Best posts made by surreality

@Miss-Demeanor said in MSB: The meta-discussion:

I would rather see shit getting spewed out here than keeping it bottled up to where it gets spewed out onto someone's rl.

...or on the actual games.

Venting is necessary, sometimes.

I would rather see someone explode here in a froth of senseless bile and profanity than see them treat somebody like crap on the game because they're fed up with a peeve.

Negative feels are real and are as valid as positive feels are.

People are not negative, not-nice, or bad people for having negative feelings about a negative experience.

Negative experiences are common things everyone encounters sooner or later in life.

Repressing shit is not, actually, super great for someone if they do it for too long. I would rather see someone post, "Dammit, it always drives me crazy when people hog a scene. Attention whores are annoying." in the Hog Pit than suppress that feeling the dozen or so times it takes for them to explode with the force of twelve times the vitriol the unlucky thirteenth person they perceive to be behaving this way could ever possibly deserve even if the problem behavior really was genuinely and objectively problematic behavior.

@bored I have to be honest here: the kind of negative assumptions that are being consistently made in your post are exactly why it took me since October to mention anything about what I was working on at all. I asked people to stick to some specific questions (and from the jump, nope), and that a lot of other information would have to wait, because there's a lot (to be specific, I'm betting 2-3 months of full time hours put into the setting/lore details in writing) left to do on it that exists in the brain, just not on paper with its various reference material and citations. I think it is pretty reasonable to say: please stow these questions and assumptions until that information is ready to be shared.

Not only are you making a lot of assumptions about the subject matter -- what it includes and what it doesn't -- but now, assumptions about the availability of options for various character types and even insinuations about staff corruption and favoritism. Thanks, man. That's totally what me and @Coin are known for, I guess.

And the simple fact that some people are freaking out about the very notion that there might be places that only some character types can go being the inevitable destruction of a game that doesn't even have a grid yet, while others are bemoaning that everyone will only want to do one thing (because who'd want to be anything else, I guess?) is precisely why this kind of post is something a lot of people developing games do not find this place to be an especially useful one for input, no matter how much we may all fancy ourselves experts on everything.

Other than easing my mind that @Lisse24 is not going to hate my face for continuing to work on something I'd already put one hell of a lot of time into before knowing she wants to do something similar, this thread has thus far unfortunately been pretty discouraging, and it's especially hair-tear-worthy that it's based on assumptions of what must be going on, rather than what is.

I am honestly not concerned with people telling me what to do with the place, because when I decided to do this, I decided to build the game world I wanted to build, and that is what I aim to do. What I am trying to do here is ask, "There are possibilities in Direction X, is there interest in that enough to warrant writing it up for a setting that is <very rough mix of concepts>?" because I believe in including as many of those things as possible from the outset. Trying to shoehorn them in later when a pile of people express interest almost always makes them appear tacked on like an awkward appendage and it starts to break things, and I'd rather avoid that if possible.

While I'm happy to leave this be so people can see 'zomg surr is horrible' if that's the conclusion they'd like to draw and it remains on the record, I'm going to ask @Glitch to lock it (please?) because it's unfortunately not serving the useful purpose I really hoped it potentially could.

This is our 'do not be a douche about TS' file:

• The common sense clause: If you want to keep it private, actually keep it reasonably private. The bigger a show you make of it OOC, the more people may react.
• TS is allowed in private areas of the grid. Don't TS in public areas. (If you ''absolutely have to bang the waitress on the bar after closing time'', make a +temproom for it. We know people do things like this in the real world and there's no reason characters in a game wouldn't do the same. Just use your common sense and be realistic about it.)
• Do not ask staff to care about who is or is not TSing who. It's not our business, and it's not yours, either, unless you're one of the people actively involved in writing the adult content in that specific scene.

Resolution: Staff will remind you this is not high school, and if you continue to behave like it is high school, you'll quickly find yourself expelled. We make no apologies for having no patience with this behavior whatsoever.

Sexual subject matter and relationship-based roleplay is expressly allowed on this game, within the rules outlined in policy. I'll sum up: no child porn, consent is required for sexual themes, don't spy on people no matter who you are, don't TS the staff NPCs -- you know, the things that should constitute the usual common sense.

This doesn't stop it from generating mountains of needless drama. Let's not do that.

We ask: please don't ask staff (or anyone else) to care about anyone's TS. Please don't involve staff in your relationship drama, psychosexual exploits, real world relationship troubles, or those of others.

• We do not care that that other group over there is just TSing all the time. Guess what -- if they're enjoying themselves and not breaking any rules, we don't care.
• We do not care that JohnnyBones said he'd be SuzySweetheart's true love for all times then went and got his knob polished by SallySuckmistress. Don't bring us this kind of thing, because we don't care.
• "OMG HarryHardon is such a TS character!" So long as HarryHardon was built legit and isn't breaking any rules, we don't care.
• "Those two only ever spend time in their private room! You know what they're doing in there!!!" Hey, guess what? We don't care.
• "He promised he'd stay away from that bitch!" We don't care.
• "That bastard is TSing my real world girlfriend!" We don't care.
• "I don't think a ThisSplat would ever date a ThatSplat! DO SOMETHING!!!" We still don't care.

If it's going on behind closed doors and is not against the rules, we don't care. Don't ask us to care. This likely is not even your business, let alone ours.

(It's hard to get clearer than that, I think, about how little TS drama will be tolerated, I think.)

@mietze said in Course Corrections:

What's wrong with staff saying "Clearly you've put thought into this and we respect that but it's not a direction the game is going to go, no matter what you roll, by our choice?"

There's no need to do weird contortions to justify it, just say "We don't want that within the scope of the game."

Will some players get huffy or feel constrained? Yes. Would they have probably found something else to bitch about? Yes. Is it unreasonable for players to have the expectation that they have truly free reign without boundaries to change anything at all in the game environment whenever they wish to start rolling for it or because they want to? Yes. Has our community coddled this a bit by letting people down easy, throwing down false mechanical barriers, and deflecting the question so as not to cause a fit? Yes.

This is exactly what I was wondering about.

There's a pretty pervasive 'omg they won't let me change X!' outcry whenever someone finds one of these barriers -- and I think it's reasonable to have some barriers in place.

I don't think would this dramatically change the feel of the game in a way that makes it into something entirely and irrevocably different within the space of a week or less is not a bad litmus test for that question to arise: do we just say no, even though this is something this character could arguably accomplish.

Destroy the grid and most of the people in it is a pretty easy call, if you're willing to ask the question.

I see the question as a reasonable one to ask. That doesn't seem to be a common view, though, since for too long, I think, people weren't allowed to do anything that might upset some absurdly stagnant status quo.

People need to know that the world has room for (and ideally welcomes) change within the scope of what the game is intended to be, but that room isn't infinite, nor is the scope.

Someone could, arguably, take on the leadership of the Invictus on a game, be too powerful for players to take down easily, and say: "We are no longer the Invictus. We are now Bronies. Choose your magic butt-sticker and pony codename and get it tattooed within the week or I will call a blood hunt. I will now dominate all of you into dyeing your hair rainbow colors and wearing enough body glitter to make the entire cast of Twilight start muttering about overkill."

I would hope the players would find a way, but really... as a TL or headstaff, that would be a log I would read with my finger hovering over the retcon button, and I hate that button really a lot.

A player stepping in and running the faction? Should be welcome, even if they do some things differently -- so long as they're still within the theme and scope of the game, which the example above is really just not for most of the games currently running.

This is similar, to me, to 'I don't care how many dice you have or how good your roll is, you are not going to jump the English Channel on your motorcycle: this is an impossible task.'

@ThatGuyThere This still sounds like the odds are a little less awful than WoD when it comes to that problem, since it sounds like the amount of min-maxing required is less extreme in FS3.

...cannot even begin to recount the number of characters I've min-maxed and buffed in WoD over the years to be good at their one thing they're even remotely able to be good at that never once succeeded on a roll for it. There have been many.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said in Emotional separation from fictional content:

I have also seen people who viciously emotionally abused others by telling them they were too invested, when in fact it boiled down to them holding the other person by the wrists and making them slap themselves in the face, while chanting "Stop hitting yourself!"

Also, this.

I tend to find this comes up the most often not when someone actually is too invested, but when someone expresses even the slightest irritation that someone else pulled a major dick move on them, either IC, OOC, or both, as a deflection tactic. It isn't that they did something that might, say, have crossed a line, or just be the sort of thing that maybe they should have thought to ask about, or clearly didn't think through properly before charging ahead like a bull in a fine glassware emporium, it's that clearly the other guy is just too sensitive.

Kinda hate those people. Kinda hate them a lot. Sometimes this isn't even intentional dickery, but really, if you hurt somebody, you don't get to tell them that you didn't. If you didn't mean to do it, yeah, by all means make that known, but not meaning to do it doesn't mean you didn't do it anyway. Very crazy-making.

@HelloProject In fairness, LinkedIn will not ever stop emailing you ever no matter what once they have your email. I am pretty sure someone could carpet bomb every one of their server farms and corporate locations and they would still never stop sending email constantly, nagging the shit out of you that don't you know Bob, that guy you met that one time when you were 12 who just can't resist the urge to connect with you? WE KNOW YOU KNOW BOB, YOU UNRESPONSIVE, UNPROFESSIONAL WRETCH!!! Ahem. I might just hate LinkedIn, and want to set everyone who ever farmed their address book to try to get me to sign up and add me to it. Anybody who hands out a list to LinkedIn like this should be thrown into sludge pit full of electric eels and have their corpse displayed publicly as a warning to others.

I am really not kidding. I sincerely mean that. That company is a plague. I've seen MLM schemes less tenacious.

What makes me shake my head about this is that so many places get email addresses in a manner much less secure than what I'm suggesting every day via wiki login requests, which reveal that information potentially to the entire staffcorps of a game, since these jobs tend to go to an all-staff-viewable bucket, rather than one game gmail account maintainer, with a designated alternate headstaffer who also has access in case the other vanishes or has to be away for whatever reason.

We do not have widespread problems from this information being shared to potential entire staffcorps the way it's regularly shared now. This is, I think, a much more significant indicator of how people handle this information when it's available. (Read: with a very low incidence of troubles stemming from it.)

Hell, what I'm recommending shares it with fewer folk than it currently is normally on any game with manual account creation and a staff corps of more than 2, so the flinch factor seems disproportionate to reality to me. Sure, it's a fairly occluded reality, but it's still the reality of things.

In the end, if people aren't cool with it, they won't sign up for a game that asks for it, and life will absolutely go on.

I know it's relevant for my purposes.

Create at login is not going to be enabled.
Guests will not be enabled at all times.
Wiki is required.
I am not allowing anonymous users account creation access on the wiki, and I do not trust the extensions that handle this in an automated fashion; further, they would not provide means to send the player their initial MUX password.

I'm going to need an email, because people will need to email to request a login for the MUX and wiki, and that's really just all there is to it. Ultimately, I am not going to cater to what I consider an unreasonable degree of paranoia about what is undoubtedly going to be, or quite easily can be, a throwaway gmail address.

If someone genuinely can't be bothered to create a throwaway email address if they're that concerned about being identified by one of two headstaff who can see their IP address anyway, I can't really say I have much sympathy, and can't imagine how, if this is somehow beyond their ken, they would ever make it through chargen on any MUX, anywhere, pretty much ever. Even CG on Shang is more complex than creating a throwaway webmail addy somewhere.

@Arkandel We also tend to have zero qualms about eating our own young, though, so. Kinda cuts both ways.

@Ganymede said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

In the past decade or so, I think that players have generally adopted the policy that: (1) staff are responsible for their own games and have the authority to make whatever decisions they want; and (2) policies can be ignored where circumstances demand attention.

I think we still need work on the bolded bits, really. It's better than it was, but the bolded bit really needs work. The level of shrieking that erupts -- I do not exclude myself as a source of it as much as anybody -- over anything new, or anything people can't see past their preconceptions about, is still a pretty major issue. The race to start trying to tag people with the worst of all possible traits over fairly trivial shit is also grossly problematic, especially when paired with behavior blindness.

There's been... more of that than usual this month thus far, and it is really getting to be a concern, in the sense that it makes me wonder if it's worth sticking around or not. Not something I ever thought I'd be saying, either.

I don't really think it's entirely fair to dogpile @Derp here, though, and he's kinnnnnnnda taking all the lumps for this forum-side.

He's not the game owner, and the game owner is the one who has apparently made the call, at least according to Spider's post.

I know I wouldn't feel it quite fair if I was taken to task for decisions made by headstaff that I don't really have a say in, but have to enforce or relate to others, so, y'know. Something to keep in mind here.

@Coin said in How Do I Headwiz?:

I am more and more in favor of XP being a player thing and having players distribute the XP among whatever alts they have as they see fit, logistics and logic be damned.

I it when the ideas I want to run with that everyone initially decries as totally the end of the world and clearly I am just a stupid idiot person get more than me behind being willing to try them.

@ixokai said in Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?:

As it happens, a lot of times that is bad. I'm a big fan of consequences and growth from failure. What I don't like is a roll of a dice or a whim of something or other ending my story in a meaningless way.

But bad? And consequences? This is how people grow.

^ This.

While some folks have such thin IC/OOC separation that they just cannot ever handle anything bad happening to their character, or their character not always having maximum IC fun, that's far from universal.

The fun that's relevant is the fun the players are having. This may be in tandem with or directly opposed to the fun the character is having at any given time.

Re: wiki vs. MUX: I'm of a mind that information should be accessible in/from both. It's important to have it on the wiki or website for people to be able to find out something about what the game's about before plunging in, to avoid wasting their time if it's just not something that appeals, which they could have found out with a quick glance over this or that basic primer.

The identical information should also be available on the game for reference as needed or for the people who do prefer just to read all of that on the MUX itself if they're so inclined.

It is a very good thing that files can be tugged from wiki to MUX these days through a variety of means, because this also means that information is consistent in both places at all times. (Consistent information wherever that information is going to appear is important.)

@arkandel The self-awareness thing is why I tabled RP and any dev for the foreseeable future. I know I'm not in the headspace for it, and would rather take knocks for being a flake or 'ha ha idiot can't do it' than pursue something I give a shit about, only to see it get completely scragged due to a period of particularly bitchy depression on my part.

This is actually not as hard as it sounds. We all have our strengths, our weaknesses, and our limits. We do tend to know what they are, deep down, under whatever levels of denial or insecurity or whatever else is going on at the same time. (Ex: All the people who fret over being shitty writers who are actually brilliant; the folks who will literally type 'alts are allowed' and then 'alts are discouraged' and refuse to see why they might be confusing someone as to the game's feeling about whether alts are actually welcome, etc. I'm sure everybody's seen stuff like this and there are other plentiful examples.)

Functioning within them is important. You don't have to do it all; this does not make you a failure. You're a great storyteller and a shit administrator? Team up with a good administrator who is a shit storyteller. And so on. This ability -- to work within your strengths and with the strengths of others -- is not to be underestimated, ever.

^ That's what I think @Thenomain successfully addresses, actually; while it may be semantic, I wouldn't call it passion, exactly. Some 'toxic' people with passion are great at this and can produce a good game as a result. Some awesome people with passion suck at it and will produce a dumpster fire of a game.

You need passion, too, because it's all a lot of work. Passion is what gets you to do the work when there are no rewards to be had from it•, be that 'yet' in terms of dev, or 'during' when all the things are going sideways at once (because they will; Murphy's Law and all that).

• Even if the only reward someone wants is 'make a space for people to have fun in, ideally but not necessarily including themselves', this counts as a 'reward' that I'd dub morally neutral or best-intentioned and not in the same category as things like 'praise' or 'power' or 'new besties' or 'popularity', etc. that are oft-cited.

@thenomain Don't make me grumble and tinker with things.

The setup I was looking at allowed people to enter the data on a basic web form on the wiki. It then formatted everything for them for the game wiki without having to delve into wiki code at all, and kept everything there (what data was present, how it was presented) uniform.

It then piped the same data over to the game to populate finger/etc. as needed. This kept everything up to date and consistent everywhere.

I got a lot of feedback from people who were hobby-new on BITN re: the forms being very helpful, and the on-game commands being somewhat confusing to them. Being able to pick something from a dropdown menu or fill in a text box that covered both game and wiki seemed to be the safest, 'this is almost self-explanatory, and where it isn't, a description of what to do and how to do it can be right there above that section' route.

consistency + multi-platform access + ease of use =

Don't make me go wanna look at a thing, though, I'm serious! I will wanna poke at things again, or something. And augh. Not yet.

I think taking a look at the IGU posting standard for any potential dev section is worth considering.

gamers should have a place to gather in order to discuss various aspects of MU*ing in a constructive, if critical, manner without worrying about being flamed for their opinions. Constructive criticism is not never disagreeing with another's opinion, nor is it praising that which is sub-par so that you don't hurt someone's feelings. Instead, constructive criticism looks at a story, an idea, a post and offers suggestions to help improve whatever one thinks needs improving.

Think of English papers you've been handed back, what would be more helpful to you? "Sloppy work, do over!" or "You need to work on strengthening your main point, you should provide more evidence to support it." The latter is what IGU is looking for.

I would strongly support that.

The question I have to ask myself is whether people are actually trying to make the case that the cause of misbehavior on games is this forum, as that really seems to be the direction quite a few posts are directed, no matter how obliquely. (And it's not terribly oblique.)

Some misbehaviors could find their roots here, sure, if for instance someone saw a bad thing go down on a game and then went to troll the game, as someone did on WORA -- only to hear how not cool this was, much like the people who suggest the same here are told every time. How many of them might have gone through with it if they'd heard the story of the horror show go down from a friend instead of reading it on a forum, without someone saying they understand the impulse, but that they really shouldn't?

I have to wonder if people realize how many people who contributed a great deal to this community over the years have left for the opposite reason; that things were too forcibly civilized for their comfort zone. These people also exist in that realm of 'others that could be here amongst the crowd, but are not'.

I have to wonder how many people staff at UH would have continued to screw over, or how many more people like Elsa or Rex would verbally abuse and exploit who had no warning, how many more people would be sending Spider cash and wondering why their games were going down in flames to a clique no one will admit exists.

All of these what-ifs swing in both directions.

That's because, like collaboration, creativity, contribution, compassion, consideration, and constructive behavior, destructive behavior, microagressions, anger, venting, and other negative traits are part and parcel of being human beings.

So long as the hobby is made up of human beings, these problems will exist on games, because that's where the problem ultimately lies.

The culture on games today is considerably less toxic than it's been for a very long time. Most of the things we talk about now as basic staples of common decency were scarcely considered a decade ago, and while it may be convenient for some to forget it, the origin of those discussions was -- yep, really -- WORA, the hellish cesspit of all evil as its presented today.

And the reason why is the same: because of people, specifically, people who were not going to tolerate horrible behavior on games from other people, even when the proportions of the community focus were completely the opposite of what they are today on MSB. (WORA had one constructive area; MSB has one Hog Pit.)

It's a galling denial of personal responsibility to claim that people being rude to each other on a forum is the root of social problems on games, because if positive and constructive things could emerge from a pile of filth and creative profanity in a place where they were neither the focus nor were they often welcome, we, as people, have no excuse here, where the focus is far more heavily weighted toward constructive collaboration than WORA ever was. Beyond this, there are many people who have never visited here, and bring their own toxicity with them wherever they go, even if they don't last so long these days as they once did.

It is especially uncomfortable to hear this come from people who have most certainly rolled around in the mud themselves; no, the forum did not make you do it. We all have shit, and we all have to own it, even and perhaps especially when we're flinging it around.

@mietze I just remember the Firan flood. So many of those players were terrified to page, and would spend like... five sentences apologizing for paging before asking a simple CG question, then were like... shocked that they got instant answers and 'that's what we're here for!' and asked if they needed help with anything else.

It was pretty eye-opening re: how some folks in the hobby really are scared of anybody with a staff bit, period, which is really depressing. I'd never actually seen that before, since the games I'd worked on previously were much smaller and everybody more or less already knew each other, and were already chill and familiar with who they were asking (or would ask somebody they were chill and familiar with). So I kinda get it, in the sense that it may not actually be (generic) you they're scared of at all.

It's even more cringeworthy when the 'so and so' they name is a completely different person than the one that actually spoke up.