Part of the issue I have with ever staffing again is that I’ve had such bad experiences with other staffers on TR, FC, HM. It can be a very weird, very cliquish experience where everyone that gets a sliver of power thinks they have a say on every little thing that happens. This always gets compounded when players are also staffers and have IC problems with other staffers.

Headstaff in particular has a problem with this, and also the disappearing for months at a time thing only to come in and give a swirly to the staffers outside of their TS/Discord groups before poofing into the aether once again for six months and not approving literal years-old jobs before doing so.

Or worse, the dreaded system of HR approval in some games where every staffer was able to add input even outside of their spheres. I am very glad for games like Liberation who don’t even let other staffers outside their spheres see unrelated jobs for this reason. These kinds of jobs become grudge matches where reason goes out the window and people fight because their character bits had a spat a decade ago.

It’s really quite annoying and not conducive to a good experience as a staff member especially when ‘job monkeys’ and ‘general staff’ become a thing; doubly when those staff members don’t pull their weight and only get online to talk shit on staff channels and post negative stuff on jobs that they have no business reading at all. This combined with obvious favoritism killed most of the games I staffed. In actuality, this problem is exacerbated when spheres and games have TOO MUCH staff, not too little.

Too many cooks, and none of them are actually cooking–just standing on the line, judging the way you cut your onions.

Why would anyone want to be a staffer after OOC experiences like that?

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

its policy of permitting underage characters (and sexual scenes involving them)

@Arkandel said in What Do You Want Out of a MU?:

My twenties back.

/thread lol

Thank you for sharing this, Cobalt. LAMush was the first World of Darkness game I ever played, and the first MUSH. I was 17 when I first signed in. There were bad things that happened there which I have heard about over the years, including the infamous meetup. I experienced a few borderline things myself in pages and scenes. I thought it was just how things were, like hazing or I was just new to the MU* scene, and since I was too young and didn’t want people to know I was too young I made the mistake of not speaking up.

I’ve often had an overly rosy view of that place which I may have shared with you on occasion later on other games, and now that I realize how oblivious I was, I feel awful. I’ve been out of the hobby a long time, but I’ve always liked roleplaying with you when we’ve come across each other over the years. So, I felt compelled to say thank you for your courage and screw LAMush. And thanks for making the scene a safer place.

My dream MU would have…

-Large staff and playerbase that is active 24/7
-TinyMUX / PennMUSH / RhostMUSH
-World of Darkness / Pathfinder / DnD
-Both self-starter RP and storytelling encouraged
-Complex ASCII maps because I’m a nerd
-OOC Masquerade: I’ve always preferred games with this ruleset
-Large and descriptive setting/grid with character
-Player-buildable rooms and objects
-Full PvP of various kinds with rewards for respectful play
-Controllable grid squares
-Obfuscated players, room sweeps, door locks, and other stuff to encourage spying/intrigue
-A cool rumor code that is sorted into spheres. I’ve only seen this once and it was awesome
-Good old fashioned retro +bboards and +events
-Danger zones / Peace zones, Night zones / Day zones
-No discord, I’m in like 50 of those already
-MediaWiki for player pages / game info
-Generous but balanced homebrew content
-Lots of colors and QOL bits and bobs from ye olden days

I’d settle for the top 3, everything else is a bonus

@SuspectHound it’s hard to blame Sundance for trying to catch a falling knife. After years of terrible staff leads that caused myself and many of my friends to leave MUSH for several years, the way Sundance runs things is a breath of fresh air and the way Liberation is set up is the main reason I’m back in the hobby at all.

I feel that the childish actions of one person is a hard lesson learned, not a weakness on Sundance’s part. She stepped up to get him out of the situation once and for all and made the right decision, and the destructive actions were 100% on Polk, no one else. It would have been fair to expect someone with such ties to the game to be an adult and hand it off responsibly, no matter what kind of personal problems between the two, but that is not what happened. Few of us can truly know what happened behind the scenes but I suspect that this was a slow burn of bad behavior that finally reached a peak.

One of the tenets of Liberation is to leave baggage from other games and situations behind, and she must have extended that to Polk. That he chose to prove everyone else right is his cross to bear. The game be better off for losing the short fuse.

@Pyrephox I’ve been fiddling with Rhost in my spare time, I do have a cool concept for a game like this. But about halfway towards amping myself up to learn Rhost’s finer details, I started learning Unity for a video game and have put my creative juices there for the moment. This has been a constructive conversation about what is needed in a MU* with pvp though and I’m thankful for those that helped me notice some of the stuff I may have missed; I’ve scribbled various house rules trying to tackle many of the issues that were brought up today.

Maybe the ease of newer systems comparatively is why so many devs go towards those languages, or maybe from the various reasons Ashkuri posted. I do get the pain of doing it from the ST side of things, been there as a staffer and it’s not always fun and sometimes outright painful.

I do completely agree though that the game I want to exist cannot exist unless I make it a reality. I’ve basically given up on most games at this point because they don’t hit the way they used to. There are no turn-key solutions, I just have to get my hands dirty with the code and challenge myself past what I’m comfortable with code-wise. And making games is challenging no matter what it is you’re making.

Great game when it was great. One of the best IMO, but Sundance stretched herself too thin. She’s quiet quit for well over a year now, and without others to make decisions, things sort of fell apart.

I had a few bad interactions with Sundance, many in my group also did and most left because of several things that sucked –

1. Unkillable NPCs/unwinnable plots – these took the wind out of everyone’s sails, and make the game feel like a novel. Granted they were great NPCs with great plots. But in this medium sometimes you gotta let that stuff go when there’s player fatigue. A prince that never actually held court but no one could question this? A Sabbat Ductus who was able to kill players freely but couldn’t be defeated? An ancient and racist evil character that even bringing up in RP could get you ganked? Yeah no, that stuff isn’t too fun.

2. Uneven decisions – This was more part of Sun not being available IRL; in the beginning, she’d go through backgrounds with a fine-tooth comb and make sure that things fit the game’s narrative. Later, random and conflicting things were approved. When confronted with these mistakes, it tended to be a gaslight type of response. Sun was very rigid in her decision making, often at the expense of players over her carefully crafted plot.

3. Slow jobs – I’m not talking one month, I’m talking 6 months no response and sudden closures; full year open jobs with no answer or explanation as to why they aren’t getting answered, plots with no resolution, and more. Just overall not the best in terms of actually playing the game.

4. Entrenched cliques – this isn’t something that’s directly Sundance’s fault, but I do feel that it’s the job of a game owner to at least try and break these up a bit and foster crossplay. That said, Sun had her own clique which also happened to be part of the unkillable bloc, so good luck attempting to do anything plot-wise that involved those NPCs.

5. Power imbalances – WOD games don’t put people on equal playing ground, this is true of all WOD games. But approving some players with 300-500 XP and others with 50 with no regard to how much effort or activity they bring to their sphere always felt like a kick in the teeth to people that Sun didn’t like. What was felt and what was true are two different things though, and it was likely more of a ‘too long didn’t read and I’ve got shit to do IRL’ kind of thing, though this doesn’t explain the XP differentials.

There were some really great things about the game too, like awesome plot, great writers, and truly a large amount of nice players that were fun to be around. One of the things that Sun was best at was conflict resolution between players, and I truly loved the way she set up the MUSH in terms of job privacy and overall OOC masquerade.

Even with all the negatives, I think the good outweighs the bad. If and when she gets her RL resolved I’d love to see her write up a new game or refresh the setting with a plot that was a bit more malleable and collaborative, learning from the mistakes she made the first go. I would absolutely play it, doubly so because truly a lot of these issues stemmed from Sundance just not being able to give the game the amount of attention it needed the first time. But she would definitely need to delegate way, way more. Running a game of so many people just isn’t feasible with one person. On top of this, she’d need to distance herself and her own RP from the plots, and be willing to let players win sometimes and enact some changes to the setting with their RP or else things will return to the same static problem.

I WISH I had a game to play like Liberation was at it’s best. But it’s just not there at the moment. I hope that changes, and if anyone can do things justice, even with everything that happened there, I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort.

@MisterBoring Most are or can search it up no problem. Better yet, they don’t pressure you for RL pics or out trans people they don’t like. Probably more fun to RP with a bot than be on most of the WOD games these days

@MisterBoring In my own experiences, I’ve never encountered a ‘job monkey’ that didn’t have access to everything and all the same powers as other staff. Occasionally these job monkeys can grow to become as big of a problem as VASpider. This is not always the case, but hard-coded limitations on what they can see + what they’re able to comment on could potentially help this issue.

Really, when the issue becomes paramount is when Headstaffers are absent for months at a time and then rely on job monkeys/VASpiders to be indispensable so they don’t have to do things, and corruption starts to run rampant.

It has real potential to turn a job monkey into Planet of the Apes if you don’t put hard lines in the sand.

@Pavel See I never said want a cybersphere where you die as soon as you step outside the safe zone, just something inherently more dangerous. People tend to blow these things out of proportion – if there’s any PVP at all, diehard PVE players have a tendency to distort things and overstate how bad they really are. This happens in all games.

@Livia I agree that making friends and socializing is fun, hell I even remember when we had several chats in the past (on HM too I think lol). I still have many friends from the old MUSH days so I suppose taking it TOO far for metagaming protection purposes might be kind of lame and missing the forest for the trees.

Out of curiousity, would you be interested in a game that has such communication semi-public? Or would you need the private @mail/page system for it to be the kind of communication you want? Maybe keeping it to channels would be a good medium ground, with subchannels for coteries and such?

@mietze I agree with both sides of this sentiment. There’s got to be a good tension-building middle ground between jumping people for their misspelled descs and needing to ask permission for every interaction.

@Pyrephox I’ve been fiddling with Rhost in my spare time, I do have a cool concept for a game like this. But about halfway towards amping myself up to learn Rhost’s finer details, I started learning Unity for a video game and have put my creative juices there for the moment. This has been a constructive conversation about what is needed in a MU* with pvp though and I’m thankful for those that helped me notice some of the stuff I may have missed; I’ve scribbled various house rules trying to tackle many of the issues that were brought up today.

Maybe the ease of newer systems comparatively is why so many devs go towards those languages, or maybe from the various reasons Ashkuri posted. I do get the pain of doing it from the ST side of things, been there as a staffer and it’s not always fun and sometimes outright painful.

I do completely agree though that the game I want to exist cannot exist unless I make it a reality. I’ve basically given up on most games at this point because they don’t hit the way they used to. There are no turn-key solutions, I just have to get my hands dirty with the code and challenge myself past what I’m comfortable with code-wise. And making games is challenging no matter what it is you’re making.

@MisterBoring I’d actually argue that of the MMOs I mentioned, EVE Online in particular maps really well to the MU* experience. It’s actually not a PVP game, it’s a single shard social sandbox with very strong PVP elements. You can be a miner, an industrialist, a spy, a propagandist, an admiral, a pirate, etc. Yes the devs do occasionally sprinkle in some lore, but it’s the players and the conflict between them that creates the engaging stories there. There is TONS of RP – when the Triglavians came out, people were talking to each other in triangle script and everything. Wars between thousands of players happen. Sometimes you go out looking for content. Sometimes you -are- the content. In the end, people are fairly chill with the people they’re fighting because it’s so easy to get back into the action.

What darkmetal and EVE Online had in common:

• Fast to remake characters/ships and get into play
• A large safe area for players to PVE in
• Relatively hands-off staff within the parameters of the game
• Player-driven storylines and plots
• Robust character-driven skills and stats to spend your XP/training time on

I think these similarities are touching upon what makes a good PVP game, and it’s my view that its why the EVE Online devs wanted to make a game with the World of Darkness IP so badly.

@Faraday No argument with this, but there is toxicity in PVE environments too that is well documented on many games. WoW is egregious for this. My point is that we shouldn’t shy away from pvp game elements just because of a percentage of bad actors that can be found in any sufficiently large hobby. I realize your experience with this has been bad and that really sucks. My only argument is that devs should learn from what makes a good PVP game and integrate it into MU* for those that enjoy PVP MU*s, not that everyone has to like it or that it’s always going to be a good experience. Just that it CAN be for the reasons RedRocket posted originally. Devs in the end can make whatever game they want after all, I just wish more wouldn’t shy away from what made early WoD games so special to so many of us.

@spiriferida how is it weird to not like the current games out there for different reasons? You’re right that this one is less specific and more just a bad impression, but why are you policing what I can and can’t say on a public forum about criticizing MU*s? THAT is weird

@spiriferida We’re in Rough and Rowdy – check out this topic if you want to avoid reading someone else’s mild criticisms https://brandmu.day/topic/69/opting-out

@spiriferida I would never app after reading that house rule. But where else would I comment about it? Not a lot of forum posts about Dies Irae out there.

@bear_necessities Some say that elderly romance novelists are the best at PVP, book sales confirm this

@Faraday It’s not that they don’t exist, but older gamers have PVP communities as well.

Stellaris comes to mind as a really good game with a competitive scene and older playerbase, with fighting games coming in close to strategy titles. MMOs are so big that there’s multiple groups in them, so they’re a bit of a microcosm in general. Many toxic WoW guilds for example, but just as many ‘gamer dad’ guilds. MMOs are also closest to MU*s, hell the WoW Classic and Everquest games were based on MUDs. Monsters and Memories, a new PvPvE MMO similar to EQ and WoW Classic, actually goes back towards MUDs with a MUD command panel which you can use to /listen in a room and /pry coins from between walls and stuff.

Case and point, MnM has a PVE and a PVP community which has remained fairly segregated but both supported. That game in general is less toxic than say, Pantheon, which largely supports PVE and PVP is an afterthought. In that community, PVE players have distinct hatred towards PVP players. All communities are different so it’s hard to put a pin in any one, but I think it’s all about how the devs approach things – if it’s handled correctly, PVP can work. If it’s ignored or tacked on, it sucks.

@Autumn I think this is close to the real center of things – the subjectivity of the WoD rules make it really tough. But power imbalances I don’t think are a bad thing inherently.

EVE Online, whose former owners I will never forgive for dropping the WoD MMO they were developing btw, really did things right in terms of PvP in a lopsided universe where people’s power levels are not equal. Sure you can fly the battlecruiser into low security space / take the elder into the streets, but you can get got by a group of frigates with warp scramblers / neonates looking for diablerie. There is also high security space for the people who just want to mine rocks all day / bar RP.

I think the dev time would be better spent on designing systems that allow players to hide/fight back with existing rules, and really support the creation of coteries and give people stuff to do. I always like the +map stuff on MU*s with territory control, that gave people stuff to do other than kill each other. Requiem for Kingsmouth also had an awesome influence system for more social/mental pvp, though that was not without problems too, it needed to be automated.

There’s also somewhat unique problems to MU*, like spawn camping someone who just apps in (that sucks), or the issue of people showing up randomly and brigading scenes, or just logging off the moment consequences or pvp starts to happen. These things would need to be accounted for somehow. In EVE there was a 30 second timer, but what’s the answer for MU*? Handing control to a staffer?

@Autumn This is so very true, and why I loved RedRocket’s post about this so much RE: Darkmetal. It had a lot of those things, and I feel that’s why it became such a cornerstone of the hobby for a time. A PVP game would definitely need all these things, but I don’t think we should throw away the narrative aspects as well. Just maybe keep backgrounds to a page or so during approval so people manage their time better.

I know I’m guilty of writing long ass backgrounds for no reason even for PVP games, but I can totally understand how it could be super frustrating to lose that work and potential in a pvp setting.

@Tez Those games were just examples of where developers had went, first internationally popular PVP games that came to mind. I’m talking about PVP games in general, not the toxic COD lobbies of xbox past which is the worst possible representation of those communities.