@Pavel I’m presuming that there’s not a whole bunch of people that the staffer dislikes, and that the staffer isn’t feeling over-stretched.

A few people that a staffer has a dislike for is probably, all by itself, not a good reason to add another staffer.

If I ever make another game and more than one or two people wants to GM it, I do have this scheme to allow players and GMs more freedom about who they play with and an easy hopefully painless and not terribly feather-ruffling way to pass players off to another GM.

@voiceinthevoid

Staff either deals with me and makes a good faith effort to treat me equally to others in spite of disliking me, or they tell me they refuse to interact with me.

If they tell me they refuse to interact with me, they might ask me to leave (and I would, without a ban being necessary). Or they might not ask me to leave, so I could stay and continue to RP with zero staff support if I wanted (which I don’t, so I’d leave.)

Since they’re already trying to recruit new staff, Siren might have told me that she won’t deal with me but that I could wait for the new staffer. Suggesting that the game hire a new staffer just to tend to players that the existing one doesn’t like seems ridiculous.

@voiceinthevoid said:

I do have a few questions. Is @gashlycrumb banned? Does he want to be banned if not? Does he still play there? Does he believe he should be banned?

I’m not banned. No, I don’t play there, I left. I don’t want to be banned. I don’t think I should be or deserve to be banned. I don’t care if I’m banned since I won’t return anyway.

You don’t actually have to ban a person to tell them that you refuse to interact with them. That’s what should have been done, six months ago or whenever Siren made that decision. I dunno about ‘unethical’ as @Roz has a point that it’s not a moral calamity, it’s just crappy.

Yes, there have been a lot of periods when almost no jobs were answered on Lib, and the major such time has a tragic cause. I didn’t resent it or bug anybody about it. Siren has posted a couple times on the bb that everything is caught up and jobs are being done normally, with the implication of a less than two-week turn around. I didn’t even think she disliked me until I asked the cause of these delays for me in the context of the posts and she told me so. I thought it was an organisational issue.

@midnightcreature I don’t like framing it as volunteer work either.

Say, folks. Y’know, museum and library volunteers sometimes:

Refuse to do the parts of the job they don’t like.
Skip their shifts on a whim.
Reserve for their friends tickets/swag/prizes that they are meant to give out first-come-first-serve.
Demand frequent praise.
Become furious at any attempt to guide them.

This is why many institutions find that they cannot afford volunteers. You need a full-time professional to wrangle them. It’s not uncommon for volunteer programs to run at a financial loss and the institution to continue them purely for community goodwill.

Please don’t have this attitude towards volunteer jobs. You may harm the organisation you’re trying to help. (And if you are just doing it for your ego, well, pssst: the professionals are likely to call you “the staff infection,” when you’re not there if you do that stuff.)

@Wizz said:

but no one is arguing with you.

Not on the simplest level. They’re excusing it, though.

I do not believe that there’s a player who is so terrible that it excuses staff from talking to them yet doesn’t require that staff remove them.

I don’t believe that it’s ‘most ideal’ for everybody to get a turn and ‘not bad’ if they don’t. Turns are so core to social play that baby rats with one cubic centimetre of brain matter do it. I don’t believe it’s ‘most ideal’ for GMs to talk to players, I believe that’s a core element of the job. A bike without wheels isn’t less than ideal, it’s fundamentally broken.

@Pavel said:

You’re taking general suggestions and advice and treating them as immediate instructions.

Huh. This is totally my bad because I misread this sentence. Not just misunderstanding what you meant, but what it actually says. I apologise.

@Kestrel

I can see why you’d see it that way and hope you mean based on just this thread and just from Siren’s shoes. The thing is that deciding not to engage with someone when you are their only GM in a GM-required game is bad practice even if they’re a problem player or even a bad person. Pre-emptively refusing to engage and thinking you dodged a bullet 'cause they snarl doesn’t seem right.

@Kestrel said:

Forget about what staff was thinking, decide what you want/expect, and pick where to spend your energy accordingly.

Good advice. Easily muddled if there are announcements made about how what you expect is what staff wants to give and will be forthcoming, please be patient etc. I am often naive that way.

@Pavel Seems to me more like you just want to deny that it’s reasonable for me to have understood you the way I did.

I’d like to examine this more closely but I expect it would read to you as exactly what you’re complaining about,. I’ll take a run at it another way.

@Pavel Okay. It came across that way to me is all, then.

@Pavel

It’s immediate instructions that assume I didn’t already do that, and imply later that because I didn’t, my uh, ‘moral superiority’ is broken.

That an ignored player will get cheesed off and the game is likely to feel it is a general truth that staffers should understand.

In this particular instance? I’d been logging in, taking the frustration hit, not bitching about it except to those who opened the bitch-session, reaching out every few months as either a nudge or a new thing, not RPing because it annoys other players if your PC doesn’t do what he says he’ll do ‘cause the +request won’t move. A lot of this had to do with the smooth transition between +jobs not getting done because they needed Sundance and she wasn’t there and +jobs being slow because of the backlog from that and my jobs not getting done when others’ were. This was the second time I had annoyed Siren by responding (no, not on the bb, I put my messages in requests or mail) to bbposts that implied reasonable turn-around times for jobs by pointing out my stale ones and asking what’s wrong, but the previous one was probably nearly a year ago and at least nine months. I just don’t think I was stinking up the place with my cheesed-offness, though it wouldn’t be odd if I had done.

@Pavel

Yes, and when I learned that it was genuinely intentional (or close enough that Siren would claim that it was) I left.

I am not sure why it’s being taken as a given that I’m still playing there. But then again it’s taken as a given that Siren gave a clear “no” for me to not take as an answer previous to refusing to respond. I’ve said otherwise.

What “more problems” did I cause?

@Wyrmsign said:

“No.” is a complete sentence.

Who said it?

@hellfrog Yeah;. What I was getting at with that is that even if a player is annoying and horrible, it’s not good practice to just leave them twisting. That is to say that, even in cases where it’s understandable, it’s crap.

@hellfrog said:

As a staffer, if you knew that turning someone down/telling them they were being too much was likely to get you called abusive and stupid and whatever else…would you be eager to have that conversation? Would you want to put it at the top of your to-do?

Turning someone down, or telling them they’re being too much, or even just telling them to re-read the theme guidelines and not app an elf into an elf-free world is likely to get that response. I did know it when I was staffing. I knew it would happen before it happened, which was practically day one. (It was an elf.) If you are staffing an open game it’s going to happen.

Did I like it? No. Did I worry about it? No. Did I take a few moments to be chill and centered before I told people stuff like that? Yes. Did this mean I didn’t do it instantly? Yes. Did this mean I might even put it off 'til tomorrow? Yes.

Did this mean I’d decide to just not do it at all and hope the player went away? NO. Absolutely fucking not. It is understandable that I might want to, but it’d be mean and harmful to actually do that. If that player is waiting and waiting for a response from me they are experiencing frustration every time they log on and find no answer. It builds up. The player is gonna get cheesed off and it’s likely that they will, understandably, act like they’re cheesed off. The scent of cheese permeates. Pretty soon the vibe is in shambles, and it’d be my fucking fault for consciously and unnecessarily aggravating somebody instead of doing a part of the staffing job that’s not fun.

Grasp the nettle firmly, for fucks’ sake.

@MisterBoring

One.

I appreciate your continued efforts to help me feel bad about myself.

You are not, in fact, curious. I can see the parallels and anticipated that you’d be eager to point them out, but curiosity is not your motivator.

MN headwiz did not “stop responding.” +requests for me there had an average of 16 day turn-around when other people claimed four days. Staffer kept making scene appointments with me, then standing me up, then rescheduling and doing it again and again, such that it took an average of five reschedules to ever actually get to the thing. She frequently critiqued my behaviour and I repeatedly corrected it and found that this was impossible – asked not to complain about the game, I stopped only to be told that everything I ever mentioned negatively on any space was a thinly-veiled reference to the game, even if it was something that happened decades previously. Eventually I was ‘complaining’ by joining the LFRP channel and not saying anything at all. That staffer approached me the week before I was banned to give me a lecture about how content I should be without plot because everybody loved me and I got more +recs than anyone. Yet at the same time she was complaining about me on the staff channel daily, it seems. Also, frankly, that situation lacks bearing on pretty much any other because we were close friends previously and it’s fucking complicated.

I don’t know Siren from adam and I asked for normal player shit in a polite if no-doubt over-explainy way, and then had the gall to ask again when the issue didn’t get resolved.

Also, it’s a damn common complaint about Lib. For years a huge segment of players have found that their +requests sit and then get closed without being handled to ‘clear the queue.’ Scroll up. I actually suspect that Siren ignored me for that long out of pure habit and laziness, and then told me I deserved it rather than admit that she just can’t be bothered for a (formerly, who’s left?) significant segment of players, without stopping to think, “That’s worse, you do get how that’s worse, right?”

Also, no, not “eventually stop responding.” My entire experience with Siren was of someone who responded once and then ignored any follow-up. If her first response didn’t resolve the problem or answer the question, fucked are you, O Starr.

ETA: Oh, wait, since it wasn’t an ‘eventual’ stoppage but a near-immediate one, then the number of MUs where this has happened to me is actually zero.

@Apos said:

would never play on a game where staff obviously could not stand me, and that you do is absolutely mind boggling to me.

Oh, right. This.

That’s sort of the rub, isn’t it. It wasn’t obvious until they’d wasted a shitload of my time.That’s the bloody problem.

It really shouldn’t be mind-boggling to you that some people don’t take silence to mean "I can’t stand you’. I am not even sure how you get that out of what was actually said, which was “…can’t be bothered with you.” In any case, I just don’t feel like asking my GM for advice and a sheet-fix a second time when it didn’t get done before is all that evil, and I’m pretty sure that what I am not supposed to do is make the jump from “I keep getting skipped” to “the GM hates me!” without, like, asking what’s going on.

Why is it 'not taking a hint’ seen as bad player behaviour when hints are hints? Why are ‘not communicating clearly’ and ‘not communicating at all’ so defensible? This seems poor practice.

@Jennkryst Back in my day, we just used our better judgement.

Get off my lawn.

@Pavel Among the most hilarious of my gamerunning experiences was the conversation that went kinda like this:

“You guys need to adjust your RP to reflect the fact that your characters are the ones role-playing rape. Abelard is letting Byron climb in his window wearing a mask, and if you keep talking about it IC as real rapes, Abelard’s PC sister, who’s finding this traumatic, is probably gonna go to the watch and get Byron hanged and I don’t think that’s where you were aiming to go with this silliness.”

This solved it but I dunno that PC sister ever really got over the squick. She did keep playing, though.

@MidnightCreature said:

Ultimately, your response boils down to “I personally don’t care about this, so you shouldn’t either.”

That’s pretty much the current (fairly long standing) pattern 'round this corner of the hobby.

Spend ten or a hundred hours of your free time doing creative work to contribute to a shared fun space, then find that you are hurt and angry when somebody denies you a share in the fun but uses (and takes credit for) your work? How very childish of you, it’s just a game and your contribution can’t be monetised or anything.

Agree to GM but spend your time chauffeuring your besties around in Cheaty-Cheaty-Bang-Bang while ignoring everyone else, treating the two minutes it would take to say, “I refuse to GM for you, pound sand or leave,” to somebody as a Herculean task and see them squirm trying to find a path to inclusion? How very appropriate of you, you’re just too old for this shit.

It’s this flavour, except the peasant who ‘votes with their feet’ loses their life if they fail to establish themselves as an alpine goat or something, while the MUer who fails to find a better game or enjoy themselves as much writing a novel just loses a hobby.

Shared around to members of three different nodes of artists. Hope you get some good stuff. I’m in touch with this Anishinaabe painter but I don’t think you want woodlands school dragons even though this idea makes me drool. I kinda doubt he’d do it but I can add him too if you like.

Because it’s the only way to fix this?

@Meg Do you have an email or other contact you are using for this? I could pass it along to a few comics and graphic design people I know.