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MU Peeves Thread
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@Raaspra This, but I go anyway because I need to make connections but then I don’t make connections because I’m miserable yay.
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I think it sort of goes back to the point that was made about needing to be liked. I don’t doubt that there might be super fucked up people that are out there, deliberately trying to get someone removed from a game or create whisper campaigns to make them leave. As someone that has been staffing a good sized game for over three years now, I can say that those people are fairly rare as long as the game culture is established in such a way to frown upon that sort of bullshit.
Most of the time, what happens is that people take someone not being as friendly or receptive as they expect or hooking up with someone they wanted as an IC partner or getting some story thing that they wanted, and blow that up into some sort of rivalry that is wholly unnecessary. Often, it is also one-sided as one side is all worked up about the other person existing in the same space as them while the other party just doesn’t care. It might be different for a really small game with a close-knit group, but for larger ones, there is usually enough going on that you can co-exist without ever having to interact. If someone is complaining about being ‘run off a game’ and it’s not because they fucked around, found out, and got banned, then it usually has a lot more to do with weird and wrong perceptions than an actual conspiracy to get rid of them, in my experience.
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@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:
There have definitely been times that a person has left the game I’ve been on and I have felt a deep and abiding relief about their absence, but I could not think of a single action I took towards them to encourage them to leave. Like … unless my not answering when someone I don’t want to rp with asks on the rp channel is somehow responsible for them leaving. In which case … shrug.
This. But also, the absence of someone I’m trying to avoid and then thinking to myself “Are they just playing someone else I’m not aware of because I’d really like to not interact with them…” And then paranoia sets in.
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@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@schrodingerscig said in MU Peeves Thread:
@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
The idea of ‘running people off of games’.
The staffing example is weird and awk but I’m curious - how does this translate to ‘running someone off a game’? Remembering past interactions sure, it’s the active part of the accusation that always boggles me.What actions do these people take that causes someone to leave a game? Are you just talking about getting them banned?
My objection is to the idea that disliking someone or not wanting to interact with them is actively trying to make them leave a place.
I think I just misinterpreted what you were saying. I don’t understand the idea that not RPing with someone == running someone off the game, but I guess that’s what you were referring to. It must be something specific I haven’t encountered before.
I thought you were talking about someone actively trying to get someone to leave a game, versus a player perceiving things weird and feeling unwelcome. Certainly, in the context of your comment, that’s definitely that isn’t done, but that someone chooses to have done to them.
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@schrodingerscig said in MU Peeves Thread:
thought you were talking about someone actively trying to get someone to leave a game,
This is the claim I was talking about, yeah. I’m saying I don’t understand how this happens. I see a lot of accusations that so and so ran so and so off a game - or tried to - and there don’t ever seem to be examples of how that is done.
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I played on a game a few years back where a couple of players continuously gave me grief. I’d send stuff out to schedule scenes, one person would reply, I’d schedule it for the one person, those people would complain enthusiastically sometimes at me or just talk behind my back about how I wasn’t doing enough/doing it right, and it’d get back to me. Just lots of hm, petty things? I don’t know that they ever did it as some concentrated effort to get me to leave.
But it sure did get me to leave.
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I’ve definitely been run off of a game before, lol. I think at some point, staff has to co-sign those kinds of shenanigans when it goes beyond not just getting the scenes with who you want or whatever. Granted, in that case, it was later revealed that multiple staff bits and their associated alts were all more than likely one incredibly committed individual.
The last straw on this particular game for me was when I ran a slice-of-life scene as a mentor-type character for multiple players who weren’t getting a lot of attention due to timezone politics, and I invited anyone/everyone, people attended, it went fine, it was a perfectly normal situation – and then I got a passive-aggressive nitpicky @mail about how I could improve. From someone who not only didn’t attend but posted a log where-in their character shit all over the event in question and my character. Sooo cute.
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@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@schrodingerscig said in MU Peeves Thread:
thought you were talking about someone actively trying to get someone to leave a game,
This is the claim I was talking about, yeah. I’m saying I don’t understand how this happens. I see a lot of accusations that so and so ran so and so off a game - or tried to - and there don’t ever seem to be examples of how that is done.
I have seen it done, although I didn’t realize it had been done until I reconnected with the victim some time later by chance. As to how it was done? Whisper campaign - a group decided to tell a great many other players that X was being abusive towards another character/player (who was, in this case, mine), and that they were harassing me, etc. No one ever reached out to me to ask about this (which I could have told them was entirely untrue), but instead harassed the target and froze them out of things until they dropped out of the game entirely.
I remain really confused why no one asked me about this if they ‘cared’ about my well-being enough to attack someone else over it. But it was apparently effective. So, yeah. It happens. It’s not that hard to do, honestly, because most people do get a sense of ‘not being wanted’ and then just drop out. We’ve seen it with a number of abusers in the community, who isolate a player by telling everyone how ‘crazy’ they are or inventing things they’ve said or done that drive people away.
The thing that really upsets me is: abusers will always exist. But what makes their abuse possible is the number of players who will jump on based on second-hand rumors and knowledge. If you have a concern about someone? ASK THEM. If someone is trying to whip you up into a frenzy to ‘protect’ someone else, ask yourself if they might actually have another motive, and who benefits if you do what they want. Don’t pass rumors you aren’t damn sure about, and honestly, pass them to staff first, not to every random player you come across.
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Now I have seen some examples!
@Pyrephox said in MU Peeves Thread:
If someone is trying to whip you up into a frenzy to ‘protect’ someone else, ask yourself if they might actually have another motive, and who benefits if you do what they want.
y y y y
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@helvetica said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’ve definitely been run off of a game before, lol. I think at some point, staff has to co-sign those kinds of shenanigans when it goes beyond not just getting the scenes with who you wa
Sloppily quoting here, but yeah. In my experience these other players were personal friends of the wizard. So what would I do other than vote with my feet? Plenty of other games out there with really nice people.
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@tsar Everyone knows every staffer on every game is corrupt and will cheat for their friends. It’s about not catching their attention.
Some of them have motion-activated vision
fr fr
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@Snackness It’s like we share a brain and a soul.
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@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@tsar Everyone knows every staffer on every game is corrupt and will cheat for their friends. It’s about not catching their attention.
Some of them have motion-activated vision
That’s assuming we have friends.
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Whenever my client flashes BECAUSE SOMETHING NEW HAPPENED and it’s not actually anything new, just like me getting idled out or something. The disappointment is real.
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My least favorite is seeing the blink, getting excited, flipping to it, and seeing Soandso has disconnected when I’ve been trying to catch them all week. UGH.
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@KarmaBum This is why I have weather emits turned off, even if I think they’re cool.
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This is the tamest self-peeve ever, but…
Circling around a pose or reaction that will be extremely interesting and inject life into a scene, getting most of the way through it and then realizing it’s completely out of character for your given PC, and is entirely driven by OOC logic.
And then quietly backspacing out of it and mustering only a lukewarm pose, delivered late.
I try to lean into the most interesting ways to spur a scene, but it’s crappy to look upon your work and just realize, “This would be fun, but this is not the character that would actually react this way.”
Related: When I actually pose it before realizing it.
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STORY. Once upon a time on an MMO far far away there was someone in my guild who nearly destroyed it with a whisper campaign that had to have been going on for at least a year. I can only guess at the motivation, but I think my guess is pretty accurate, and that’s that this player was, uh. I’m going with “Spreadsheet Supervillain”. Most spreadsheet enthusiasts are lovely people I deeply appreciate because they have the ability to be slightly organized, which is basically benevolent wizardry. This person wanted to Organize Things and that also meant Organizing What Other Players Did. She was also a Very Serious Roleplayer who was convinced anyone who did anything slightly goofy in the general vicinity of RP was not a Very Serious Roleplayer. She once blew up at @Solstice for jumping around while we were hanging out waiting for her to get back to the group. This was such a terrible breach of Serious Roleplay Decorum that she brought it up months later as an example of someone who just wasn’t interested in roleplay, and thus not fit for the guild. It was incredible.
In any case, at some point she started sending private messages to guildmembers about me, and a few others that had unknowingly slid onto her carefully ordered Excel-powered shitlist by RPing personal character story stuff without allowing her to choose the when and how (did she even express her desire to do this? lol no). At the same time, she’d send private messages to me (and the others) being very concerned, goodness there are anonymous guildmembers telling her that they’re upset that I’m doing <thing> or not doing <thing> or maybe they’re just all concerned too, and gosh she’s just trying to be helpful and encouraging. Maybe it was a coincidence that she started doing this more or less right after I told the guild that I have some pretty severe social anxiety, but ahaha no it wasn’t, she literally backed me into a corner at a guild meetup to tell me how everyone had been talking about me on the drive over.
This went on for ages, but skipping to the end, nobody knew the extent of what she’d been doing until it suddenly blew up. Folks I’d been friendly with for years never interacted with me again. She skipped out immediately without a single glance back, but everything was so poisoned, and emotions were so raw, that I ended up leaving the guild anyway. I rejoined some decent length of time later, and I still RP’d with the guild in the interim, but that’s my personal experience with someone trying to run me out of an RP space.
I’m wiser to that bullshit these days, but I think ultimately the tl;dr of it is that it can and does absolutely happen, just not in the volume or necessarily the circumstances that the accusation tends to be thrown about, and it’s probably very dependent on a person’s vulnerabilities and how well the manipulator can poke at them. Most folks, whether they like someone or not, have far better things to do than spend significant chunks of their leisure time trying to master chess someone off a game.
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@kalakh I had somebody pull the ‘some people expressed concern to me’ line on me as late as last week.
There is only one appropriate answer. If these people will not stand up themselves and voice their concerns, or at the very least allow their names to be used, then their complaint is invalid.
People with concerns should go to staff and make themselves known. At the very least they should allow the person they pick to talk to staff to identify them. Because it’s bloody easy to pull ‘some people agree with me, actually everyone does’ out of your arse, and there is no way to verify that these people even exist.
