Liberation Drama!?
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My character had a crush on Bartok, who appeared to distinctly not want to RP with me and was only very rarely around me, so it was minimal. When he bitched to me about the game we agreed to have a mutual bitch-session before we started. He annoyed me a couple of times but nothing serious. But my view is a really narrow one.Y’all got stronger tea.
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@Gashlycrumb That opener sure reads like he was swerving you trying to bang a gargoyle.
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Siren is well intentioned, intelligent and has good social understanding. I don’t believe she would ban anyone without a good reason. In addition I don’t think she enjoys giving out punishments and I don’t believe she wanted to ban him. I am not her ooc friend just a player who has witnessed her consistently acting right.
It is of course still possible she made an error in judgement, but I don’t think that is the most likely scenario.
We’re going to have to disagree on Siren.
She’s one of the least ethical and least capable people I’ve seen trying to staff a game, never mind run one. Abusers go ignored and unpunished while the abused are unprotected. She’ll shower you in adoration and run scenes and plots for you if you’re one of her special friends or sucking up to her characters in the right way, but if you don’t react as she thinks you should she’ll drop you like a hot potato. Where she had responsibility for a sphere, it went almost completely ignored and was allowed to trail away into nothing - like all the jobs that anyone bothered to put in.
I’ve watched Siren make a lot of errors in judgement, but I’ve also watched her ignore abusive players and steal a whole fucking game.
Yes, we’re going to have to disagree on Siren.
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steal a whole fucking game.
You’ve said that a couple of times now, though @somasatori previously said that Sundance previously announced she was going on hiatus.
Do you have any evidence to back up your assertion?
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I will try to break this down and analyze it.
Disclosure on my bias: I am not Siren’s ooc friend and I’m not in discord off game communication with her. I’m not and never have been very involved in her plots and am not a frequent role play partner of hers. That being said I like her and get along with her. In addition I tend to favor staff in these sorts of debates as I feel like staffing is easier said than done and there is always going to be someone who isn’t happy. I also weigh in that staff are unpaid volunteers with their own real life responsibilities.
I believe Siren is being accused of stealing the game, showing favoritism, not answering jobs, not keeping the game active, dropping role players who don’t role play to her preference and keeping abusive players around.
Stealing the Game: Sundance has been inactive for a very long time and was less and less active before she fully left. I have no hard feelings as real life first and hope she is well. Siren I am pretty confident had and still has Sundance’s blessing and somebody needed to step up or Liberation won’t be staffed. I don’t think she stole, I think she was given.
Showing Favoritism: I don’t know, I’m not deep enough into things there to know. Most staffers are eventually accused of this. It’s a bit subjective. Also at the end of the day staff are people who will role play with those they enjoy and staff who try to tough it out and role play with those who irk them usually burn out.
Not Answering Jobs: yes this did happen, but I don’t judge harshly as staffing is tons of work and Siren was doing it mostly on her own for a while and likely started with a huge back log. This is also my answer for not keeping the game active. She also has a family irl.
Dropping role play partners: I would need receipts on this. What role play choices did she cut people off over? Sometimes there is a valid reason.
Keeping Abusive players around: There is a couple abusive players around. I have faith that when they act abusive under her watch she will act as she did with Addison. I don’t think Addison was the most problematic player there and I have concerns about a player there who has been banned on most other games. Because of this one player I do kind of agree with this complaint against Siren. This player is in best behavior mode right now as Liberation is really the only WOD that will have him. He can be charming and likable when he tries and has been laying it on thick to Siren. Still I think when he goes back to his bad ways Siren will take the ethical action. Time will tell how this will go. I suppose there is also a small unlikely chance he sincerely changed.
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So originally I wasn’t going to say anything here at all, despite knowing about the existence of this board for awhile now. For a guy who(reportedly) famously likes to complain, I generally am not the sort of person to come post it here on Complain Zone Dot Com.
What changed my mind was finding out that are still some unpleasant things are still happening on Liberation specifically regarding work that I created for the project. I want to highlight that this was a pretty persistent and thorny issue long before my removal for at least but not limited to a year, and it bothers me that it continues to be an issue after my ban.
The two things that brought me here are as follows: Firstly I was informed that Siren had picked up a very specific plot I designed and decided to run it herself after keeping it in an administrative bottleneck for well over a year that prevented me from bringing it to a conclusive end. Secondly I got a ping notice to the gmail account I have tied to the game that the email that Siren used for Liberation MU adjacent activities was trying to access my Google Doc files where I had a huge amount of game related information stored.
I would really rather that she didn’t do either of those things and I would prefer the plot notice be taken down. To me that would be the simplest and most respectful course of action.
Will she? Probably not.
I’m also here with the bias that I have been working in the same space as Siren for a long time. I was a long time contributor to the game and someone that Siren frequently tried to minimize the contributions of, despite knowing about those contributions.
So in the scope of typical MUSH operations I was not just some random player she had infrequent contact with.
With that bias I have to express that while she has a pleasant “customer service” approach to how she speaks/types to people but that presentation doesn’t always reflect or translate to a genuine commitment to treat people with a respectable amount of dignity or provide actual support to people when it is most needed.
I think if there’s any credibility behind that the staff was earnest in how difficult banning me was the right choice should be fairly easy. But these are also the same staffers that rammed one of my game lore write-ups through an LLM and posted the sloppified version of that document up on the game boards so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Whatever anyone thinks of me personally or of the decision to ban me from the game, I do think the current staff should be capable of creating their own material going forward without immediately resorting to the cannibalization of a full storyline written by someone they have just removed.
The plot in question is currently this one, but I wouldn’t be surprised the other ones had also been seized upon as well…
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I think if there’s any credibility behind that the staff was earnest in how difficult banning me was the right choice should be fairly easy. But these are also the same staffers that rammed one of my game lore write-ups through an LLM and posted the sloppified version of that document up on the game boards so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Mostly I’m quoting to highlight. Would love a Liberation staffer to respond to this because this hits me as pretty deeply Not OK if this is an accurate account of wtf happened.
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I have the receipts from that particular incident, including examples both documents.
Kraken particular has been heavily promoting LLM usage over there these days, which is one of the many things I was in disagreement with. I was also not the only player that found the uptick in LLM use concerning.
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Siren is well intentioned, intelligent and has good social understanding… I don’t think she enjoys giving out punishments…"
Evidence to the contrary on all those points:
Siren informed me that she deliberately ignored all communication from me for half a year because I “don’t take no for an answer,” so she “can’t be bothered” with me. I am legitimately extremely annoying, but what she didn’t do is tell me that I was being punished or why,
(Nor indeed did she tell me to close the discussion and take no for an answer until after this lengthy silent treatment, which extended to all communication with her and rendered all but BaRP play out of reach.)
By the way, covert punishment is a form of abuse. It’s not a mere red flag, it’s one of the crevasses that red flags warn you against. It’s wrong and abusive even if you do it to a horrible person like myself.
If you feel an urge to defend this behaviour, please click here before you give yourself a knee-injury.
- Stealing the game
Probably not. I haven’t seen any evidence that Sundance didn’t agree.
- Showing Favoritism
Yes.
at the end of the day staff are people who will role play with those they enjoy and staff who try to tough it out and role play with those who irk them usually burn out.
This is true. Not playing with people you actively dislike is normal and appropriate. It’s not a problem unless they need your contribution to play and you let them labour under the false impression that you intend to give it.
There is a very significant difference between blacklisting (I do not play with those I already know I can’t stand) and whitelisting (I only play with those I already know I love.) The former is not favouritism, and the latter is.
- Not Answering Jobs
Is happening. As of last week.
She’s still milking that backlog, but it keeled over with cramps and died of dehydration.
A thing is, +request/+jobs code numbers the jobs. So if +job 500 is 180 days old and I the one I submit today is +job 770, how many jobs have been submitted per day on average for the last six months?
The recent result of this for Lib is 1.6. The previous six month’s average was a hair less than two. This is a shitty overall metric because there are many ways in which the number of +jobs doesn’t at all reflect the hours of work put in, but the Lib fashion was for staff to almost always close the job with their first comment. It’s a fine metric when the question is a +request backlog specifically. It’s not sneaky or clever, I glance at two numbers every time I buy gas and know my fuel mileage is or isn’t changing, don’t you?
Siren completed four, not counting duplicates, in under 20 minutes, not thoughtfully but in complete paragraphs, while replying to my page to tell me she didn’t believe me that I didn’t report it as a bug just to spam the system, and that she ignored me intentionally.
“This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”
– A. Bertram Chandler -
Siren informed me that she deliberately ignored all communication from me for half a year because I “don’t take no for an answer,” so she “can’t be bothered” with me. I am legitimately extremely annoying, but what she didn’t do is tell me that I was being punished or why,
Have you tried not being “legitimately extremely annoying?” If not, why not?
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@hellfrog Yes.
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@Gashlycrumb said:
Siren informed me that she deliberately ignored all communication from me for half a year because I “don’t take no for an answer,” so she “can’t be bothered” with me. I am legitimately extremely annoying, but what she didn’t do is tell me that I was being punished or why,(Nor indeed did she tell me to close the discussion and take no for an answer until after this lengthy silent treatment, which extended to all communication with her and rendered all but BaRP play out of reach.)
By the way, covert punishment is a form of abuse. It’s not a mere red flag, it’s one of the crevasses that red flags warn you against. It’s wrong and abusive even if you do it to a horrible person like myself.
okay i don’t think this is great behavior. but not every instance of someone ignoring you is abusive. the silent treatment can absolutely be abusive in intimate relationships – familial, romantic, friendship, etc. but it is utilized for specific purposes when it’s abusive: controlling someone, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.
a hobby acquaintance ignoring you because you’ve made yourself repeatedly unpleasant for them to deal with could be immature, it could be irresponsible, it could even be assholeish. but i am hard-pressed to call the specific scenario you’ve described as abusive.
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@Roz said:
, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.ETA: Like the vast majority of abusive behaviour on MUs, which have an off-switch, this crevasse is an ankle-twister, not a terrifying fall to crushing injuries. If you decide that truth means it doesn’t legitimately qualify as abuse, I won’t argue.
“This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”
– A. Bertram Chandler -
Siren informed me that she deliberately ignored all communication from me for half a year because I “don’t take no for an answer,” so she “can’t be bothered” with me. I am legitimately extremely annoying, but what she didn’t do is tell me that I was being punished or why,
(Nor indeed did she tell me to close the discussion and take no for an answer until after this lengthy silent treatment, which extended to all communication with her and rendered all but BaRP play out of reach.)
By the way, covert punishment is a form of abuse. It’s not a mere red flag, it’s one of the crevasses that red flags warn you against. It’s wrong and abusive even if you do it to a horrible person like myself.
If you feel an urge to defend this behaviour, please click here before you give yourself a knee-injury.
If someone is thinking, ‘Hah, I am going to ignore everything this person does to make them feel bad, and passive aggressively make them realize how upset I am at them, until they have no choice but to apologize’. Yes, that is the Silent Treatment.
If someone is thinking, ‘Every time I see this guy I want to quit the game and never return, I am going to nope out and hope he leaves me alone’. This is not the Silent Treatment, that is someone very much hoping that you take a hint on a boundary. That is not someone punishing you, that is someone wanting no relationship with you of any kind ever, and they owe you nothing. Idk if you paypal’d them money for GMing and they ghosted you or something, but if you did not, then expecting that and then calling them an abuser because they would not deal with your shit is more than a little fucked up. I think it is better to tell someone that you will not interact with them, and they might be wasting their time, but it is not owed.
I do not think it would be abusive to ban you. It just isn’t. It would be saying, ‘we do not get along, best of luck in your future endeavors’. There is nothing stopping you from just making a new game and going and doing, and you frankly should if you do not get along with staff to that degree. I would never play on a game where staff obviously could not stand me, and that you do is absolutely mind boggling to me.
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okay i don’t think this is great behavior. but not every instance of someone ignoring you is abusive. the silent treatment can absolutely be abusive in intimate relationships – familial, romantic, friendship, etc. but it is utilized for specific purposes when it’s abusive: controlling someone, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.
a hobby acquaintance ignoring you because you’ve made yourself repeatedly unpleasant for them to deal with could be immature, it could be irresponsible, it could even be assholeish. but i am hard-pressed to call the specific scenario you’ve described as abusive.
I’m generally in agreement with this but with the caveat that the the dynamics are often askew when you’re dealing with a scenario that involves a power imbalance. Namely between someone equipped with a staff tag and administrative privileges.
Ultimately I have no idea what @gashlycrumb was so persistent about or what their particular situation was but added context there could potentially be meaningful. I am going to assume good faith and the Crumb was reaching out to Siren in a way that was perfectly normal for a player to do.
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@MidnightCreature All your years of hard work snatched up by staff, your name stripped from it and your character banned? Maybe some of the current staff did learn a thing or two from Sundance before she " " “left” " " (source: literally happened to me and my IRL partner a few years ago, though the attempt to access your Google Docs is a low they didn’t even try with me). And now with LLMs slithering into the mix? Talk about a race to the bottom.
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@Roz said:
, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.someone trying to avoid you is not doing those things. like, unless you have additional context to add to indicate that these actions were taken to punish you and not to simply — not have to interact with you.
@MidnightCreature said in Liberation Drama!?:
Ultimately I have no idea what @gashlycrumb was so persistent about or what their particular situation was but added context there could potentially be meaningful. I am going to assume good faith and the Crumb was reaching out to Siren in a way that was perfectly normal for a player to do.i mean…i feel that i am responding to how gashly characterized the situation themselves. in which they seemed to agree that they were being a difficult player. they presented the complaint as “you repeatedly wouldn’t take no for an answer” (which is not normal good player behavior) and didn’t refute the characteristic. so i am taking their presentation in good faith. just not agreeing with the resulting descriptor.
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I do not think it would be abusive to ban you. It just isn’
You are absolutely correct. It’s not abusive to ban someone because you don’t want to deal with them. I don’t even think it really matters what it is about them that causes that. I didn’t get banned, though.
@Roz This is the GM that I need to do anything that needs a GM. They withhold all of this service interminably because I annoy them but leave me to believe I am in the queue. They did not tell me I annoyed them or that they were doing this because of it. They knew I had been frustrated by this long term.
Ultimately I have no idea what @gashlycrumb was so persistent about
There’s an assumption that I was super-persistent about anything. It actually had to do with a stat that I was approved with by mistake. I asked to get it turned into something allowed, and for advice about what to do with it. Siren renamed it but didn’t advise and left the necessary info blank and stopped responding. Maybe six weeks later I poked it and she said she hadn’t responded because she thought it was finished and closed it, but I still had the blank so I tried again. Then we had a new sphere GM who asked me to submit something during her brief tenure. Six months pass, I’ve got newer unrelated stuff stale in the queue but zero return contact.
“This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”
– A. Bertram Chandler -
i mean…i feel that i am responding to how gashly characterized the situation themselves. in which they seemed to agree that they were being a difficult player.
My bad. I don’t agree that I am a difficult player. I think the opposite. But if you find me annoying, who am I to say you’re wrong? And you still shouldn’t cheat at RPGs to avoid annoying people when you’re the one who can just tell them to leave the table and avoid them properly.
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