MU Peeves Thread
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@catzilla Yeah, that’s the new innovative method of MU GMing. Respond only to the players you feel like responding to. Get really huffy when someone outside that set asks for timely reponses. Take their request as a hideous accusation. Claim you didn’t mean to ignore them, you’re just really swamped running the game and you’re doing your best. Castigate them for giving you a hard time when you’re doing your best. Don’t actually try to do better by them. Say you will, though. Pretend you don’t know that +requests are numbered and people can do math and figure out that you’re swamped by three requests a day. Pretend you don’t know that people can see you on +where RPing with or GMing the players you feel like responding to for three or six hours several times a week while not providing +request response that will take you five minutes. Punish players who complain that you’re unresponsive by refusing to respond to them. Complain about your inexplicable inability to retain players. Complain to your friends about the killjoy players who destroy the vibe by asking you to be responsive instead of leaving. Blame them for your inability to retain players.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
Ooh, was looking at old discussions with people, and I just remembered another peeve I forgot about.
Players who do the following in order:
- Start a PRP that only has any meaning of any sort for their PC.
- Expect staff support for that PRP even though nothing going on in the PRP requires a Staffer to portray an NPC, or otherwise adjudicate major narrative.
- Get incredibly irate when the Staff inform them that they don’t see a need to sit in on the PRP, and then shortly after that find out that no other players actually want to participate.
- Throw a fit in Public chat or by paging people they think will back up their tantrum.
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@catzilla @Gashlycrumb lol, I’ve had a similar experience where it’s a “we aren’t like other games, and this is going to be fun, fast, easy…” smash cut to 4 to 5 months later, and nothing has happened on said request other than kicking said can down the road. It’s a strange vibe when you ping a job after a month like… so, what about now? Oh, still nothing… I’ll just keep hitting this job up every couple of weeks, maybe at some point it’ll be worth someone’s time to handle.
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I think that sometimes it is to do with some well meaning GM who are just very conflict averse and struggle to say “no” to a request. And so your request going unanswered forever is the most unconfrontational “no” they can manage. Which is infuriating, but we are in a hobby with a lot of people who struggle socially, so I try and be as understanding as possible.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
Pretend you don’t know that people can see you on +where RPing
Not to discount everything you just said because it sounds quite specific, but game admin are allowed to rp, they aren’t obligated to defend that time, and anyone who thinks otherwise can go fuck themselves.
Imo if request backlog becomes too big for the expectation a game has set for its players, that’s when you temporarily shut the door on new apps and/or get more GMs. These games are too damn big for one main staffer and a bunch of other admin who are spread thin on every other game.
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@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:
Not to discount everything you just said because it sounds quite specific, but game admin are allowed to rp, they aren’t obligated to defend that time, and anyone who thinks otherwise can go fuck themselves.
I would echo this simply to amplify the intent: Game admin should be required to give themselves time to RP. If nothing else but to remind themselves of the joy of the thing they’re working so hard to put forth, but it also allows them to see where things clunk, and where changes need to be made.
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@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:
Not to discount everything you just said because it sounds quite specific, but game admin are allowed to rp, they aren’t obligated to defend that time, and anyone who thinks otherwise can go fuck themselves.
I would echo this simply to amplify the intent: Game admin should be required to give themselves time to RP. If nothing else but to remind themselves of the joy of the thing they’re working so hard to put forth, but it also allows them to see where things clunk, and where changes need to be made.
I agree 100%, so staff enjoys playing, and wants to keep games open, and wants to continue playing and running games.
In games, I think staff should also take long, hard looks at what they do and think about whether ‘the juice is worth the squeeze’ in some of the things they’ve historically done. If you have a process like you must wait X amount of time and spend Y amount of scenes with a staffer/logged scenes with PCs to get some outcome… and there isn’t enough staff time and/or active PCs, maybe rethink that process
Or if you have a process and you have been kicking this can down the road because you are too busy, the process just doesn’t work, or there is some other problem with getting it done… Maybe just call it a flawed approach and change how it’s done. Modernize, as it was once said: Any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.
This gives staff more time to focus on what matters in running the game and playing, and gives players a game that works…
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@helvetica Not any one specific game, but yeah, I was specifically talking about situations where it’s obvious that staff isn’t spread thin and one really can’t help but notice this.
Of course staff should RP.
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@xCroaker said in MU Peeves Thread:
I agree 100%, so staff enjoys playing, and wants to keep games open, and wants to continue playing and running games.
I agree as well, which brings up another peeve for me.
When players complain about staff having PCs. Yes, in some cases, it’s warranted, especially in games where a staffer’s personal PCs seem to get the focus in 100% of plot 100% of the time. But in the majority of cases, it’s the staffer in question taking some time to enjoy some RP for themselves, and some player somewhere is offended that the staffer is not actively working on requests or builds or fixing code bugs or running plots or whatever. Sometimes they even claim the staffers are ignoring their duties to the game, which usually isn’t the case.
#GiveStaffersBreaks
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
in the majority of cases
Perhaps so, but this does not mean that the problem I mention does not happen frequently.
I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general, They complain about staffers cheating for their PCs or other staffers’ PCs, or staffers making all plots the Staff-Alt Story.
Hell, there is such a taboo (and likely a justified one) against +where stalking that if a player is waiting for a five minute reply to a +request and happens to see the staffer online 15 out of 16 days and they appears to be spending 5+ hours each day actively RPing their alt with Abelard and Bridget or GMing scenes for Abelard and Bridget, the player still won’t say anything. This is probably for the best, but it doesn’t mean that players don’t know, and lying to them about how busy and thinly spread staff is doesn’t entertain.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
I do kind of agree. I have staffed and run games, and I am definitely in favour of being kind and compassionate towards staff, respecting that they have limited time, etc., etc., which are all very good and true things that are mentioned here frequently.
I do think there is an extreme other end of the scale, where there are no expectations on staff to do anything within any sort of timeframe ever.
Yes, they are volunteers, but if they were volunteering at the dog shelter, I would still expect them to at least show up, keep the lights on and at least put some food down, even if they can’t manage to take them all on a walk.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general,
I’m glad you haven’t had my experiences.
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The truth of MU*s that we’re always going around about on what behavior is expected and what behavior is not okay and who is owed what and what sort of obligation anyone has (player or staff) is that this is all free and no one owes anyone anything. The only obligations are social ones, and you only have as much right to be offended by the perceived deficit as compared to what the other party has explicitly committed to providing.
If staff has a policy of handling all requests within a two-week timeframe and yours is not, then it’s fair to be upset. If there is no policy, then whether you like the way that things are being handled or not is your personal preference and not any reflection on whether staff is good or bad. You’re certainly free to decide this doesn’t match your preference, but it’s not really fair to decry it as a miscarriage of justice.
This is why it is so important for games to have explicit policies for staff and players to follow. The only thing you have to pin down a game on whether the people there are being fair or not is how they measure up to what they have committed to. If they have not committed to anything, you have no ground to stand on, and I would not personally play on a game that did not have any clear policies on subjects I feel strongly about.
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@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:
You’re certainly free to decide this doesn’t match your preference, but it’s not really fair to decry it as a miscarriage of justice.
A miscarriage of justice? Haha.
But really, the expectation that everybody gets a turn and the GM doesn’t skip yours because they kinda feel like it is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in a policy. It’s how gaming works. It is fair to decry it as rude fuckery, which is what we talk about here.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb Different requests take different amounts of time and energy and skipping one for awhile because you aren’t feeling it is an extremely reasonable thing to do.
It is definitely possible to go to the other extreme and it is extremely draining of player enthusiasm to set and wait forever for a response. I have waited forever for responses. I am not going to go into the specifics, but I get it. I just don’t think it’s fair to assume X staffer hates me or that there’s some other player favoritism reason why this one request is a pain in the ass while others are not.
And if you really feel like you can’t trust the staff in a game, stop playing there.
let it be a challenge to you
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My MU peeve is that I write a big post then remember it’s the peeve thread where you’re allowed to have unproductive, non-constructive complaints about the system that innately discourage all would-be game creators who may now believe that someone is always going to be watching them on the +where to decide whether or not they are stretched thin enough.
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@Yam don’t let the assholes win, honey. Learn to thrive on spite
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
But really, the expectation that everybody gets a turn and the GM doesn’t skip yours because they kinda feel like it is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in a policy. It’s how gaming works. It is fair to decry it as rude fuckery, which is what we talk about here.
There’s a lot of stuff to consider on staff side too:
- Some players will rub staff in a bad way, but not go so far as to do something bannable. The staff in question isn’t trying to generate unnecessary confrontation, so they just sit on those jobs until they have nothing else to do to limit their interaction with the player, when they should honestly just sit down with the player and say something like, “We believe that our staffing style and your playing style are not compatible, and for the sanity of both ourselves and you, we need you to exit the game.” This can even extend between games (as a lot of staff are forever-staff and may know a given player from previous encounters).
- Some larger games generate hilariously large amounts of jobs in very short time, even with a good number of staff working on them and set policies regarding job response times. If your job is #293 out of 480, it’s gonna be a while before you see a response, even if they’re using buckets and queues and notifications and stuff. I have totally seen players get irate because they don’t enjoy the speed at which the 200 jobs in front of theirs get resolved.
- Staff might be having a bad month, week, day, or year. This can result in players feeling unnoticed by staff. Staff R People 2.
- Staff have their own availability schedules, and getting mad that no staffer showed up to ST and provide Staff NPCs for the scene you scheduled for 4 PM on Christmas Day is just a waste of everybody’s time.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
Hell, there is such a taboo (and likely a justified one) against +where stalking that if a player is waiting for a five minute reply to a +request and happens to see the staffer online 15 out of 16 days and they appears to be spending 5+ hours each day actively RPing their alt with Abelard and Bridget or GMing scenes for Abelard and Bridget, the player still won’t say anything.
This sounds like something you’ve done yourself. Are you a +where stalker?
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I’m vaguely reminded of some L&L that drew ire for taking a break for Christmas. I do kinda’ think it’s just… the nature of a free medium. People are ultimately, eventually, going to do whatever they want, even if it might result in bad things later. It’s like being mad at the rain for personally raining on your picnic. I see solutions here like “just fix it
just do the thing :)” and if it were that easy we probably wouldn’t be having this convo. Ask any staffer who was DEDICATED to prompt, “fast”, consistent responses how long they stuck around. How long the game existed.I try to tell this to folk all the time, you will be a far happier person if you do not put all your eggs in one basket. Do not put all your happiness in one game, because then you will internalize everything as a personal slight. It may mean that you pull back on your engagement, but I’m sure we’ve all seen a particular player that goes SUPER hard into something, creates a TON of activity, and eventually either peters out or crashes out.
