Evilgrayson

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.

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

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.

When I was younger, I was promised that the machines would do the work so I could do the painting and the writing and the music.

The machines are doing the painting and the writing and the music, now, and they can only do it because someone fed them a whole load of things that lots of people made, for free. Perhaps I have the right to be a little pissed off about this.

What happens, happens. A roll of the dice - and my dice luck is legendarily horrific - or someone outplaying my character intellectually, politically, whatever. Bring it on, as long as the playing field is level. And as long as I’m allowed to come up with what happened because of a bad roll, botches are almost always some form of hilarious, because my characters often take themselves too seriously and I love the chance to poke a hole in that.

But when it’s not a fair playing field? When you wake up in the morning, log in and find out your character died while you were asleep for no reason? When your plot fails because staff doesn’t want their friend to be discomfited but you can go hang and they didn’t bother to mention that X won’t be changing in advance? When it’s written in the stars that you’re going to be the universe’s punching bag forever and always because you created what the source material says is absolutely normal? No. Not playing that game.

If the only real way to advance on a game is to TS a staffer’s alt, they can go fuck themselves because I’m not going to indulge them. If the only real way to succeed is to follow this nice set of rails, but no-one does me the courtesy of telling me they exist and I just have to kind of guess at what to do next and hope this is the right answer, I’m derailing myself right out of the game. Let my actions have consequences, and let me do things you haven’t foreseen. And if those consequences fuck me over sideways, as long as it’s all fair or I had some sort of chance, I’m happy with that. And if everything I do has no consequence at all, because the plot’s already written and all the roles are filled and that person over there is the shining hero who saves the world? No thanks.

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!