Posts made by WTFE

@Catsmeow said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

So here's a stupid question: Why do we care who Custodius plays?

Should this be a concern?

I'm probably the person who played with Custodius the first here on the board since, AFAIK, Castle Marrach was his first online text game. So let me tell you about his tenure on CM. Then let me point out that he has not visibly improved in any aspect beyond manipulation since.

In Castle Marrach, a MUD-like game similar to Arx in feel (although far lamer in theme), the character that Custodius' player is most known for is the character with the rather twee name "Morte". Of course this character was dark and mysterious and wore nothing but black and so on and so forth. (Interesting side note: he snidely kept insisting that "Morte" should be pronounced "Mort-ay" -- "like the French do". Actual francophones told him he was full of shit, but hey, Custodius isn't the kind of guy who lets facts interfere with his rich fantasy world.)

Now CM at the time was billed as a game of intrigue. And Morte played that game really well by all visible signs. He had a gang of thugs who'd go around beating (or worse) anybody who crossed him, and they were terribly good at their jobs, seeing as, you know, not a single one of them ever got caught. Ever. Even when the entire castle was up in arms and looking for even a single one of them. Long after I quit the game I found out how Morte managed to pull this off. He introduced "blue-booking" to the game. All those thug attacks? They were just him manipulating drama hounds into saying they'd been attacked by thugs in "blue-booked" scenes. None of it ever actually happened in-game using in-game mechanics. Why were no thugs ever caught? Because they never fucking existed. It was win-win for the pairing of Morte/Custodius and the drama whore of the week. The drama whore got attention for the brutal beating and wounding and worse, and Morte/Custodius got this mysterious air of untouchability.

Now, naturally, given the Big Baddie nature he built up around himself, there was work done IC to take him down. And there was one guy (name long since forgotten, so I'll call him Pulpit) who was almost obsessive about getting Morte. He would loudly denounce Morte for his crimes, would plot and scheme to take Morte down, and would get involved with everybody else who was anti-Morte to help them in their own schemes, reasoning that if everybody worked to take Morte down together, Morte would fall. (Morte would eventually fall. I'll get to how later.)

All these plans came to naught, however. Somehow Morte had informants who would tip him off to any plans against him. (Even the good ones.) He was never where he was supposed to be; never near the pincers. Other people took the fall for him and he just skipped away, untouchable. Of course when you find out later that Pulpit was one of his alts…

Morte/Custodius was made staff (a "StoryPlotter") at Castle Marrach for "driving RP". Then he got really bad. With his staff powers he would just emote escaping through a secret door that wasn't there in the game. He was able to make perfect disguises that couldn't be seen through (the game mechanisms actually permitted disguises and let you see through those if you had the right powers/spells/abilities/items). He could make his mysterious thugs with impunity, then have them mysteriously die whenever they were caught. His antics got things to the point that as soon as any hint of Morte was in a plot, all the experienced players who weren't in the in-crowd of staff and staff-friends just walked away.

Now, keep in mind that Morte was elevated to staff because he "generated RP". Let me, as a sideline, give you a Morte "plot" in a nutshell. For a long time there was nothing happening for most players at CM. The staff was an inbred circle jerk and paying customers were getting fed up with this. Revolution was brewing. So Morte leaped in to throw the paying rabble a bone just to help stop the upcoming mass exodus. (Foreshadowing: it didn't work.) He inhabited the body of the palace chef and came out to the "Outer Bailey" (code for "place where those not in the in-crowd were forced to play with nothing ever really happening") to treat all the peasants to his special stew. It was sickening to watch everybody and their dog log in their characters just so they had a chance to actually interact with someone (an NPC even!) from the "Inner Bailey". And then the "plot" started. A rat stole the chef's prized ladle. (Yes. Ladle. You read that correctly. The plot was about a stolen ladle. Stolen by a rat.) Morte-played-chef goes ballistic and orders all food cut off to the Outer Bailey entirely because of his precious ladle being stolen. Until his ladle was returned to him, nobody would be eating anything. Everybody scatters trying to find the rat and the ladle. Many hours of "RP" ensued that consisted almost entirely of "have you seen a rat?" "no, have you?" "yes, but no ladle" repeated ad nauseum. Finally someone who was a staff-friend well on her way to joining the Inner Bailey crowd mysteriously finds the ladle in a room that had been searched by at least a dozen people before already. Crisis is averted. Ladle is returned. Food supplies are restarted.

Then the biggest "fuck you" of the story: The "grateful" chef "rewards" the person who found the ladle … with his fucking stew. You know, the stew that at the start was going to be for everybody? Yeah, that's now the reward for one person.

Fucking. Stew.

Every fucking Morte-run plot was like that: something offered to many, then taken away, then offered to a staff-friend who "solved" the problem. (Most CM plots sucked if you weren't in the in-crowd, but Morte's were the lamest and most aggravating by far.)

So I said that Morte finally fell. Here's how. He seduced the wife of one of the game's owners/principals into meeting him in a motel room and fucking. They got caught. He was banned from the servers and a lame duel was fought that killed his character bit. That was it. (How do I know? Interesting story: when I was trying to figure out why a bunch of characters had vanished without a trace, I said, in a private OOC conversation with another character, "WTF HAPPENED!? DID HE FUCK THE BOSS' WIFE OR SOMETHING!?" Within 30 seconds I was yanked into the staff room of discipline and grilled for who told me about this because apparently there was a huge wall of secrecy complete with signed legal documents around it. My frustrated, off-the-cuff ludicrously over-the-top comment turned out to be true. They got really upset when, upon being asked who told me, I said, "You did. Just now." Then they tried to claim that I had a legal obligation to not spread the story. Which I just laughed at because at that point I hated the fuckers more than they hated me.)

So, that's your "Custodius". You tell me: is this a source of concern? I've been watching his performance on many places since his CM days. I've even interacted with him via IM services and on some social MU*es since then. He's claimed many times that "I was only 17" and "I've improved" and so on … and then stories come out of the MU*es he plays on that shows he's the same old Morte I knew and despised back in the CM days. He is truly the metaphorical leopard whose spots never change.

If Custodius is on your game, get him the fuck off your game. If you're in a game with Custodius on it, get off the game. People here have a hate hard-on for VASpider. I think Custodius is at least at the same level as her for sheer toxicity. If you don't listen to my advice in this paragraph, let me know so I can get the popcorn started.

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They have an easy application

They want an email for application. That's an instant "nope!" here. On two grounds:

1. I don't know them from a hole in the ground. I'm not going to hand them my email.
2. If(f) they think this somehow "secures" things they're too stupid to staff.

I don't know (or care) if #2 is true or not. #1 is sufficient grounds for turning and walking away.

@Insomnia I love fucking with people like that. My current favourite is to tell people who say their time zone is "EST" (as if this is something universally understood) that my time zone is "CST".

This causes endlessly entertaining "misunderstandings" because it is, just not the CST they're thinking of. Some of them figure out after all the hijinks that perhaps it's best to talk about UTC±<n> (or GMT±<n> if you must) rather than thinking that "EST" and "CST" and "MST" and such are actually globally standard names.

@Insomnia said in RL Anger:

Doing new training, I'm the only Canadian. Trainer is telling me I'm wrong and there is no timezone past Eastern.

The world stops at America's borders, amirite?

@Auspice Isn't that what this whole thread here has turned into?

@Auspice said in The Apology Thread:

Can we mention apologies we want?

I want an apology from the guy who, many years ago, tried to lecture me on proper use of it's/its and did so incorrectly. He was a snotty bastard about his improper use of grammar.

(Yes, I am being utterly facetious here. :P)

Aw, shit man! I SAID I was sorry dozens of times since. Now you have to make it public!?

@silentsophia: Ah. I lose track of the insanely stupid things in the USA these days.

@silentsophia

Is Target the one that banned the open carry fruitcakes?

@Pandora: Eggs predate chickens by quite a few million years…

Note that the question is "which came first, the chicken or the egg", not "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg".

In a similar line of thought, I've always felt that "spare the rod and spoil the child" was very clearly worded as a commandment, not a warning.

@Wizz said in RL Anger:

Taking him in has also changed my life in ways that I still don't understand. I had a group of friends I used to see pretty regularly, and they've basically disappeared. They make zero effort to see me or get involved, and so I have no real social life anymore.

Most young males without children of their own deep down really dislike children. From their perspective you were a guy who used to be cool to hang around with. You were someone who could do marathon sessions of <drinking|gaming|television|sports|whatever>. You could concentrate on it and be a big part of the crowd.

Now, after the child, you're a guy who has priorities that are above those of the herd's. The result it that you're no longer of the body. Landru has forsaken you.

Welcome to adult life. I wish I could say that it gets better…

@Thenomain I said (rather implied) that evolution has solved overpopulation. And that we simply don't really like its solution.

Any species that overproduces dies out in mass die-offs until it reaches sustainable population levels again (which, in extreme cases, can be a level of 0). If goats overproduce (because, say, their predators died off somehow) they will go around eating the shit out of everything until there's nothing left to eat. Then they will starve to death in huge numbers until the number of goats left won't strip all the food. If they've been too efficient in stripping all the food, then all of them will die and we have an extinction from overpopulation.

This is evolution's solution. It just happens to be one that humans really wouldn't want to experience.

@Thenomain said in RL Anger:

… not even evolution has solved overpopulation.

Sure it has. We just don't particularly want to experience its solution.

@Apu said in The Apology Thread:

@Coin

I didn't mean you, hun. But a lot of other people seem to be interested in picking everything in the OP's first post apart and then picking apart everything everyone else says and... it's kind of becoming a self-perpetuating, never-ending thing.

So … business as usual for the WORA-descended line of sites?

@Monogram said in The Apology Thread:

It's evil. Full of carbs and gluten. Anyone who's proponent of white bread is a bad person.

Like @WTFE

Bad person.

Who said anything about white bread?

@Arkandel said in RL Anger:

Winter is coming.

Nah, it's only breathing hard. Poor bastard is so out of shape that climbing up a flight of stairs winds it.

@Monogram said in The Apology Thread:

This kinda makes me want to start a thread about bread. Something bland and boring as bread and if it erupts into a debate.

Just to see if it happens.

If you think bread is bland and boring you are a bad person and you need to be ashamed of yourself. Bread is arguably the most important food innovation in all of history, and given its sheer bewildering variety of forms, flavours, textures, and uses calling it "boring" or "bland" indicates a huge degree of total ignorance.

(How did I do?)

This thread is the reason why we can't have nice things.

Also, anybody who apologizes in a public forum is practically begging for the ensuing dogpile given the current cultural climate.

Keep your criticisms and your apologies in private where they belong.

'Some kind of' video.

I'm pretty sure that analyzing your connection logs with, say, an Awk a script tailored to finding shared IPs across characters would easily find alts across time.

Then follow through. That's the important step people forget when drawing boundaries.