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.

I’ll never play at a game Chaos runs ever again. What a shitshow. Checking the relaunch wiki, it’s wild to me that he still allows a certain player named Eddie to be a sex pest on there without recourse, but not that wild given he too is a sex pest. Truly gross staffers in most spheres who gaslight, play favorites, and TS each other.

What else could you expect from a vampire lead with an omniscient staff prince PC that hasn’t read the books and plays favs with his TS partners?

Will we ever get a WOD game that isn’t run by weirdos?

@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.

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?

@somasatori said in Liberation MUSH:

@OnceWas said in Liberation MUSH:

It’s a guy with a mall wakizashi, his elder brother’s castoff trenchcoat one size either too big or too small, and faux-Lennon sunglasses with a red tint, trying to use a “demonic” voice to pick up girls.

Yeah, we’ve all met Josh the Obtenebrous.

I feel so attacked right now.

broods on a rooftop

@Roz Ah, I see. I don’t see that as misusing player info personally, though I can understand why it would make people mad. Maybe misusing admin privileges at most, but a downvote isn’t really personal information in the same way as an email address or real name, etc. The way it was framed made it sound like he doxxed people or something.

That’s not to discount anyone’s feelings on the matter. I’m sure whomever he followed around the forums wasn’t enjoying it. But, for me personally, that’s not something that would get me to distrust him or any of his work.

People get mad, people get bitter, emotions run high on forums. All of that stuff is forgivable to me. People grow and learn from their mistakes. There’s plenty in the world of MU* to be weary of, like those who tear down the sandcastle when they lose their beach ball or the VASpiders of this hobby; a little trolling seems tame by comparison.

@Roz said in Liberation MUSH:

Theno got kicked off of MSB staff back in the day for abusing his access to private user information.

@catzilla this, which I’ve not heard before tonight

@Roz The times I’ve interacted with Theno as staff in the past, there were occasional ironic jokes and some sarcasm, but that kind of thing doesn’t bother me. No bad interactions on the level of what we saw recently.

It’s surprising to me and somewhat alarming that they would misuse player info though. What happened? I thought Theno is the one that started/owned MSB back in the day after the WORA days.

@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.

@Roz that is so cringe it caused me physical pain.

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.

@Kestrel said in MU Peeves Thread:

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

@Polk amazing thank you so much !!!

Anyone know if this game is currently open for apps? I emailed for a login about a week ago and haven’t gotten a response. Looks like a fun setting, hopefully it is still accepting new players

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

My twenties back.

/thread lol

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

having 2-4 grid rooms describing broad areas of your town or countryside, with players able to use a temproom or make their own builds feels less overwhelming than a city section of 15-20 rooms

Fallcoast started with a broad strokes grid similar to that, on a slightly larger scale. One of that game’s challenges was that as it grew, each of these broad areas were replaced with smaller groups of rooms and so individual builds had to be moved around inside to populate them accurately which then required jobs, time, and clutter on top of the usual difficulties of building a grid. Zooming in is tougher than adding new areas wholesale, so to anyone building a grid I would suggest keeping this in mind–not to mention the increased development and maintenance of larger grids.

To your point though, my preference is larger grids on an immersion level, especially once map games come into play; larger grids should always have a map to help traverse the main areas of the game, plus they’re fun and dynamic on a gameplay level if controllable. There’s also something special about dropping onto a big new grid and experiencing it for the first time. It’s overwhelming, but in a good way. There’s something uniquely retro and MU* about a cool grid on a game which we have gotten away from in recent years with the advent of discord RP servers and play by post games, but that’s another topic.

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

Not really rough or rowdy, but I’m hoping to get my login soon because this game looks active and fun. It’s been a long time since I’ve played oWoD but Liberation’s setting looks great so I’m excited to try it out and see if I can get a character rolling