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Comic Games Are Still Fun!
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@GF said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
There is probably something profound or insightful to say about how HAM was formed because the staff of their previous game quit en masse after the head staffer started treating them as badly as he treated the peon players, only for the response game built from that exodus to seem to go exactly the same route.
I’m starting to believe that a combination of institutional memory and “make victims lest you be victims” (to quote an RL friend) are modus operandi for a portion of the tabletop (and online, and live) RPG community.
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So, beyond the sins of HAM itself - of which there are clearly many! - I think it’s important to bear in mind that it’s just another link in what is swiftly becoming a chain of games created exclusively to house the right abusive staff and player figures.
Like Prototart said, Heroes Assembled MUSH was the result of the very same people who aided, abetted, and participating in sexually harassing and/or emotionally abusing others on United Heroes MUSH objecting to no longer being allowed to do so with the same impunity, or guarantee of safety from the same treatment they visited upon others. Crucially, its main driver - the aforementioned Chaucer, AKA Halicron around these parts, I believe - was someone well aware of the kind of place that United Heroes before finally leaving in protest-- because years prior to doing so, he’d already left in disgust and protest due to the entirely unrelated scandal in which Ditko’s abusive tendencies, and the rest of the United Heroes staff’s apathy towards the same was initially exposed. In doing so, he began nurturing the seed that would eventually bloom into his beloved thicket of a theme, but not without facing obstacles. Among the moderately sized group of players his morals apparently drove him to leave beside, the sentiment that his theme - which at one point attributed the entirety of the fictional African superstate of Wakanda’s technological prowess and bloodline connection to the special herb that empowers its rulers to the presence of a race of (predominantly white) alien colonizers crashing there in ancient times and interbreeding with the local populace, uplifting them into a hybrid race capable of fully accepting their gifts, alongside a host of other bizarre additions driven primarily by his simultaneously disdain for comic books and blind confidence in his own abilities - was in fact a confusing, unwieldy mess that would prove a detriment to incoming players not already familiar with its bare bones from previous exposure (or willing to overlook its egregious flaws due to kinship or other such factors) almost immediately drove him directly back to United Heroes for the run that would ultimately culminate in-- leaving, in disgust, because the same people who had already proven to be abusive shits were still abusive shits.
The main difference, of course, is that the second time around, he was happy to bring along some of the very same untrustworthy personalities who’d proven themselves abusive or supportive on the first go 'round, because this time they were his friends.
On Heroes Assembled MUSH, Halicron’s ~decade long pattern of being a player and occasional admin characterized primarily by narcissism neatly tucked beneath a veneer of personability reached what felt like a zenith. Beyond the behavior which Prototart outlined - his love of treating people who were interested in taking inspiration from comic books like idiots; his willingness to directly insult the ones he didn’t feel like processing apps from - he made a habit of refusing character claim requests (read: requests for the passwords of previously created character objects, so that players could go through the app process on those objects) from people who he felt ‘shouldn’t’ play those characters for whatever reasons he deemed fit, including feeling that they should ‘branch out’ and try someone in one of the two or three fiefdoms of the game he felt were worth exploring.
His takes on long-established women characters like Janet ‘The Wasp’ Van-Dyne seemed to stem primarily from his own natural ignorance of the source material combined with barely latent misogyny: Janet for example, a character mostly depicted as a fiesty, big-hearted and ballsy heroine with an empathic streak became a bitter billionaire drug addict with sociopathic tendencies under Halicron’s pen, a take which he was not only deeply proud of, but insisted was the only logical understanding of a character who dates back to 1963, despite it not lining up with any version of the character published between then and now.
When confronted - multiple times - with the news that two of his good friends (Vorpal, a player who inspired a generation of comic MUs to ban original characters for the express purpose of keeping him from bringing yet another iteration of the tiresome self-insert he has been playing since 2013 or so; and Wolfs, a player notorious in comic MU spaces for trying to coerce strangers into engaging with their latex fetishes) were responsible for bullying a long-standing player off of the game, his initial response was to get angry at me for bringing it up (publicly, granted); his subsequent response was to close an official complaint on the matter roughly five minutes after its submission with a tepid promise to look into it which was never again followed up on. Whether this is because he’s friends with these players, he disliked me for making A Problem out of it in the wrong way, he disliked the person being bullied, or some other, unforeseen factor, I obviously can’t say; I was never given any indication that he did indeed care, take the issue seriously, or say a word about it to any of the involved parties, though.
Why bring all of this up in a long-ass reply to a long-ass post venting about someone who has already flounced away from a game and inspired his cronies to do the same, poisoning the well as they go? Because like Prototart said, they’re gearing up to do it all over again. If there’s anything you take from anything that’s been said about this game, these people, and their future endeavors, please let it be this: do not indulge them. Do not waste your time and energy on a space that exists to give abusive people a fresh hunting ground. Do not confuse a game with explicit carve-outs…
Each player may have one character on +reserve. When a character opens or hits +idle, reserves are processed on a first come, first serve basis. The first player in line has one week to claim the character. At the end of a week, or if the player declines, the reserve goes to the next player in line. If no one claims the character, they are set Open and are available to app. There is a 24 hour window after opening to allow any interested party a chance to pitch for the recently opened character. The original player must wait one week before they can put a new +claim on the character. To +claim a reserve: *Player must not have any idle characters on their account. *OCs and NCs have a +kudos in the last 21 days. *Player must have sufficient space in their roster for the new character. +Interest Players may express interest in up to three characters at once. Reserves take priority over interest. Players may check to see if their character has any +interest flags. This means another player is potentially interested in playing the character. If these flagged characters start having issues with their activity or +kudos requirements, staff will approach the player to discuss whether or not the player wishes to retain the character. EFCs and MFCs must submit a plan of action to improve their activity in the next 60 days. This is primarily a tool for Staff to gauge interest among players in writing the character. ----- One of the things that will impact this system is how we're going to kind of overhaul the +idle system. Things are going to be handled on a case by case basis, and we aren't going to just reap a list of characters because they've hit idle and have a reserve. While I can't necessarily give any hard numbers yet, if someone has been playing a character for a long while (or alternatively, have been playing characters plural for a long while) without any issues, we will at the very least want to talk with that player before opening the character.… to create exceptions to its activity rules for the benefit of staff and staff’s friends to either hold onto their own characters in circumstances when inactivity should lead to losing them, or claim desired characters from others on the grounds of expressed interest for one that is in any way conducive to cooperative storytelling. On at least two occasions, Chaucer has personally seen to it that players who claim characters played by one of his friends when they fall idle under Heroes Assembled’s similar ruleset for activity are banned soon after doing so; in one case, this meant ignoring multiple accounts of a player being a sex pest until they had the temerity to claim a character and post that they were new to that character, and planning to depict her in a gentler way than the previous player did, at which point the sex pestery was suddenly exposed and used as grounds for banning.
These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity, and Halicron in particular has demonstrated a complete inability to serve as an unbiased, approachable, or even particularly useful staff member on every occasion he’s attempted it. I realize that this is not an audience that’s all that high on comic book games to begin with, but for any lurkers, or any occasional 4 color fiends out there: do not go there. Do not go. Break the chain and let it dangle uselessly until it rusts away.
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@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
his love of treating people who were interested in taking inspiration from comic books like idiots
I know this is the least important thing anyone could ever bring up, but, like, it still drops my jaw when I think about his reimagining of Caitlin Fairchild from a friendless computer nerd with a dumptruck’s worth of self-esteem issues into a genius who routinely invents bleeding edge robots and spends all day barbecuing.
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@GF said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
his love of treating people who were interested in taking inspiration from comic books like idiots
I know this is the least important thing anyone could ever bring up, but, like, it still drops my jaw when I think about his reimagining of Caitlin Fairchild from a friendless computer nerd with a dumptruck’s worth of self-esteem issues into a genius who routinely invents bleeding edge robots and spends all day barbecuing.
I was literally about to mention this. He made Caitlin Fairchild a devoutly religious Catholic promiscuous lesbian bull-headed jock super-scientist.
Most insulting of all, he used to tell people he did this because he was so impressed seeing me play her that he just couldn’t stand the thought of someone making her a sex kitten.
I’m happy to rag on Chaucer all day, but I think it’s important to recognize that he wasn’t a sole, malicious force that turned HAM into be a bad game with a poisonous culture run by abusive staffers. That’s a rot that starts at the very top. Everything he and his various friends did for years happened with the knowledge and explicit approval of Shakespeare. He isn’t wrong about her, it’s just that he’s also everything he accuses her of being. My very first interaction with her on HAM was her yelling at me for insulting someone who went on a misogynistic incel tirade in the OOC room.
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I do not know if this is one of the games I poked my nose onto and then vanished from, but seems legit bonkers.
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I never actually got through the app process on HAM because I was told by one staffer that my concept seemed great and they were looking forward to it and then I was told via back-channels that Shakespeare on the other hand had pre-veto’d it so continuing to work on it would be wasted effort.
Nothing about this situation or anyone involved looks great, honestly.
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@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity
okay okay but we’re talking about running a MU right, the bar is so low most people trip over it but I think any game runner would die of cringe if someone described them as a serious person because they ran an online roleplaying game well
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@Apos said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity
okay okay but we’re talking about running a MU right, the bar is so low most people trip over it but I think any game runner would die of cringe if someone described them as a serious person because they ran an online roleplaying game well
Shit’s relative. ‘Serious’ for this dumb dying hobby is ‘does not perpetuate the abuse of people who choose to spend their time playing on an online roleplaying game’ and ‘will probably not behave like a raging asshole if disagreed with in any way’.
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that it’s pathetically easy to do makes it all the more remarkable three generations of game have seen the bar on the floor and announced, “i know! we’ll dig our way under it!”
@Redbird said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
I never actually got through the app process on HAM because I was told by one staffer that my concept seemed great and they were looking forward to it and then I was told via back-channels that Shakespeare on the other hand had pre-veto’d it so continuing to work on it would be wasted effort.
the very first char I made there was in app limbo for over a month - like zero word back at all - bc shakespeare just didn’t like the char, something i learned about only when i asked someone why it had been literally a month since i heard anything about my app
and then chaucer approved me over her head bc he liked me then, as i had not got all uppity
(the LAST char i made, he gave a glowing approval for as a concept pitch & then rejected outright and told me i was trash when i very lightly pushed back on something he said during review)
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@Apos I’m sorry but I can’t resist:
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
(the LAST char i made, he gave a glowing approval for as a concept pitch & then rejected outright and told me i was trash when i very lightly pushed back on something he said during review)
Damn, is he my thesis advisor lmao
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<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “It’s a place where people go to vent, and make up a lot of stuff, and present it like it’s fact to support their vitriol. Very very bad place.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Dr. Headmistress Jean Grey says, “Also I think it closed didn’t it?”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Scott Summers says, “It’s still open. I’m looking at it right now.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “there are other ones just like it.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Scott Summers says, “And I am filled with self-loathing and anger.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “I didn’t know it was still up. I haven’t logged in there in years.”
<Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “No one should. You’ll never find any truth on a place like that.”Hi Ruby! Ruby/Rogue doesn’t like any version of this site because she repeatedly humiliated herself posting totally deranged things to defend Claremont and Ditko, then got outed as an inveterate liar who carried water for not one but two incredibly repulsive sexual predators. One of the people she defended later harassed her, leading to HAM’s founding. (It was fine when other people were victims, but a member of the in-group was too far.) (The harassment, for the record, was her deciding she wasn’t going to TS with Claremont anymore and Claremont rescinding everything he’d let her do because he was TSing with her. The most egregious example being, he took a jet pack off of Lara Croft’s sheet. This was, I’m not joking, the last straw.)
I don’t know who Scott was on UH, but on HAM he’s a former staffer who’s an insane bore, tantrums at the mildest pushback, refuses to interact with anyone playing a villain, whines non-stop about people not wanting to do things with him (I wonder why), and is why the Fantastic Four are all pushing 70 but have absolutely no canon attached to them (because he wanted Reed Richards to have been Batman’s math tutor.)
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All the UH stuff remains documented in the old MSB thread, by the way.
Or feel free to just look at all of Rogue’s increasingly whacked posts,
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
he wanted Reed Richards to have been Batman’s math tutor
The thing I like about shared universes is that characters who don’t normally get to interact ostensibly can now.
But, like…
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Somehow I missed that this thread exists (I probably have my notifications, flags and groups etc set wrong). So I thought all this drama had gone under the radar and just assumed no one here played comic places anymore. But no! Drama ensues. Here’s a few other bits from the still-unfolding trainwreck, some deleted posts and other ephemera preceding the Chaucer post.
They’re not really about Chaucer, although they kind of link in to the ongoing underlying dramas of the game, which alternately involve Shakespeare’s ‘faction’ of do-nothing TS cliques for whom bad behavior is overlooked and activity policies ignored, and Chaucer’s group of more pro-active… well, also sex-pests, but with grander scale bad ethics (ie making his own character the chosen of literal monotheistic God) and a tendency to aggressively force his views, opinions, and plot ideas on people. Also, the complaining players themselves kind of seem like assholes. This dumpster fire goes far and wide.
mmmmmmmmmmmm<* Heroes Assemble BBS - 2: Public Discussion - 523 *>mmmmmmmmmmmm Message: 2/523 Posted Author Ahem Feb 14 2024 Wade Wilson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Shakespeare. I could have precluded so much of my trouble on your game if I had just agreed to sleep with you repeatedly. Like an online Harvey Weinstein you are this horrible little predator behind your monitor, providing your benefits to the people you enjoy snogging. You are surrounded with two flavors of people. Empty utterly gutless useless pieces of human detritus who are looking to stab you in the back the first chance they get. And ones you have humped. Sometimes these spheres overlap. I know my behaviour is so horrid. I laugh at you and yours while you sit with your legs up and your blood clotting, your tremendous weight straining under your reinforced office chair as you tap on your keyboard, hypocritically screeching your idiotic social values while working for a fucking oil company. I had the gall to question your horrible decisions with staff, while your idiotic half-man Chaucer repeatedly plots to steal from you, and screeching about how someone is punching down on them while they routinely abuse their position as a staffer to pursue their lovely little bouts of harassment. So cute they imagine if anyone disagrees with them that it's punching down. Probably has to do with their dead end in life at the moment. I have had most of my trouble on your game... because of getting angry about your corrupt staff. Sapkowski/Waid, lovely chap, loses his mind on me in a public channel. My fault for daring to disagree with your horrible global plot with the dumb ass angels. That guy was lovely. A piece of work. Ask him if he's talked to Silvestri lately? I have! What a waste of oxygen. Who was the chucklehead that went on his huge political rant on the pub channel? Yeah, then it came to light he was using his position to actually try and get people to harass that one gal who was running SHIELD off the game? Teaching them how to do it with as little accountability as possible. Yah you've had some swell staffers. I've had a lot of trouble with staff. On Here. Elsegame. But the awesome thing about this though, over time it's always come to light how utterly horrible those people have been. You are no different. Go to hell, you sad little fuck. Bye. :) mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm< End +bbread 2/523 >mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmmm<* Heroes Assemble BBS - 1: Announcements - 168 *>mmmmmmmmmmmmmm Message: 1/168 Posted Author Thor's Player Banned Feb 14 2024 Stoker ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thor's player, who also wrote Alexander Aaron, Piotr, and Deadpool, has been permanently banned from the game after sending Staff and other players an extremely inappropriate page/email laden with misogynistic commentary and foul personal insults. This follows a long history of similar comments and insults he has aimed at staff; this time, he broke the pall by launching this tirade after he was denied permission to run a +event with inappropriate ties to RL political issues. We apologize for the disruption to your gameplay. Please Keep Calm, and Carry On. - Staff mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm< End +bbread 1/168 >mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmContext: I don’t have the +event text on hand, but it was something along the lines of ‘Fighting ANTIFOH.’ The scene never got run, although it’s notable some of the tagged players were staff-alts themselves. I think it was aimed at the idea that both Shakespeare and Chaucer like to use language of activism/inclusivity in their communications while not upholding these beliefs in practice (ie, years of enabling sex-pests on UH & HAM alike).
<Public> Tim Drake says, "Phoebe Beacon represents everything that is wrong with MUSHing today. She is a narcissistic, gaslighting, professional victim who sucks energy from others. She, along with her OOC RL friend Doyle/Xander Prescott/ex-Tim Drake have systematically shut me out of RP here by doing things like accuse me of racism and restricting the number of people who can join a scene specifically targeted to Bat Family, all the while allowing people not tagged to come and play. And all of this is has been done to either get me banned from the character or frustrated enough to quit so Doyle can have Tim Drake back.%r%rCongrats, you succeeded, Phoebe. You can continue to be a big fish in a small pond and I'll go spend my time doing something somewhere else with positive people who build up others, not nasty, temperamental, small-minded people with personality disorders.%r%rThe funny thing is, if you had come to me and asked nicely and explained the situation, I would have gladly given the character up and chosen someone else.%r%rTake care. I hope you find some sort of peace and balance."Context: I have no idea, other than the fact that Doyle did take Tim Drake immediately after this player was banned, and that Phoebe was connected to the ‘angel plot’ where Chaucer got to play the chosen of actual real God. She also quit not long after all of this stuff.
Finally, in the last week there have been a couple posts where prominent/long-running plots were abruptly canceled by their players. Seems like a likely next wave of drama.
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@bored said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
assumed no one here played comic places anymore
There’s still some Ares-based comic games, but they tend not to be so explosive with drama I guess. Anyway, my experience with HAM was from 2020 and both Chaucer and Shakespeare can fuck right off imo. They let some obscenely toxic behavior go along for way too long all because they were afraid of hurting “their numbers”.
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The current Xavier’s drama is hysterical, but I’m not on the channel, so I don’t have receipts. I know others do, because I’ve seen them.
Funniest shit.
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@Popes said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
The current Xavier’s drama is hysterical, but I’m not on the channel, so I don’t have receipts. I know others do, because I’ve seen them.
Funniest shit.
fr, Rogue/Ruby having the audacity to pretend to be the adult in any room is seriously just the most deranged shit in the world I stg
I know for a fact people have involved Shakespeare in her shit but shocker nothing happens bc the game was literally made for her she is protected from on high and is subject to literally no rules at all
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@Prototart said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
@Popes said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
The current Xavier’s drama is hysterical, but I’m not on the channel, so I don’t have receipts. I know others do, because I’ve seen them.
Funniest shit.
fr, Rogue/Ruby having the audacity to pretend to be the adult in any room is seriously just the most deranged shit in the world I stg
I know for a fact people have involved Shakespeare in her shit but shocker nothing happens bc the game was literally made for her she is protected from on high and is subject to literally no rules at all
There was a much (much (much)) longer post here. After taking time to sit with it and think about it, I just am not comfortable with dedicating a manifesto’s worth of words to one person over this stuff, even if it’s one who I thoroughly dislike and distrust. It feels weird and gross. The highlights:
- The Xavier’s School group has a real fucked up atmosphere, to the point of making people drop characters to avoid it.
- The people in charge of the Xavier’s School group are fine with this, or at least willing to behave as if any and all issues faced by people who have dropped characters due to feeling uncomfortable with said atmosphere are solely the fault of those people.
- I really ought to work on controlling my temper, because I acted like an asshole in reacting to the above two points.
That said:
@Prototart is one hundred percent correct that Rogue/Ruby is an awful excuse for an ‘adult in the room’. She’s the sort of person who thinks it’s fine and normal to throw sexually tinged jokes at virtual strangers, then double down when they show signs of not appreciating it. She’s the kind of person who, from her position of acting as the volunteer organizer/coordinator for a large faction on a MUSH, is perfectly alright with dodging accountability by any means. She’s a habitual liar and gaslighter who is best given a wide berth.
I’ll leave my other related posts up because whatever, I feel less weird/gross about those ones.
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