Posts made by Gashlycrumb

@tsar God yes.

There was a GM who would stand me up and then reschedule the next week. Stand me up. Reschedule. Ad nauseum. Each time involved me waiting about for hours because, well, people are late sometimes. Things happen.

Having survived some serious abuse that was smothered in gaslighting, I take notes when people appear to be trying to tell me my memory is wrong. And I like logs. So, I was easily able to calculate that on average, GM would stand me up six times per time they actually showed. If snarling and giving immediate but unscheduled attention when I eventually developed a ‘tone’ in requesting to reschedule again counts as keeping an appointment.

I was the one accused of not understanding that other people have lives, denounced as a jobless basement-dweller who does nothing but MU, and castigated because expecting somebody with ADHD to keep an appointment is ableist bigotry.

Sometimes you’re going to miss scheduled MU events. Sometimes you’re gonna be late. Things happen, and MU events are low-priority in the scheme of things. But for fuck’s sake, don’t make a habit of it, and apologise when it happens. And if the reason was that you didn’t feel like it, LIE. And if you don’t feel like showing up for a scheduled thing you agreed to be there for, but do feel like RPing snugglebunnies with your bestie, it’s probably tough fucking luck. Maybe you can beg off, but at least show some fucking humility about it. The expectation that people will be just fine with it if you show up late for scheduled RP and then say, “Naw, I’m not going to do that tonight,” and go to RP playing dabo at Quark’s is damned overbearing.

Edited to add: @Aria, really when it’s not a chronic issue I find these kinds of things vaguely funny, in a ‘whaddaya gonna do?’ kind of way. Quite recently I scheduled an event where I weighted a certain player’s convenience above others because that player almost never gets to attend group stuff. So of course everybody showed up but that player. Who apologised later and we all shook our fists at life.

Edited again for typos.

I had no idea that I desired to wear a tuxedo while teaching until I noticed that the faculty handbook forbids me from doing so.

This email is ‘encrypted’. What I am supposed to do is click a link within the email, which brings me to a website, where I can then click to choose from among the email-addresses mentioned in the email, and it will send the actual message to that email address.

Like a large proportion of these things, this doesn’t actually send anything to my email box at all. Thus transforming what should be a two minute task that I can do on my own schedule (reading an email for a single word peice of info) into a group effort requiring three different people at least and having to be performed during business hours.

Also, HOW THE HELL does that make anything more secure?

@Pavel

Indeed, because the two sentances following are about people making themselves look bad.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I find it very telling when people make a policy of not posting. Maybe they realized that when they post they are telling on themselves. It’s always my favorite when someone goes to post and just makes themselves look worse.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I find it very telling when people make a policy of not posting. Maybe they realized that when they post they are telling on themselves. It’s always my favorite when someone goes to post and just makes themselves look worse.

This puzzles me.

If game-runners make a policy forbidding others to post, I find it telling.

But the majority of people in the hobby neither read nor post to forums about the hobby. I don’t think it’s because they know they’ll look bad, they just don’t, uh. Want to.

Do you mean people who have a rant in private but keep it private? Or?

@Tez

An aside, I feel that Firan’s most excellent moment was when they banned my friend because there were no gay people in Firan-world, or there were only pre-made characters and none were gay, or at the very least, that particular character wasn’t to be gay, but staff could tell that my friend was making the character think gay thoughts.

Did Firan announce its ‘no forum posting’ rule? It seems like that’s one that doesn’t end up on game websites, but shows on bbs. I’m not sure Blood of Dragons has it on their site either, though it’s well-known and they have a history of bbposts forbidding players to ever mention other GoT/ASOIAF MUs or to speculate on how long it might be before George R. R. Martin gets the finger out and finishes the next book, etc.

@Roz I don’t think getting banned at all is commonplace. Being treated shabbily may be.

Fortunately, the hobby is still big enough and broad enough that Your Milage May Will Vary.

My experience is that I’m playing fewer games and have fewer RP-buddies, but I hear privately about shabby crap at about the same rate or higher, and more insist on keeping it private for fear of repercussions.

@Roz Not sure there’s a new story. I mean, yeah, I was banned from a game a few years ago for it.

Once upon a time, if you posted about the fuckery on a MU to WORA, and the staffers on that game responded by treating you shabbily or banning you, the forum readership would heap scorn and derision upon said staffer and game. This was really about the only way WORA could hurt a game. Any other complaint tended to cause new players to show up. Which is reasonable – No game is perfect, but if somebody’s bitching about its flaws, this proves that it’s good enough that at least one person is invested. Enough, even, to have an emotion.

The last five years or so, it seems to be pretty much a given that somebody will take your ‘peeve’ and insist that it’s a targeted personal insult and get hostile with you on the game. This will happen if you complain about something that happened ten years ago or something very general. Somebody put it something like, “My peeve is a one-size hospital johnny and you’re taking it like it’s a bespoke suit just for you.”

The “vote with your feet” line is a far cry from new, but shaming players for complaining became cool.

The last year or so of MSB included some real gems – It’s wrong to suggest that GMs who do things are better than those who do not, it might hurt their feelings. Why should anybody bother making and running a MU if it’s inevitable that someone will complain about it? Heck, the whole “Are friends bad?” catch-phrase appeared, as far as I know, as a straw-man response to the suggestion that GMs shouldn’t spend all their time making game for insular cliques who don’t spread the fun.

Games with stated rules “Do not post about the game, it makes the game look bad,” pass without much comment, even when they’re not ‘Blood of Dragons.’

@Roz Yes.

Sorry, though, it’s not the thread for it. I was being implusive.

@Jumpscare Naw, it’s the same shit, but it’s no longer considered wankery to punish players for pointing at it.

Alice Brock, the Alice of Alro Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant.

You can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant. Excepting Alice.

That deal where, of all the people who are involved in a situation, the one expected to do something is the one who is least empowered to be effective? Too realistic.

That PC who is rude as fuck, but also extremely touchy (eg. “How are you doing?” “How DARE you! Suggesting that I might be doing anything other than brilliantly is unforgivable insult!”) is also too damn realistic.

@Towers Towers is the one I know of. It looks good.

@Roz I was thinking it wasn’t a blacklist, but a situation where Player was innocently being a player when staffer pages them some variation of ‘your IP and so-and-so’s IP match, please explain?’ and things went pear-shaped socially.

@Snackness I dunno. I recall my ex being surprised that I knew he’d been using a website of mine from his work, and when and for how long.

I kinda get it as a thing that everybody really ought to know but it’s still somehow creepy to say, “I know your IP address.” Watch Daniel Radcliffe in Guns Akimbo freak out about it. And anybody can look up a geographical location associated with an IP but I might be creeped out if a gamerunner or forum admin or whatever was to tell me where I live. (I told a “player” who was attacking a game their work supervisor’s email address, but that was war.)

@catzilla said in Active WoD MU*s?:

The Houston one is their own game they started some months ago. According to a mostly dead Discord server, the Houston one is in Alpha?

I don’t know why inuki is pretending to not be chokitypok/jujube/etc.

Is there a reason we care?

Seems like a relief, considering who else springs to mind if I think “WoD, set in Texas”.

@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:

VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.

Certainly there’s no reason to be suspicious about somebody who connects from several different IPs – it’s probably home, work, the library, the coffee-shop. I never looked at the geographical locations unless I was fact-checking a story. No reason to be suspicious of people using VPNs, either. I figure you’re streaming Anishinaabemowin-language television the way one does.

There’s not much reason to be suspicious about two people connecting from the same IP, they’re house-mates or they use the same library or whatever. I’d ask and make a note.

It’s a good thing to keep an eye on, not hard proof of anything. And should be tempered with a good dose of “could I give a shit?” in a lot of cases – OMFG the horror if it turns out my suspicion is correct and Abelard and Bridget are really the same person and not neighbors. If they’re not making trouble, cheating hard, or squashing people’s fun, could I give a shit? Hell, odds are pretty good that Abelard just didn’t want to tell Camille that they really like her but sometimes don’t wanna chat and made the Bridget set of alts to avoid the conversation. I don’t even want to push an admission of this pretty-normal-but-embarassing situation.

We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.

I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.

What’s CoG?

Fulcrum is Metro 4.0, with Escalus, set in Minneapolis.

The London one isn’t open yet and might stay invite-only. I haven’t heard of the Houston one.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.

But.

Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?

Probably because MUs don’t collect the browsing infomation you might want to keep private. They don’t collect your credit card number or your social insurance number or your medical records or data about your pr0n-viewing habits.

I have only encountered two reasons for a person to use a VPN to connect to a MU. 1: They have it on for other reasons. 2: They have an ‘illegal’ alt.

Certainly stalking on and across MUs is a thing. But unless it’s an unlikely situation where somebody like Faraday is stalking you, the only stalker a VPN is likely to protect you from is a wiz-level staffer, who probably only has that power on one game. Nobody else is seeing your IP info. “Don’t play MUs where the game-runners are stalking you,” is a pretty obvious rule for protecting yourself, and a VPN isn’t enough in that situation anyway.

Using VPNs to do the stalking, however, can be effective.

I had somebody make a dozen alts to attempt to play with somebody who didn’t want to play with them. This poor player was having a weekly experience of finding out that NewPC was, in fact, AnnoyingPlayer. PoorPlayer would then ask AnnoyingPlayer to leave them alone. Not complying with such a request was a bannable offence. AnnoyingPlayer would abandon NewPC and make a new alt, EvenNewerPC, and pounce on PoorPlayer.

I made registering alts mandatory, and regularly looked for matching IPs. People using VPNs would regularly forget to turn them on, so yeah, I could see that a PC was logged on from Davenport, Iowa, and then again from Anchorage, Alaska, less than two hours later, and knew that the set of alts associated with those two IPs were probably all the same person. So, I’d ask them to register their alts and they’d either do it, quit the game on their own, or get banned for being bad at lying to me. Easy-peasey.

I felt hesistant about this because of the idea that ‘alt privacy’ is and should be a thing, but it didn’t take me long to feel confident it was a good choice. SO much, so very much, fuckery simply disappeared when the players themselves could spot stalkery shit, and conflict-of-interest shit, and cheaty shit. The game was empowered to police itself. And it allowed players more freedom – I could allow people to have alts in potential-conflict-of-interest situations and trust that they wouldn’t cheat in that way. Because if they did, it’d be obvious to everyone.

I dunno. If I, like many before me, write a story about Conan the Barbarian, I am not sure I’d describe it as having outsourced part of the work to the late Robert E. Howard. I mean, technically, yeah, but there’s sort of a fuzzy line there. If I write a story about Robin Hood did I outsource it to Anonymous? One weird drunken night a friend of mine and I wrote a hilarious libretto for an imaginary opera about Robert Downey Jr. tripping on mushrooms and getting shipped to Guam, and okay, this notion was inspired by Robert Downey Jr.'s actual drug-fueled antics in the late 90’s, but outsourced to? Hmm.

If I cut and paste room/area descriptions from a novel and just cut and edit a little to be more MU-desc like and uniform, that seems clear plagarism/outsourcing. But not necessarily a terrible thing if the novelist doesn’t mind.

None of these actions seem equivalent to getting a glorified markov chainer to do the job, but maybe I’m just sour; I have a lot of professional artist and writer friends.

Double standards.

Abelard’s so pissed about what Bridgit did IC, so mean and it messed up his RP prospects. So he does the very same thing to Camille, because she was standin’ next to Bridgit, and accuses Camille of being unable to accept IC consequences when Camille doesn’t like it either.