@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

A lot of people don’t realize they’ve become a chore until well after the fact. We’re not often conscious of annoying social behaviors because we’re used to acting a specific way, even in an online text form.

I mean this very nearly literally. Not ‘over time Abelard became tiresome to AwesomeStaffer and Abelard didn’t know it’ which certainly does happen, but ‘AwesomeStaffer has not responded to Abelard since they approved him.’ Awesome has no bad experience of Abelard. Little ways Abelard is annoying haven’t built up over time.

@Pavel I think so? I think the deal was supposed to be that a paying player couldn’t tell if another player was paid or paying to be there, but the paid ones would be paid to pounce on the payers and do stuff their finger-files asked for. The scheme really didn’t get far. I expect it was also meant to have, uh, some kind of naughty mobs so instead of running around typing ‘attack monster with sword’ like on an ordinary MUD, you’d go ‘tickle nymph with magetongue’ or somesuch and seek the treasured magical Long Strong Dong With the +8 Double Prong and stuff. Lewd Zork was also a thing then.

Once I was supposed to get paid to TS people on a pay-to-TS-people MOO. I never did, because it never got completed, possibly because the place hosting realised that it would be difficult to be sure all users were of age. That was back when 14.4 baud dial-ups and does not seem viable today.

I used to ask players to donate to certain charities, but also made it clear that I wouldn’t know if they did.

I suppose you might monetise a MU by allowing connections only from a website with adverts.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb Idk how to ask this… does this happen to you frequently? Are you a bit of a chore? I mean I’ve absolutely been a bit of a chore.

No, it does not happen to me frequently. No doubt yes, as all humans are a bit of a chore.

I’ve been playing these games since 1993, and seldom had conflicts with staff, or anyone. In the last handful of years I’ve come up against it/heard about it more. My sample size is small, but I certainly believe @catzilla that this could happen twice in a row. People used to bitch about staff running plots starring so-and-so but never meee, now it’s staff that just don’t answer.

If I have become an insufferable chore recently and this is the reason I’ve had this experience, then staffers have developed time travel. You really can’t say staff is refusing to interact with a player because the player is a chore when there was never a period when they did actually interact with that player.

Look. GM attention on a GMed game is a reasonable thing for players to expect. There’s nothing wrong with a GM taking a break, or a GM choosing to interact with the people they particularly enjoy to have some fun and relief from their troubles. But if that is so much of what they do that they never get around to the players they don’t particularly enjoy and leave those PCs unable to act, it’s not “GMs are people,” it’s bad judgement or careless or mean.

@sao said in MU Peeves Thread:

skipping one for awhile because you aren’t feeling it is an extremely reasonable thing to do.

This is true. But I’m not talking about skipping one for a while. That’s gonna happen.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

discourage all would-be game creators who may now believe that someone is always going to be watching them on the +where to decide whether or not they are stretched thin enough.

I’ve said it before, to the disgruntlement of the MuSB readership: If you run a MU that has more than a few hand-picked players, someone will criticise you. If that is gonna fill you with rage, or shame, or anxiety, you should just not run an open-apps game.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s a lot of stuff to consider on staff side too:

1. Yes, they should honestly be honest with the player and ask them to leave, not waste the player’s time, damage their own temper, or profess that it’s wrong for players to expect GM attention on the same time-scale as other players.

2. Yes, but I’m not talking about that, for as I said, a player can tell how many +requests have been submitted between two of their own +requests, and even if you’re not trying it’s likely that you will notice that the job number went up a lot since your last +request, or didn’t.

3. Yep. I would suggest if they’re having a bad year they should take sabbatical. If they’re having a bad month, week, or day, well, yeah, that happens. But players are also people, and they talk to each other, so if you tell them you’re not responsive because bad week but they also heard Abelard talking about the quick and cool response he got that same week, well. Reasonably, they’ll probably think you ran out of steam after you got to Abelard. But when the same thing happens week after week? They have a point.

4. What? If I have a scheduled appointment, I expect the person to show up. Even if it’s at a weird time. Why the heck is any staffer scheduling something at a time they can’t make?

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

This sounds like something you’ve done yourself. Are you a +where stalker?

It does?

I did once inspire the wrath of VASpider by telling her that yeah, everybody knows from the +where that she’s TSing with Tiny while players are waiting for +requests, and nobody’s saying anything because it’s against MU etiquette, which is how it goes, but for crying out loud, don’t tell the public channel that’s what you’re doing. I am not sure that counts. And it was probably 2003.

@hellfrog Those are valid reasons to ask them to leave, not valid reasons to cheat.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

But you can’t convince me that running plots on a game is the same responsibility as caring for living, breathing beings in a real caretaking sense.

It’s not, but y’know, they want joy and relief from the absolute horrors and it’s not wrong to be dissapointed, annoyed, or hurt at being shut out when it’s working for others and they can’t figure out why they’re not able to reach the top of the queue.

@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:

You’re certainly free to decide this doesn’t match your preference, but it’s not really fair to decry it as a miscarriage of justice.

A miscarriage of justice? Haha.

But really, the expectation that everybody gets a turn and the GM doesn’t skip yours because they kinda feel like it is not something that needs to be explicitly stated in a policy. It’s how gaming works. It is fair to decry it as rude fuckery, which is what we talk about here.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

in the majority of cases

Perhaps so, but this does not mean that the problem I mention does not happen frequently.

I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general, They complain about staffers cheating for their PCs or other staffers’ PCs, or staffers making all plots the Staff-Alt Story.

Hell, there is such a taboo (and likely a justified one) against +where stalking that if a player is waiting for a five minute reply to a +request and happens to see the staffer online 15 out of 16 days and they appears to be spending 5+ hours each day actively RPing their alt with Abelard and Bridget or GMing scenes for Abelard and Bridget, the player still won’t say anything. This is probably for the best, but it doesn’t mean that players don’t know, and lying to them about how busy and thinly spread staff is doesn’t entertain.

@helvetica Not any one specific game, but yeah, I was specifically talking about situations where it’s obvious that staff isn’t spread thin and one really can’t help but notice this.

Of course staff should RP.

@catzilla Yeah, that’s the new innovative method of MU GMing. Respond only to the players you feel like responding to. Get really huffy when someone outside that set asks for timely reponses. Take their request as a hideous accusation. Claim you didn’t mean to ignore them, you’re just really swamped running the game and you’re doing your best. Castigate them for giving you a hard time when you’re doing your best. Don’t actually try to do better by them. Say you will, though. Pretend you don’t know that +requests are numbered and people can do math and figure out that you’re swamped by three requests a day. Pretend you don’t know that people can see you on +where RPing with or GMing the players you feel like responding to for three or six hours several times a week while not providing +request response that will take you five minutes. Punish players who complain that you’re unresponsive by refusing to respond to them. Complain about your inexplicable inability to retain players. Complain to your friends about the killjoy players who destroy the vibe by asking you to be responsive instead of leaving. Blame them for your inability to retain players.

The strange delight I feel when students suffer from autocorrect.

This week, there were a lot of nasty analyses and nasty generalisations.

Bud Cort, dammit.

Michael Parenti

@Wizz Maaan I wish I felt like I missed something after reading that.

@hellfrog Yep. But also note that making unfair and non-interactive bad shit happen to PCs is legit unfun. It’s their responsibility to work it out, and they don’t get free rein to lash out at people because of it. BUT regardless, the shitty thing about unfair non-interactive shit is that it’s unfair non-interactive shit. It wouldn’t be just fine if the mark would only shut up and pretend it’s fine.

Like everything else, it depends.

I want bad stuff to happen to my PC, because I want stuff to happen.

But.

Is it fair? It sucks the fun right out of it when it’s shit like, “The House Rule I just invented means that the action you took before I invented this rule and told you about it was not the ordinary way of things, but a crime for which you are now in deep trouble.”

Is it interactive? It could be that as a story element the Bad Stuff is in fact A Gloriously Epic Trauma Conga Line, but if it’s all off-camera it’s insufferably frustrating, not fun.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most players who respond badly to bad stuff happening to their PCs have had experiences of unfair non-interactive bad stuff being used to shut them out of the game.

@Trashcan It is part of ‘Turnitin’ which is pretty widely used. I have no idea if it’s one of the ones you’ve listed here, or which one if it is.

Part of what’s exasperating about it is that it doesn’t give me any clue as to why it is tagging segments as “likely AI generated” so even if I don’t spot some way that makes it seem likely that it’s wrong, what possible use is it?

It would be ironic to the point of grotesque in the context of a class where I spend the whole time saying, “Why do you believe that?” and “Prove it,” and “Where’s the evidence?” and “Does that research methodology work? Do you think the result mean what the reaseachers say it means? Did the newspaper report say it means what the researchers said it means?” and so on. After that I’m gonna roll up and say, “Hey, a computer program using semi-secret methodology to detect AI says you cheated, so did you?” to a student?

I get @Faraday’s comments about people trusting computers in a weird way, but I guess I don’t share that, because I feel like I may as well draw tarot cards and just say anybody who gets an inverted swords card cheated.

I’ve got this AI detector thing and I hate it with the hatey black hate sauce.

No, you stupid thing, 100% of this student’s paper isn’t likely to be AI, I’ve watched him building this argument for twelve weeks.

Say, what, this one’s paper is also likely all AI? Who the heck tells AI to do APA formating so creatively wrongly?

Yeah, right, this is so likely all AI, the student fed the assignment into AI along with the instructions, “Write this in the style of someone who doesn’t know how to write an academic paper trying to write an academic paper.”

I really hope other instructors are not taking this daft thing seriously.

Oh, it’s a troublesome character even if you remove the ableism.

Deep in my little black heart I have this desire to app a comics game as the demon Baytor, a sort of tube with teeth that shouts “I AM BAYTOR!” a lot and does little else.

This is a bad, bad idea, obviously bad. It might be okay if I made sure Baytor could only be found where it’s found in the comics, working as a bartender at a certain pub, completely easy to avoid, and treated it as a sort of NPC I depict while playing a reasonbly PC-written-PC primarily.

Aside from brain damage not being very funny, this person did outright say that they wanted to RP an obnoxious character.

Boiled down, the conversation seems to amount to:

PeeOften: I want to RP a disruptive and annoying character, specifically. But you won’t tell me how to RP a disruptive and annoying character without it being disruptive and annoying, you big meanie you.

@SockMonkey I’m strongly with that living room model. They say it’s wrong to compare a MU to a tabletop, and there sure are big differences, but the living room gaming sessions of my young-adulthood are what I’m aiming for in text-format.

It’s your living room, you provided the space and the bog-roll. You make the rules and so long as you make them clear or they’re just aligned with general and MU-specific norms, you’re not doing it wrong. Not letting people you actively dislike in is natural and will spare everyone trouble.

I tried to insist that players who couldn’t stand each other avoid each other with grace and not snipe at each other, because we may not all be friends but we’re going to act friendly in my living room. And tried to encourage OOC socialising and be available and friendly for it myself, since to me this is the real meta-game of RPGs (what you can win is friends) for Gary Gygax is the godfather of most of my oldest and most treasured friendships.