Best posts made by Roz

@faraday said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

We have a hard enough time already getting people to come forward with complaints. I envision even fewer if people know their complaint is going to be plastered all over a bbs.

This. I feel like making everything from the very first complaint public will actually end with fewer complaints submitted, not more. I'm a pretty strong believer in staff confidentiality until the point of a ban. (Permanent or temporary, I guess. I've never dealt with permanent.) If you have to take serious action like that against a player, I think you absolutely need to be up-front about it. For me, that means summarizing what the bad behavior was.

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@roz

It also provides a history. "Oh there's Theno, yelling at Tempest again. Will those two ever get a room?"

I would like to think that we're all just the nicest people in the world, but we're not. Knowing who will and won't escalate (i.e., me and Coin, respectively) is useful in this hobby.

I just don't find that a particularly compelling argument versus "If we had actual consequences for getting out of hand outside of the Hog Pit, then maybe people will eventually learn." As others have said, getting your post moved to the Hog Pit isn't a real consequence, it's basically making the mods have to be responsible for you after the fact because you couldn't be bothered. Losing out on your FINELY-CRAFTED INSULTS is a consequence. Temp bans are a consequence.

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@auspice said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

The other issue with it is this: people can be shitty purposefully to force a thread into the Pit.

Then you don't force the thread into the pit, just the messages.

If this is something that's too difficult with the current tools, then maybe they're the wrong tools.

And I also don't think it's reasonable to say "Make no rulings on how to mod based on the efficiency of the tools at hand." Like, that's just not a helpful argument. You have to make policy based on multiple factors, and one of those factors is how much modding time and energy is available. I also disagree with @Sunny's sentiment that there's something bad about having some reliance on people flagging posts, if only because it's a high-volume forum and, yeah, the mods should be proactive and apparently have been without flagging, but there's no reason why they can't also put an expectation on others to at least help point them in the right direction. It doesn't have to be all one or the other here.

@thugheaven This is actually more like OOCI=ICC. OOC Ignorance = IC Consequences. Which I'm not interested in myself, and I certainly don't blame anyone else for not being interested.

Either way, saying things like "your fee fees might be hurt" isn't really a productive way to address a fair concern.

I haven't started Cyberpunk yet, and I'm certainly happy for the people who have been loving it, but the idea that it should be fine to ship a product with this amount of bugs because "no one releases a bug free product day one" is -- well, basically just consumers being trained that it's somehow unreasonable to expect products that work when they're released. It's a corporate lie. Yes, bugs are probably inevitable, but there are levels here. If people are dealing with crashes daily, that shouldn't be considered a finished product.

But the critical response has clearly been pretty gentle on the bugs, because it's sitting high and pretty on Metacritic. I'm probably just gonna wait for a few more patches before starting, but I'm also not a huge fan of the genre in general that I'm sitting on any particular urge to immediately play. I got it mostly because of how much I loved Witcher 3.

@icanbeyourmuse said in World Building: What are the essentials?:

One thing I REALLY dislike is the just spamming a link or help file (or for things based on books or what have the book/page number/whatever). If someone is asking they were, probably already looking at the aforementioned thing and does not understand.

As someone who is a habitual question-answerer, it's really not my experience that this is the case the majority of the time. (And people who have already checked the available resources tend to be fairly clear about that in their initial question.)

I definitely squinted at him when he first showed up with that game ad, as it smelled a lot like certain other game ads we've had from people who ended up banned. So I'm not super surprised.

As someone who poked around WoD within the past year after lots of time in the community never playing it, I sure didn't care about technical answers, I just needed someone to be able to tell me what people actually meant in conversation when they started saying "Chronicles of Darkness." I ONLY CARE WHAT PEOPLE MEAN COLLOQUIALLY. ALL YOUR ABBREVIATIONS ARE CONFUSING.

@three-eyed-crow said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):

@mr-johnson
I honestly don't think a playable prologue is a terrible thing, or that staffers can't have some kind of vision for their stories. They shouldn't be totally pre-planned, but I also think plots with NO direction tend to be frustrating in their own way. Like, don't let one terrible PRP run by someone who's clearly a moron make you think a loose outline is some kind of source of evil.

Yeah. It's not that there's no place for scenes or plots like this, but you have to just manage expectations. You want to be clear with players up-front at what they'll be participating in. People who are totally not cool with that type of plot will just self-select out.

@Kanye-Qwest said in MU Things I Love:

Also, I love it when you can take multiple NPCs to a PC event and not steal the entire focus and everyone just hums along in conversation and about the event and things flow well and it's wonderful.

I was going to come to this thread to talk about that event anyways because honestly it went so well and I was just so delighted by it. WHO KNEW A RP ART SHOW COULD BE SO FUN. Look at all the pretend money we've raised to free pretend slaves!

@grayson said in Forum wonk:

The loss of history would mean/does mean that when people like VASpider pop up in other hobbies, I can't say to the victims 'go here and you'll see that you're not alone, that this is a pattern and that you aren't going insane'. If we lost all the history, I wouldn't even be able to drop by and refresh my memory on the patterns that we've observed over the last 20 years.

We don't often need the receipts. But when we do, it's nice if they still exist. Although, a better search function would help massively.

(No, the VASpider example was not a random example pulled out of thin air.)

I'm really of this mind. I see people regularly mention the loss of the WORA archives for some of the valuable information that was shared there (even amidst a lot of awful). Yes, as a community we are not just an archive, we are wherever we set up, etc., that's all great, but that also feels more like -- the reaction you have when you accidentally lose a whole thing and are trying to move on. I would not want to plan for losing all of it.

I would also pitch in to any sort of fundraising campaign to help improve the forum situation. Unfortunately, while I'm a mildly techy person and tend to pick up stuff, I don't know that I have the full expertise for a lot of what's being talked about regarding server issues and databases. Like, I'd probably be able to help set up something new that had good instructions, but I'm sure I'd struggle with more complex stuff.

But I'd literally help pay for someone else to do it.

@Tinuviel said in Armageddon MUD:

@Derp said in Armageddon MUD:

Here's the thing with that, and this will be an unpopular stance -- accusations are not evidence.

While I agree that this is true, we're talking about a job rather than a criminal prosecution.

I mean...in a criminal prosecution, witness testimony IS evidence.

I do think to a certain extent you kind of just need to make a decision either way and lean into it and let folks opt out of the game if it's not for them. It's just a different playstyle: some people are really into the immersion of environment, some people aren't. Some people want more control of those aspects, some people like having the game prompt it. @faraday's certainly not wrong that the fuzzy middle ground will likely just end up with more confusion.

@sunny said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:

@meg said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:

And honestly, if you don't want anything to happen to the person from your reporting, then you still aren't /reporting/ the behavior. The conversation is still 'how can a game make reporting more likely'. Your conversation is a different one. Your conversation is 'how can I be a supportive friend and just listen to someone's shitty experience', which doesn't require it being staff or not.

This. I don't think the question is 'how can we help victims come forward and talk about their experiences', it's 'how can we encourage reporting'. They're very different conversations. Frankly, in a staff capacity, someone telling me something while saying they want no action taken regarding it is less than useless. It does not help them. It does not help me. If all that's desired is someone to talk to about what happened, there are several chat-based services on the internet involving people with training as to specifically how to deal with this sort of conversation. If that's what somebody is after, that is what somebody should be doing.

If I am unable to act on what I am told, what is the purpose of telling me? I can't help make things safer for the person telling me. I can't help make things safer for anybody else. I'm not trained to be of actual assistance in these matters, and could actually end up doing real psychological harm by trying to do so. So, seriously: who does it benefit to encourage someone to come to me with things I cannot take action on? It does not even benefit the victim.

ETA: Also, survivor here. So yes, I am allowed to have an opinion on this topic before someone gets into "oh you just couldn't understand" because I do.

This. Like, probably at a glance it sounds like a heartless to say "I don't want to hear about your report unless I can act," but honestly it's true. If you're coming to staff, please help them help you -- and help them help others. Honestly, I would do a lot to help someone keep themselves safe off my game if they were worried about retaliation there, even if it's just trying to help them figure out laws and how to report things and all of that. But it's a little like going to HR with an issue in the workplace. It's generally HR's duty to do their best to protect the source of a complaint, but if it's something that falls within the purview of things they need to act on (for legal reasons), they have to do so. (Which may not involve naming the person who lodged the complaint, but often in situations like that it'll be fairly obvious to the person reported.)

Obviously MU*s aren't in the position of having legal responsibilities to, say, protect their workplace from sexual harassment, but I do think there's a certain level of similarity in that HR is there to protect the company, as staff is there to protect their game.

None of this is to say that it's an easy thing to tell someone "I have to act on this information" when they don't want you to. And honestly, I can't recall having ended up in that position as a staffer -- at least not for anything major. So I think it's a very difficult path to sensitively and empathetically handle these sorts of situations while still needing to move forward with acting on information that someone on your game is doing stuff that necessitates serious discipline to protect the game and the playerbase at large. I unfortunately don't have a magic set of words to easily figure out how to do that.

@rucket said in Forum wonk:

@arkandel I know there's stuff people want to keep but man at some point I can't help but feel like it might be easier to archive certain important posts/threads in some fashion and then start a fresh forum. I know a lot will be lost but it sounds like any sort of migration is going to be either costly or damn near impossible and i fear we may hit a point where, as you mentioned, restoring functionality won't be available and we'll lose everything anyway.

I just saw an Arx cat tarot Kickstarter raise thousands of dollars in 24 hours, I don't think cost would be a difficulty.

I love DA2 with the fire of a thousand suns. I don't care they were rushed and reused the same map a billion times, it's far and away the best Dragon Age game for me.

I actually don't agree that DA2 is a gritty game. Gritty isn't just about bad things happening in the game -- although plenty of bad things happen -- it's as much about tone and tenor and reaction to the bad things. But THIS is DA2 to me:

It's an awful, terrible black comedy. Like, it's literally ridiculous how much shit the game piles onto one person who would probably rather be sitting in a bar with her group of misfit loser friends getting trashed than actually be forced to save the shithole of a city she lives in.

That said, gritty isn't the word that comes to mind when I think of DA:O, either. But I can swallow it far easier for that than I can for DA2.

Also, Fenris is amazing. Fight me. (ง’̀-‘́)ง

pLZ. It's like the one major core element missing from the web portal.

@faraday said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@sunny said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

@Collective and I are surely not saying it now, but it's sure being addressed like we are.

I seriously don't know what you're talking about. Who do you think is misrepresenting what?

I see:

@collective said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:

And yes, I know my characters are not me. But I also don't think it's entirely unreasonable to ask why the 'right' to be vile and hurtful to other people is so much more important than anyone else feeling welcome in a given environment. Because those words hit the players with the same force they hit the characters sometimes.

That certainly comes across to me as saying that it's bad for people to argue for the "right" to have IC -ism in their games. And there have been other comments in this thread to that same effect. If that's not what was intended, then it's just a miscommunication.

I took it to mean that it's bad for people to insist they should be allowed to force this RP onto people who don't want it.

@Kanye-Qwest said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

Also, no lily white blond people.

This bit is actually interesting for me to think about, because I feel like you'd have to explicitly say it somewhere, because players are still gonna default to white PBs. (Even if you do say it somewhere, they're gonna default.) But I'm pretty sure that there's just no white people in the Avatar setting.

There was a lot of really good conversation on this topic here. There was also some really not good conversation.

But tl;dr: our platform absolutely is a barrier for new players who would totally embrace our playstyle, and the people who insist that telnet isn't part of the barrier are not correct. There are players who force their way through the barrier and then fit great with the playstyle. Playstyle is less of an issue than platform limitations. The point isn't to change the playstyle, it's to make a more accessible platform to the style that exists.

The fact that there are people on other platforms RPing in a different style doesn't actually mean all of them don't want better options, and won't adapt and find the MU* style of things an improvement. It means they're stuck for platform options.

@Meg said in Avatar / Korra game considerations:

@Kanye-Qwest and, you couldn't justify airbenders if you set it before korra and after aang.

That's a big one. I think you have to go pre-Sozin or post-Korra.