MU Peeves Thread
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@Gashlycrumb I get the feeling that either the staff on those games ended up having too many players on their game or are burned out. Staff need to accurately judge how many people they can handle. Quality is better than quantity, quantity does not equate to the success of a game. Like you said, they also need to man up and tell players that they do not want to deal with or interact with straight up about it. If it something the player can be given a chance to change, offer that chance early and make a decision. If it’s a player they just don’t jive with, kindly ask them to leave. Don’t wait people’s time.
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My approach as a player has been to try and consider myself a guest in the house of the Head Wiz and be respectful of the staff and try not pester them beyond a gentle, occasional, nudge if warranted.
If I’m doing that and shit there sucks anyway, I feel confident it’s not my fault and I leave.
You will be miserable trying to demand attention from people who either can’t, or don’t want to, give it to you - and you will make them miserable in the process.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.
A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@howyadoin said in MU Peeves Thread:
You will be miserable trying to demand attention from people who either can’t, or don’t want to, give it to you - and you will make them miserable in the process.
+100000000000000
But also…
If you aren’t having fun then leave. If you find a problem on every game you play? Stop MUSHing.
I’m old, my health is shit, and I’m tired. I love a great deal of people in this hobby but this hobby became a chore for me. I’m sure I made interacting with me a chore b/c I was too stubborn to realize that after 15-20yrs of active mushing I was burnt out.
These days I play video games, write, and spend time with my spouse. None of these things make me feel frustrated or like I’m pushing myself to do something unrewarding.
Frfr, if you are finding that everywhere you go there are problems? You are the problem. I love being around a lot of people in this hobby, but I am so burnt out that I could no longer enjoy spending that time people that I genuinely believe are amazing. This wasn’t anyone’s fault but my own.
Unless you keep running into notorious bad actors in our community, it may be time to take a break.
cob.alt@Discord
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@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m old, my health is shit, and I’m tired. I love a great deal of people in this hobby but this hobby became a chore for me. I’m sure I made interacting with me a chore b/c I was too stubborn to realize that after 15-20yrs of active mushing I was burnt out.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.
A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.
I mean this very nearly literally. Not ‘over time Abelard became tiresome to AwesomeStaffer and Abelard didn’t know it’ which certainly does happen, but ‘AwesomeStaffer has not responded to Abelard since they approved him.’ Awesome has no bad experience of Abelard. Little ways Abelard is annoying haven’t built up over time.
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@Cobalt said in MU Peeves Thread:
I love a great deal of people in this hobby but this hobby became a chore for me.
WORD.
For me, it was just realizing that I really don’t want to play what most people want to play. I have zero interest in RPing flirting or slice-of-life; since that’s pretty much the meat-and-potatoes of every game…
…meh.
I don’t feel like I’m missing anything right now. If another game like Horror or LA came along, where every scene felt like it was building toward a comprehensive story, I’d absolutely be down to clown.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.
There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with, that may manifest in ways you don’t anticipate. Something you gotta’ just roll with and improve upon. People forget as folk cycle in and out, but I wonder how many people will forget Polk trying to torch 2 game servers in like… 1 year.
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@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:
People forget as folk cycle in and out, but I wonder how many people will forget Polk trying to torch 2 game servers in like… 1 year.
People forget, the North (me) remembers.
Though I remember in the same way I remember my moods: I know that I’m mad, I don’t remember why I’m mad.
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@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:
There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with, that may manifest in ways you don’t anticipate. Something you gotta’ just roll with and improve upon. People forget as folk cycle in and out, but I wonder how many people will forget Polk trying to torch 2 game servers in like… 1 year.
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@KarmaBum said in MU Peeves Thread:
I don’t feel like I’m missing anything right now. If another game like Horror or LA came along, where every scene felt like it was building toward a comprehensive story, I’d absolutely be down to clown.
I’ve been having a blast running Silent Heaven for nearly 3 years. The players constantly surprise me with the things they come up with. I don’t know if I ever played with you (I missed out on Horror and I was too busy with SH to play LA). But I’ve heard you’re a legendary player, and you’re welcome to play!
You may have checked it out in the past. I know there were a few people who weren’t a fan of the spatially-consistent grid, nor the real-time public RP. I admittedly cribbed from Arx on that matter, haha. So, no worries if it’s not your thing.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare Thanks, the offer is very much appreciated.
The theme/setting/whatever always seemed exactly up my alley, and it’s one of those things I’m sure I’d enjoy if I took the time to get into it. But Evennia and me just don’t jive.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.
A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.
I try my best not to be a problem for other players and staff, even when it means a much worse player experience for me. It’s better overall for me in terms of how I feel about myself, but I’ve been finding I dislike most other players more and more over the years, for what appears to be the exact opposite type of behavior.
I find myself trying to “yes and”, find places for us all to work together, give us all story elements to work with, and then when it’s handed off, none of that seems to be returned or very rarely. Which makes playing harder and harder the more time I sink into games.
Mix in the number of times sunk into apps, building characters, opening jobs, and just things falling into black holes where staff seems to think player time doesn’t equal any amount of their concern, and it all leads to a horrible overall vibe. But maybe there are better games out there that I could find and play. If anyone has suggestions, hit me up!
I usually slip off and go to the PS5 or PC, but I love to write, and it’s just not the same, you know?
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@KarmaBum said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Jumpscare Thanks, the offer is very much appreciated.
The theme/setting/whatever always seemed exactly up my alley, and it’s one of those things I’m sure I’d enjoy if I took the time to get into it. But Evennia and me just don’t jive.
Thank you! If I may be curious, what about Evennia don’t you jive with? If it’s about the syntax, I’ve removed a lot of the default commands and made them much more user-friendly. For example, there’s none of that desc/brains=“Very smart.” syntax. Now you just type desc, choose the thing you want to edit, and start typing. Much of the game follows the principle of “just start typing; it’ll likely know what you want to do.”
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Jumpscare There are two big barriers for me. This is speaking to Silent Heaven specifically.
1 - Client dependency. I play a lot from my iPad with a keyboard attached. Between the sucky options for mobile clients and the inability to keep firmly connected via the web, I’m pretty well locked out.
2 - “Join our Discord!” This is a big turnoff for me. I don’t want to have to join a Discord for a game; it makes me uncomfortable. While I’m not sure that joining Discord is mandatory on this game, it IS one of three prominent buttons on the home page, so it comes across that way. Keep it on the MUSH, thanks.
The syntax and stuff isn’t a deal-breaker, as long as it’s documented. I am admittedly a very independent player and do not like asking for help with commands. I am much more likely to just logout than to page a staffer if I can’t figure out a command - which always left a bad taste in my mouth on the Big Evennia Game That Shut Down That Shall Not Be Named, so that’s probably created a general bias in my head against the platform.
I’m also not into coded crafting, playing with coded NPCs, etc. That feels like video game stuff, not RP stuff to me. So the fact that there’s commands for things like “Food,” “Gaming” and “Gardening” suggests this won’t be up my alley.
All that to say… it’s mostly a vibe thing. Evennia does a lot of things very well, from what I can gather, but it doesn’t support casual, web-based RP very effectively.
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That’s perfectly understandable! And thanks for expounding, it really helps me to understand where Silent Heaven stands in the MU ecosystem, haha.
Here are some responses to your points. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to convince you to play. I’m just providing clarifications.
1- I understand the frustration with mobile closing the connection the instant you tab out. I’ve recently learned about split screen being a feature for Android phones to help with web connections. It’s still not ideal, but maybe someone reading this doesn’t know about split screen and could benefit from it. (Tap the button that lets you switch apps, then tap the icon at the top, and choose “Split Screen.”)
2- The Discord server is absolutely not necessary. It’s just for OOC chatter. I’ve seen a number of issues for when public OOC is on the same medium as IC, involving people blurring the lines between the two. And for a game like Silent Heaven that could carry higher bleed than usual, I felt it prudent to separate the two. Everything else, such as event scheduling and notifications about OOC updates, are available in-game.
3- I worked hard on making an intro sequence that sets the tone while teaching the most necessary commands, so there are no worries there, haha. The first 30 minutes of any new player’s experience are the most important minutes, because those are when they’re most likely to bail if they can’t figure something out.
4- I fully understand that the “crunchiness” of the game mechanics is a dealbreaker. I did my best to make it support RP, not supplant it. For example, the automated NPC responses are to help when PCs or Storytellers aren’t available, with teaching commands, providing basic setting information, and suggesting safe places to explore. While it helps with some of the cognitive offload of initiating new players into a setting, as well as standardizing rules around certain aspects of the game, it is ultimately gamier, and I accept that that reduces freedom.
Thank you again for responding!
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@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:
There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with
That is so.
Nevertheless, no.
I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.
It’s pretty demoralising and anxiety-provoking to tell people that unresponsive staff probably dislike them personally for probably good reasons. And it doesn’t go well with being compassionate, patient, and willing to extend trust to staff.
Seems pretty off when paired with concern over game-runners feeling discouraged because somebody admits that players can often get a pretty good idea of how active they are and where.
What @xCroaker said just exactly except I suck at video games and don’t play them.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.
I think our hobby is getting small enough that it’s getting more and more common.
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@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.
I think our hobby is getting small enough that it’s getting more and more common.
Then people in authority need to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.
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@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:
Then people in authority need to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.
Let me fix that for you:
Then people
in authorityneed to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who have developed a bad reputation in our hobby that have been told they have a bad reputation, with receipts, and they just dismiss any argument in that regard. Sure, there are plenty of staffers who are non-confrontational, so they just ignore the people that have a bad rep, which is a problem in its own right, but largely it feels, to me at least, that the people with the bad reputation are just as guilty of bad communication skills as the staff.
I guess after watching other staffers on other games attempt to communicate and get shut down, staff on the games these people are currently on give up on attempting to talk it out. Communication is a two way street, and what it seems like we have is problem staffers who aren’t willing to talk it out, and problem players who aren’t willing to accept constructive feedback.
