Well, I think I know how to filter some player temperament through using my knowledge of the English language. It certainly gave me some application question ideas to send to Staff if there is a Player Helper application for Arx 2.

@Testament said in Plagiarism: @Rathenhope [image: 1704150660759-431129ad-d5fa-42c9-8598-5dd2111d1d73-image.png] Clearly you haven’t seen my Grindr matches.

@MisterBoring I could be wrong, but there’s no indication in the forum post that it was continuing after the initial ban.

[image: 1690693604423-61275c93-0f4d-41b5-87ea-371530aef16d-image.png]

@Wizz Sounds about right. Which means it is due for an x20 update on one of these games, who wants to step up and get weird?

Hi. This has been a hard thread to read and try to figure out what I should be saying in it, but I do feel like I need to be saying something. I tended to play Haven in six month to year-long stints, getting a character in, established, meeting some kind of goal, and then bouncing for a bit until I could come back and do so. I can’t say I didn’t have a character in Blackfield; I can say I did not enjoy it and got that character out ASAP. The real question that keeps coming around is people wondering what compels people to play a game like Haven, and all I can really offer there is my own experience. I joined Haven in roughly 3.0, which I want to say was around 2014 or 2015. This was one of the lowest points in my life. I was sleeping on a couch, had recently gotten out of the most toxic relationship of my life by far, had no work, no prospects, and my mental health was in the gutter. The answer was therapy, but I couldn’t afford therapy. But out of all the hurt and pain I was experiencing that time was a real sense of wanting to change myself, and that meant engaging in more negative parts of who I was. I had met my ex playing Achaea, and I tried to pick up and radically change my old Achaean character, but it was too many memories to go back there. I had met one new friend (spoilers: this was bad), and started looking at other games to play with them, and found this game on … I want to say Top MU sites. It was a horror game, and I liked horror themes, and so I poked in, looked around at some of what was there, saw the theme that corruption is power, and decided that I wanted to give it a try. Let my friend know, and we made characters that same day. And thus began one of the most intense roleplaying experiences of my life. I lost myself into Haven, because what Haven became was, functionally, shadow work. I heard rumors that there was an even seedier underbelly than what I was seeing, but it wasn’t really on the surface, and honestly, coming out of world of warcraft RP, people play some very, very, very messed up things. I just decided that wasn’t probably actually a thing and mostly ignored the players taking part in it. Later iterations of the game made that harder to ignore, but so it goes. By then, I was invested. I was not always the best player. I engaged in what could generously be called light griefing, including keeping characters locked in rooms largely inaccessible from the grid, punishing people who i perceived as misbehaving with making it so their character couldn’t speak for RL days on end, and IC harassment campaigns. Other people hit back just as hard, and I had my own little Grima Wormtongue in my ear in the form of my friend - Azazello - telling me that these actions were right and proper and nothing like the things HE had been made to go through on previous games, and that people who complained about it were just weak. I also endured my share of griefing, including someone who actively threatened the characters of anyone he knew were OOC friends with me ICly if they even stepped out of their grid homes anywhere he could get to them, just because he didn’t like me. People in this thread were part of that, they’ve acknowledged it to me, the reason I bring it up is because I was both the victim and the beneficiary of a lot of staff favoritism. I got hooked into metaplot, I played an unhealthy amount, it was toxic as hell and it’s pretty impossible to deny it. I’m only hinting at things. There are more stories. And all of this was basically in version three and early days of version four. That’s when the griefing hit a point where I basically had to take a break. I want to talk about what kept me going back in those early days, though, and why I bounced off of WoD games at the time – similar settings, similar vibes, but they just didn’t have what I was looking for. I wanted a game where I felt in constant danger and adrenaline, where we could be nasty, vicious little creatures, where we could be cruel and punishing. It opened up a steam valve I hadn’t realized I had glued shut my entire life, and it let me get a chance to really review the nastier parts of myself, figure out which ones I liked, which ones I didn’t, shape the ones I could into something better and discard the ones I couldn’t, and what was just going to be in my nature that I would have to learn to live with and learn to work around. Shadow work, just done in a much more informal way. I liked that I was in a community of people just as messed up as I was, even if I had major issues with a lot of them, and that I could test wild things and see how people reacted to them. The speed and quantity of RP was completely unlike the MUSH scene. The quality was a significant step above the MUD. There were game elements that gave me a solid sense of character progression, and storytelling tools that really let me branch out, and all these things were fun. They weren’t why I kept playing. Eventually, I realized the rumors that were creeping into my ears about who Azazello was were true, and after about a year, I withdrew from him pretty heavily. I took my break, I tried other games, I took a step back and watched what people wanted out of RP, and I came back in with a character with which I tried to do my part to reshape the culture of Haven into something a little less toxic; I think, to a degree, it worked, but only temporarily. The sharp edges I still had on me from Haven got honed away on other games, but the ability to slip into a character immediately like she is a second skin is still there. The game is fucked up. I actively told people to never play it even when I was there in full force. A lot of people describe it like a drug habit, and that’s not an inaccurate way to talk about it, but it was also a lot of other things. I made friends from Haven I literally spend 15+ hours a week hanging out with, talking to, chatting with, a decade later. We have all, by and large, moved on and grown as people. I stared into the abyss of who I was and came out the other side with a much firmer grip of what I believe and value and who I want to be. I learned that things which I saw as immutable are anything but that, and things that I saw as inevitable weren’t actually that big of a thing. I learned to be okay with not being okay. Haven was a crucible of an experience where I got to tell some really good stories, refine my writing chops, put myself through an emotional wringer, do terrible shit, and come out the other side. But, honestly, I should have just gone to therapy.

In almost ten years at my company, I have only ever gotten one bad review – one! out of almost twenty! – from a person who was my manager for all of two months. It was from someone who not only didn’t understand what my job was, but who regularly gave conflicting instructions in the same day, would ignore when I pointed this out to her, and then wondered why I couldn’t do both of these things that were in direct opposition to one another. This manager then proceeded to be mean to me for the next two years straight, all the way up until I moved to a different subdivision, and still tries to pull my current boss into almost everything I work on that she’s involved in. Today she was forced to acknowledge that my work is fast, thoughtful, and high quality despite being related to a request that is urgent, complex, and so confusing to convey to our audience that we need spreadsheets of who gets what messaging, when, and from whom. And she had to say the nice thing in front of an entire committee. Including my boss. [image: will-smith-victory.gif]

@Pavel said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen: @hellfrog said in Web-based CharGen or in-game CharGen: yeah applications are to tell you about the player more than the character, I think. "Name a non-fictional woman that is smarter than you’ would be a perfect application prompt. Faraday and Cobalt. Next question. you’re in, buddy!

@Pavel said in Admin Accountability: All backstories usually start with “I was born” which is enough of a tragedy in itself. [image: tenor.gif]

My gut reaction was to say that I’d prefer people be able to delete threads. But, having missed the thread in question that I guess started this whole conversation, I have actually come around to thinking that threads should not be deleted. Because it really bothers me that I don’t know which of you assholes were being assholes to a new game runner and I’ve been deprived of my opportunity to adjust my perceptions of you.

Godzilla Minus One was the live-action Grave of the Fireflies/Kaiju film mashup I never knew I needed in life. It’s wonderful but also a gut punch.

It’s a privilege that can often feel like a punishment. I’ve done everything from applications to building to plot master to headwiz and I love, LOVE seeing people having fun and getting involved in things. I loved doing apps too, not only to help people really get what they were going for, but I think I called every problem player we ever had from their initial application/reaction to being asked to tweak things. But it’s work. And I don’t know what’s popular now, it seems to flip flop back and forth, but I was always a firm believer in if you became staff you didn’t get XP for the stuff you ran. You could participate in things with your PCs and get XP, but unlike how PRP or volunteer GMs could be rewarded, that incentive went away when you ran things with your staffbit and you shouldn’t be running things on your PC at that point. The real reward was getting buy in from other players and getting them involved! And of course being able to dig into people’s sheets or backgrounds or plot notes or metaplot outlines or whatever that weren’t available to the general public. While dealing with problem players is never, ever fun and no matter how hard you try there’s always going to be people that think you’re treating them unfairly, I still lean that it’s more privilege. It’s just the best feeling to entertain a grid full of players who keep coming back for more of your stories. To know that people are enjoying themselves and see them growing their own stories from seeds you threw out there or chasing a mystery that you put in a post one day that no one noticed for months. It’s just fun and when you have the time and bandwidth for it, worth the headaches that come with it.

@Pavel said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players: @Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players: ‘A close up of a man with a mustache and a suit.’ [image: fair-true.gif] [image: correct-futurama.gif]

@Jenn if this was discord I’d respond with a laughing emoji. Holy shit my brain is rotted

@Selira said in Killing telnet +/-?: @Pavel Not for everyone, but no system is. The ability to do more with the tools on hand and experimentation within the field are critical for bringing it to new audiences, imo. True. I’m very old and grumpy and want things to stop changing so much because I can’t keep up. This is all a reflection of me, not of how the field should develop.

@shit-piss-love said in How long should characters last?: I love this topic so much, because I have learned over the years that I seem to be on one extreme of the spectrum for how one enjoys PC play. … I strongly suspect that I love this pattern because I’ve been the Forever GM since the 90s. Playing a character, for me, is less about the story I am experiencing and more about being the hand behind experiences that others enjoy. I also really like being a Conflict-driver because there is truly no one a character is closer to than the people they are at odds with. It’s a kind of intimacy that, done in a positive and collaborative fashion, is unique to the medium. Forgive the follow-on to thread necromancy, but I love this response. I’m at least a decade removed from a MU* career, but share similar instincts and hadn’t fully internalized the “Forever-GM” aspect as a possible root cause. This is one of the reasons I prefer games that have generous character roll-over policies that are tied to players vs. characters. -r

@crawfish said in Top 5 Most Embarrassing Things to Do on Arx?: Getting caught junking babies. Not a sentence I thought I’d write. This is the funniest thing that has ever happened on the game that wasn’t staff involved.

@Trashcan said in Blocking Players: If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair, That was the requested feature, yes. I understand that someone may only want to suppress notifications rather than block completely, but I think differentiating those would entail too much complexity on both the player/command side and the code side.

Yeah, yeah, the drama heart attack, we’'ve all seen it. [image: the-dilemma-the-good-place-s3e12.jpg]

@Faraday said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen: So there was this one TV show where the main characters had each been (independently) kidnapped and then wake up in a strange town with no idea why. I absolutely loved that show. So bummed that it was only one season… @Pavel said in Requring Character Connections at Chargen: My main thought process with any rule or policy like this is “why?” If I can get a good reason why, even though the rule is off-putting to me, I can take some satisfaction in knowing it was actually considered rather than just some arbitrary thing that was decided. The idea was supposed to be that new players would have people they could go to for RP rather than start out not having any connections and wandering around unable to get hooked into RP and plots. If they already knew each other, they would have at least someone and something to talk about to get the RP ball rolling. It didn’t work that way in practice, but that was the theory. They explained it often since a lot of people had the same questions you guys have.