Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@ixokai
I volunteer IRL, too (and I've done organizational stuff for book clubs/poker games/etc), and I have wildly different feelings/expectations/personal fulfillment about that experience and the people I do it with than I do about my IRL job and co-workers. I am one of those people who it grates whenever the term 'professional' is equated with hobby work. I get that it's inferring certain types of behavior (responsibility, commitment, etc) that I do think MU staff should have, but I get the knee-jerk reaction because I also have it.

This has been a tangent. Back to your regularly scheduled thread, and such.

First off, I don't think quitting a game is - at all - a negative thing or some kind of slam against a game (or the weird 'failure' some people seem to view it as) a lot of the time. There are lots of perfectly fine games that aren't for me because of code or rules/setting, or that don't have activity at the times I can be around. I think most of the time people hang onto places they aren't enjoying for far too long. Nobody should feel bad for leaving a place they aren't enjoying or be guilted into sticking around something that's not for them.

There's a Star Trek game I tried numerous times and it's a good example of a place that just wasn't for me. I came up with some characters I liked and really enjoyed a lot of the STing in the plot scenes, but there wasn't the churn of 'social' scenes that I feel like I need to invest in a character/build relationships, and I was turned off by the amount of +job virtual paperwork necessary, even though I saw some benefits to it in terms of deciminating information.

I tend to drop off Lords and Ladies games because, while I like fantasy, I feel like they attract players who are really into a type of RP that I'm not (soft politics based around marriages and costume drama stuff).And if the majority of your fellow players are RPing stuff you aren't into, that's not gonna work for me. This is also why I tend to feel uninterested in very sandboxy games. If I can't engage with some sort of consistent game world, it gets just isn't the kind of world I want to play in.

I try lots of games I drop off of after a week or two because the character just doesn't grab me and my ability to invest in my PC is the thing that actually makes me want to play. That's on me. Motivation to do this stuff is more internal than I think a lot of players want to admit. I also don't think it's BAD. If there's nothing something I'm inspired to play at a given time, I'm happier playing video games or reading or whatever, and I'll circle back to MUing eventually when I have an idea I want to play.

I've also quit for what I consider actionable reasons based on staff abuses (oh, Steel and Stone) and just general Ugh-ness (oh, Battlestar Pegasus), but that doesn't fall under my 'quitting isn't bad' point and isn't what I wanted to talk about. Quitting is deserved and logical when staff is screwing with you or cheaters/harassers aren't being booted, but I honestly don't have a ton of negative experiences. Maybe because I tend to Out pretty quick when my annoyance level rises.

@tek
This is pretty standard behavior from this dude. Very sorry you had to experience it. Forewarned is forearmed for those reading, at least.

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

@surreality I just thought I would note that I can't even count the times that the staffers thought themselves approachable and diplomatic, but in reality they were so damned defensive they'd harangue you for hours and were liable to talk smack about you behind your back.

Creating an atmosphere where players actually feel complaints will be taken seriously is probably the most important part of this. There are a lot of reasons people don't report harassment, some of them personal and beyond your control, but you absolutely can control what you tolerate when you see it and what kind of tone you try and set. I think all of us can be more aware of the atmosphere on the games we're on and speak up and complain, even if we aren't the direct targets of harassment. Maybe especially then. I don't think it's on the person being fucked with to push back, it's on the game and the people around them to have their backs. These assholes thrive where their behavior is excused and normalized.

@mietze said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I think most of the toxicity on games occurs because of private-ish eco chambers. Small restricted channels, off game chats, etc.

Yeah, this I agree with. This negativity still exists, and it's waaaaaaaaaaaay worse on Skype/Discord even if you aren't forced to acknowledge it. At least on a third-party forum, other posters can apply push-back to obvious BS.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

@three-eyed-crow said in Regarding administration on MSB:

And making it a separate thing from the Hog Pit would make staffers less able to obfuscate criticism from the masses, which I do think happens as things stand now.

I'm not sure if Yelp! allows owners to respond to reviews or not, but would it be reasonable to keep staff responses to reviews on the Advertisement thread?

I'm the wrong person to ask, since my original pitch in that other thread was an Ad section that ONLY allowed posts by the OP and mods and all commentary and questions somewhere else. And I do think questions need to be answered somewhere/don't think all criticism is valid and dumb shit should have push-buck.

Maybe a new Reviews section would be useful. I did a lot of posting in the pro-'getting commentary out of ad threads' camp when that came up, and I still think that's ultimately a good idea. But it feels like there's currently no good "home" for discussion of specific games and what they're doing right or wrong (wrong, specifically, since no admin is going to ask for praise to be removed).

ETA: And making it a separate thing from the Hog Pit would make staffers less able to obfuscate criticism from the masses, which I do think happens as things stand now.

@apos
It's only an issue (to my mind) when players are being specifically directed to threads about complaints that are being suppressed on the games they're on. And, like, this happens. This isn't a conspiracy theory or a thing I'm imagining. We can observe this happening. The number of new members recently is not coincidental, I don't think. MSB isn't a huge slice of the MUing community and even discussion of specific games goes right past the people actually playing there until it reaches a kind of critical mass.

Standard with opt-out would certainly be better than opt-in from my point of view, but my view of what the board should be is pretty different than the view of a lot of posters who would opt out of the Hog Pit, I suspect.

I do want to make clear that I spent a not-insignificant amount of time last night in PMs with @Arkandel and @Ganymede about my issues with how the United Heroes thread move was handled, felt like they listened to my concerns, and worked quickly and hard to resolve them. I do appreciate that and I think it's how moderation should work, and I don't want that to get lost because it was going on while the whole Hitler thread thing was reaching max Godwin's Law.

I'm glad the rules are being clarified, though, because oh gosh I hope no one is arguing they're crystal clear and consistent right now.

@auspice
Except, like @Ganymede said, mod voice isn't being used consistently, which is an issue being discussed in this thread, so it's not at all clear what's a slap from on high and what is just us slapping each other like normal.

@meg
What bugged me about that particular mod action, is that people weren't attacking you because of your story. You'd made the decision to share it and it led to a few decent posts before @auspice came in (without using mod voice, which also bugged me, so I'm not even sure I can call it a 'mod action' or not). If that post was flagged, that was one thing, but I did not perceive any sign it had been. If it was just a personal response...that should be separated from moderation in some kind of obvious way.

I mean, 'constructive' is a really fuzzy line. I'm not sure there was any way to respond to the UH admins and whatever the f their white knight was in a constructive manner. I DO think you need to be able to talk about actual THINGS that are not good (spying on players, how sexual harassers are dealt with, and even questionable policies like the No Sex RP thing those Star Trek admins eventually decided to overturn) outside the Hog Pit, because those are important topics. And I think dealing with those things in a way that is...umm...not great is fair game to comment on. The line I was trying to walk is to talk about the bad thing without talking about the bad person but it does feel really nebulous right now.

@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

After at least one person WARNED and ASKED you guys to not do it (I think it was @Three-Eyed-Crow?) because of that, I am just facepalming.

It was me! It apparently got missed (which I believe, given everything going on in that thread) or lost in the scramble just to do SOMETHING. I addressed my issue to @Ganymede and @Arkandel in PMs. There's now a split thread (maybe that one'll go back in Constructive? Idk).

ETA: Or will be maybe? I seem to have posted while things were in the process of being moved so I will await making any pronouncements.

ETA 2: And it's split now and back in Mildly Constructive. Thanks.

I think it's a good idea. It's kind of similar to what TGG (the World War game) did, where you got to roll-over a portion of your old character's XP to your inevitable new character. Made re-genning frequently less painful.

@surreality said in Original Sci-Fi?:

Since this seems to be the #1 pastime of sci-fi games, I consider them an unfriendly environment on the whole, often to the point of active hostility and ugly condescension in the same way the people who are obscure comics lore experts railing about how so-and-so is 'doing it wrong' in their portrayal of a character are obnoxious, or it would be obnoxious for me to OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG SO STUPID DID YOU SEE THAT HEADPIECE?!?!?! WHAT SERVING GIRL CAN AFFORD THOSE PEARLS; THIS IS CRAZY! at people enjoying an episode of Reign, and modeling something they do on an L&L game on that dubiously accurate ensemble.

If you don't think people do this on L&L games, you have never played an L&L game.

There are spottily-informed theme dictators everywhere (and people playing with zero adherence to anything resembling theme that make them feel empowered, also everywhere).

@tnp said in Stranger Than Fiction MUX:

I'm giving it a shot. I'm not big on playing sixteen but Riverdale meets Buffy meets It is just too tempting as a change from supers and isn't WoD.

I find it works OK when EVERYBODY is playing teenagers (I was an active Harry Potter setting player, back in the day).

This is tempting and seems well put together. I'll give it a look as soon as I finish binging Stranger Things (alas, workplace that makes me...go to work).

@sunny
This is pretty much where I'm at. There's a lot of rose-colored glasses going on about pre-wiki MUing. What I remember is lots of the same stuff, only disconnected on player's individual Geocities pages and livejournals. Wikis just provide a community portal for people to do the things they were always doing, and hopefully they'll use the available templates so it doesn't look like ass. Maybe the players disinterested in this stuff SEE it more now, but none of this strikes me as new. Just more organized into a user-friendly platform that actually serves the game as well.

Anyway, my preference is wiki/website, with the caveat that I want to be able to do quick stuff like look up profile/finger information and quickie command references on-game.

@zombiegenesis
Though Enterprise always had consistently higher ratings and budget than BSG since it was on network (such as you can call UPN a network). That's kind of an apples to oranges comparison. BSG was never a "hit" for Sci-Fi, but it was doing OK by cable standards and was supported in part by a cost-sharing distribution deal with the British broadcaster Sky One (this is why episodes actually aired in the UK prior to them airing in the US, it was part of the deal). Enterprise had to meet pseudo-broadcast ratings expectations, which were higher at the time than they are now. I always saw its problem as that it wasn't pulling in what Voyager had pulled in (and Voyager hadn't been the flagship to a launch a new channel UPN had hoped for to begin with).

This has been my tangent about TV shows from 10 years ago.

I guess I probably find Discovery and The Orville incomparable for the same reasons. Very different funding models and expectations, very different creative goals. More TV sci-fi that's not totally ghettoized on Syffy is definitely good for everyone.

ETA: It was Sky One that co-financed BSG's first season, not the BBC. Because I need to correct my tangent about TV shows from 10 years ago.

@zombiegenesis
See, I rewatch Star Trek eps quite often on Netflix. TNG had very good writing much of the time (I do really miss the 'random sci-fi spec script' quality of that series). And generally solid to great acting (Patrick freakin' Stewart). I can get that whenever I want. This is maybe the thing I appreciate most about streaming. I don't have to wish for the latest inferior copy of a thing. I can just have the thing itself.

The Orville just doesn't do it for me (and I dislike Seth MacFarlane as a writer in general, a barrier for entry which is just not going away).

@templari said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

For the most part, it's just simpler to keep it all in game. Oh, and well, less bots posting dumb shit on a MU*, unlike wiki's.

I have yet to see a half-way decent wiki in which bots/spamming was a problem. If it is, I usually take this to indicate incompetent administration or an abandon-ware game...which is useful in and of itself since it's a clear sign I should not waste my time.