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)

@InkyTheGhost said in Numetal/Retromux:

Blossom’s player is not the creepy stalker. She is kind, extremely loyal, unafraid to speak her mind, and one of the best writers I’ve RP’d with in decades of playing on MU*s.

She is a great writer, great enough that I often threw away red flags when I received them. She has a lot of good qualities; she also sent things to my house that I found uncomfortable, would page me when I was in scenes angrily if I wasn’t in scenes with her instead, tried to dictate who I could and couldn’t RP with, and got very cold whenever I disagreed with her about anything. She was highly OOCly motivated and had trouble telling the difference between IC/OOC more often than I thought was appropriate.

Two things can be true at the same time. I don’t think Blossom as a person is inherently evil at all, but I choose to cut contact once because her interactions with me were getting obsessive, forgave her for the reasons you stated and with help from Sundance on Liberation, and have since cut contact again for other reasons.

My feelings about Blossom player are conflicted because we were friends for a long time, but the reason I brought her up was because she was the one who begged me to come to Retro, who is closely connected to Sephiroth (she plays his Giovanni mom on that game for those who don’t know), and who has gotten lots of staff favoritism IMO, plus has a strong friendship with Chaos. So it is relevant, she was deeply involved in several of these situations.

To be clear, I don’t think she’s the reason why Retro is a bad game. But I do feel that Retro being a bad game is the reason why she is there. Because the game has very loose controls, or they happen too late, it creates a negative feedback loop which attracts a certain kind of player and encourages or excuses their behavior when it does happen. I think the MU youngins are calling what she does ‘harem-building’ these days, we just called it a clique. She gathers players who agree with her IC/OOC around her, building a small community that goes outside of the game, and those who act out of lockstep OOC or IC have a tendency to be ostracized OOC and IC until they conform. I don’t think she does it for nefarious means, but because she can’t be assed to RP with people she doesn’t like–which, fair enough. I also don’t think it creates a healthy community in a MUSH either, since it’s a shared space that suffers from getting cliqued out even further than it already is by definition. It’s a gray area, innocent at first, but it tends to spiral out of control if left unchecked for too long and I see it unfolding again on Retro.

These cliques tend to have staffers from their ranks who join and change the narrative to suit their own, get mad when something doesn’t go their way at some point, then we see a mass exodus of players/staffers and games die or take a while to recover–best case scenario, the group disbands and bad feelings all around which leads to future drama. Best example of this is the Reach with VASpider, but other examples exist–at least one of which Blossom-player was the faction head of, at a game where I staffed like 10-15 years ago.

Anyway, thought I’d take a minute and explain my reasoning for what I said in my OP. I don’t hate the player, or you, or really anyone in the situation except maybe Eddie. In general, I’m just happy to be away from the game and those people and I’m sure the feeling is mutual and that’s cool. You were always a blast to RP with though, and the least problematic person ever. So kudos to you for that lol.

@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 Earlier in the thread talked about the secret giovanni discord separate from the game discord where Chaos went to talk shit about players, so it’s safe to say he’s a part of it. I’ve been away for a long while though, I don’t even know who’s still on staff other than the tags on the post of Eddie getting banned for doing all the shit I said he was.

Definitely telling though that a staffer from that game came in to say there’s never been reports about Eddie and the game is fine, yet this is what they’re posting on site.

@Yam Just to address the other point you made, I can’t remember a temp ban that didn’t turn into a full ban or that person leaving a game. Temp bans do not work. They actually just make things worse, because you lose good players to bad actors in the process of them pretending to be a better person for a while before they inevitably slide back into the shit show.

People can and do change, but usually the people who do will change at the warning stage and before temp bans get handed out. It’s exceedingly rare otherwise

In the end I feel that it comes down to tolerance. If you can tolerate a player you don’t like in a court scene or work together occasionally on a mutual plot for the betterment of the game and enrichment of plot, you’re probably fine. When it becomes exclusionary or hateful, then it’s bad. There’s a serious gut check here sometimes too, because how does staff police things that are happening in pages or on discord? It’s not something that’s ever been solved on MUSH as far as I know.

@Pavel to be fair, so did cliques back in my day. It’s not exactly the same, but every weird MUSH clique that ever existed has manipulation and it is often sexual. Important here to say that welcoming circles of friends are different than cliques or harems, we’re not talking about those here.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

@Cygnus So it’s your position that a person refusing to RP with people they don’t like is bad for the game? Are you saying that you’d rather force them to RP with people they don’t like?

How did you get this from what I said? I said it’s a gray area. It can be innocent at first, but when it becomes exclusionary it spirals quickly out of control. Are you saying that the hate for people like VASpider who have done exclusionary things like this is unwarranted because they just didn’t like the people they excluded, and they were justified killing the games they killed?

Also, MU*s are games that tend to include a large amount of players, some of whom you are likely not to enjoy. Does this mean that your feelings as a player about another player dictate whether they can or can’t enjoy the rest of the game, and whether they get plot/job attention? Because that’s what happens when these cliques take over a game.

@MisterBoring said in Numetal/Retromux:

To rephrase my question:

Does @Cygnus feel it is a staff’s job to ensure that any single person is RPing with everyone?

It’s staff’s job to break up cliques and not let them take over the entire game, staff, and culture, to not let them spread hate campaigns, and not let players be the jury of who is allowed into scenes and plots. Because that’s what happen when these things get out of control. That’s when staff needs to step in, not when it’s a group of friends playing games together.

This is a person who would do exactly that; get angry when someone in their group was RPing with someone they didn’t like, and do exclusionary things that are not healthy for a game.

It’s obviously tough for staff to tell when this is and isn’t the case, but when complaints start to pile up it should get addressed. This doesn’t happen on RetroMUX because certain staffers are part of the clique itself; they dole out plots to people the popular kids club approve of, so they’re feeding into the non-community aspect of a game.

It’s totally fine to not RP with people you don’t like. It’s not ok to make them feel unwelcome and ostracized until they leave. Players don’t get to decide to do that to another player, and behavior that rationalizes or makes excuses for this kind of thing needs to be excised from MU*s forever.

@InkyTheGhost said in Numetal/Retromux:

Blossom’s player is not the creepy stalker. She is kind, extremely loyal, unafraid to speak her mind, and one of the best writers I’ve RP’d with in decades of playing on MU*s.

She is a great writer, great enough that I often threw away red flags when I received them. She has a lot of good qualities; she also sent things to my house that I found uncomfortable, would page me when I was in scenes angrily if I wasn’t in scenes with her instead, tried to dictate who I could and couldn’t RP with, and got very cold whenever I disagreed with her about anything. She was highly OOCly motivated and had trouble telling the difference between IC/OOC more often than I thought was appropriate.

Two things can be true at the same time. I don’t think Blossom as a person is inherently evil at all, but I choose to cut contact once because her interactions with me were getting obsessive, forgave her for the reasons you stated and with help from Sundance on Liberation, and have since cut contact again for other reasons.

My feelings about Blossom player are conflicted because we were friends for a long time, but the reason I brought her up was because she was the one who begged me to come to Retro, who is closely connected to Sephiroth (she plays his Giovanni mom on that game for those who don’t know), and who has gotten lots of staff favoritism IMO, plus has a strong friendship with Chaos. So it is relevant, she was deeply involved in several of these situations.

To be clear, I don’t think she’s the reason why Retro is a bad game. But I do feel that Retro being a bad game is the reason why she is there. Because the game has very loose controls, or they happen too late, it creates a negative feedback loop which attracts a certain kind of player and encourages or excuses their behavior when it does happen. I think the MU youngins are calling what she does ‘harem-building’ these days, we just called it a clique. She gathers players who agree with her IC/OOC around her, building a small community that goes outside of the game, and those who act out of lockstep OOC or IC have a tendency to be ostracized OOC and IC until they conform. I don’t think she does it for nefarious means, but because she can’t be assed to RP with people she doesn’t like–which, fair enough. I also don’t think it creates a healthy community in a MUSH either, since it’s a shared space that suffers from getting cliqued out even further than it already is by definition. It’s a gray area, innocent at first, but it tends to spiral out of control if left unchecked for too long and I see it unfolding again on Retro.

These cliques tend to have staffers from their ranks who join and change the narrative to suit their own, get mad when something doesn’t go their way at some point, then we see a mass exodus of players/staffers and games die or take a while to recover–best case scenario, the group disbands and bad feelings all around which leads to future drama. Best example of this is the Reach with VASpider, but other examples exist–at least one of which Blossom-player was the faction head of, at a game where I staffed like 10-15 years ago.

Anyway, thought I’d take a minute and explain my reasoning for what I said in my OP. I don’t hate the player, or you, or really anyone in the situation except maybe Eddie. In general, I’m just happy to be away from the game and those people and I’m sure the feeling is mutual and that’s cool. You were always a blast to RP with though, and the least problematic person ever. So kudos to you for that lol.

All I have is this gem of a post from the staff of this game who in this very thread claimed there was no issues or complaints with Eddie. Ironically, someone who had the same type of experience that I did sent me this on discord. We both laughed at the north star part.

================================ Announcements ===============================
Message: 1/42 Author: Ori Mon Aug 25 2025
BAN: Niall/Khafra/Eddie/Ryen/Darius 03:48:28

As has been said time and again, our north star is to create a space where people feel safe and can enjoy themselves without being a disruption to others. Telling good stories is important, but the former is more important to us than the latter.

It is in this vein that we must look not only at the behaviors and actions of individuals, but their effect on the community as a whole. We must consider whether someone’s desire to be a part of our community is more important than the ability of others to participate in that community.

Or, to put it another way, when everyone at the party is avoiding you, it’s time for you to go home.

The player of Niall/Khafra/Eddie/Ryen/Darius has alienated the majority of the community with his unwanted behaviors, some big and some small. This alienation has, unfortunately, culminated in a detectable shift in player participation (backed up by direct complaints) in scenes and plots this player is involved in. This shift shows no sign of improvement, and has gotten worse over time.

While we believe there is a game for everyone, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s this game. As such, our only valid course to improve this situation is to remove this player from the community indefinitely.

We appreciate your patience, and apologize to any disruption to plot he may have been involved in or PRPing. Thank you for your continued efforts to help us build something truly special here.

-Chaos, Daedalus, Ori
= ==========================================================================

Also, as a quick aside, Eddie was finally, actually, fully banned from Retro. So that’s one sex pest down. I guess he did something so egregious that even his staff buddies couldn’t help him this time. Which one of you lovelies knows what it was that finally got him burnt?

@Gashlycrumb A little late, but thank you for this, I really appreciate it! There was a lot of dogpiling here, it made me sign out for a while. It was good to see something positive upon returning

@LeeRoyBatty Still though, I hope it shined a little light on the bullshit that happens on that game and people learn to stay away. My life has been a whole lot better out of MUSH in general, even reliving this excruciating experience has been awful.