Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo

[Anony Mouse]

@SqeakyClean said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Pulling out all the stops to retain/bring in new players. Even though all these types of rewards were suggested a million times by people such as myself and others. Only to be ignored, brushed aside, or hee-hawed at.

Yes. Very much yes. For years now, even suggesting that plot-runners get something for their efforts, or suggesting rewards for players in plots (even just looting the bad guys), has been absolute heresy to Cujo. If you even thought anyone should be running events for anything other than the satisfaction of telling a good story (or just +noms from all attendees, like Aryn/Sumi/Poe and Hadrix/Reverberate), you deserved to be cast out into utter darkness, with all the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

How things change when people start abandoning your game because you actively support sex pests. Well, most sex pests.

@SqeakyClean said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I was always running up against Hads stuff anyways like you were (which were org specific mind you… except for those select few people they decided to let come on the down-low).

While the sexual harassment thing going public is recent, Reverberate has been on staff for a few years now. One of his first actions as staff was to have some Hutt, who apparently ran the long-dead Hutt faction, ban the Array Consortium from Nar Shaddaa for not supporting the Hutts against their enemies (who were enemies for maybe 30 seconds).

The action was IC, but the IC reasons were pure bullshit. Supposely it was because the AC didn’t fire up their flagship (a Guardian-class light cruiser) and try to fight off an FO Star Destroyer that bombarded and destroyed Corestar Spaceport in the space equivalent of a drive-by shooting (yes, this actually happened: the First Order destroyed a starport to kill one smuggler, and in the end they didn’t even get him). The problems with this are that a) the Hutts were allies with the First Order at the time, despite how little sense that ever made ICly, b) the Hutts themselves never fired a shot at that same Star Destroyer despite having their own warship in orbit at the time, and c) this was years IRL after that ill-considered bombardment.

The real reason: The Array Consortium was competition for the Koras in signing on new PCs fresh out of chargen. New fish wouldn’t know about the Koras’ horrible reputation ICly or OOCly, and would be more likely to sign on with them and give them +noms for bad events (and possibly be harassed by Hadrix). Get the AC off Nar Shaddaa, they’re a lot less of competition.

I ran into Adhar Gann and his group several times, and they struck me as a good bunch. Adhar really gave a damn about his players and their characters and supported their efforts until RL landed on him, hard. Well, that and the vicious gossip Aryn and Hadrix were always spreading about him. OOC (and occasionally IC) backstabbing is something neither one has ever had a problem with, if you’re a bother for them in any way.

@SpilledBeanz said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

This should be more than enough evidence for mu* staff to take this shit seriously. To take people’s desire to play in a healthy sandbox, where they are treated as human beings first, and WHO padding second, seriously.

Evidence or no evidence, AoA’s staff will never take this seriously, aside from banning people who publicly speak up about it. The poisonous staff culture is too deep-set at this point. Even if it wasn’t, Cujo is far too self-absorbed to care what people think about the people who keep his WHO list stable. He’s put 20+ years of ego into AoA and it’s sticking around, no matter how bad it gets.

(EDIT: An adjustment to terminology.)

[Anony Mouse]

While we’re on the subject of fine print:

@Krautistanian said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Pay out is negotiable if you have an idea that you get staff-approval from.

Translation: You have to get approval from Cujo to run any scene for any payment. Anybody he doesn’t like, don’t bother. And even if you do get approval, that’s no guarantee of the payment you wanted, or payment at all.

@Krautistanian said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

First time in 5 years they offer anything for running.

Closer to six years. Shortly after the Episode VII reboot, they did offer stuff to players and GMs for events. This didn’t last beyond a couple months because it involved a lot of effort on staff’s part.

Also, the rewards generally weren’t worth it. I ran into a few players who did some scavenging on Jakku and dug up an old Imperial assault shuttle that took an engine hit and augered in before it could make its troop drop. Their net reward was one Tier 1-2 mod each and one nothing-special blaster pistol.

The shuttle in question carried a complement of pilot, copilot, and 12 Imperial Stormtroopers. Standard equipment for Stormies includes a relatively good set of armor, a utility belt full of fun toys, an E-11 rifle, and a blaster pistol as sidearm. Out of all that, you’d think at least one rifle and more than one pistol would’ve survived in working (or at least repairable) shape! But then again, Cujo didn’t like the player who ran the event. At least one group involved in a similar event received decent weapons for running and attending.

The player herself said frankly that she left because of constantly being treated like shit by staff, despite trying to encourage and provide activity on their game.

So… some things never change. Not until staff gets desperate. Even then, they’ll still treat non-pets like shit.

[Anony Mouse]

@SqeakyClean said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I was always running up against Hads stuff anyways like you were (which were org specific mind you… except for those select few people they decided to let come on the down-low).

The Clique protects The Clique. But for a while, they did try to bring in other people purely for the +noms. For example:

===================< 21: RP Recruit / Group Ads - 137 >====================
Message: 21/137 Posted Author
The New Republic wants you! Feb 24 2021 Jessika Pava

The New Republic wants you!

Player characters are important in the game. They’re an investment of time and dedication. They’re not mere cannon fodder. They exist to tell the story in the long-term. Unfortunately, that also leads to a situation where there’s usually no death! Failure is infrequent, and often player characters escape odds just like the canon characters of the movies do.

Have you ever wanted to get in on the story of a war faction, but never wanted to dedicate the time, suffer from the restrictions, or sacrifice the alt slot to do so? The New Republic is offering you a chance to get in on the action with no strings attached.

So, what are we looking for? Cannon fodder! We’ve got troops and starfighters and capital ships that sit around doing nothing! NPCs ripe for the picking! The New Republic is offering anyone the chance to come play an NPC during our events, where death is likely! The best part is that you get all the noms and experience for the character of your choice!

If you see a New Republic event up on the events board being run by Poe Dameron, Jessika Pava, Rose Tico, or Aryn Cortess, please feel free to reach out to the GM of the scene and inquire about playing an NPC! In the coming future, we’re also looking at running events entirely based around NPCs, which means everyone can die and failure could be imminent! This also provides people without the character archetype or sheet to come try out and enjoy combat without having to spend experience they don’t want to.
------------------------------< +bbread 21/137 >------------------------------
=================<* New Republic - 3: Republic <OOC> - 12 *>=================
Message: NR3/12 Posted Author
NPCs in events. Feb 24 2021 Jessika Pava

We’re starting an initiative where we’re inviting other players outside of the New Republic to come and play NPCs in the events using the NPC assets that we have. If you’re interested in allowing individuals to come to your events, please let me know so that I can add your name to the post that’s been put up on Board 21. Thanks!
------------------------------< +bbread NR3/12 >------------------------------

Small problem with the quote command aside, that was one way they tried to get around the faction-specific ban on non-faction characters. One has to wonder if attendance for Poe’s/Aryn’s/Sumi’s events had dropped so low that they felt this was necessary. At any rate, no change in Aryn’s behavior was necessary: She could continue to disregard the efforts of every non-Clique player and just have nameless NPCs shoot at them every round. I have no doubt that was a requirement for the policy.

For anybody who doesn’t know The Clique, Jessika was the Resistance/Republic FC alt of a player who has an alt in every one of Aryn’s faction-specific groups. She’s not hard to recognize, as she’s usually only there to RP with Poe/Aryn/Sumi. She virtually ignores everyone else. I’m pretty sure she was Tahni in the Jedi. And that annoying Human Replica Droid of the Koras’, who was destroyed multiple times and always somehow managed to download herself into the CPU of some nearby mundane object to preserve her memories and personality (and most importantly, attribute and skill levels). Though why anybody’d want to keep a personality that murderously abhorrent is beyond me. Another mystery is where they kept getting HRD bodies for this twinky character to inhabit; they’re supposed to be vanishingly rare.

But in CujoWorld, I guess anything’s possible if you kiss the ass of the person kissing Cujo’s ass the most.

[Pavel]

@Anony-Mouse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The Clique protects The Clique.

I’ll note that this particular phrase (The Clique) has a more… historic meaning around these parts.

Though I wonder how many of us left are old enough to remember.

[Jennkryst]

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Anony-Mouse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The Clique protects The Clique.

I’ll note that this particular phrase (The Clique) has a more… historic meaning around these parts.

Though I wonder how many of us left are old enough to remember.

It hasn’t even been a year since we, THE CLIQUE OF MEAN GIRL BULLIES, got ran off of ZeSoapBox.

… or is there a different clique I now need to join?

[Pavel]

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Anony-Mouse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The Clique protects The Clique.

I’ll note that this particular phrase (The Clique) has a more… historic meaning around these parts.

Though I wonder how many of us left are old enough to remember.

It hasn’t even been a year since we, THE CLIQUE OF MEAN GIRL BULLIES, got ran off of ZeSoapBox.

… or is there a different clique I now need to join?

I had another one in mind.

[Jennkryst]

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I had another one in mind.

Elfbians on Shadowrun games?

[Pavel]

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I had another one in mind.

Elfbians on Shadowrun games?

No. The majority of The Clique have seemed to move on from MUing, so I’ll not name them. Suffice to say, there was a group roaming around the internet somehow worse than people who demand Mummy everywhere.

[Popes]

@Anony-Mouse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

How things change when people start abandoning your game because you actively support perverts. Well, most perverts.

This is not most perverts! This is my stand. My line in the sand. Being a pervert does not make you a sex pest. I am a pervert. I like the spicy typing and getting weird. I also always make sure that my partner is into it and comfortable and knows they can walk away at any time with no consequences or hard feelings.

Sex pests do none of these and are the bane of this hobby.

[GF]

@Popes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Anony-Mouse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

How things change when people start abandoning your game because you actively support perverts. Well, most perverts.

This is not most perverts! This is my stand. My line in the sand. Being a pervert does not make you a sex pest. I am a pervert. I like the spicy typing and getting weird. I also always make sure that my partner is into it and comfortable and knows they can walk away at any time with no consequences or hard feelings.

Sex pests do none of these and are the bane of this hobby.

I get what you’re saying but I feel like this might not be the venue to try to reclaim the word “perverts.”

[hellfrog]

@Popes you’re valid, reclaim it

[Anony Mouse]

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I’ll note that this particular phrase (The Clique) has a more… historic meaning around these parts.
Though I wonder how many of us left are old enough to remember.

A sad fact of MUSHing is that there will always be more cliques, with the usual troubles they entail.

It’s important to note that RP groups will naturally develop, just people who are comfortable playing together and mostly share a schedule. It’s only when they try to keep everybody else away (unless there are material benefits from having them around, as in this particular case on AoA) that they turn into the dreaded RP Clique.

@Popes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

This is not most perverts! This is my stand. My line in the sand. Being a pervert does not make you a sex pest.

Good point, and you have my apologies. I’ll adjust the language of my post. It’s true that sex pests are perverts, but perverts may not necessarily be sex pests.

[Wizz]

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Anony-Mouse said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The Clique protects The Clique.

I’ll note that this particular phrase (The Clique) has a more… historic meaning around these parts.

Though I wonder how many of us left are old enough to remember.

[Testament]

@Popes said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I like the spicy typing and getting weird.

For this sentence alone you have my respect.

[hellfrog]

@Anony-Mouse friendship bad

[Chani]

@Anony-Mouse Hi. I’m Chani. I started on AoA some time ago and I’m the person responsible for bringing Sumi Kora/Poe Dameron/Aryn Cortess to the game. I’m also responsible for the presence of Nora Frayus/Fae Renta/Luna Tokani and Colo Nell. The latter are a pair of RP friends I knew from a different game. I used to know Sumi IRL, and did for years. After learning of their interest in RP, I decided to invite them to try out MUSHing. To say that I regret that is an understatement.

To start, I did not know about the kind of toxic individual they are, and when I did discover it, our friendship ended. As you can imagine, it ended the way things typically end with Sumi: by being blocked in every format they can think to block someone in, while they go around saying, “I don’t know why, but that person won’t talk to me anymore,” which is typical attention-garnering behavior for someone who abuses people and wants to establish themselves as the victim first.

I played Jessika Pava on AoA for a number of years, and she was my most active character. After the war factions started to receive a little less attendance (I wasn’t sure of the reason at the time, though in retrospect Poe’s presence probably had a lot to do with it), I was speaking with Cujo about potential ways to get some more interest and that’s one of the things that was landed on. It had nothing to do with helping Poe farm +noms.

I also didn’t have a character in every organization Poe is apart of. I had Jessika Pava and then I tried out the Jedi Order a few times until landing on Chani, a character concept that I enjoyed versus all the others I’d trialed. For a brief time, I tried out a news reporter bit named Raina Tanassi, I think. I thought it was fun to write news stories about things that were going on, but was unfortunately not able to keep up with it. I have never had a Mandalorian character, a bounty hunter, a spice runner, Alderaanian, or any other affiliation/organization related to Sumi/Poe/Aryn. And, yes, it’s true, I attended a lot of Poe/Sumi/Aryn’s events. We were RL friends at the time.

I’ve never had an HRD in the Koras that downloaded itself to numerous HRD bodies. I wasn’t involved with the Koras in any dedicated fashion. I had an engineer character on Nar Shaddaa who would repair their ships and participated in none of their events or their general RP. I was never part of the +group in any sense.

I was also not in the habit of ignoring people in scenes. I did my best to acknowledge other characters, their dialogue, and what they were doing in a scene, save for people who made it clear to me OOC that they wanted no sort of contact with me.

I’m not a perfect person. I’m sure there were a few people who disliked me. I didn’t like everyone, but I tried to never let it interfere IC, because at the end of the day, I was there to enjoy a hobby and a game, not marry IRL drama with IC drama. I took a few breaks from the game for that very reason. I’ve been following this thread since it came out and also decided to leave AoA when the depth of the issues became apparent. I have my own anecdotes about going to Cujo over player behavior and being told, “Just don’t talk to that person,” and, “If I banned everyone that was a problem, no one would be here playing.” To be honest, I thought it was just me. Then he removed Kasia and Hex, the two people who went out of their way to meet and play with me the very first time I played a character there, and the evidence against what Cujo was covering up really started to come to light.

To anyone who had a negative interaction with me, I can only offer an apology, but I’m not guilty of some of the things I’m being accused of and being associated with Sumi in that way makes me nauseous, because their behavior and the behavior of those they’re associated with is disgusting.

[Warlander]

@Krautistanian Speaking of Banshee, he’s gotten his Sithy Force twink bit back. After the Reliquary faction that he ran (largely into the ground) disappeared, so did Kuolo. Now he’s back under the name Darth Kuolo, and probably affiliated with the Sith Empire somehow.

Banshee/Kuolo was the original Kylo Ren on the game, the guy who got put in charge of the First Order faction, only to have it die for the first of many times due to lack of activity, largely due to Banshee’s own lack of interest in doing anything to run his own faction. The only thing he put effort into is trying to whine/wheedle/cajole/browbeat FO PCs into doing all the work of running the faction, and finding ways to punish them if they didn’t. He eventually got ousted from the Kylo Ren bit, though Cujo instantly gave him another powerful Dark Side Force-user alt. Given that Banshee is one of Cujo’s best friends on the game, this was to be expected. Anony Mouse knows more about this than me, so I’ll leave the details to them.

It should be noted that Banshee’s number one goal on the game is to have the most powerful Force-using character, PERIOD. And given that he writes and plays like a 13-year-old edgelord trying to out-edge 15-year-old edgelords, it should surprise no one that he plays nothing but Dark Side users.

In short, he is a player to avoid. At all costs.

[hellfrog]

@Chani said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

If I banned everyone that was a problem, no one would be here playing.”

If this was actually said, that’s lol. lmao.

[oknow]

@hellfrog said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Chani said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

If I banned everyone that was a problem, no one would be here playing.”

If this was actually said, that’s lol. lmao.

Can’t imagine why

[BloodAngel]

@hellfrog

Very heavily makes me think of this scene over and over in my mind at this point.