@somasatori said:

Should one play any games at all?

Only if you do not actually expect to play.

Any expectation that a game be a game is overbearing presumption. And a personal attack.

@Ominous Yep. Evidently their take-out was inferior.

@Roz Years ago I was befuddled that conservatives kept calling the Bureau of Land Management a terrorist organisation. It’s some sort of cognitive flaw.

The absolute best was that in the late '90’s neonazi skinheads started getting D.O.C. tattoos like in ‘American History X’ and I think, no, not ‘Department of Corrections’, no, I think DOC stands for ‘Day Old Chick.’

The excessive use of initialisms.

I read a whinge about take-out from BWW. I thought, “A big weird woman brought you food and you complain?”

@Jumpscare said:

Some people cling to my character’s words in a way that feels like they’re hoping to get in on a plot, and others suddenly disregard my character.

If you make it known (in +finger or whatever) that it’s your PC, the disregard side will probably reduce. Discovering that two personas you’ve been dealing with are one person can be off-putting and people who have that reaction are likely to withdraw some. Some people may feel that secret staff PCs serve as undercover wrongfun police who are scrutinising them rather than playing with them, and will avoid.

The cling-ons may drop off if events on the game are transparent enough that people can tell that IC connection to a staff PC isn’t a doorway to plot access. At least, it was my experience that my main PC didn’t attract that sort of thing, while people did run out to meet certain NPCs.

@Faraday said:

there’s nothing inherently wrong with running plots for yourself/your friends

I think its more inherently right. That’s what’s really wanted, isn’t it? The ideal MU experience you have a friendly RP group of gaming-friends and work plots together with GMs who are also gaming-friends.

The balancing act is the but also making it so that random gamers who find your game on MUDstats or Ares Central etc have a path to getting in on it.

@Roadspike said:

I’ve been accused of spotlighting my own characters and she’s been accused of running scenes just for my characters

I’ve no idea what the circumstances were for that, but I want to point out:

It’s not wrong or bad to do either of those things.

It just shouldn’t be a big percentage of all the spotlighting and scene-running that you do, you know?

I remember games that did regular ‘staff appreciation’ events where staff PCs (including those who saw a lot of action without that boost) were purposefully spotlighted . Players were down with it.

@Faraday said:

On a good game with a decent staff, you can trust staffers to remain fair even for their own characters

Yes. And if alts are all marked, so everybody knows that the staff PC is a staff PC, and the staffer is not a raging ego who will explode at being called imperfect, then – while I was typing @roadspike hit it – that staffer/player will hear about it if they’ve overstepped.

@L.-B.-Heuschkel said:

Staff that is essentially faceless authority figures invite abuse and fuckery from players who don’t identify with them as fellow hobby nerds.

This, and more.

Staff who really want to be authority figures are, hm. Typically not great. If they value protecting their authority more than they value fairness and widespread fun, they’re liable to be a nightmare.

You cannot separate the authority from the work, but the authority should not be the reward for the work nor the reason you do it.

In workplace type situations that get studied by sociologists and the like, people who put much psychic stock into being an authority figure and protecting that status are at a much greater risk of burn-out as well as making everyone around them miserable.

Because I was raised by goats I am an anarcho-syndicalist, but even putting that aside I’d still actively make an effort to be an OOC-friendly chat-channel user as a staffer. Players should feel that I have a personality, and that I am accessible, and that I am open to making new friends, even them.

@Third-Eye There’s a secondary issue in there – PCs that are just called NPCs 'cause they’re staff PCs and staff aren’t allowed PCs in their own section is a weird thing that happens. I’m not sure it matters much except for giving bad vibes, though.

@Kestrel said:

It’s very easy for game admins to grow out of touch with what the actual day-to-day experience of the game is like. This especially matters on crunchy games. You need to have the experience of someone stomping you into the dirt in the least fun way possible, in order to appreciate just how unfun it is for everyone else (and realise it needs fixing).

@Muscle-Car said:

As long as staff characters are marked as such, absolutely they deserve to play!

I strongly believe that every alt, staff’s PC or not, must be identified – RP as many characters as you want, but don’t pretend to be more than one player, whoever you are.

This rule put an end to ninety-some-percent of troublesome crap I had to deal with and reduced player anxiety by some unmeasurable but noticeable amount.

But it does mean that some players are going to treat staff PCs differently. But if you don’t mark alts, many players are going to figure it out anyway, and you’re bound to tell some. So in that case you’ve created an in-group with a seeming advantage (in front of people who’ve probably seen it abused to advantage in the past) and for what?

Staff should play PCs if they want and what they want, and it is helpful for knowing what’s happening on the game and what it’s like to use the systems, etc, but don’t expect it, or the words of your play-group, to be a great example of what it’s like for somebody who found your game on MUDstats or the like.

Wolf 1273M. He was famous for being the guy who trotted up to a photographer’s set-up, sniffed around and then stole a tripod. Park rangers worked on hazing him specifically to get him to shy away from human stuff more like the other wolves. He hadn’t been showing signs of being habituated to humans any more, and I don’t see any reason to think the hunter who killed him targeted him specifically or knew which wolf they were looking at, but, a bummer.

(It’s so hard, but sometimes you really have to haze wildlife for everyone’s safety. Yelling, “You got no job and you’re not wearing pants, get out of town!” at mountain lions is a public good.)

@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.