Posts made by WTFE

So, today I exploded on some people I otherwise generally like. At issue: M-103 and C-16.

The first of these is a parliamentary motion. It has ZERO legal teeth. It is a statement of parliamentary opinion and nothing more. Motion M-103 and five bucks will get you a small Starbucks coffee. (Or has that risen to ten bucks these days?) This hasn't stopped people from exploding all over the fucking social media scene with "ZOMG! SHARIA LAW! BLASPHEMY AGAINST ISLAM IS ILLEGAL IN CANADA!" bullshit.

It's not a fucking law. It's a motion. It's political grandstanding and pandering at its worst. It has NO LEGAL WEIGHT (and little moral weight, given, you know, politicians!) of any kind. Anybody who calls it a law is either stupidly ignorant or a dishonest shithead with a political agenda to push.

This is in contrast to the latter, which is definitely a law. Bill C-16 is either sitting in, or has passed, third reading and is about to become law of the land. And people are losing their collective shit over this one like nothing I've seen this side of "ZOMG CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF SANDWICHES!" or "WAR ON CHRISTMAS!" bullshit. If you were to take seriously people like Jordan Peterson (who is in the vanguard of the screeching hysteria over C-16) you'd think that it was the beginnings of the Freedom Holocaust.

But you know, I've read C-16. You can too. I linked to it. It's a remarkably short document. It basically adds four words of significance to the 40 year old Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 and four words of significance to the matching portions of the Criminal Code. These additional words add one more protected group to the eleven pre-existing protected groups: the transgendered.

Now, I'd understand it if the objection was to the entirety of the CHRA. I might even have some sympathy for it. The notion of a hate crime is very ... troubling to me. There are powerful arguments both in support of and in condemnation of setting up classes of people who get special protection under the law. I don't know enough to know which side is right or wrong and I lack the time or wherewithal to go in and make that determination.

What I do know, however, is that C-16 changes nothing of substance. If you were fine with the CHRA (and its paired criminal code clauses) and suddenly oppose C-16, you're doing something that's either very bizarre or you're doing something that clearly brands you an asshole. For 40 years we lived with the CHRA and have not had the Freedom Holocaust happen. For 40 years most of the current screeching gibbons have been dead silent on the CHRA, but suddenly have lost their shit over C-16. And this makes me want to plank them. By which I don't mean that idiotic YouTube thing. I mean I want to hit them in the head with a quickly-moving plank.

@Meg Uh... That would be remarkably expensive.

Yeah, they show up here and there indeed.

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

@WTFE

Sometimes when you post, I really want to send you chocolate. (You're always so grumpy! Do you want some chocolate, WTFE?)

Chocolate. And booze. Either works.

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

@WTFE The only people who can stop her are the staff who allow or disallow her to play on their games. I think we're all aware of that.

It's the staff I'm viewing as the village bumpkins. Their whole "we've got this, trust us" thing has me giggling. It's almost as if nobody has ever in the past thought of watching her closely with an eye toward stepping in if she starts being a problem...

It's so cute watching the village bumpkins pick up their pitchforks, confident that they, this time, can slay the dragon.

@Derp Their connection aside (which has torpedoed five scenes now), I've found United Heroes to be near-perfect as a game. (This tickles me in particular because usually I'm not a fan of supers games.) It has about the right amount of staff vs. player balance. Applications are often approved within seconds (!) of hitting the submit command, rarely taking over a day. Code exists for helping with scenes instead of interfering with them. About the only thing that's missing from making it perfect (connection aside--not really their fault entirely) is a means for player actions to impact the grid without staff intervention. Given how engaged the staff is, though, this may prove not to be much of an issue.

I'm sorry if you think finding "staff über alles" and "all PrPs and nothing but PrPs" being both equally problematical is an issue. (Hint: I'm not sorry in the slightest.) <flamebait>You're probably American, of course, so you can be forgiven for thinking that there's only polar opposites possible. What I'm looking for, though, isn't something an American would like: a middle ground or compromise (evilbadword, I know!).</flamebait> I'm looking, in short, for something where staff are actively engaged but where players are also empowered to do their own thing within reason instead of having to wait for staff to get into the mix.

Leaving everything in the hands of players is abdication. It really does render the existence of a game server entirely moot; it's basically the equivalent of RP over IRC or online-TT servers or even ... I don't know ... Livejournal only with more arcane commands and fewer players. This isn't a solution to a problem so much as a throwing of hands up into the air and giving up on the problem.

Requiring everything to go through staff, on the other hand, is terrible in the opposite direction. It engenders the whole learned helplessness thing that staff then later ironically bemoans as "entitled attitude" and generates a player base that won't even try doing things on their own because staff beats them down for it. Worse, though, and we're seeing the fruit from this particular seed now, it engenders a MUSHing-wide culture of people who won't do things on their own because "everybody knows" staff doesn't really want you to.

You won't believe me right now because I'm the Big Bad Man Who Says Mean Things and can thus obviously not be trusted, but holy fuck, just fucking read! Read Thenomain's reports, for example, about how games used to be exactly what is now viewed as so rare as to be mythical: populated by players who just went out and did fun things. Then come up with a plausible mechanism that just mysteriously turned the playerbase into the mewling entitled creatures you have in your mind's eye. Be sure to include in your model the fact that the players from back then are largely the same players as now. (And be sure to factor out that part where everybody but you is lame while you're super-awesome because that will just make anybody watching you laugh.)

SOMETHING HAPPENED to that player base that used to be self-starting and fun-seeking and turned them into the mewling "entitled" zombies you see today. If you don't figure out what that something was, you won't change anything. And the connected counts at MUDstats will continue to drop.

@Rook said in Identifying Major Issues:

@WTFE said:

Players are enjoined to run plots, but only if the plots don't in any way, shape or form touch the grid in the slightest. So your PrPs are fine so long as they have zero noticeable impact on the setting!

So I read this and think to myself, when I was building and advertising Umbral Shards as a game entirely designed to be modified, changed and built out by the players... no one was willing to either believe it or touch it with a ten foot pole... where is the draw?

I didn't try out Umbral Shards because WoD gives me hives. It has zero attraction to me as a setting and the few times I tried it out because I wanted to see if maybe there was actually something to it were sufficiently disastrous that it's not a brick wall I'll be smashing my face into any time soon ever again.

Granted, I suspect that most everyone that checked the project out was a MSB reader, so the sort of group-think that has lead WTFE to that conclusion above might be statistically prevalent amongst those that showed up. Thus, there was a lot of uncomfortable feelings when reading the intent and mission statement of the game. See, US was supposed to be entirely PRP-driven, with the locks taken off and the players trusted to not only do dangerous things, but game-changing things. That was the entire dream!

And then there's this: "PrP-only" reads to me as "staff doesn't give a shit". At this stage, I may as well play over IRC for all the difference a game server makes.

@surreality I know it's trivial to add. Hell, I've done 90% of the work for it and I hate MUSHcode. The problem is the final 10% needs someone on staff to make it "official" (and to make its use automatic) and I've never seen a game where anybody was willing to do it. I've seen staff who'll actually go in and modify locale descs FOR you, but to give you the tool to just drop a modification in place? Dead air.

@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:

I'm grateful for good, easy to use tools that let me do my thing without what @Thenomain quite aptly described as 'sticking my hand in the blender of bureaucracy'.

I'd love to see those tools. I literally never have.

Something as simple as a "PrP object" I can drop in a room because Bad Shit happened here would do wonders for making PrPs that aren't basically glorified bar banter.

As things are now, at least in most games that I've been on, you could be on a spaceship, have had a firefight in the engine room that led to the room being flooded with deadly radiation only to have some other people come in five minutes later and do RP centred on the concealed engineering distillery because literally nothing that happens in a PrP leaves that PrP. Ever. Only (increasingly vanishingly rare) staff-run plots have the ability to do anything that actually changes the setting in even minor ways.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

And still, only a minority of players are willing to do anything other than the military equivalent of BarRP between staff-run events.

Part of my response was: It's not you, it's other staffers.

And this is the part that kills. In refusing to acknowledge history and its damaging impact staffers set themselves up for a fall. […insert shovel thing from above…] Later: "Dammit! I tell you, I bend over backwards for the players and they reward me by not trusting me! Fuck those guys!"

If you really are different--and I have no doubt, @faraday, that you are (there's too much good press from even curmudgeons around you)--you're going to have to understand that this gun shyness has nothing to do with you personally. It's about the environs. Hard-learned lessons are even harder to unlearn. Taking this process personally is about the worst way to proceed.

It took the hobby years to get to this stage of players simply not trusting staff. It will take years of good staffing to undo that. Worse, it will take only a small amount of fucking up to snap people straight back to "whatever you do, don't involve the staff/don't do anything on your own/don't do anything/whatever".

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

Or maybe it's because there's a sense of entitlement that expects staff to be their personal tabletop GM. Or maybe neither/both. I don't know the cause, only the effect.

This "sense of entitlement" thing is bullshit invented by usually-bad staffers to explain why nobody wants to do anything around them. On one game (I want to say it was a Star Trek game, but I'm not sure any longer) I was told I had a sense of entitlement because I didn't want to run PrPs. Ever. For any reason. No matter how much I was cajoled into it. The comic factor here for me was that at the same time that I was having this conversation I was running a scene elseMU* where skeletons were attacking a small town from their local graveyard. A wild scene full of improbable antics (helped along by really funny botched rolls in the game system). So while I was being told I was feeling "entitled" to free fun I was making my own fun on another game.

What I felt "entitled" to was to not have to jump through dozens of fucking idiot hoops, meetings, approvals, etc. to go shoot up a few Klingons or whatever. Now I was lucky enough at the time to be playing on a game that permitted wild, wooly, and above all FUN player plots. Those kinds of games are few and far between and, as a result, a lot of players have unlearned the habits of spontaneous joy that player plots can bring.

In most cases where staff whine about players, you'll find that the players are victims. (The specific staffers involved may not have been the perps, but the players themselves? Yeah, definitely victims.) Throwing labels like "slackers" and "entitled" at them is counter-productive. It just demotivates further.

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Thenomain As usual, we come from different worlds with different experiences. There's no 'bureaucracy' involved. It's literally: go, have fun, don't break the game for others.

There's the core of my own problem with the whole PrP thing: PrPs are fine as long as you don't do anything of significance.

A scene I had a few months back involved botching up the foiling of a burglary. The characters caught burglars in the act of robbing a restaurant and, well, one failed roll after another (FS3, you see--sorry, I couldn't resist!) led to the restaurant catching fire. I mean we doused it, sure, but there was significant fire and smoke damage.

But of course since this was a PrP there was NO WAY to show this result to the world at large. Players are enjoined to run plots, but only if the plots don't in any way, shape or form touch the grid in the slightest. So your PrPs are fine so long as they have zero noticeable impact on the setting! Whee! What fun!

I even @mailed the staff about it and got thanked for telling them about a change to the grid; and then nothing. The restaurant remains untouched now, months later, and has not at any point had even its desc changed to reflect damage (hastily-repaired or otherwise). There were never any consequences from doing significant damage to property IC. Nothing. The plot could just as easily been run over Skype or IRC or email for all the impact it had on the game.

And that's a minor example. Picture the collective staff shit-losing if a lucky series of die rolls had resulted in a major baddie cacking!

And still, only a minority of players are willing to do anything other than the military equivalent of BarRP between staff-run events.

What do you do to make this attractive? "We don't get in the way" is NOT MAKING THINGS ATTRACTIVE. The fact that "the staff won't interfere with your fun" is a selling point is one of the most depressing things about MUSHing these days. That should be the fucking baseline!

What support do you give for PrPs? Do you even allow PrPs that may necessitate changes to the game? Even if I could just have a "PrP object" that I could drop in a room with details of changes to the setting as a result of PrPs that would be better than the static bullshit we have now.

l
The Laughing Buddha is an upscale Chinese eatery that blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda…
*PRP MODIFICATION*
As the result of a confrontation gone awry, the wooden statue of the Buddha has deep, charred score marks. The back wall is scorched and covered in soot. The floors show signs of blood traces hastily cleaned off.

Something as simple as that would probably motivate me to actually do PrPs more often because it wouldn't feel like the PrPs run in a complete bubble universe that collapses instantly at the end.

@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:

While there are absolutely players willing to run their own stuff (and I love them), they are the minority. There are also a lot of players who are gunshy about participating in PrPs.

Because we have made this not fun.

How could a process of taking a whimsical, extemporaneous idea of doing something fun and then grinding it down with weeks-long process of negotiating with staff over what's allowed, what the reward will be, which people will or will not be permitted to participate, passing muster over tests of "inclusiveness", etc. not be fun, @Thenomain?! You're talking crazy talk!

Just add in-character written reports and you have the epitome of fun!

Quelling the willingness of people to do things on their own didn't happen overnight, either. You can't expect people to trust you personally when the experience has been quite different elsewhere.

"But I'm different from the literally dozens of other people that have smashed you in the face with a shovel! I won't smash you in the face! Why won't you hold still when I pick up a shovel?"

So PrPs:

1. Tacitly turned RP into a monetized activity

The irony being that there's plenty of evidence that monetization demotivates people.

2. Turned the reward system of doing things into a bureaucracy

I still cannot fathom the people who bureaucratized RP. I simply cannot grok the personality types involved. Do these people work in HR or something?

3. Removed staff from a key position of running of their own game

Abdication of authority is motivating! No, really!

@Tinuviel I have "fond" memories of '80s-era games that had gigantic skills lists (Space Opera leaps to mind with a character sheet that was in the tiniest print I've ever seen for a character sheet, most of which was skills, and didn't even cover all possible skills at that) and no meaningful defaults.

In these games it was incredibly easy to overlook something your character would obviously have, especially given the militaristic nature of most character paths where you would, in a plausible universe, have training regimens giving you basic grounding in your core skills. Many an idiot GM, however, refused to allow respecs to cover obvious oversights leaving you nerfed with the only guy in an advanced, technological civilization who can't figure out how to turn on an electrical appliance. Even though he's a computer programmer...

@Auspice The sense of entitlement many employers (most?) have is sometimes truly shocking, or would be if it weren't so comical. Some highlights from my past:

1. A colleague of mine and I worked in our spare time: evenings, weekends, lunch hours, on bringing the product line's core architecture into the 20th century. At the time we were a single-vendor shop, but the industry in question was exploding and interoperability was becoming a major thing with standards (note the plural) developing for mixing and matching disparate components into systems. We knew it would only be a matter of time before that bit us, so we decided to take the lead on fixing the architectural errors that made us almost militantly a stovepipe shop. In one of our lunchtime bull sessions the boss came in, asked us what we were doing, demanded a demonstration of what we'd done thus far and pronounced it "useless" and "a waste of time". So we stopped, reasoning that working on something the boss thought was useless wasn't a good use of our meagre spare time.
   Months later the inevitable we predicted happened: a major sale hinged on our ability to incorporate an additional device into our support. The sale didn't happen because we couldn't. "But what about your fancy new architecture?" "We stopped working on it." "Why?" "You said it was a useless waste of time." "I said no such thing!" He was genuinely put out that we'd stopped using our own unpaid, free time working on something that he himself said he didn't need. He was actually pondering firing us over not continuing to work for free on a skunkworks project that he had killed.
2. The very first school I worked for in China was run by a real piece of work. I could write entire novels about this place, but I'll restrict myself to a single representative anecdote. The two foreign teachers in the school had, single-handedly (O.K. dual-handedly) taken the pro forma (but do-nothing) "English Club" on campus and turned it into a major activity centre. We'd organized the students into organizing their own "English Corner" (I will not be trying to explain this concept because it hurts my brain) and we'd marshalled the necessary resources and relationships to make an English Conversation Lounge happen, after which we handed it over to the student club again to run. We'd easily spent an extra 15-20 hours a week on top of a full time teaching job (how full time? -- one teacher once asked me how many teaching hours I had and was shocked; she had 2/3 that number and was complaining about being treated as a "teaching machine") setting this up, participating in the activities, and generally keeping the students engaged and interested. All this in the face of leader ennui and active disinterest.
   And the effort paid off. Our school's English Corner attracted English students from literally every other school in the city (as well as a dozen or so local businesses trying to up their game). Our English Conversation Lounge was written up in an education ministry newsletter. This latter point proved the school's undoing. One of the leaders of the school was interviewed in local media about the programs and he lost face publicly when it became increasingly obvious over the course of the interview that he had no fucking clue whatsoever what he was being interviewed about.
   So the leadership swung into action in the inimitable corporate way: the bosses swept in and started ordering gratuitous changes. Like moving English Corner from Thursdays to Wednesdays. For reasons. And here's where the thing went sour for them really quickly. First, other activities all over the campus had been organized around the existing English Corner schedule. The English Corner was the 900 pound gorilla of school activities, augmented by the fact that a lot of outside influence was involved as well. NOBODY but the leadership wanted to change what was already working just fine, but you're not a "leader" if you're not telling people what to do, right? So they ordered the change. And we said that our English Corner would be held on Thursday.
   The students (and outsiders) came to ours, not theirs.
   So they tried to order us to go to the Wednesday one because we were their employees. To which we pointed out that we were contractors and had done all our work for free as a gift, but if the gift was going to be stepped on and spit upon like that we'd be withdrawing our gift. Instead we would treat it as contracted labour, present our bill for services rendered thus far and negotiate our payment for the extra work.
   Suddenly the leaders magnanimously ordered English Corner to be held on Thursdays again, but in private they were very distressed that we'd dared to threaten removing our unpaid labour on something they'd not given a shit about for over a year while we worked ourselves into exhaustion.
   To them a "thank you" was "we won't fire you for gross insubordination in threatening to withhold unpaid labour". And they couldn't figure out why none of their by-then six foreign teachers after that point ever wanted to do anything for the school any longer. And why all six bailed at the end of their contract. And why all six left word in every major expat teaching circle that their school was to be avoided.
3. A bottom-feeding consulting company I worked for refused to ever pay overtime (but would CHARGE customers overtime!). Even worse, they were claiming R&D tax credits for my overtime. And they couldn't understand why I left my job without even giving two weeks' notice. (In my resignation letter I said I'd be taking two weeks' vacation in lieu of overtime. They still didn't get it.) Nor could they understand why they lost all their consultants inside of six weeks. They called us "disloyal" for wanting to move to employers who actually paid us.
4. Another company I worked for survived only because three people put in superhuman effort for about three months. I'm talking the degree of effort where a 75 hour work week was us taking it easy. More normal was 96. It impacted the health, both mental and physical, of the three people in question and this herculean effort literally saved the company (AND literally prevented the company owner from being rendered homeless!).
   The company moved from the brink of bankruptcy (at one point, right at the very end of the period, there was a high degree of probability that the next paycheques would bounce; only the fact that we finally got the product finished and made a few big sales of it saved us) to wild profitability to being purchase bait. And someone took the bait, making the company owner a multi-millionaire. And his response to being made a millionaire on the backs of the health and labour of three key individuals? Two bonuses of $10,000 and one bonus of $15,000.
   We'd literally saved the motherfucker from being homeless and he thought an ample reward was a "bonus" that was a fraction of what he'd have had to pay in just plain overtime for our efforts. (A quick thumbnail calculation says that's about 20% of what he'd have had to pay in overtime.) And he was shocked to his core when every one of us was so "ungrateful" that we left our jobs inside of six weeks. And that within six months he'd suffered an almost 80% turnover in his company as those who left found jobs with the place they'd moved to for those who'd been left behind. And he had to explain to his new owners (part of the terms of the purchase were that he had to keep running the company for three years, and there was a profitability clause as well whose details I don't fully know) why the people who made the product all quit.
   And he blamed "disloyalty" of course. The motherfucker.

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

It feels disloyal somehow to jump ship even if rationally I realize it's just business, or that I've seen my boss lay people off without any warning several times over the last few years.

Businesses can expect upward loyalty iff they exhibit downward loyalty. I've not seen (nor even really heard of!) a business that consistently exhibited downward loyalty at any point in my life. Downward loyalty only happens when economic times are good and workers are rarer than positions. As soon as there's even a momentary turn in that relationship businesses show their true colours.

Don't feel "disloyal". Feel "smart".

I just hope all that - and a nice salary bump - make all this worth it.

It is. And it isn't. Unless you're a sociopath you will miss your former colleagues. You might remain in touch with the ones you were closest too, but likely not once the main reason for your getting together is removed from your relationship.

Just make new friends in the new place. Then it's worth it.

@Ganymede said in RL Anger:

See, what I get out of that story is that adults are shit, not children.

The thief is also shit. It wasn't enough that it stole a cellphone, which is worth a substantial amount of money; it also had to go ahead and be a tremendous dick about it.

I addressed that. The child in question is a shit, no doubt. But very rarely is shit just there. Shit doesn't just happen:

Shit takes systematic effort to make most times. And in this case the shit was made by parents who aren't monitoring and who likely even helped protect the shit from consequences multiple times in the past.

@mietze said in FS3:

Uhhhh why is a developer who shares their system being criticized for making improvements or changes and making them available to people 3 times in 10 years?

Point me to where I criticized for making improvements or changes please? (Hint: this isn't possible.)

The confusion stems from several things:

1. The name FS3 already looks like it has a version number in it. For example I use the programming language "Logtalk". The current version of it is called "Logtalk3". There is no confusion here because Logtalk3 is just shorthand for Logtalk 3.x.y: it is the third major revision of Logtalk which has itself had several minor revisions and several more bug fix releases. On the other hand I also use the programming language "SNOBOL4". This is confusing because there never was really a publicly released SNOBOL1, SNOBOL2, SNOBOL3, etc. SNOBOL4 is the only version of SNOBOL anybody alive is likely to have ever used. (There's an extreme outside chance someone is alive who once saw SNOBOL3 if they worked with Ralph Griswold back when he was making the language.) The confusion is further magnified by the fact that there were several versions of SNOBOL4 proper. When you have a number in the name of the language the issue of version numbers gets muddled. FS3 is more like SNOBOL4 than Logtalk3 in terms of generating potential confusion. This, however, is a minor source of confusion. The remaining two are the big ones.
2. The fact that there are multiple versions isn't all that clear. Pick a game, any game, that uses some version of FS3. Look for the mentioning of versions in the various +help/+whatever commands. (Hint: This may not actually be possible in a lot of games.) This leads to problems like two people on two different games "using FS3" talking past each other because they don't realize that each game is using a completely different engine underneath. It also leads to disorientation when moving from one "FS3" game to another "FS3" game and having ... an entirely different experience. (This aside from the fact that apparently some games customized FS3 to be unrecognizable on top of this; that's on them, though, not on the system or its developer.)
3. Even if the fact that there are multiple versions is made clear in a game, and the version identified is also made clear, the documentation that can be found is for the latest version. So I may be playing on an FS32 game and when I go to the docs for how the system and its commands are supposed to work I read ... FS33 docs. So I'm told commands exist that don't, or I see sample output that isn't.

So the confusion isn't because "ZOMG THREE VERSIONS IN TEN YEARS!" it's because the versioning isn't communicated well, and the docs aren't kept around for those poor schmucks on games using old versions. (And, as a minor addition, because the name itself looks like it has a version number built in which obfuscates the existence of multiple versions.)

@Catsmeow See, what I get out of that story is that adults are shit, not children.

The shit child who stole the phone was brought up badly by an adult. That adult probably protected said child from the consequences of bad actions for years. (I see this shit all the time where children here get in trouble, but a quick gift of portraits of Mao in red smooths over all consequences.)

The principal is an adult. He's an ignorant cunt who (incorrectly!) uses the "it's not illegal" argument as an excuse for inactivity because actually doing his fucking job is too much work. I mean just the fact that someone committed a crime (theft is, last I heard, an actual crime!) on his watch should have him hunting for the perp, bringing in cops, etc. never mind the added bullying!

@Catsmeow said in RL things I love:

I couldn't eat them too cute, but OMG where were you and how did you get them and OMG. There is much OMG in my world right now.

http://imgur.com/a/occZ8

I went out for dinner.