Posts made by Pandora

@Lotherio said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

That said on a mu I will show concern once, if that's a trigger and they tell me to get the fuck out, fair enough, I'm not there to counsel or help. I'm not writing them off, I'll respect their online space.

@Lotherio said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

If they told me to piss off and leave them be, I'd do just that and write them off as not to waste my time with concern again.

Emphasis mine. In either case it's entirely up to you what you do, I completely agree that we're not on these games to be anyone's counselor. It's just a bit of a conflict of statements here; if you're going to reach out in the first place, it wouldn't hurt to take into consideration the timing, if in fact your initial goal is to help.

@Lotherio Sometimes, immediate displays of concern/empathy can come off as thirsty for gossip/drama when you're already on-edge and feeling like you might be a spectacle. If you are told to piss off, I'd hope you take into account that they might in fact be sensitive/vulnerable at the moment & not entirely write them off as a person worth concern.

If you're not aware, Steam now has a remote-play feature that allows one person that owns a game to play split-screen/shared-screen couch-cooperative games with people online even if they do not have the game.

I have Catastronauts, Overcooked 2, Upbreakers, For the King, Lego: The Hobbit, Toybox Turbo, and a few other games as well, so if you've got Steam and like to couch co-op without having to sit on anyone else's couch, hit me up.

Never read these threads backwards. This just happened to me:

@JinShei said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

My Foster sister was Fred West's barmaid, and they often babysat her kid. She was always an amazing judge of character...

Me: Oh, who is Fred? scrolls back

@Auspice said in [Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy

The worst was when Fred was in my shower, yes.

Me: What? Who the hell is Fred and why is he in someone's shower? Better click the link.

clicks link, spends 20 minutes reading Wiki page of the Fred West murder spree in shock and horror MEANWHILE THE WHOLE TIME THINKING THIS GUY WAS IN @AUSPICE'S SHOWER ONCE

@Sunny said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

Asking if someone is ok is not branding someone a creep.

Yeah, in a perfect world that doesn't exist on the internet.

I want to know what public, 3+ people in the room emote was so 'creepy' in-character that it warrants OOC discussion. Like, copy-paste an example please, somebody.

IC creeping is usually just terrible flirting, something MOST roleplayers not only suck at, but are also perfectly aware that they suck at it.

Imagine playing a 'suave and charming' dude and you're sweating bullets trying to pull this off and you have a sinking suspicion you're failing badly because this chick won't even let you buy her a drink and drinks don't even codely cost anything because this is a MUSH-

And then you find out out that not only was your RP kinda bad today but now you've been branded a creep because some third-party put it into your RP-partner's head that not only was the flirting bad but it was also worthy of OOC checking in so omggg this player must have a history of abusive behavior omg am I being victimized? Thank you so much for the warning, I will now tell EVERYONE!-

Pump the brakes.

Portraying characters outside of our comfort zones can be challenging enough without this type of overkill. Please save the flashing lights for actual emergencies; this isn't CNN, everything isn't a Breaking News Pandemic.

@Auspice said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

And yet, there are infographics that can tell you, based merely on how your cookies look how to fix them... based on science, not art. That you put too much (or too little) of an ingredient. That you baked at too high or too low a temperature. Nothing of art to it.

art1
/ɑːt/
noun
1.
the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination

Your science of baking is art. Even your infernal infographics are art.

I lost my job recently, redundancy is a bitch but it happens. Other than that, everything else is fine except for this weighted-blanket of depression I have no excuse for because everything is fine. No one has outright asked me 'Why are you depressed?' yet which I'm grateful for, but I keep asking myself and have no good reason. Went on vacation a couple weeks ago and literally spent most of the time curled up in bed at the hotel for no good reason. Depression feels a lot like laziness, looks a lot like laziness. Got myself a Switch & Pokemon Sword on my S.O.'s orders and my starter is Sobble because I can relate to crying for no reason right now. Hoping it's just the weather + performance anxiety about spending the holidays with the in-laws, who knows though.

Huh. I'd never imagine banning someone that's done nothing but disagree with me. Sure if they were persistent or abusive or disruptive that makes sense. But simply for nothing other than disagreeing seems petty af.

@faraday said in Staff’s Job?:

@Pandora said in Staff’s Job?:

If a game goes down, who do players look to? Staff. If there is a disruptive theme breach? Staff. If a plot conclusion needs a game-wide emit? Staff.

I just disagree, sorry.

You're not going to look to build staff if there's a disruptive theme breach, but these people are still staff.

The question was 'Staff's Job?' not 'Head coder's job?' or 'Build staff's job?' or 'Storyteller staff's job?'

@Thenomain said in Staff’s Job?:

Splitting off from the other recent discussions, what in general is staff’s job?

Of course you can break staff down into subgroups - the same goes for most any job with more than one aspect. If asked for the definition of 'McDonald's Employee's Job?' would you say 'It's impossible to say because there's no universal constant, some people flip burgers, some take orders, and some are CEOs making millions a year.'

Or would you say, 'People doing the tasks required for the McDonald's Corporation to keep making money.'?

@faraday said in Staff’s Job?:

@Pandora said in Staff’s Job?:

The job of staff as a whole in any text-based game is to maintain the code, theme, and community standards through all of the back-end tasks that players do not have access to,

It's as decent a generalization as any, but it's still not quite accurate. [...]

It just varies a lot. There's no other way to put it.

Students and teachers may overlap in duties (passing out pencils, deciding who gets to use the swing first, monitoring attendance or participation, grading tests) but at the end of the day, there is a difference and it isn't definitive to say it varies - the teacher is the teacher and the student is the student.

Same goes for Staff vs Player in terms of responsibility, or as taken from the name of the thread 'job'. If a game goes down, who do players look to? Staff. If there is a disruptive theme breach? Staff. If a plot conclusion needs a game-wide emit? Staff.

Players can help, it is a community after all, but at the end of the day, staff's job is to keep everything running in all of the ways that players cannot.

Some games require staffers to build, others have systems in place where players can do their own builds. Some games require staff to run plots, others are PrP only. Some games require staff to approve character applications, others have a full chargen where staff input isn't required.

And so on.

It is therefore ineffective to bog down the definition of staff with specific tasks, as those then become game-specific definitions.

The job of staff as a whole in any text-based game is to maintain the code, theme, and community standards through all of the back-end tasks that players do not have access to, and these will vary greatly depending on if you run a MUD, RPI, MUX, MUSH, or MOO as each have different systems and requirements from staff.

This differs from players, in that their responsibility is to interact with the systems in place on the front end, ensuring that their contributions to the game are thematic and not to the detriment of anyone else attempting to play the game.

(Also players - See Below:)

@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:

That is a reasonable way to look at it, but it's not one that I share. If someone suffers public shame as a result of being banned, so be it; however, I know a handful of people who have been banned which I do not considered to be either shamed or besmirched by the act. Sometimes, a ban comes down because a player simply cannot work with staff for one reason or another.

I find this curious. If a player simply cannot work with staff, why are they banned? Have they actually done something wrong? If not, a ban seems silly and excessive. If so - well, then that's the shameful thing they've done, and why banning them is still textbook public shaming.

Unless of course there's some sort of example of a situation in which someone is banned, having done something legitimately deserving of a ban, but no one thinks any less of them as a player/staffer as a result. But I do not think this is possible, as a banning smacks very much of 'Leave and never come back!' as opposed to 'Sorry it didn't work out, maybe one day!'

I've been staying under 20g of carbs/day for the past 3 weeks, prepping for vacations & holiday dinners in the next couple of months. It's been going well, I've lost 17 lbs & that size 8 dress is on the horizon.

But I ate a burger on a bun made of actual white flour today, with Heinz ketchup, and it was so delicious I don't even feel bad for cheating. #YOLO.

@Ganymede said in Punishments in MU*:

And the second sounds like public shaming, which I am generally against.

Banning someone is a form of public shaming; just because they're off your game now and you don't have to look them in the metaphorical eye afterwards doesn't mean they haven't been shamed and that they aren't going to suffer negatively within the wider community as a result.

That said, public shaming is fitting for anyone that's done something egregious enough to warrant getting banned in the first place. Whether it's a ban or some other form of punishment, at the end of the day a game is a community and people deserve to know who and what the problems are. I'm not saying they need to be tarred and feathered, but a simple acknowledgement that X did Y & has been given a warning would stop the whisper-game in its tracks.

Imagine if <insert your favorite gaslighter here> wasn't able to do that shit to you or anyone else because people knew it'd happened before, had been informed, knew what signs to keep an eye on, and knew staff was not going to turn a blind eye to it?

I'm with @Ganymede on this one, time spent going through escalation procedures with someone that repeatedly feels the need to live above and beyond the rules is time wasted.

I have seen/heard of some tactics that work to varying degrees however, such as banning a player from IC romantic relationships, or making people publicly post short essays about what they did and why it was wrong. I actually use that latter tactic with my kid, some of the answers I get are hilarious.

My Opinion:

NPC: Has goals and agendas that further the plot and story via meaningful interactions with the players & ultimately exists to offer a glimpse into the world/powers beyond that which players see in their day-to-day roleplay.

Staff PC: Here to play a role like everyone else, with player-level abilities and goals, to tell a story about themselves entrenched in this world, again like everyone else.

You'll note that in my example of an NPC, it's perfectly possible for them to have tea, share secrets, or font-fuck any PCs without violating the Terms & Conditions.

@L-B-Heuschkel Surely that has nothing to do with privacy from on-high, and everything to do with players that had no power over you other than to make your roleplay experience tedious - same as any other player on any other game?

@Derp Cool. What was being discussed before this tangent was the merits of the ability for staff to see all roleplay/PMs/@mail on their server, not RP that happens literally on Discord.

When I mentioned Discord, I was talking about the annoying tendency people have to have OOC conversations about everything IC, getting things incredibly wrong without staff oversight, and then taking it on-grid.

What I did not mention was staff needing to have the ability to police what happens on Discord, but rather the ability to see everything that happens on-grid and nip the stray theme in the bud.

I sincerely hope that clears my end of things up, I intensely dislike the feeling of being chased through a thread with arguments that I didn't make.

@faraday Sure, I don't have any problem with what anyone feels; I wish people were more cognizant of their feelings & that people were more ready to accept that people(not me of course) have them and are entitled to them. This isn't an exercise in trying to convince anyone that they need to embrace the joy that is an omnipresent staff, I'm just wondering if there is any angle I personally am not looking at, in terms of privacy, that should make me less open to the idea of staff seeing everything. Thus far, that's a no. But it's always interesting to see other people's points of view, so long as they have some measure of reason to them other than 'just 'cause'.