Yep, it's a cultural thing. So the best thing players and staffers can do would be to focus on combatting that culture at large, then supporting different personality types on the ground. Combatting the culture can mean positively reinforcing a culture that is counter to it, being steadfast about enforcing their culture, make sure policy supports this culture, and iterating for improvement. I don't think there's a handy guide for this yet. I don't think there ever will be because every person is different. I think this is more about developing skills as players and staffers over time to create better cultures in the face of that. I realize that doesn't sound helpful or concrete, but this really is something people need to doggedly and iteratively improve on. I can't stress iteration enough here. Conditions will constantly be changing and so will the stakes.

Make sure everyone is aligned. Create a culture of responsibility and support. Be realistic about your obstacles. You will have to deal with players who never want to get anyone else in trouble no matter what has happened to them. You'll have players who don't want to 'cause problems' for staff. You'll have all these other great (as in interesting problems to solve and dig into) conundrums that @surreality originally posted. To cut through those, empathy, listening, firmness, and graciousness are needed to succeed. Possibly a lot more, and not just by the people directly involved.

Most of all, be real with yourself. Invite criticism. Listen. Demonstrate a pattern of collecting feedback publicly, addressing, changing, following up. This builds trust and accountability with players. It also keeps people in check. And anyone can do this, not just staffers.

If something is let go, you need to follow up. You need to provide context. It's not enough to just say, "My word stands," or, "My door is open." It's hard work, but anything short of this usually breeds more problems than results.

I would suggest that the job of a player relations wiz would be to establish and foster this kind of culture. To encourage other staffers to hold each other accountable to this culture, and ultimately, to get the culture to be self-reinforcing. It is the hardest job/role on a MU and if you don't have someone formally dedicated to it, no matter how small the game is, you're missing out. I don't think this person should hold all the power. It's probably more effective if they do not have major conflicts of interest.

I'm interested in why people quit or check out of games in which they feel heavily invested. Looking for constructive reflection on root causes and what anyone can do to address these root causes (let's learn from each other).

To lay out some ground rules for this thread...

Dos (encouraged)

• provide facts and concrete examples (you can analogize or obfuscate names/situations to be classy and protect the assumed innocent)
• present your perspective as your opinion (presenting opinion as fact can muddle root causes and diminish learning)
• try to think of the instance you're sharing from multiple angles
• provide possible solutions - speculate as to how you, other players, staff, etc could have taken action, solved, or alleviated what was going on

Don'ts

• no external reasons (life got you, you lost interest in MUing, etc) - not that we don't care, more that it's not very pertinent.
• not due to player harassment - It's not helpful for this thread's purpose to simply put "harassment" and that's it. While I certainly welcome this as a valid reason, let's not let it take over the thread. There are a lot of interesting other reasons to dig up here.
• totally axe someone else's point of view - This doesn't mean all perspectives are precious or that no one should comment on other people's contributions. It's just basic respect and it acknowledges that something happened to generate this perspective; it is the effect of some cause. Dismissing it misses opportunities for understanding how it came about.

...If someone brings up something and you disagree, this is not the place to go hashing out what happened or didn't happen in a specific instance. You can say, I didn't see it that way. Hopefully, the other person will be interested to know how you saw it, and you guys can get into that on PMs. Maybe you'll both have something to come back to the thread and share constructively about that exercise.

@apu
Marcus and Alastair

@scar said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:

@auspice said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:

I will note that the suicide of Marcus was not a single incident. He's done it on other games, too.

He did it on Unification twice and on 5th Kingdom.

So it's not like it was an accident, a mistake, or a 'one off' situation.

If abruptly tossing characters off-cam for injury counts... more than twice?

No apology necessary (especially if it is going to be filled with doublespeak) but I'm going to be real with you, you made me uncomfortable @DownWithOPP. When our paths crossed, the PMing and pressure you apply to join large scenes is irritating and eventually for me, once it became a constant that I could expect every time I signed in, bordered on aggressive.

I agree that throwing your char off-cam due to injury is not a big deal (as long as you just give people a courtesy heads up...it's not required, but it's thoughtful). Character death that can cause irrevocable emotional trauma to other characters with little to no notice on a game where that is not the status quo is...negligent of other people's feelings.

As for the aggressive-ish RP pressuring. >__< ...that sucks and is unfortunate.

@downwithopp said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:

@auspice Uh. No. You were talking marriage and babies and shit, and I was uncomfortable with what was going on elseMU* (this was the same time as @tek for the record was doing all the weird shit with Clara/Randy, et al), so I made the move to put all my relationships to an end. I should have told you more on that, and I'm sorry. So, yes, I killed off the character, especially since it was a roster pull from a former character who informed me after I pulled the char that he wasn't supposed to be on roster, which made me feel worse. I made that decision. I'll own it.

I think the better approach would be to find a way to be direct with people. Like, "Hey, that's cool for you. I'm not into it. No hard feelings." Just, a word of advice.

@tek said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:

@loke said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:

@downwithopp

But you still lurched her. He could have been transferred out of command. Instead you pulled a ripcord on everyone attached to that character. It's not about your motivations, it's about the effects of your decision on other people.

And he did so within a week of me telling him I wouldn't do a Skype date with him. And he suicided the character in a scene that I was in as corpsman just to twist the knife.

I'm not sure I would call all of that intentional. Maybe careless.

@downwithopp

But you still lurched her. He could have been transferred out of command. Instead you pulled a ripcord on everyone attached to that character. It's not about your motivations, it's about the effects of your decision on other people.

Apologies are 'nice' but actions speak louder than words.

@Alzie said:

@Griatch your first mistake was assuming people updated their telnet clients. Your second mistake was assuming there aren't people who use zmud.

SimpleMu, Mushclient, tintin++, Z/Cmud, Atlantis along with any number of archaic java clients that the websites that used to host them no longer offer them. See the mudmagic client, mudconnect client, mudbytes client and others.

Off the top of my head:

SimpleMu/Mushclient/ZCMud are mostly used on windows though Mushclient works under wine. However, most people on linux use...

Tintin++ is mostly used on linux because it has some good integration into the linux stack and is CLI based, meaning it doesn't have to get in your way. Also people that use linux like their CLIs.

Atlantis is the mac one. There are others but we don't talk about them, we use Atlantis. Some people use TinTin++ on mac but not many. (Seriously though, the others are either unfinished, half broken or just don't work.)

This is just based on the average discussion around those specific communities.

I agree. Atlantis is the huge one on MAC.