MU Peeves Thread

[sao]

@Alveraxus I am skeptical that cliques are something that can be effectively policied.

[Alveraxus]

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Alveraxus I am skeptical that cliques are something that can be effectively policied.

Yeah, they can’t. The policy page that we wrote up literally says that we can’t, but that we want to try to encourage people to go outside their clique when they can as a general principle.

The only time we would get involved is if a clique is also gate keeping, which is a whole other thing.

Most games have cliques. Usually, a clique is harmless to other players if it just exists on its own off to the side, unless they are sitting on top of something that other players want to be involved in. Except in some cases where it can lead to bullying, which again, hopefully, can be addressed with awareness. At least, I’d like to think so.

[Roz]

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Alveraxus I am skeptical that cliques are something that can be effectively policied.

Yeah, they can’t. The policy page that we wrote up literally says that we can’t, but that we want to try to encourage people to go outside their clique when they can as a general principle.

The only time we would get involved is if a clique is also gate keeping, which is a whole other thing.

I think the big solution to this particular thing – that is, one player or a small group of players controlling an area of plot that more people should have access to – has to be solved on the staff side. And not by saying “you have to RP with these people about this thing,” but by simply giving more people access via GM fiat. If a plot thread isn’t spreading as much as you want, figure out how to drop more clues in the laps of other people who aren’t involved yet.

I just don’t think there’s ever a “general principle” here to even encourage people to do, really; people are motivated to RP with others for the fun of it, and you can’t fix anything by making it into an etiquette thing. I honestly think the best approach is to simply drop your GM story seeds in the laps of a variety of people.

[hellfrog]

I’d advise against even having a policy that mentions cliques. Even though we all know friendship BAD

[Alveraxus]

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

I just don’t think there’s ever a “general principle” here to even encourage people to do, really; people are motivated to RP with others for the fun of it, and you can’t fix anything by making it into an etiquette thing. I honestly think the best approach is to simply drop your GM story seeds in the laps of a variety of people.

100% where we were going with it. We have Player and Staff Obligations outlined separately (and player obligations are minimal, really), but from a staff perspective we have this:

As a staff, we will do our best to ensure that any plot that we run will have multiple entry points, unless it is very specifically catered to a specific group, which itself will be a rarity. We admit that this may require some OOC conceits in order to be able to combat the very real IC leanings that might want to induce people to “keep things close to the vest”. We get that. But we would rather find creative ways to get everyone involved than create an environment where someone sees something fun that their character would want to be involved in, but cannot get to it.

[helvetica]

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

friendship BAD

and stupid

[Alveraxus]

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d advise against even having a policy that mentions cliques. Even though we all know friendship BAD

Yeah. We’re still going back and forth on this. I think what we really want to promote is openness and accessibility, and to prevent any one group from driving players away from any one thing. It feels tricky to call it out, but sometimes you have to talk about the elephant in the room to avoid stepping in its poop.

Or something.

[Roz]

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

It feels tricky to call it out, but sometimes you have to talk about the elephant in the room to avoid stepping in its poop.

I admit I loled at this a bit. Is it really the elephant in the room?? It’s one of the community’s favorite topics of conversation to rehash

[helvetica]

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d advise against even having a policy that mentions cliques. Even though we all know friendship BAD

Yeah. We’re still going back and forth on this. I think what we really want to promote is openness and accessibility, and to prevent any one group from driving players away from any one thing. It feels tricky to call it out, but sometimes you have to talk about the elephant in the room to avoid stepping in its poop.

Or something.

While I am also skeptical that cliques can be effectively policed, defining a game’s culture is as useful for players as it is for admin.

With ares games where you can see all the logs neatly organized, I’ve seen cliques form around a plot thread like a swarm of locusts ready to eat it all up – and I honestly don’t think any of those people saw themselves as a clique. They probably just saw themselves as organized. And that’s a slippery slope, because having organized players who are inclusive can make or break a story.

Going in with the intention of “keeping a close eye on groups of players who come off as insular” might be less charged than naming thee a clique or whatever the fuck.

[Jenn]

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’d advise against even having a policy that mentions cliques. Even though we all know friendship BAD

I think what we really want to promote is openness and accessibility

Here’s the thing, though. A lot of gamers have a LONG history with one another. And sometimes a KEY piece of a game’s accessibility is the ability for some players to block and 100% ignore each other both IC’ly AND OOC’ly. So. Anything that is depending on player A /having/ to interact with player B to move meta-plot forward is going to die as an option if only player A or B has a piece of info that the other would need in order to have the clues spread through the game.

This is easily done by staff and story-tellers having all kinds of similar and over-lapping seeds where you only need a percentage of folks to work together to solve it, or to have a few groups solve it from various different and cool perspectives. But to have Players have to be responsible for needing to scene with people who have shown bad faith and intentional fuckery in the past? It’s not going to end well for anyone, and it’s very possible that many plots will just dead end before they’ve even gotten started.

[Alveraxus]

@Jenn said in MU Peeves Thread:

But to have Players have to be responsible for needing to scene with people who have shown bad faith and intentional fuckery in the past? It’s not going to end well for anyone, and it’s very possible that many plots will just dead end before they’ve even gotten started.

Yeah. I don’t mean to derail this thread with too much talk about our game which is not yet open (haha, you all can trash us fully once we’re open, we’re bracing for it ), but this is 100% our belief and Roz called out how it’s a staff obligation above. We have that as a guiding principle, and what we’re really trying to call out with our “policy” is staff obligation to find a way to work other players into things they want to be in WITHOUT having to rely upon players RPing with anyone they don’t want to RP with. We have this listed above everything else on the gatekeeping page:

Prime Directive: We do not, and will not, compel anyone to RP with anyone that they do not want to RP with. Period.

The onus is on US, as Staff and Storytellers, to get Player A to where they want to go if Players B, C, and D don’t want to actively engage with them to get them there.

Then they can stare vacantly across the empty pond at each other and not interact, but each dip their toes in happily.

Or something like that, anyway.

(Unless they are really dirty enough to pollute the entire pond with their toe, and then we’ll be right there with you tossing them out.)

[SpaceKhomeini]

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Alveraxus I am skeptical that cliques are something that can be effectively enforced.

I agree that they simply can’t. I think as far as this topic goes, really the only effective action that can be taken from a Staff/ST perspective is to ensure they’re not in a position to gatekeep public RP (and specific plot hooks) from other players.

As far as players consciously avoiding and being able to avoid other people of their choosing, that’s a whole other topic but it’s a necessary prerogative, IMO. It’s just a lot harder to do that on some games than others.

[mietze]

Sometimes there’s a difficulty in that there isn’t gatekeeping in a direct way so much as someone who is unpleasant to a person who wants to engage being all over everything but its not personal or purposeful targeting. I call that plot-licking. When someone is so all over everything they need to answer or dominate all conversations, spam everything, seem distressed if they are not able to be “helpful” to everything going on with it. Kinda akin to the toddler that just loves a thing so much they have to slobber all over it in that primal way.

A lot of times it can be just easier to stay away. I definitely have someone I avoid now because their ooc behavior towards me made me super uncomfortable (I don’t believe it to be personal in my observation and it wasn’t breaking any rules, could be they were just trying to be funny and it bombed for me, so its not a reportable thing.) and really has made me not want to proactively engage again not because they are horrible but because I just don’t want to be stressed out! But because of this person’s high activity I have to really think hard about if/how I want to engage with things and don’t pursue other things because I just find it off-putting. And other people haven’t been weirded out by this person so this is a me thing.

So it does chase me away from certain things. However, I don’t think it’s their fault and one person’s slobbering all over everything is another’s active engagement. I’m not sure its possible for staff to really see that necessarily!

I actually think though that its this sort of thing that curtail more people from jumping into things they want rather than flagrant NONE SHALL PASS. I do think though that its the person that’s put off’s responsibility to learn how to work past or accept some way around it.

Some people just don’t click and that should be fine. But I am always super grateful for structures that allow for many alternate pathways to info or plot interaction even though its more work. Sometimes players rub each other the wrong way! No one should be penalized for that imo. But its good to have that in mind when figuring out access!

[bear_necessities]

I’m in a bit of a COVID brain fog so if I missed something huge here I’m sorry, but you can’t policy around everything and if you try to policy around it all, you’re just going to exhaust yourself.

Focus on telling stories and giving people access to the stories.

[Roadspike]

@mietze Yeah. This is definitely something I both see and feel very much so. And I think that about the only thing Staff can do is specifically stake out some events for “people who haven’t gotten as involved as they’d like” to create some GMed scenes without plot-lickers. It’s not a perfect solution and has its own problems, but it’s -something- at least.

[Aria]

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

Sometimes there’s a difficulty in that there isn’t gatekeeping in a direct way so much as someone who is unpleasant to a person who wants to engage being all over everything but its not personal or purposeful targeting. I call that plot-licking. When someone is so all over everything they need to answer or dominate all conversations, spam everything, seem distressed if they are not able to be “helpful” to everything going on with it. Kinda akin to the toddler that just loves a thing so much they have to slobber all over it in that primal way.

A lot of times it can be just easier to stay away. I definitely have someone I avoid now because their ooc behavior towards me made me super uncomfortable (I don’t believe it to be personal in my observation and it wasn’t breaking any rules, could be they were just trying to be funny and it bombed for me, so its not a reportable thing.) and really has made me not want to proactively engage again not because they are horrible but because I just don’t want to be stressed out! But because of this person’s high activity I have to really think hard about if/how I want to engage with things and don’t pursue other things because I just find it off-putting. And other people haven’t been weirded out by this person so this is a me thing.

This. Not too long ago, I encountered a player like this who got involved in everything. And when I say that, it’s not me being hyperbolic.

I mean they made me super uncomfortable with open IC hostility for posing into a public event, when they had never met nor interacted with my character before and who I did not, as far I was aware, have any previous interactions with on other games or really know OOC aside from passing channel conversations. On the game where I first encountered them, it reached a point that there was literally one PRP left that they weren’t involved in. The PRP-runner was kind enough to include me in and then said player decided that should be under their IC purview, too, and pushed their way into it because of what type of plot it was.

Cue me encountering them displaying the exact same kind of behavior on the next three games I tried, some of which were running concurrently. It has reached a point where I have seriously wondered if this person sleeps because I have no idea how they have the energy or the brain space to RP this many things, at this pace, across this many games all at once.

Also can I possibly use their blood to sustainably power my house?

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

Sometimes there’s a difficulty in that there isn’t gatekeeping in a direct way so much as someone who is unpleasant to a person who wants to engage being all over everything but its not personal or purposeful targeting. I call that plot-licking. When someone is so all over everything they need to answer or dominate all conversations, spam everything, seem distressed if they are not able to be “helpful” to everything going on with it. Kinda akin to the toddler that just loves a thing so much they have to slobber all over it in that primal way.

A lot of times it can be just easier to stay away. I definitely have someone I avoid now because their ooc behavior towards me made me super uncomfortable (I don’t believe it to be personal in my observation and it wasn’t breaking any rules, could be they were just trying to be funny and it bombed for me, so its not a reportable thing.) and really has made me not want to proactively engage again not because they are horrible but because I just don’t want to be stressed out! But because of this person’s high activity I have to really think hard about if/how I want to engage with things and don’t pursue other things because I just find it off-putting. And other people haven’t been weirded out by this person so this is a me thing.

This. Not too long ago, I encountered a player like this who got involved in everything. And when I say that, it’s not me being hyperbolic.

I mean they made me super uncomfortable with open IC hostility for posing into a public event, when they had never met nor interacted with my character before and who I did not, as far I was aware, have any previous interactions with on other games or really know OOC aside from passing channel conversations. On the game where I first encountered them, it reached a point that there was literally one PRP left that they weren’t involved in. The PRP-runner was kind enough to include me in and then said player decided that should be under their IC purview, too, and pushed their way into it because of what type of plot it was.

Cue me encountering them displaying the exact same kind of behavior on the next three games I tried, some of which were running concurrently. It has reached a point where I have seriously wondered if this person sleeps because I have no idea how they have the energy or the brain space to RP this many things, at this pace, across this many games all at once.

Also can I possibly use their blood to sustainably power my house?

I’m fairly certain I know of whom you speak and this person is like a stinkbug infestation.

[Jenn]

@SpaceKhomeini NGL… Like. The voice in my head insists this has to be me. Because I’m usually bored af and just looking for ANY distraction to give me another ten minutes of moving forward. And I absolutely know that if I were other folks, I’d be annoying the crap out of myself. So. On the vague chance it is me, or has been me, or later becomes me… Everyone has blanket permission to ask me to cut back on the plot licking and I’ll do my damnedest to accommodate.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Roadspike said in MU Peeves Thread:

@mietze Yeah. This is definitely something I both see and feel very much so. And I think that about the only thing Staff can do is specifically stake out some events for “people who haven’t gotten as involved as they’d like” to create some GMed scenes without plot-lickers. It’s not a perfect solution and has its own problems, but it’s -something- at least.

One of the things that got me disengaging more often than not in the last year or so was repeatedly running afoul of the same handful of sharing-averse people with a sense of manic “pick-me” energy who manage to maneuver their characters into positions of key plot importance (often just based on who they know) in ways that barely made sense to me. If I’m going to basically play an NPC, I should probably just go do something else.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Jenn

I had no idea who you are and went to go look at your playlist and I don’t recognize a single one of these names. So no flames from me.