Numetal/Retromux
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@MisterBoring Absolutely don’t do a three strike system for blatant, overt, and purposeful flouting of rules like that. Like, at most give the player one single warning.
But the real answer is the first option: ban them. There’s absolutely no need to entertain that sort of OOC sneakery.
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@Roz Agreed. If there is some particular reason that you think they accidentally made an alt (I can’t even think of a reason that might happen, but who knows…), wipe all but one character and tell them that they just got their one and only warning. Otherwise, it’s a flagrant violation of a clear-cut rule: ban, explain, and move on.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@MisterBoring If someone chooses to break a game’s rules, they are uninvited from the game. It’s not hard.
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@Muscle-Car said in Numetal/Retromux:
Lots of points of failure led to it but it was universally avoidable if any one of the balances had worked.
I feel like this sentence describes the world we’re living in.
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Naturally, make sure the player is actually breaking the rule first. Perhaps make mention of some mechanism for people living in the same house to have that fact (and the characters they play) registered somewhere so that all the staff know that any IP similarities have already been accounted for.
I imagine it’s fairly obvious when that mechanism is being misused.
@Roadspike said in Numetal/Retromux:
If there is some particular reason that you think they accidentally made an alt (I can’t even think of a reason that might happen, but who knows…)
The only reason I can think of is if you create a character, get into CG, and get distracted by something shiny and forget about it. Then you come back some time later and don’t recall you’ve ever been there, and make another character. In this instance it should be easy to tell, the other character is old and still in CG.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Gashlycrumb Requiem for Kingsmouth had a thing where you’d have to specifically “apply” for tiers of characters
Yeah. You could have people apply, you could require that they have a trusted existing player as a ‘sponsor’ to get a ‘Main’ character.
It might be a good solution to go with your population-control idea – if you open with a hard limit on how many PCs, then you’re likely to end up with only 1/3 that number in three months and it’ll be hard to recover 'cause the ones who got turned away are not terribly likely to come back. If you have a hard limit on ‘Main’ characters you can upgrade ‘Supporting’ ones and probably have less of a crash problem.
@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
So assuming a game has a “no-alts” policy, what’s the ideal response for when a player breaks that rule? I had two ideas, one harsh and one not.
Just ban them.
There’s nothing harsh about it, really. “One character per player” is not a rule that’s open to interpretation.
I am regularly bemused about clear violations of clear rules being repeatedly tolerated, or people getting endless ‘strikes’ after said rule has been clarified. I’ve seen a player continue for a year with a habit of changing the subject any time somebody rolls to eavesdrop on their IC conversation, with other players calling staff and Cheaty-Cheaty Bang-Bang getting the lecture, and then doing it again a week later. I’ve had a staffer tell me they gave an insufferably rude player The Lecture, problem solved, and then just ignore it when I replied that rude player was doing it again right as staffer was assuring me that it wouldn’t happen again. It’s not harsh to stop people who make a habit of breaking the rules or ignore really clear and plain rules.
In over thirty years of playing these damn things I have been banned once, and it was, as far as I could tell, for asking another player for their contact info and explaining that I was gonna quit since Staffer had made clear their intention to exclude me indefinitely. I’ve been threatened with banning for telling a staffer that it “felt railroady” to not be allowed to attempt a con that NPCs were already doing. The recent actual banning that had me raising eyebrows was for the hideous crime of paging people asking for RP when those people wanted to avoid the pager but did not want to go so far as to ask the pager not to contact them. That shit is harsh.
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"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Roz said in Numetal/Retromux:
@MisterBoring Absolutely don’t do a three strike system for blatant, overt, and purposeful flouting of rules like that. Like, at most give the player one single warning.
But the real answer is the first option: ban them. There’s absolutely no need to entertain that sort of OOC sneakery.
Doing anything else will encourage some people to do it until they get caught, knowing they had a freebie.
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@Roadspike I am trying to imagine how you could accidentally make an alt.
Like… I make characters pretty easily but it’s a volitional act.
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao The same way you accidentally sleep with your partner’s best friend. You slip and fall face first onto ‘create “Alt Character” %PASSWORD%’.
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@sao said in Numetal/Retromux:
I am trying to imagine how you could accidentally make an alt.
I will admit I have done this once. Here are the details:
This was around 2013 and I honestly don’t remember what game it was (if you happened to be staff there, and recall this, HI!). I was off sick from work, and sitting at my computer delirious from fever and I decided to join a new game. I check it out as a guest, look at their wiki, decide on a concept and then build a character, all while under the effects of OTC cold medicine and general malaise. I submit the character for approval, which required an email address to be associated with the bit, log off of the game, and end up falling asleep while watching Lost In Space.
I promptly in my sleep forget about the character and end up staying in bed with the flu for 2 more days, during which, my initial character gets approved without any changes needed. When I finally get over my flu and sit back down at my computer, I decide to find a new game to play and pick the same game from when I was sick. It doesn’t even dawn on me that there’s a reason I have the game saved in my MU Client. I create an entirely new character from scratch, submit it for approval with the same email address, and almost immediately get a page from staff, “Hey, are you sure you want an alt already? You haven’t even RPed with your first character since they were approved.”
I immediately felt so embarrassed about the situation that I logged off and ghosted that game without playing either character.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:
In over thirty years of playing these damn things I have been banned once, and it was, as far as I could tell, for asking another player for their contact info and explaining that I was gonna quit since Staffer had made clear their intention to exclude me indefinitely. I’ve been threatened with banning for telling a staffer that it “felt railroady” to not be allowed to attempt a con that NPCs were already doing. The recent actual banning that had me raising eyebrows was for the hideous crime of paging people asking for RP when those people wanted to avoid the pager but did not want to go so far as to ask the pager not to contact them. That shit is harsh.
Actually, Scarpia, I banned you for being a psychic vampire who tested the patience of various players within and outside of your sphere. The reasons why you might have drawn the wrong conclusion is because you were paging people constantly bitching about the game and they told me that you were a gigantic fucking buzz kill and they were avoiding you. Funnily enough it’s essentially the same reason that retro banned Ryen: what’d they say again? “When everyone is avoiding you it’s time to go”?
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@sao I was trying to come up with a situation too, but I couldn’t. I did want to leave the door open, because there are very few things I want to be an absolutist about.
I could imagine something like the delirium situation @MisterBoring mentioned, or it being a month or two in between creating a character you never played and creating a new character because you forgot about the first one, or getting so excited about the concept that you forgot that there were no alts allowed and submitted a new character.
But the response to Staff going, “Um… hold on a sec” would be very telling, and would decide if I went scorched earth or just nuked all but one character and gave them a warning.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike said in Numetal/Retromux:
But the response to Staff going, “Um… hold on a sec” would be very telling, and would decide if I went scorched earth or just nuked all but one character and gave them a warning.
My response in my situation was literally:
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Whoops, @Gashlycrumb I was out somewhere doin’ thangs and forgot to evidentiate what i’m talking about.
You’re Scarpia, here’s how i know,
(redacting a screen shot where it was gashlycrumb talking to me on discord about his alt)
Took me a minute to find it because I forgot I blocked you the day I banned you because you never respond to boundaries with “OK”, you’d respond to them with fucking Atlas Shrugged. That’s the problem. You wouldn’t leave people alone.
et cetera. And this is what I can find by half-ass looking for your screen name on Discord while I’m on vacation. I wonder what is actually on my harddrive at home. Point is, no, nobody is ever banned for one tiny little harmless incident. You got banned due to a larger pattern of behavior of repeatedly sandbagging people who didn’t want contact with you.
The line you say of “but did not want to go so far as to ask the pager not to contact them” is just shifting responsibility onto others for not spelling it out for you instead of acknowledging your behavior was draining and unwelcome. And in fact, I think I did spell it out for you, repeatedly, but since I don’t have access to logs since i’m not home, whatever, let’s say I didn’t. You’re still shifting responsibility onto others for not spelling it out, instead of acknowledging your behavior was draining and unwelcome.
ETA
Wait a minute,
@Gashlycrumb said in Numetal/Retromux:The recent actual banning that had me raising eyebrows was for the hideous crime of paging people asking for RP when those people wanted to avoid the pager but did not want to go so far as to ask the pager not to contact them. That shit is harsh.
So you’re admitting people were avoiding you and spin it as their fault for not giving you a formal ‘do not talk to me’ WHILE dismissing the whole thing sarcastically as a “hideous crime”? Bruh. That’s WILD. Shit like this is why I banned you, man, boundary disrespecting shit like this right here.
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@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
Hey @LeeRoyBatty, when can we run a FATAL game?
I have several better ideas, but gotta kidnap that coder…
@Pavel said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Alamias No excuse, please commit seppuku by dawn tomorrow, thank you.
I can only assume this means L5R, which is on the list, so go go go? A discussion to be had elsewhere.
@labsunlimited said in Numetal/Retromux:
We all have to share the spotlight on a MU* or this kind of thing happens. I sometimes wonder if WOD could have been better if the mechanics and narrative were better suited to that, like the 2013 MET LARP ruleset, since that’s designed for games of like 15-20 people over 3-5 in tabletop.
I’m on record somewhere agreeing with this, it could stand a test run somewhere if nobody has tried it yet.
@Jumpscare said in Numetal/Retromux:
@dvoraen said in Numetal/Retromux:
I couldn’t think of how to do an inverse to “Hog Pit.”
First you ban someone who replied to a do-not-interact request with “message received.” The rest just happens organically.
First, we need to foolishly hand over the keys to a robot cat lawyer.
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Don’t know what I just spent an hour reading but it’s helped me deal with waking up at 330am and kill some time lol.
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@Roadspike said in Numetal/Retromux:
@sao I was trying to come up with a situation too, but I couldn’t. I did want to leave the door open, because there are very few things I want to be an absolutist about.
I could imagine something like the delirium situation @MisterBoring mentioned, or it being a month or two in between creating a character you never played and creating a new character because you forgot about the first one, or getting so excited about the concept that you forgot that there were no alts allowed and submitted a new character.
But the response to Staff going, “Um… hold on a sec” would be very telling, and would decide if I went scorched earth or just nuked all but one character and gave them a warning.
I can’t really think of a situation where someone would accidentally make a character (aside from the one MisterBoring outlined), but I can imagine someone accidentally breaking a no alts rule by incorrectly assuming that a game regularly conducts idle purges if, hey, turns out they don’t.
I mean, I know that I’ve made characters on a game, not really had them jive before, and then go back to the place a year or more later with a new concept, in a new sphere, with a different group of friends. Granted, I also did check if my old login still worked, but that was more out of idle curiosity than anything else and hey! It turned out that said character had in fact been deleted, so my assumption was correct. But I’ve also made a handful of characters that I ditched so quickly that my recollection of them was, “Ohh, god. What was her name. Uhhh, she was a Daeva, that I made with my friend Matt, and her name started with an I… she was a lawyer… or something?” on a game that I know didn’t purge their database literally ever because I had friends who staffed there.
So I think an easy workaround for what I’m describing and even what happened to MisterBoring is effectively what that staffer in MisterBoring’s case did–check and see if said alt has been played actively or logged in recently. If the answer is ‘no’, then it’s probably a case of assuming idle purges like Ares games do or a foggy memory. If the answer is ‘yes’, then you’ve likely got a deliberate rule breaker and do what you will.
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@Aria Yeah, I can definitely see that happening. So as with any rule enforcement, one should probably initially assume cock-up over conspiracy and chat before banning.
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@LeeRoyBatty said in Numetal/Retromux:
You’re Scarpia, here’s how i know,
Yes. I am. It is pretty telling that you assume that this is a secret I suck at keeping, It is something I’m just too lazy to make more obvious. Veiled threats to dox people are a great quality in any MUer, especially, staff.
First screenshot — Wow! I actually remember this conversation. This is fucking amazing because of the volume of whisky it took to get through listening to you tell me that if I just wasn’t so boring and ran plots, players who didn’t exist would come out. I had to pour to refrain from reminding you that you couldn’t attract or retain players, required approval for PRPs but refused to take the time to discuss my plot pitches, and that it was you, not I, who had signed up for the role of Cam RP staff.
You claimed everybody was afraid to RP with me because I might say mean things about them on MSB. But that was not everybody, that was you. And you were the only person rain-checking me. Unbelievably enough, it typically took four or six reschedules, each time involving me waiting an hour to see if you’d show. You refused to do stuff async in the +job. Nice to see you were admitting that it was purposeful. You castigated me about my lack of respect for your time and said it was ableist of me to expect you to keep appointments because ADHD.
Second screenshot — the active cam players not minding your banning me didn’t mean much when that consisted of me and a couple who never came out of their room. If there were others, they didn’t play when I was on.
Third screenshot — This just shows that you lied to me about your feelings about that incident and had dismissed some highly relevant shit that I told you about it. And it gives the strong impression that you’d been bitching about me on your staff channel before it happened. That’s interesting because, well, we clashed at opening, and then things went along fine and fun until then. So was I supposed to have known I was unwelcome and left in spite of you saying we were fine AND approving me, neither of which you had to do?
You should explain what “The Registry” was for the people in the back.
Screenshots of you complaining about me don’t prove I was behaving badly or that I was disliked. Funny, one of the last of your lectures/rants/advice sessions was about how I should be happy because I topped the +votes and +recs every month and was obviously well-liked. +votes were just XP farming, but there’s no explanation for the +recs that doesn’t involve players wanting to compliment me. Why the hell would you tell me that when you wanted me to leave?
You are right that it wasn’t a ‘single harmless incident.’ There was a long-standing pattern of you acting like an absolute twatwurst and then getting real mad that I didn’t like it and denying that it was hostile.
Sure, I was a buzz-kill. It was ugly to watch. But I didn’t have to do anything to be a buzz-kill, besides log on and want to play. This is why you accused me of “complaining on the looking for RP channel” when what I did was join it and not say anything.
People left over your confrontational and inconsistent GMing. This messed me up – you really liked one of them and were sad they left. They found you hostile and had a panic attack when they learned they’d been RPing with your PC. This kept me questioning the intent of your hostile behaviour toward me. Which you consistently denied was intentional.
I should have left, but we’d been good friends. I liked you and gave you too many chances, and you did shit like act all delighted to see me when I did leave and logged back on again a week later to @mail someone. Still my mistake.
I shouldn’t have been there at all, since when we met you were staff on Sheltering Sky, playing an illegal alt that the other staff there saw as a problem player, and complaining about staff and other players. I knew you were untrustworthy and trusted you anyway, absolute muppet that I am. My bad.
But those bads were me being naive and loyal, not malicious. The night before you de-approved me was the actual moment when I finally and completely gave up on you.
So you’re admitting people were avoiding you and spin it as their fault for not giving you a formal ‘do not talk to me’ WHILE dismissing the whole thing sarcastically as a “hideous crime”? Bruh. That’s WILD. Shit like this is why I banned you, man, boundary disrespecting shit like this right here.
No, on all counts. That was not me. Nor was Ryen the name. The person said they did not know the other players were avoiding them and had played with them recently.
Also. “shifting responsibility onto others for not spelling it out” line is bullshit. If you want another player to leave you alone, it is your responsibility to tell them, or at the very least, stop chatting with them. “Do as I say, not as I do,” is unfair, but “Do as I wish, not as I say,” is untenable. MUs are a text-only neurodiverse space.
Y’know, I did notice that MN was dead less than three months later. What happened? Was it just no fun without somebody to fume about and blame? Did you pick the wrong replacement scapegoat and destroy a friendship you cared about?
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler
