Tough Calls
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@Tez Guess who just got through writing a paper on practitioner ethics, boundary setting, and bias acknowledgement. >_>
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@Tez said in Tough Calls:
I used to be a very evidence-based staffer.
I think evidence is still worthwhile, as sometimes, people can pass the vibe check, but still end up doing some horrible stuff, and evidence will get past the “oh, they’re good people, they pass my vibe check”, and can also indicate that maybe a review of the vibe one is looking for might be needed.
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@MisterBoring Quite agree. Trust, but verify the good vibes, while maintaining a readiness to just react to the bad vibes.
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@Tez can confirm you have had to tell my dumb ass to knock shit off and I never thought of it as a warning. Just oh god I’ve embarrassed my friend by behaving badly on her game in a perceivable way.
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@Yam bans are cancel culture and i like to think i have healed and evolved beyond such p e t t i n e s s
PS the calls I remember struggling with the most were
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a complaint about an interpersonal player relationship where one party was going against the rules/spirit of the rules of the game, but it all occurred in private off game conversations and there was a lot of ‘evidence’ to look at
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it was custodius, and he was honestly not doing anything i would ban another player for, but he wasn’t doing GREAT and we were just using a lot of staff time and energy like, watching him, corralling, investigating, etc.
But also, man, lots of them are hard. A lot of times you are looking at situations where neither side is being very cash money, and you’re trying to sort out which party is in the wrong this time and if there was some provoking incident that slipped by you and just aaaaaah. This is how I got burned out beyond belief. Telling a racist or a creep or a weird liar to buzz off is easy. I find that’s maybe 30% of player management
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Sadly, I think bans are sometimes necessary. A few years ag,o I had to ban someone I’ve gamed with and known for around 20 years. We’d run games together, we’d RPed together, we’d known each other for a long time, and I considered them a friend. They crossed more than a few lines, however, and refused to back down or take a break. So, in the end, I had to do what was best, not just for the game but also for my sanity.
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@Yam said in Tough Calls:
I’d like to hear some experiences from staffers that have had to make the tough call to ban what they’d consider problematic players, or players that were simply not a good fit. What factored into your decision? How did you approach it? Did you consult with other staffers? Did you receive any backlash? Did you set aside time to discuss the ban with them or did you simply notify and ban? Did you issue warnings? Did it result in a healthier atmosphere, a worse atmosphere, or something else?
I know this is like five days ago, which is apparently a long time but…
Back on Haunted Memories, when I was TL of the vampire sphere, I eventually removed a player from the sphere because they were too much. I would come home from work, log in to the game, and have at least five requests from them. Often PVP requests, requests for rulings, requests for more plot, etc. Just constant stream of me, me, me, me, me.
I was constantly handling their requests, their problems, their fights with other players, their urgent needs. It got to the point where I could not get anything else done. I sat them down and said: You are taking up too much of our time, you are not a good fit for the sphere, your character is being frozen, you are free to app into any other sphere but vampire.
It didn’t go over well and I was both lauded and flamed for doing it. I still breathed a sigh of relief when I washed my hands of them.
Most of my other ‘please leave my game’ decisions were cut and try harassment or sexpest issues.
Though I do wish I had asked Spider to just the fuck off my game, when she decided to lead a player riot against me on Darkwater b/c I didn’t make Shaft the summer king.
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I think in the realms of tough calls, it’s important to keep in mind that anything a player is throwing YOUR way, as a staffer, they are doing that and probably worse to their fellow players.
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@hellfrog Yeah. You might want to be generous and lenient, but your playerbase still has to manage this person. Sometimes they manage to play around this person. Sometimes they just move on. Orrrr sometimes they get tangled up in this person’s nonsense and question why they even have this hobby.
Some thoughtful answers here, thanks gang. I always appreciate staff that take care in this regard. The wrong kind of player can absolutely kill your game, even if all they do is make your ass tired. Problem player burns your playerbase out, dead. Problem player burns YOU out, dead.
It’s true that it’s very easy to boot off someone that’s being inconsiderate. Like, it’s very easy to be considerate. Really! But it’s way harder to boot off someone that you KNOW is TRULY just having it rough and they probably shouldn’t really be on a game but here they are and now there’s problems and the OTHER side is being a bit shitty, perhaps understandably and it’s just… bleh. I don’t think people can really guard against it. Perhaps this is why I’m so eager to try to nip it in the bud in strangers.
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@Yam Nip what in the bud in strangers? Just the general…combo of sensitivity/insensitivity that is ‘being difficult’?
I used to get a lot of shit for telling people on arx: 'people you rp with are not your friends. treat them like friendly strangers and don’t presume getting along in rp scenes means you are building real ooc bonds"
I was just in a position where I could see so many problems were the result of ‘i thought X and i were on the same page, now they have done something off-script and I am feeling HURT so their actions were done on purpose to HURT ME’
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@hellfrog That’s a hard lesson to learn, especially for us nerds with wonky brains. “If not friend, why friend shaped” might be a meme but it definitely resonates in some of my previous interactions on MUs (and in RL as well, let’s be real).
I have thankfully had the privilege of building some OOC bonds, but 99.999999% of people are like… colleagues. We work at the same RP mine, we might have a group project together, but we’re not going to the pub after the RP is done and I’m not going to write you a Christmas card.
It’s a really hard distinction to draw, especially when young.
