Neitherlands

[Roz]

@helvetica said in Neitherlands:

@Roz There was an effort during/after this fiasco to iron out some policy.

why is it that literally everything i see written from this person in their official staff voice (including all the stuff i saw in the actual wiki files) sounds like 5000% annoyed and patronizing at their game’s players???

@mietze said in Neitherlands:

@Roz honestly yeah it wasn’t unheard of. Including in a retaliatory way, especially aimed at degrading female pcs. Also included doing the same sort of burn it to the ground unnecessary shit if you left that inuki did but again even more on the degradation.

[helvetica]

@Roz said in Neitherlands:

@helvetica said in Neitherlands:

@Roz There was an effort during/after this fiasco to iron out some policy.

why is it that literally everything i see written from this person in their official staff voice (including all the stuff i saw in the actual wiki files) sounds like 5000% annoyed and patronizing at their game’s players???

Spoiler

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Also, please dont burn Sparrow’s body.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Just bury it.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “It’s rude to do a cremation without knowing the dead’s religious practices. You might get haunted.”

Sophia (@Jenn) says, “I mean… Do we want a zombie sparrow in the woods later?”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Risk of zombie sparrow or higher risk and certainty of ghost sparrow. What do you prefer?”

Luka (@Scar) says, “It’s hard to imagine the clinic doesn’t have like… a morgue… situation, with how deadly magic is.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “But once it’s decided what y’all did with the body, just lemme know, cause ICA=ICC.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Dead student bodies that aren’t sanctioned means paperwork for Fogg.”

Luka (@Scar) says, “Not if he’s on vacation again taps head”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Yeah, but that means Pierce Sr. is in charge right now.”

Luka (@Scar) says, “okay”

Luka (@Scar) says, “the fact remains”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “I mean, if y’all wanna do it, I’ll just go with the flow of what happens.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “I purposely put Fogg on vacation for 2 reasons.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “1) He’s on a mission to try to recruit other hedge clans for stuff.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “2) I don’t want people to be like ICly: Let’s go to Fogg for /everything/.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “And bonus reason 3) Dumbledore was never at Hogwarts during important plot stuff.”

Luka (@Scar) says, “disposing of a dead body seems pretty up there, though”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “You’d think people never watched teen movies like I know what you did last summer or SCream. People in their 20s don’t go to the authorities! They try to hide everything and bury the evidence!”

Luka (@Scar) says, “okay”

Sophia (@Jenn) says, “@Luka - Getting official faculty help was the IC preference of a few folks there. But. Storyteller fiat was that it’s not allowable. Not sure what Zayden/Austin/Seline will decide to do with Sparrow’s remains.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Another way to say it: You go to authority figures, the plot ends there and the adults take care of it.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “If you wanna be the main character, then act like a main character, ya know?”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Selene got the fuck out of town. She doesn’t trust Brakebills at all.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) would also like to reiterate, “None of y’all are helpless damsels in distress. To be a magician requires a level of mental fortitude that would have been weeded out during the entrance exam and interview. Fogg won’t hesitate to brainwipe students who don’t meet those standards just for the safety of the magical community at large. Pierce? He’d do other things.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “If you start freaking out or need authority figures to solve problems constantly, then maybe you need a talk with Fogg. >.> <.<”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Translation: Please have your characters do things instead of going to NPCs to do things.”

Tia is sort of a side character who will grow into a main character in a later season. For now, not going to authority figures, but tagging along for sure.

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Finally, the /only/ way to get rare/forbidden/dark magics and more powerful spells than what’s in the standard curricula or to get the traits of shamanism/exorcism and other future traits with neat advantages is to take risks. With active participation in stories, I go beyond meager XP dots, and give dots in skills.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Tagging along for shenanigans is fine. I just want active participation instead of: let’s hand it off to NPCs.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “The greater the risk, the greater the reward.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “Thus endth sandbox.”

Calliope (@chookitypok) says, “That being said, if you just wanna do PRPs and never participate in staff plot, that’s kosher. Just don’t expect the greater rewards, ya know? You’ll still get XP and stuff if you post the log.”

Sophia (@Jenn) says, “I think that, when it comes to a dead student that stops showing up in classes… Making sure the faculty knows to inform the parents is reasonable. But. Trying to stay in the lanes where, how, and as they’re painted.”

[Third Eye]

@Roz said in Neitherlands:

(IIRC I actually proceeded to go to Neitherlands site to see if they had any posted policy about sexual assault in RP and not only did they not have any policy about it, I couldn’t find policy files at all? I can find restricted concepts in the CG guide, but not – actual written files about how to exist on a game. Which is also wild.)

All of their policies seem to as bbposts with the frequent answer to thorny staff questions being ‘put it in your RP Prefs.’ I mean this game has other problems beyond non-existent policy documentation but it’s been DRIVING ME INSANE FOR SO LONG. And now I’ve said it lol.

Edited to add: NGL this really was a turn-off to me for the game initially and I spent a decently-long time reading through its wiki when it opened. I like The Magicians show a lot. No regrets I guess but it was baffling.

[helvetica]

@Third-Eye A lot of it was by the seat of your pants, but the freedom that this chaos added kinda felt like a secret ingredient. At least for a little while.

[somasatori]

@Pavel said in Neitherlands:

I appreciate this new (or pseudo-new) crop of staff going out of their way to make me look better by comparison.

Yeah, I’ll say!

[Wizz]

@helvetica

Having dipped into the tail end of it feels a bit like a fever dream in retrospect…kinda sobering that all my personal experiences of a lot of places in the hobby are either a staff and playerbase that are chill and fun, or Satan and his lamest pit fiends just absolutely eating each other alive.

Where are all the mildly insane people??

[helvetica]

@Wizz said in Neitherlands:

@helvetica

Where are all the mildly insane people??

i’m right here, bb. always been.

[Wizz]

@helvetica

[ten]

@Wizz

[somasatori]

I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Edit: Also this wasn’t intended to be a reply to helvetica, but the log output from inuki lol.

[Coin]

@somasatori said in Neitherlands:

I also come from a WoD background and know that non-consent doesn’t invalidate fade to black, and especially doesn’t allow forcing someone to play through potentially traumatic stuff. So, with regards to “I come from WoD where you’re lucky to have staff even acknowledge you before doing what they want,” I feel like this was a pretty old perspective even 15 years ago. IMO, one thing most successful/decent staff took from places where staff acted with impunity about your character’s consent was to at least check in on certain things. Even just a heads up of, “hey this is likely a combat scene, are you cool with that?” was pretty standard on several games which were non-consent MU*s. Player side, most games had a +warn system. All you’re doing is taking the worst elements of past WoD staffing habits and bringing them into a new generation and setting.

Not only that, but someone saying "you’re lucky [this thing] is not as bad as [this thing before]’ is some of the worst type of justification tactics for abuse.

“You’re lucky I only open-hand slap you, my dad beat my mother with a bat.”

I mean, yes, extreme comparison, but that’s essentially what it is: ‘I’m not as bad as what you would have had to deal with, so don’t complain’.

Fuck that, lol.

[Testament]

Two things I’ve learned from being an outside observer to this.

1. This is a reminder to me that WoD are still a series of games that were very much a ‘sign of the times’ when they were made.

2. @inuki is a fucking weirdo who, if I’m to tap into the Twitter speak, needs to go outside and touch grass.

[Jenn]

@Warma-Sheen said in Neitherlands:

You coming back to take more digs at @inuki kind of makes it seem like you’re just trying to bait her. She very obviously made a conscious decision not to do the thing you say you think she’s going to do, but you showed up to insinuate she’s gonna do it anyway while calling her a horrible person for it.

I mean. You’re going to read things however you wish, and it’s clear how you wish to read these comments. But I am pretty certain that this is not me coming back to take digs. It was a month ago she banned me. I have not looked back. But when old friends page me on Discord to ask if I’m back behind Sophia’s keys? Yeah. I pulled the game site up Saturday to see wtf they meant. “Coming back to take digs” is when someone logs into someone else’s account, reads through their personal shit, and then posts scenes that had nothing to do with them.

So I came by to ask if there was a reason for that. She’s clearly been by here since then, but there are no reasons for that. It’s not a dig at someone to point out that someone else is snooping through their things with massive abuses and violations of staff powers.

I know she is an easy target which is why the thread has gone the way it is, but you’re just being a bully.

Like I said. You’re clearly reading things how you want them to read, not from any factual stand-point. Pointing out what she does or doesn’t choose to do is not being a bully. It’s informing others on the playground that there’s someone near the swings trying to steal lunch money. It’s a suggestion that folks maybe stay out of the lines of that theft by playing on the jungle gym instead. This was dead, over, and far past done. I was not the one who decided two days ago that it should be opened back up again.

Not to mentioned the part where you started telling other people that she was forcing your character to be sexually assaulted, which wasn’t true.
She said “Go bigger on the curse. This is hell-realm (edited typo) torture. THink the worst you can imagine. go bigger after”

You inferred sexual assault, then made it seem like she was forcing that on your character and you weren’t okay with it, without ever checking in on whether that was actually what was intended.

Yeah. Hell realm. Worst torture you can imagine, then make that imagination infinitely worse… Maybe I just have too much imagination. Maybe she really didn’t mean to add that to the curse. But it does not at all mean it wasn’t implied, and that I was not CONSTANTLY paged in EVERY scene - even ones private because we didn’t want to deal with her, being told I wasn’t writing out that it was as severe as I should have been.

I know I’m not the only person in the past to have suffered SA. I believe Inuki at face value that they have, too. But hurt people hurt people. Being harmed doesn’t mean you can’t harm others. But I find it a very large cognitive stretch to believe anyone who has suffered from SA in their past would not imagine that non-consentual subject matter would not be part of the worst that could be imagined.

During the scenes of Sophia’s curse, she woke up the first night with coverable bruises. Was told go bigger. Obvious bruises she couldn’t cover, and injured enough she was limping. Got told again to go bigger. Broken ribs and a crushed kidney. Breathing is so hard, so is existing in general. No. Once more. GO BIGGER.

So could I have been wrong about what the implications were supposed to have been? Absolutely. I’m wrong on a lot of things, a lot of the times. But I don’t know what bigger I could have gone from broken bones and organ crushing that DOESN’T include the allusions I think she was making, and I know that I’m not the only one who read that curse the same way I did.

When she washed her hands and did not want to deal with you anymore she passed you off to another player, but you continued to antagonize.
That’s untrue. Just, in all directions, that is untrue. OTHER people asked her to storytell from it, because they wanted to see the curse broken. She storytold curse breaking for her friends. She didn’t storytell it for anyone else. Conrad and Leto trying to bust her out of hell? That was them. Laurent, Ilaria, and Luka wanting the Sparrow story told? Again, their choices. I’m not sure why she thinks I can control what stories other people do or don’t write. But people requesting ST and job things about how they can help someone else? That’s not anything I can control. Blaming me for other people wanting to do things about plots and stories is weird at best, and manipulatively gaslighting at worst.

After all that came Leto teaching the super secret family magic to Sophia almost immediately (you were only on the game like 2-3 weeks), then getting upset when the family comes at you for it.

LOL. Honestly, I don’t know where you’re getting your info, but your facts are not correct. Leto did not teach Sophia Erikson magic. Over the off-screen first year they were at Brakebills, she learned what some runes meant. It was Wizard’s own suggest that one of the two dots we were given as second years for languages and background skills would have made sense to be Old Norse. I dropped that by his typist, and he said cool. Sophia never did nor planned to write/weave/ecth/whatever runes into something magical. But it doesn’t mean she didn’t watch him do enough of that to where she could look at a stone and know which of them would be hot to touch, and which frozen.

SHE TOOK A SINGULAR LANGUAGE POINT.

And two weeks after that point was added, Wiz changed her mind. Knowing the language was the SAME as being taught horrible, secret, private danger magics. So we had to fix it, or face the ICC of our characters being killed. We pitched a FEW things, so she could pick among them for what best fit her game.

• Just retcon the language part. Sophia never learned it, the dot point can just be tossed and trashed.
• Leto could refuse to tell Sophia about the dangers, and he’d take the risk and punishments for having taught her how to read runes if/when anyone ever found out about it.
• Leto could make Sophia into an Erikson. He would tell Sophia about the risks her reading runes poses, and she’d begrudgingly accept a proposal. If anyone lived long enough to graduate, they would get married after, but long engagement to finish their education first - because untrained magicians are dangerous.

NONE of those options were accepted. She told two PC’s that they had to elope and marry, literally that second on the spot… Or they’d be put to miserable deaths.

So yes. I got snarky af about that. I was not a saint. I am not a saint. But I don’t think sainthood is required for being seriously pissed off when a character takes a sugggestion from staff, and then staff decides to use that suggestion as a reason to either force the character into unwanted marriage, or die a terrible death. So yeah. I was waiting for the ban, at that point. Because it’s not like I was going to take either of those other two options.

But then you kept up the antagonism until she had no other choice to ban you. … But looking at them, they were all pretty reasonable. I’d say they were lenient to you.

LOL. Whatever, man. If you think forced content and blaming a singular character for the choices of others is leniency? Huh. That’s a choice and world-view you can have, I guess.

So now you think your embarrassing TS logs are gonna be put out there to get back at you,

Oh, honey. No. I’m not embarrassed over anything I typed. If I didn’t want to have written it, I wouldn’t have. But unlike that vignette, I wasn’t the only person who typed them. It’s not embarrassment. It’s the super disgusting choices to invade the privacy of other characters and typists, a month after none of us are even there, because for whatever reason she just can’t let this shit go. I will never apologize for being worried and upset that someone would choose to write vulnerable stories with me under the pre-agreed boundaries that the scenes were and would be and stay private… And now I cannot keep those promises. Those scenes are in the hands of someone who has shown time and again they hold no scruples, principles, or respect for others. So yeah. I’m scared af she is going to hurt other people alongside whatever this vendetta my way is, too. If you want to pretend that being sad that other people are being hurt makes me non-saintly? Feel those feels. Emotions are things we’re all entitled to feel and to have validated. But after you’ve finished feeling them? You might want to look at the facts and experiences those emotions are based upon. Because there seems to be some disconnect between your beliefs and what actually happened.

Is this enough of the drama you are clearly craving?
Again. The craving of drama was someone logging their staff bit into the private scenes and conversations of a character who has been dead and gone over a month. She’s the one who decided to re-open all of this nonsense. I’m not going to apologize for pointing that nonsense out after she did so.

[hellfrog]

@inuki you sound like the asshole here, even in the receipts you shared. And that’s coming from me, a very talented asshole. Your passive aggression is off the charts. Please convert it to actual aggression, it makes it much easier for people to decide if they want to deal with it or not.

Also who the FK logs in a banned player’s character and POSTS THEIR PRIVATE SCENES. There is. Absolutely. No reason. To do that. Ever.

[Testament]

@hellfrog said in Neitherlands:

Also who the FK logs in a banned player’s character and POSTS THEIR PRIVATE SCENES. There is. Absolutely. No reason. To do that. Ever.

I mean, there is if you’re being a petty asshole. Which I think by this point, we’ve pretty much established that yeah, this person is a petty asshole. Granted, posting someone’s private logs is a particular new low.

[Pavel]

@hellfrog said in Neitherlands:

Also who the FK logs in a banned player’s character and POSTS THEIR PRIVATE SCENES.

Is that even a thing you have to do in Ares? Can’t a staffer just post those scenes without having to log in to the character?

[Roz]

@Pavel said in Neitherlands:

@hellfrog said in Neitherlands:

Also who the FK logs in a banned player’s character and POSTS THEIR PRIVATE SCENES.

Is that even a thing you have to do in Ares? Can’t a staffer just post those scenes without having to log in to the character?

I sincerely doubt it. Staff is given very little access to other people’s scenes AFAIK. I don’t think there are built in tools for staff to be able to see the content of unposted scenes unless one of the players reports something in it or something like that.

[Polk]

@Roz Obviously someone who owns the game could look into the database or sniff your connection to the game.

Ultimately playing on a game requires you to have some degree of trust that the player running it isn’t insane.

[Roz]

@Polk said in Neitherlands:

@Roz Obviously someone who owns the game could look into the database or sniff your connection to the game.

Yes, sure, but Pavel was pretty clearly talking about built-in tools accessible to your standard staffer running Ares. Someone with code know-how can absolutely go into the database to see all the things, but Ares doesn’t build tools to make that sort of thing easy/accessible when it comes to private scenes, DMs, etc.

[MisterBoring]

@Polk said in Neitherlands:

Ultimately playing on a game requires you to have some degree of trust that the player running it isn’t insane.

I’m convinced that everybody in this hobby is insane on some level, and you have to look out for the people with the right kind of insanity rather than people who are sane.