Echoes of the Past: Problem Players
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So I’ve been on the games that EvilGrayson is referring to in regards to this players, which means I’ve witnessed their behavior, I know who they are, and I can vouch for all of it and more.
Why?
Because I’m embarrassed to say that I was stupid enough to fall for it for a little while.
I saw these people utterly smear someone in what I believed to be a just campaign against a sex pest who was getting away with it, because said pest was (perceived to be) female and their target was (perceived to be) male, only to watch them turn around and cozy up to that player IC and OOC on the next game. Initially, I was happy to see them do it not only because I was one of the recipients of the pest’s weirdness, but because the pest’s primary target was a character with far less social standing by the theme of the game and would’ve had a very hard time pushing back. I later realized that they weren’t trying to use their standing to help someone who had less influence then they did. They were relishing making a public display of their own influence to people they were trying to impress at the time and anything that vaguely resembled taking a stance was little more than virtue-signaling, something to be discarded as soon as it was inconvenient.
I have personally asked one of these players to stop accosting me for TS because it was making me uncomfortable, an act I felt obligated to apologize to them for if I somehow misled them, only to have them respond by telling me that they were so proud of me for setting a boundary and then promptly make a “joke” about how I can’t control what goes on in their head and they’d continue imagining us in IC threesomes. I played this off as something funny to minimize my discomfort in the moment, a tactic that anyone who has been harassed or abused will be familiar with as way to end the encounter as quickly as possible. Every woman who’s ever been harassed on the street or in a bar knows exactly what I’m talking about.
I watched these people out staff alts without their knowledge or consent and, while most of these alts don’t seem to be a particular secret on the game in question, they also weren’t public. The entire point of providing this list? Proving how many staff characters they were connected to and even romantically involved with as a means of not only influencing the sphere IC, but the game OOC. As someone who supported corporate executives for more than a decade, I can only describe this as the digital equivalent of standing in front of a shelf lined with pictures of shaking powerful people’s hands. It’s not subtle and it’s not supposed to be.
I listened to complaint after complaint from one of these players about an entire sphere on the game, all centered on how the entire playerbase was not only toxic, but specifically homophobic and ableist. While I won’t deny that are problematic players and behaviors in that area of the game, I later found out the majority of the people they were naming and shaming were actually their former TS partners, who they were now turning against for committing crimes as egregious as distancing themselves from the player, setting up boundaries, or–and this is my personal favorite–paying more attention to their other partners in a scene that was specifically about celebrating said other partner. As someone who is both non-binary and neurodivergent, I find this one particularly repugnant. There is a vast difference between ‘people being prejudiced’ and ‘facing the consequences of repeatedly being an asshole’, despite this player’s insistence that any animosity they faced was purely them being victimized and never the result of inappropriate behavior.
There’s a laundry list of other issues that I can point to, from spilling character secrets about people from one game in open spaces on another, to repeatedly claiming that no less than three people were obsessed with them in alarmingly direct parallels to Regina George, to continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single location. It is, frankly, somehow the most spectacularly insidious yet overwhelming set of behaviors that I’ve seen since VASpider and DownWithOPP. Worse yet, they now seem to be expanding out of WoD MU*s and into the world of Ares, where I expect them to only continue behavior I’ve now seen them engaged in on three different games. If you’re a game admin and you’re concerned? Reach out. I’ll provide the details that I can.
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@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
o continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single locatio
Why wasn’t this person banned? I mean, instead of catering to someone, just ban them. Sounds like a lot of this could be avoided with liberal usage of the banhammer.
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@bear_necessities said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
o continually blasting NSFW content on public channels, to ranting about other games until the owner of Song of Blood had to create a channel just to contain their list of grievances to a single locatio
Why wasn’t this person banned? I mean, instead of catering to someone, just ban them. Sounds like a lot of this could be avoided with liberal usage of the banhammer.
The two of them were both early alpha players on the game and one of them ended up on staff. Like EvilGrayson said, there are a lot of good things about these players. They’re friendly, they’re engaging, they write well, they’re helpful. I wouldn’t have fallen for it otherwise. It’s only once they get a modicum of influence or control that this behavior comes out–just like VASpider.
I repeatedly warned the gamerunner that the Ares community is pretty collaborative, so it wouldn’t look great for them if it got around that they were letting people very publicly dunk on another game and their staff, that it might cause problems if they ever wanted help, but like…
They only seemed to take me seriously after I left and warned them that these two were swiftly turning Song of Blood into ‘Shang with Plot’, which I’m sure would honestly be a very popular game! But it also seemed like it wasn’t what the gamerunner was going for re: game culture, and by then I think it was too late.
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@Evilgrayson said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
Having watched them kill a game in that fashion and gain more friends and more enablers in so doing, I joined a freshly-opened game and created a Garou there in a brand new sphere. A week or two ago a new pack joined - the only pack - with characters that were rewrites of the werewolf and vampire player’s oWoD wolves in it. I battened down the hatches and waited for the attacks to start, because my character was an obvious target and I expected they knew he was my character. Two nights ago, the attacks began, and over the course of the day after I realised what the whole pattern was and where I’d seen it before.
Me on a newish opened game where a big werewolf pack just joined in the past week or two:
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This kind of mobbing behaviour where a couple of people choose a victim to isolate and corral a bunch of flying monkeys to harrass them (because they “deserve it”) is such a classic move in this hobby that I could name a few players off the top of my head.
I think I’m safe though, because WoD isn’t something I play in.
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I’m sorry to say that this is just human behavior and can happen anywhere. There might be features of oWoD games that can make it easier for the perpetrators to get plausible deniability or excuse their hostility with IC factionalism, but creating an in group and an enemy happens because some people simply do not know how to operate without one.
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I’m not sure if it’s the same person every time, but I’ve run into players finding out that certain plots are restricted to certain IC groups that their PC isn’t part of, then immediately using every social engineering thing they can think of both IC and OOC to ingratiate their way into the plot, in some cases going so far as to use OOC RP support tools (meet and such) to circumvent coded locks on sections of the grid. They inevitably get caught, and then go into social engineering mode to try and cover their misbehavior and get out of it, often times seeding multiple versions of the OOC narrative through multiple staffers to confuse them and get off light. In one particularly humorous case, they didn’t know that 3 of the staff bits were actually the same person, the head staffer, who just used multiple staff bits to make dividing up the work easier, and when they tried their nonsense, they immediately got the boot. They’re still out there as far as I can tell. It would be nice to definitely find out whether they’re a random group of unrelated people, or just one stubborn person committed to a fallacy.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
I think I’m safe though, because WoD isn’t something I play in.
I think the propensity for reporting this sort of thing from WoD games is mostly selection bias. The predecessors of this kind of board were heavily slanted towards WoD players, so we heard from WoD players about WoD players. I’d wager that this kind of behaviour would be just as prevalent on Star Wars MUDs or furry MUCKs or whatever else, we just don’t hear about it as much because we’re not focused on them.
ETA: I should say it’s selection bias compounded by confirmation bias and availability heuristic (we easily associate it with WoD because there are plenty of examples because there’s so much reporting because we’re historically/traditionally oriented around WoD). Guess who has been writing papers on mental health assessment biases.
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Oh, this shit absolutely happens everywhere. It happens in my game.
I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.
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Seanan McGuire? Really?
How did I not know this lore? Fuck. I love her books, but the more I think about it, the more her October Daye series feels like stolen MU logs for the first few. The entire tone and scope of the story changes wildly after like book three.
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@InkGolem said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
Seanan McGuire? Really?
Really, really. Find any old WoD MUer and whisper “Seiche” at them to see their reaction. Though, to be frank, she and much of her cadre have long-since departed MUing and, seemingly, have changed as people.
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@Pavel I’m sure they have. People tend to do that. I’ve never been a WoD person and seem to have totally missed this.
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@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
Oh, this shit absolutely happens everywhere. It happens in my game.
I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.
It was absolutely started as that, or at least I chimed in as that, because they’re not containing their behavior to one little corner that can easily be avoided by just not being on That Specific Game. I’ve seen it personally across two games, heard about it on a third, and given their appearance on other community hubs, expect it to be expanding into Ares games soon.
But BMD is BMD and will do with a topic as it likes!
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@Aria said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
But BMD is BMD and will do with a topic as it likes!
I’m just building up to where I can launch my definitive study of behavioural issues sorted by MU genre. I’m thinking ““All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour.”
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I guess I can count myself lucky in that I know I’ve been on games that VASpider and Seanan McGuire were on, but as far as I can remember, I never interacted with them, or never in any significant capacity.
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@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.
It kind of is - but it’s also a call for people to take a step back and think in general about what’s going on around them.
I have learned of two more sets of people on that first oWoD game who are, by more than one report, employing the same fucking tactics. And there are other games that I’m not on, and shit that I’m not seeing, and things that I don’t know. That call for people to stay safe and look after each other? That was heartfelt. By looking after each other, we reduce the harms of all sorts of things, but this stuff in particular.
Respect your own boundaries, and the boundaries of others. And above all, care.
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@Pavel Looks at the Star Wars Aoa thread Ayup it happens.
Take care of yourself out there folks.
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@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.
idk that something really be a warning about a specific game or specific players when it doesn’t name the game or players
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ok
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@Roz said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
@Juniper said in Echoes of the Past: Problem Players:
I interpreted this thread as a warning about two specific players residing in a specific game.
idk that something really be a warning about a specific game or specific players when it doesn’t name the game or players
I don’t know how to double quote but they said this
“Having watched them kill a game in that fashion and gain more friends and more enablers in so doing, I joined a freshly-opened game and created a Garou there in a brand new sphere. A week or two ago a new pack joined - the only pack - with characters that were rewrites of the werewolf and vampire player’s oWoD wolves in it. I battened down the hatches and waited for the attacks to start, because my character was an obvious target and I expected they knew he was my character. Two nights ago, the attacks began, and over the course of the day after I realised what the whole pattern was and where I’d seen it before.”
So I think it’s a warning of two people specifically AND of problem players in general?
