I was looking for something in my emails this morning, and came across one with the subject line “Oh, the drama” that was of course about RP drama and, also, 19 years old at this point.

It’s basically a TREASURE TROVE of nonsense, but I need to share my favorite line, from a player being extremely over-dramatic at me. Context is that he was VERY PARANOID that he was going to get banned, and I pointed out that Camden (my fellow co-admin at the time) had JUST told him he wasn’t in danger of being banned.

"Dylan…It’s insane not to plan for the ‘what ifs’. What if Camden gets hit by a bus?

I’m happy to say that Camden never did get hit by that bus.

@mietze said in Investing Yourself into your MU* Chars:

I don’t care how well you write. If you harm people or treat them like shit, I have no interest.

Abusive behavior should never be tolerated.

That said, I’ve met plenty of RPers through the years who were perfectly nice people, but their RP was just boring because they didn’t know how to write. I’m not talking about spelling and punctuation; I’m talking about the art of making a compelling character and writing an interesting story.

MU RP exists at a crossroads between writing, improv, and gaming. Different games and/or players may value these things to different degrees, but they’re all essential IMHO. (and as with any activity involving other humans, basic social skills matter too)

On Silent Heaven, I’m open about the fact that everything is logged, and only I have access to logs. This is primarily so that I can zip up someone’s logs and send them to the player once their character has finished their time in Silent Heaven. I don’t look at logs unless there’s cause for concern raised by a player and I’ve received permission from that player. It’s been an invaluable resource when dealing with problem players.

When you launch a new game, your playerbase has little to no trust in you. They’ve been burned countless times in the past, so why would they? It’s only through repeated acts of goodwill on a near-daily basis that players can gradually begin to trust. And one wrong step can erode that trust. All you can do is apologize, take the loss, and focus on doing better.

Overall, my recommendation is to build in whatever security features you feel most comfortable with. While full logging can help in some instances, the most important thing is to be responsive to your community. When they first come to you with a problem, they’re taking a huge leap of faith that you’ll respond to their issues in a positive manner. And that’s what matters most. Even the most robust security features are pointless if you’re not out there caring for your players.

I decided to hop on the bandwagon and update too, although no new chars. I also made my thread title alliterative because you can’t stop me, @Tez.

@dvoraen said in Something I Need to Say:

I’ve come to the conclusion that matters have silently changed with the second of the two, and as such I needed to keep my distance from them, including Discord.

Before you close the book on this friendship, you might consider asking the person. People lie. This includes staffers on MUs. Sometimes people add something to make their position seem more justified. I would not be at all surprised if the staffer involved had ONE trusted person tell them you were a problem on channels, but told you it was multiple complaints about your behavior on channels and in pages. Even less surprising would be if there were a few remarks about the channel-chat (very likely not even ‘eww, I am uncomfortable’ but ‘hmm, this is a possible red-flag, you might wanna keep an eye on that player’ comments) and none of the three people you paged said anything.

@dvoraen Been debating on buying that. Can’t wait for pay day now!

jonah hill