This is quite amazing.

24 years in this hobby and it’s the same old patterns, over and over and over again. 24 years of ‘X is a creeper and staffer Y is protecting him’ from A, with B to G arriving to agree and support and #metoo. And then Z pitches up to defend X and Y by demanding evidence and discrediting A to G and discrediting the place we’re reading it on. At first it worked, because the world was a different place and we were younger and many of us hadn’t met it before, but as more happened and more came to light and the world around us changed, we’ve seen the patterns and realised what was actually going on.

24 years later, and while most of us have grown and changed and learned, it seems that X and Y and Z still think their old tactics work.

Find a new strategy, guys. This one’s old enough to go drinking with its mates in the USA, and has been for a few years now. We see you and we see through you, and we know that whether the original story was credible or not, people who use Z’s strategy are not to be trusted.

Bleed is a) an absolute bastard, and b) what we play the game for.

If we aren’t trying to evoke an emotional response in ourselves and others, really, what do we spend all this time typing at each other for? Laugh or cry, smile or rage, we do this daft hobby of ours in order to feel - and to fail to acknowledge that is to set ourselves up for insanity.

Emotional bleed, in and of itself, isn’t the problem. It’s the failure to control that bleed that’s the problem. We can be in tears over what just happened, while at the same time relishing those tears. This is normal - for us at least - and this is good as long as we all stay friends, or at the very least cordial. There’s trust involved in giving people license to manipulate you, and if people break that trust it hurts, and that too is normal. Backbiting, whisper campaigns, releasing logs of private scenes on taboo/secret topics - all those are a betrayal of the trust we’ve put in others to allow them to affect us. We extend our trust to those we extend deep IC ties to - whatever that tie may be - and we can only hope that they have a similar understanding of what they’ve been entrusted with.

And if someone’s staffing, especially using NPCs to push story, that’s a position of special trust, because we’re giving them license to mess around with our emotions while they remain insulated. A game’s staff have many more ways to break our trust, which is why the good staffers are trustworthy - and why we react so badly if and when it happens. Trust is a fragile thing, easily destroyed and very difficult to rebuild.

Belatedly, I’m going to add to the VulgarKitten stuff. She’s been doing this same thing for more than a decade, and I am both annoyed and irritated that she just can’t seem to grow the fuck up and stop hurting real people over pretendy funtime games. I am so sorry that she did that to you, @IoleRae ; all I can say is that the pattern seems to happen when she starts getting jealous because someone’s being a responsible feature/staffer and engaging with people who aren’t her.

I mean really, WTF? What is she, 5, and in need of all of daddy’s attention to the point of trying to throttle the baby?

So yeah, when I said I wasn’t going to be returning to RtA if she was the one drumming up support, I… wasn’t kidding. There are very few people on my own personal will-not-RP-with list beyond the standard bunch of idiot creepers, but she’s got pride of place at the very top. And had I had my way at RtA, she’d have been banned.

@IoleRae It’s only a few days ago that I found out who she’d been, and I immediately raged. There aren’t many people I remember from a decade ago without prompting, but that character name is etched in my memory with a massive flashing light and a really loud warning siren.

It’s not just you. It hasn’t been just you.

And to anyone she’s made a victim of, or who’s feeling isolated, or just isn’t connecting to people? Reach out to me on game or on the board, and if I can I’ll help, just as I’ve done many times before. I can usually help connect people to other bits of a game, to plots they might find fun, or people they’ll get on with. It’s more difficult on Arx than it was when I had a staffer’s view of what was going on, but I’ll help. And I’ll even mitigate my arse of a character to do it, because helping people find fun is far more important.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

everyone wants to take down The Man! everyone has different ideas for how to do it and wants the credit

Everyone wants to take down The Man, until they themselves are The Man, at which point everyone else has to be delighted with the idea and nothing can ever go wrong ever again…

We lived in the country - mice in the house was standard - when we gained a crotchety old tomcat who was ludicrously intelligent. We rapidly came to an arrangement with Zappa; he brought us dead mice, he got tuna. 14 mice in 10 days, worked like a treat.

Unfortunately, this cat was too smart. After he’d emptied the house of its rodents, every time he wanted a bit of tuna in his diet, he brought us a dead rodent. So after a while he was getting a bit podgy, and we stuck him on a diet.

5 mice in one day.

He got his tuna, and we decided that a cat who can catch five mice in a day probably didn’t need a diet. Diet ended, everyone was happy, and we realised that our cat had grasped the basic principles of economics.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

@STD
In those dark dystopias you fight the corporations to make the world a better place for everyone. In the dark ages, it was a struggle to survive just being a human.

Think about the fantasy genre and the themes it has.
Lord of the Rings - Take the ring of power, resist it’s call to make you all powerful and destroy it.
Game of Thrones - Kill everyone and take power for yourself.
Beowulf - Kill monsters and take power for yourself.
Robinhood - Kill the nobles and take power for yourself because you think you can do a better job.

It’s all about selfishness. It’s an entire genera based on the idea that getting what you want is the only important thing. You are just replacing one self-important jerk with a nicer self-important jerk and nothing ever gets better for anyone else in a dark ages fantasy. Look at Lord of the rings, all those books, all that adventure and the only thing that really changed was 1 ring got destroyed and one human village got roasted by a dragon. Then life pretty much went back to normal.

If this is what you took away from the fantasy genre, I pity you. If all you see about you is selfishness, then perhaps you should look beyond the mirror.

You know, maybe you really ought to try actually doing some reading, given that Lord of the Rings has no dragons in it and Robin Hood is actually a name attached to a legend which wasn’t actually about taking any power at all. Beowulf isn’t even fantasy, it’s an epic poem told a millennium and more ago, and Game of Thrones was a specific reaction to all the fantasy novels about honourable people with good and selfless endings.

Reading can broaden the mind!

@Tez said in Admin Accountability:

@Meg said in Bannings:

this situation happened very specifically because of power invested in one person.

Pulling this thread out bc I was thinking about it last night, you know, in that ‘lie in bed and think about things as you fall asleep’ kind of way. I wonder if there are good ways to build checks for that kind of thing, have some kind of accountability baked in. Right now, I own the server. Glitch handles the subdomain stuff. Pyre and Pavel are admin. But if I suddenly fired everyone, like – in the end, that’s where it stops. With the person who has the keys to the server account. How do you build in checks?

As the USA is finding out right now, with the best will in the world, the checks and balances don’t always work as intended.

Be transparent. Be accountable. Be open to discussion. And if the people you think have integrity are looking dubious, stop and ask why rather than warming up the banhammer.

My characters often spawn conflict. I am conflict-avoidant.
My characters are often deeply flawed. I try to find and correct my flaws.
My characters often consider the law to be an inconvenience, for one reason or another. I think the law is a necessity.
My characters are often killers, either in the form of soldiers or flat-out murderers. I feel guilty if I kill an ant by accident.
My characters are usually sociable and charismatic, or at least capable of dealing with people at times. I’ve learned a lot about how to do the whole people-ing thing from them.
My characters are often over 6’. Me, though, I am definitely not.
My characters are generally male. I’m becoming more open about the fact that I am not and have never been male (although I have been mistaken for it quite often in RL, and even told I’m in the wrong bathroom before now).

I find it hard to play a character who isn’t deeply flawed in some way, and attempts to do so invariably fail. My characters are not me; they are warped and twisted reflections of me as seen through a fun-house mirror, then grown through their own experiences.

In game settings where telepathy exists, and on games where thought-posing is annoying me, I will make a telepath and those thoughts will get read for maximum effect.

You have been warned.

What do you do when the present echoes back to nightmares of days long gone? What can you do, except ring the alarm bells and hope that someone can recognise a subtle sort of danger?

Hi, Brand MU Day. My handle is EvilGrayson. Many of you have encountered me over the years; I’ve rarely been shy about who I am and who I’ve been, and I’ve been on this board and its predecessors back to around 2000. I’ve seen any amount of shit go down in that time, and while I might not be much good at dealing with people in RL, I am a professional when it comes to spotting patterns. And yesterday I was able to put a name to a pattern that had been slowly revealing itself for months.

One of the people I’ve been - the one most relevant to this particular topic, at least - was Judge Dredd, Shifter staff and then Wizard on Denver: Dark Destiny by Night. Or was it Dark Destiny: Denver by Night. I don’t know, it’s a long time ago and it was a very silly name even back then.

Denver died a long time ago, in large part because of the actions of two specific people and those who enabled them - and because those of us who should have stopped it didn’t have anything specific to apply the hammer for.

VASpider and Seanan McGuire would lure people into friendship by offering great RP and an in to the in crowd, while making it very clear to the rest of their spheres that there was an in crowd and they weren’t in it (but if they were good enough, they could be!). But. There was always at least one target - someone who’d drawn their attention, and had to be removed at all costs. They’d spin up rumours IC and OOC, take things in the worst possible lights, and turn their followers on them as well. And then when one was gone, another person was declared anathema, and forced off the game through similar tactics. It was subtle and it was vicious and outside their cadre it wasn’t really noticeable until you were the target - and one of them was staff, which meant they had a much easier time of covering it up and excusing it. And if that target happened to be someone who had been part of the in crowd, it was even more vicious as all their friends turned on them for no apparent reason.

How does this bear on now? After staffing for the death of Arx burnt me out for months, I finally felt up to RP again. I created a new character on an oWoD game, a sidekick for an OOC friend I’d made on Arx - a ghoul, called Grayson. If you know me you know I play archetypes, and I was easing back into RP so who else would I play? So. Said ghoul encountered a werewolf, a great RPer and friendly sort of player who promptly decided this ghoul was the best thing since sliced Bane - but the werewolf wanted the ghoul all for himself. When the werewolf tried to get between Grayson and his domitor I started getting suspicious. When they tried to isolate me from my domitor’s player OOC as well, I was annoyed. When they tried to isolate my domitor’s player and character from his whole coterie, I was upset. When I started setting boundaries and disentangling my character from the werewolf, everything changed. And when the first time the werewolf’s new vampire alt met Grayson it was with a vicious and entirely unwarranted insult, only just stopping short of the r-word, I was angry. And through it all, the werewolf’s player’s partner was playing a senior vampire of a different faction, and making life harder as well. Overall I was left feeling that I didn’t particularly want to be anywhere that either of them were, and as soon as that became clear I dropped a note to staff that I was distinctly uncomfortable.

Soon after that, I and a few others were invited to a closed beta for a new game. Song of Blood was being started up by a player from that first oWoD game, and they’d invited a few core people to help them get the game up and running. Among those were the two problem players. The vampire player ended up in a position of power IC and with one of her allies in a staff position, and half the playerbase were her associates and reinforced her every whim - which just so happened to align with the werewolf player’s, who was in this case playing her ghoul. My OOC friend from the first oWoD game was made to feel entirely unwelcome and effectively driven off before chargen, and the game swiftly became the vampire player show. I ended up retiring my character because I’d seen the problem but had neither the energy nor the position to do anything about it, and on my way out I laid out for the head wizard the nature of a problem that they’d seen but not truly understood until it was too late. After that conversation, it seems that the head wizard vanished on that game and on the oWoD game, and Song of Blood - and possibly that staffer’s entire MU* career - appears to have ended. I hope that’s not the case, but it’s another loss to lay at their door.

While Song of Blood was active and my OOC friend was still in chargen, the problem players were discussing the oWoD game on the Public channel, including comments and complaints about staff there - and bragging about friendship and contacts, knowledge of alts and oversharing of private details, just to reinforce their connections and their power. My OOC friend and I - and the head wizard on Song of Blood - repeatedly told them that this wasn’t okay and they needed to stop, but they carried on regardless. We know all sorts of details about IC relationships on the oWoD game that we didn’t want to learn, all because they wanted to persuade the undecided to join their growing powerbase and be brought along as the vampire and whichever alt the werewolf’s player was on this week rose to power. This also served as notice to my OOC friend that their character was utterly powerless against them. That character has barely gone out in public since.

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.

If you’ve never heard of VASpider and Seanan McGuire, they were notorious in days gone by. Their tactics involved being brilliant players and seeming trustworthy, friendly and outgoing, and obvious candidates for power IC and OOC. However, the only people permitted in their orbit were those who enabled them. They thought I was one of their enablers, although I wasn’t - much as the werewolf thought I was one of his enablers, although I wasn’t. VASpider invited me to their private MU*, and I still didn’t see what they and Seanan were really doing until Denver was in its last throes and it was too late to save it.

Why am I bringing up all this? Because it’s way too late for Denver and it’s too late for Song of Blood, but it’s not too late for the games these problem players are on now - and because the community needs to know this shit is going on again in new (and slightly less subtle) form. I lost my game to the very behaviours I’m seeing in these problem players; gathering a group of enablers to persuade everyone this is fine while they remove their target’s desire to log in or even play MU* again? That’s not normal and it’s not right and it needs to be stopped, pronto. The enablers are usually too caught up in a storm of charisma and lovebombing to notice; I wasn’t caught by it, but that’s because I saw this shit done by the best decades ago and didn’t quite fall for it then either.

I’ve spent more than 25 years playing on and staffing MU*s. I think of the game before myself - and I feel duty-bound to bring all this to the attention of the community. And perhaps the worst of it is that I don’t believe that their intent is to bring harm to the game, but in reality their intent doesn’t matter. Their actions - and the results of those actions - are absolutely detrimental to any game that allows them.

There is a pattern, and that pattern kills games, all without treading over any of the usual firm lines that lead to a banhammer. I don’t want to see more games die to the same old patterns. But I’m also being very nonspecific right now, because I don’t want to kick off one of the witch-hunts of old either, or get my arse banned from here in what would be a first time for a MU* forum ban in all my long existence in this hobby. If staff want to check the identity of someone they’re welcome to do so by DM, or if the admins here grant permission I’ll be able to share more then. In the meantime, stay safe and look after each other.

In sorrow, I am
EvilGrayson, once known as Judge Dredd of Denver

@TNP I’m so sorry to read this.

I mean I understand the complaint and where it’s coming from, but I’ve been the one left holding the bag for someone else’s RL emergency, and it sucks.

Whatever you do is wrong. Whatever you say is wrong. You aren’t enough and you can’t be enough, because what’s needed is the one whose bag this is and you’re just hanging onto it right now.

And it’s their RL, so you either turn into someone unreasonable, or you accept that RL comes first and this sucks.

And in the meantime, when someone puts a post up like this, it’s just pure demoralisation. There’s only one person who can answer these questions and - for whatever reason - they aren’t in the conversation right now.

Sure, the post may be accurate and it may be on point and it may be whatever, but it doesn’t help. And it won’t help. And it can’t help. All it can do is get people talking around in circles about their grievances, while also making the people who’ve been left with the bag feel like shit.

Congrats, I guess?

I’m very bad when it comes to paging people - even close RP friends - and asking for RP. I was raised to never be a bother, and paging people to say ‘Would you like RP’ feels like being a bother unless there’s a specific arrangement already in place or something that needs to be directly discussed - and, like STD, I really don’t want to be That Player Who Seems Kinda Obsessive.

I’m much more inclined to drop myself on the grid, hit an LRP flag, say on channel that I feel like RP if anyone’s interested, and so on. I try to be available, rather than seeking specifically.

Having seen people use descs etc. directly stolen from other people/games, I’m a little wary of giving someone carte blanche to use the shit I write anywhere and everywhere they please without even the ability to say ‘Really?’

And given the rise of AI data scraping, I’m even more wary of a clause allowing them to use my writing as training data. I don’t claim to be the next literary great, but the modern world is a total hellhole when it comes to automated copyright theft.

I can absolutely understand wanting to defend against scorched-earth idiocy, but giving the administrators the power to use anything I create on their game wherever and however they please feels like a bit much in this modern era.

Wandered onto Towers of Londinium earlier. Saw the terms, spotted an oddity.

3. You agree to grant to TowersMUX and the administrators thereof a
   non-exclusive, non-commercial license to any content you create via the
   mediums of TowersMUX or its game website; including, but not limited to,
   descriptions, poses, bulletin board posts, wiki pages, et cetera.

Does anyone know what the bloody hell this is in aid of? Because from over here it’s sounding kinda shady.

I too have a long history of administrative roles, and finally transitioned into a career a few years ago. This is partly because the career path I should have taken wasn’t as open then as it is now.

What I learned in administration is that you never, ever, underestimate your admins. They see everything. They know everything. And anyone who can organise other people - especially people with big egos and big tempers - to get things done is not someone you want to cross.

And yet the administrative staff are so often dismissed by people who only ever see the surface of things. It’s both stupid and weird.

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

everyone wants to take down The Man! everyone has different ideas for how to do it and wants the credit

Everyone wants to take down The Man, until they themselves are The Man, at which point everyone else has to be delighted with the idea and nothing can ever go wrong ever again…

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Evilgrayson said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yes, let’s tell the human-hating centuries-old elf who’s just slaughtered a whole town that they’re an idiot. That’s really going to go so well.

This is absolutely something that any number of my characters would do.

@Evilgrayson said in MU Peeves Thread:

the human-hating centuries-old elf had casually grown the mother of all trees through the mouthy one

And this is absolutely the extreme overreaction consequence I would be looking for, please and thank you.

If only more people thought like that.

I’m with you. If my character does something that stupid, they should get consequences! But ye gods, the wailing if consequences actually happen.

Yes, let’s tell the human-hating centuries-old elf who’s just slaughtered a whole town that they’re an idiot. That’s really going to go so well.

And yet if the human-hating centuries-old elf had casually grown the mother of all trees through the mouthy one, you’d have been able to hear the OOC screaming from my side of the Pond.