Numetal/Retromux
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@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Jumpscare So then what’s Shang?
According to their own stated theme? Technically Lords and Ladies, actually.
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@Jumpscare hahahah hahahah
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@Gashlycrumb A little late, but thank you for this, I really appreciate it! There was a lot of dogpiling here, it made me sign out for a while. It was good to see something positive upon returning
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Also, as a quick aside, Eddie was finally, actually, fully banned from Retro. So that’s one sex pest down. I guess he did something so egregious that even his staff buddies couldn’t help him this time. Which one of you lovelies knows what it was that finally got him burnt?
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All I have is this gem of a post from the staff of this game who in this very thread claimed there was no issues or complaints with Eddie. Ironically, someone who had the same type of experience that I did sent me this on discord. We both laughed at the north star part.
================================ Announcements ===============================
Message: 1/42 Author: Ori Mon Aug 25 2025
BAN: Niall/Khafra/Eddie/Ryen/Darius 03:48:28As has been said time and again, our north star is to create a space where people feel safe and can enjoy themselves without being a disruption to others. Telling good stories is important, but the former is more important to us than the latter.
It is in this vein that we must look not only at the behaviors and actions of individuals, but their effect on the community as a whole. We must consider whether someone’s desire to be a part of our community is more important than the ability of others to participate in that community.
Or, to put it another way, when everyone at the party is avoiding you, it’s time for you to go home.
The player of Niall/Khafra/Eddie/Ryen/Darius has alienated the majority of the community with his unwanted behaviors, some big and some small. This alienation has, unfortunately, culminated in a detectable shift in player participation (backed up by direct complaints) in scenes and plots this player is involved in. This shift shows no sign of improvement, and has gotten worse over time.
While we believe there is a game for everyone, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s this game. As such, our only valid course to improve this situation is to remove this player from the community indefinitely.
We appreciate your patience, and apologize to any disruption to plot he may have been involved in or PRPing. Thank you for your continued efforts to help us build something truly special here.
-Chaos, Daedalus, Ori
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@InkyTheGhost said in Numetal/Retromux:
Blossom’s player is not the creepy stalker. She is kind, extremely loyal, unafraid to speak her mind, and one of the best writers I’ve RP’d with in decades of playing on MU*s.
She is a great writer, great enough that I often threw away red flags when I received them. She has a lot of good qualities; she also sent things to my house that I found uncomfortable, would page me when I was in scenes angrily if I wasn’t in scenes with her instead, tried to dictate who I could and couldn’t RP with, and got very cold whenever I disagreed with her about anything. She was highly OOCly motivated and had trouble telling the difference between IC/OOC more often than I thought was appropriate.
Two things can be true at the same time. I don’t think Blossom as a person is inherently evil at all, but I choose to cut contact once because her interactions with me were getting obsessive, forgave her for the reasons you stated and with help from Sundance on Liberation, and have since cut contact again for other reasons.
My feelings about Blossom player are conflicted because we were friends for a long time, but the reason I brought her up was because she was the one who begged me to come to Retro, who is closely connected to Sephiroth (she plays his Giovanni mom on that game for those who don’t know), and who has gotten lots of staff favoritism IMO, plus has a strong friendship with Chaos. So it is relevant, she was deeply involved in several of these situations.
To be clear, I don’t think she’s the reason why Retro is a bad game. But I do feel that Retro being a bad game is the reason why she is there. Because the game has very loose controls, or they happen too late, it creates a negative feedback loop which attracts a certain kind of player and encourages or excuses their behavior when it does happen. I think the MU youngins are calling what she does ‘harem-building’ these days, we just called it a clique. She gathers players who agree with her IC/OOC around her, building a small community that goes outside of the game, and those who act out of lockstep OOC or IC have a tendency to be ostracized OOC and IC until they conform. I don’t think she does it for nefarious means, but because she can’t be assed to RP with people she doesn’t like–which, fair enough. I also don’t think it creates a healthy community in a MUSH either, since it’s a shared space that suffers from getting cliqued out even further than it already is by definition. It’s a gray area, innocent at first, but it tends to spiral out of control if left unchecked for too long and I see it unfolding again on Retro.
These cliques tend to have staffers from their ranks who join and change the narrative to suit their own, get mad when something doesn’t go their way at some point, then we see a mass exodus of players/staffers and games die or take a while to recover–best case scenario, the group disbands and bad feelings all around which leads to future drama. Best example of this is the Reach with VASpider, but other examples exist–at least one of which Blossom-player was the faction head of, at a game where I staffed like 10-15 years ago.
Anyway, thought I’d take a minute and explain my reasoning for what I said in my OP. I don’t hate the player, or you, or really anyone in the situation except maybe Eddie. In general, I’m just happy to be away from the game and those people and I’m sure the feeling is mutual and that’s cool. You were always a blast to RP with though, and the least problematic person ever. So kudos to you for that lol.
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@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:
she can’t be assed to RP with people she doesn’t like–which, fair enough. I also don’t think it creates a healthy community in a MUSH
I think it’s a neutral thing in itself. Where it goes foul is when there’s ST cooperation to make it so the group can fully engage with every plot without ever RPing out-of-clique. Or making rulings that allow them to defeat PC foes without engaging, or remove the consequences of stuff like ignoring Ensign Dull telling you about the cracked beryllium sphere, or blithely walking away while Ensign Dull is being clubbed by a Gorn.
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@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:
I think the MU youngins are calling what she does ‘harem-building’ these days, we just called it a clique.
Harem-building often comes with connotations of sexual exploitation or manipulation.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@Cygnus So it’s your position that a person refusing to RP with people they don’t like is bad for the game? Are you saying that you’d rather force them to RP with people they don’t like?
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@MisterBoring I’d think it depends on where the emphasis is in that sentence. If one refuses to RP with people they dislike, that’s fine, but avoiding RP with people they don’t specifically like can make a game feel very unwelcome indeed if it’s the norm.
That said, no individual player should be expected to carry the weight of being the welcome wagon and intake machine.
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whenever people complain that someone doesn’t RP with people they don’t like I’m like ??? that’s how hobbies work??? you do hobbies for fun???
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@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
@Cygnus So it’s your position that a person refusing to RP with people they don’t like is bad for the game? Are you saying that you’d rather force them to RP with people they don’t like?
How did you get this from what I said? I said it’s a gray area. It can be innocent at first, but when it becomes exclusionary it spirals quickly out of control. Are you saying that the hate for people like VASpider who have done exclusionary things like this is unwarranted because they just didn’t like the people they excluded, and they were justified killing the games they killed?
Also, MU*s are games that tend to include a large amount of players, some of whom you are likely not to enjoy. Does this mean that your feelings as a player about another player dictate whether they can or can’t enjoy the rest of the game, and whether they get plot/job attention? Because that’s what happens when these cliques take over a game.
@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:
To rephrase my question:
Does @Cygnus feel it is a staff’s job to ensure that any single person is RPing with everyone?
It’s staff’s job to break up cliques and not let them take over the entire game, staff, and culture, to not let them spread hate campaigns, and not let players be the jury of who is allowed into scenes and plots. Because that’s what happen when these things get out of control. That’s when staff needs to step in, not when it’s a group of friends playing games together.
This is a person who would do exactly that; get angry when someone in their group was RPing with someone they didn’t like, and do exclusionary things that are not healthy for a game.
It’s obviously tough for staff to tell when this is and isn’t the case, but when complaints start to pile up it should get addressed. This doesn’t happen on RetroMUX because certain staffers are part of the clique itself; they dole out plots to people the popular kids club approve of, so they’re feeding into the non-community aspect of a game.
It’s totally fine to not RP with people you don’t like. It’s not ok to make them feel unwelcome and ostracized until they leave. Players don’t get to decide to do that to another player, and behavior that rationalizes or makes excuses for this kind of thing needs to be excised from MU*s forever.
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@Pavel to be fair, so did cliques back in my day. It’s not exactly the same, but every weird MUSH clique that ever existed has manipulation and it is often sexual. Important here to say that welcoming circles of friends are different than cliques or harems, we’re not talking about those here.
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@Cygnus said in Numetal/Retromux:
This doesn’t happen on RetroMUX because certain staffers are part of the clique itself; they dole out plots to people the popular kids club approve of, so they’re feeding into the non-community aspect of a game.
Do you think, based on your knowledge of the game, you could identify the members of the clique in question?
