Well, I said I would update this, so here goes:

You were right.

To everyone who told me: “You can’t trust Cujo!” and “The staff are crazy!” and “Bad actors will ruin your experience!” you were right and I admit defeat.

The game was fun for most of a year, where I had crazy adventures and made tons of friends and had a big impact on the game. Cujo was fun and silly and nonserious. Most of the staff were friendly and helpful. Faction leaders on both sides were great to engage with, with one notable exception.

But everything came crashing down when Ruby did what Ruby/Rey does best and set fire to other people’s fun. Then Cujo lied to my face about it.

The update is as follows:

Many of my friends are gone or weeks idle. Plot progress receded into nothingness. The rebels were allowed a single world in all this time and the Empire got to blow up the Millennium Falcon. The Jedi are unchanged. The Sith are unchanged. The galaxy is unchanged.

And that’s not going to change any time soon, because Ruby/Rey had a bitchfit about Ben Solo having a girlfriend (not me). Sure glad we avoided THAT problem, you hateful harpy. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?

As for Cujo… I’m just hurt more than anything. I was only ever nice to him. Friendly. Encouraging. And he still lied to me.

I’m just really disgusted that she managed to do this to me not once but twice and I wasn’t even involved in the situation she flipped out about. And I’m actually pretty angry that Cujo proved this whole thread to be correct when I was absolutely convinced that it couldn’t be true. How gullible I must have seemed to him.

Anyway, that’s my final report, almost a full year since I tried to redeem this place’s name, unless something radically changes. I may log on now and then just to see if my friends have poked their heads back in. But I’m not holding my breath.

It was fun while it lasted, at least.

@catzilla This is me. ._.

@MayorMccheez said in Numetal/Retromux:

Oh, and for the people wondering what sort of ‘creepy’ things she sent him. Which, he obviously gave her his address willingly. I talked to her about it. It was a stuffed animal bat for his birthday because she felt bad when he felt like he was going to have a shitty birthday.

Wow, fuck that guy. I know nothing else about him and this alone is enough to make him the biggest piece of shit on the forum in my eyes.

Get shit on, @Cygnus . Just fucking peace out and never return.

Well, this all sucks. I was gone for a couple days and came back to not only Ben/Mando Alt being gone who were super cool, but also Ruby wanting to burn another MU I’m fond of.

Will update as details emerge. Also, if you’re reading this Ben, hit me up! You’re the best! (I’m Roan/Nika.)

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Lemon-Fox I’m curious as to which staffer made that statement. If it was a relatively new staffer (one who has been around for roughly a year or less), you may be able to take them at their word. If not… well, just be careful. Most of the time, ‘I haven’t had that experience,’ usually means, 'I haven’t had that experience yet. But I wouldn’t cry if the place really has turned over a new leaf (or at least buried the really nasty stuff far, far away from the non-twisted population of the game, and stopped hunting up new victims).

Also, the Empire snatching up worlds being due to dice results is a relatively recent thing, one that arose with the implementation of the naval combat system. Before that… well. It was basically, ‘Don’t bother locking the door… they’ll just knock it down or burn through it’. So you could either be under occupation, or be under occupation AND have to get a new door. This was especially true just after the timeshift.

As for population, the place is miles ahead of almost every other MUSH out there (even if you can see 100 logins on WHI, and about 40 of them turn out to be alts. That number has sunk to a rough average of 80-85, with at least 30 alts, but that’s still miles ahead of the 12-30 logins typical of most MUSHes), and there are a lot of scheduled events. Spontaneous on-grid RP seems to be coming back out of its grave at long last, too. This is entirely due to an influx of new and very active players over the last six months or so.

It was Discordia, and staff has been immaculate. There are occasionally semi-creepy players, but a simple “I’d prefer not to be greeted like that” has ended it on the spot. As for the Empire eating worlds, the Rebellion has since come out of its coma and been aggressively fighting back, in really stellar world-plots. For example, Tion 2 is currently viciously contested in a space war between guerilla Rebel starfighters (Black Squadron) and Imperial forces, while Turkana has been embroiled in an active ground resistance. I managed to fly up to the neck of an AT-M6 during one battle and disable its heavy guns through slicing while tanking point defense fire in my power armor. 10/10 experience!

The Hutt Cartel has also been experiencing a renaissance, while PC pirate activity is on the rise. I think Andor’s lasting impression has people energized and plots are going strong. Good time to come join us! There are also Jedi and Sith about, sometimes. My PC is gearing up to kill one.

@KarmaBum said in World Tone / Feeling:

People seem to be saying this a lot, so I’m kinda curious what “touch the world” mean in terms of MUSH gameplay.

Can you share some concrete examples from a player perspective of what this looks like on a MUSH?

Recently on Star Wars: Age of Alliances, my derpy Space Captain stumbled across the really rather grimdark tone-shift on Chandrila. Like, full-on fascist hellscape with military police on every street corner and history being dramatically rewritten to favor the Sith Empire. It really broke her heart, because as a noble-born Coruscanti girl, she had visited Chandrila as a child before the Sith rose to power in the wake of the First Order’s destruction.

This character was also very friendly with several suspected or known rebels because for her the war wasn’t personal. She had a shiny uniform that never got dirty while standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer. People were always worried about the Empire building a new superweapon, but really, what were the odds of that happening? The idea of killing a whole planet (or star system) was just cartoonishly evil, and no one would really do that. Right? After it had failed… how many times?

But Chandrila changed that. Suddenly the idea that these people would murder an entire planet, not just once but many times over, became terribly real. And all the rumors, the speculation, the inaction of the Jedi, nobody really doing anything to go after this one big problem all came crashing down on her head.

And I decided that she wasn’t going to stand for it. So I started working with Empire players, Rebel players, and staff on how to bring about a change. What might kickstart a renewed effort to stop these things before they get deployed? (Nevermind that at this point I didn’t know the planet killers HAD been deployed before at least once.)

Eventually we settled on a two step plan: Step One: Defect to the Rebellion. Step Two: Take the planetkiller schematics with her. Quitting in style, basically.

Well, no plan ever goes that smoothly, and it ended up with my poor Captain in a locker room, struggling against computer checks three times what she could reasonably crack. She had Black Widowed her way into getting security codes, then further Black Widowed her way into arranging a brief window where she could be alone with specific a code cylinder, an uplink point, and a datapad. But it wasn’t going well. I had failed too many rolls, and if she wanted to get out, she needed to move. Now.

But this was important to her. More important than anything else had been because the idea of little frozen bodies floating in space amidst the rubble of a dead world was too much for her to bear. If she ran and that happened? That was on her now. So she stayed, blew through the last firewall that she could, and uploaded the data. She didn’t get the schematics–but she did find out where they were, who the project director was, who the lead engineer was, and where they had originally been built. It had to be enough as the security team broke in and stunned her. Game over.

But, luckily for her, Captain Derp had made a lot of friends, and in something between Mass Effect and Doom, lightsabers and blasters and some really, really lucky rolls got my character out. And she got exfiltrated to the Rebellion! She lost everything–wealth, status, a luxurious private shuttle, and command of a Star Destroyer. But, because of her, knowledge of the planet killers was out in the wild. And that made me really happy. I had poked the world and made an indelible mark on it.

And that felt a lot better than any mountain of credits, gear, or rare junk I could have gotten my hands on.

I would absolutely jump on this. Make it so!

@Jax said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

Battletech Lords and Ladies is as important as the mechs. Probably more so.

But mercenaries!

@SpilledBeanz said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I don’t think you deserve anything to happen to you because you decided to check on a game that has bad publicity, and if you continue to play on AoA I, for one, wish you fun stories.

No worries. I only posted about it again because once more it was said, “Well! You can go try it for yourself, but…” And I’m still like, “Well, I mean, I did. Still no issues.” Still not trying to trivialize other peoples’ experiences, just updating about my own, like a cave explorer.

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Though I will say that anybody who reads any part of this thread and says, “Ooooh! I wonder if it really is that bad? I think I will play this game and find out!”, and follows through on that statement, is an idiot of the first order (pardon the pun) and deserves whatever awfulness happens to them. It could be compared to jumping into the Amazon River just to see if there really are piranha in the river.

I mean… I did? And while I am an idiot of the first order, I haven’t seen like…anything that you’re talking about? I play a very flirty character who is very rarely interested in following through, and no one has pestered me? And I straight up asked about the Harassment Policy thing, and no less than three admins messaged me asking if I was having any issues they could help with. One even went so far as to say, "I understand that this game has that reputation, but it’s not like that anymore, and won’t be as long as I am here.’

As for the Empire snatching up worlds, that’s more the luck of the dice, and I felt awful when we routed them from Mygeeto. (I’m Roan, hi!) We’re currently trying to invade Hapan and wow are we getting our faces beat in. We lost like…half of our fighters or something? With no way to resupply. And it’s just how the dice fall in space combat.

That said, when this all started, the Empire was outnumbered 5 to 1 in naval personnel, and I don’t think it’s shifted that far since? The Rebels seem to commit to these big, involved plans that require lots of scenes and I’m just wondering why a few easy targets aren’t snatched up first. Get some green on that map! I only apped Empire because it was super dead at the time. Get out there and rebuild that Republic!

(edit for spelling)

@Trashcan said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

We left because players who had behaved in unconscionable ways were promoted rather than disciplined. These same players remain on staff. You may not care what kind of people they were to other people or at another time, but there are certain activities that, change of heart or not, I’m simply not ever willing to be around those who have done them or who tolerate them. It’s hard to say which is worse, but at AoA you don’t have to decide; you get both.

Of course we discussed these concerns with Cujo. I spoke with Cujo a few times a week for over five years. Zephyr spoke with him every day. We tried appealing to a sense of decency over this particular decision and were rebuffed. That’s why we left. We wanted to see some justice. We wanted protection from an abuser. We didn’t get it, so we had to leave.

There is a lot of unrelated salt in this thread, that is true, but this post was not put up out of a sense of revenge but sadness and concern. I am still sad, three years gone, about the outcome of those conversations, and I am still concerned for players who, like me at the time, did not know that the environment was unsafe. Please watch carefully for yours and your friends’ safety; staff won’t be.

Yeah. You’re right. I guess I just want to be optimistic. And, as mentioned above, if I see that kind of behavior, I’ll be right back over here declaring that I was wrong. Sorry to dredge up bad memories, I was just reacting to the poo-pooing of the new galactic conquest system. I didn’t mean to chuck people’s feelings out the window, so sorry for that.

@Zephyr Thanks for the heads up. I’ll be sure to post here if stuff goes sour, or if my friends report stuff being sour. I’m not going to sit around on that nonsense.

@Jax I don’t think Banshee, Hadrix, or Aryn were involved in the admiral character thing. Heck, Aryn supported me, and has been making an effort to include me in stuff with the Force Using Sith. She also seems excited about the Rebellion taking a stand and starting to recover worlds. But, as above, I’ll update if things seem to be going negative.

My trumpet is a tool of justice, not to be used in anger, not for vengeance! And, well, this is still my trumpet, so we can’t cue any cool Metal Gear Rising music just yet. But I just wanted to report that things seem pretty good right now, and you never know! People can change! Just hoping for the best right now.

And be sure to hit me up on game if you ever wanna talk or just check the place out again.

It’s not a bug, but the very, very slight color difference between quotes and posts makes my eyes hurt when there are several on screen at once. Is there a way to change that?

@Warlander

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

And as for me ‘crapping all over it’, ‘being a giant dick about it’, ‘such a sourpuss about this’, ‘salty’, etc., etc., etc… reread my posts on this subject. Compare it to other posts here, including your own. I have my moments of anger and bitterness, as does everyone, and I’m choosing to believe that this is one of yours, because, contrary to what you may be thinking, I respect players and staff, yourself included, until they give me a very good reason not to.

I just didn’t read it that way, and it seemed really negative toward something that is just trying to help (and being pretty effective!) I think one of the major disconnects is that people here expected a cut-throat, finely honed PvP engine, when those of us using it just like to swing big ships at each other and shout silly insults when we lose. The jank is part of the fun for now. It’ll get beaten into shape with more testing.

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Cujo and Company failed that test long ago

So, this is part of why I feel like old salt is interfering with giving stuff a chance. I’ve been on the game for a while now, and I’ve not experienced…hardly anything listed here. And while I play flirty characters, I’m rarely in the mood for taking anything further. And no one has creeped on me, which is actually really refreshing.

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

(especially if it includes seeing the Sith Empire pushed into the position the Resistance occupies right now, a situation that I would consider proof positive that Aryn and her ilk aren’t just letting everyone think they’re accomplishing something while nothing meaningful actually changes)

This is actually my hope. I’m not going to sabotage the Empire’s efforts, but the Rebellion outnumbers us by a huge margin and I’d love for them to kick our butts overall. That’s the Star Wars way! I’d honestly like to also see a huge uptick in Jedi running around. Sith can be anywhere, but the Jedi are always hiding under rocks right now.

@Hobbie I appreciate the very grounded approach to how you worded this! Just a couple things, though:

@Hobbie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Then the resultant hostility from Cujo will follow, because now he has been slighted by the ungrateful players that don’t want to use what he worked so hard to create.

Have you actually talked to him about any of this? Like, directly? Casually?

@Hobbie said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

The fact that you needed staff fiat to start in a position where you can actually play with this new system (which is otherwise locked only to dinosaurs) is both common and unfortunate.

The Naval Captain thing is open to anyone! No XP, Noms, or what-have-you required! You can also make a General or Wing Commander if you like! Just wanted to make sure people didn’t have that impression about it.

@Warlander So, hi. I play Nika/Roan and I’m the reason the wargame stuff happened. I didn’t design any of it, and Cujo told me he had this rattling around in his head for years but couldn’t make it work. But he decided to try it out anyway, and people got really excited about it. So why are you crapping all over it?

To unpack all that, I apped an Admiral character so Imperial Navy people could have someone to come chat at, and Rebels could have a new enemy to lazily RP at. The game was pretty quiet and I just wanted to stir stuff up a little. Like, super low effort. The character got approved, and I was going to be plunked onto the flagship since the position was largely going to be ceremonial.

Someone disapproved of someone coming in without starting from the bottom of the ladder, and I was flabbergasted that they would care since the org had very little activity. I was cool with just binning the character since I wasn’t there for cool leadership stuff and just wanted to shake out some RP. But staff put forward the Navy Captains initiative that you saw above. Just a super-raw framework to be ironed out, and we’ve been doing playtesting on it, on and off.

And for the last part, thanks for being a giant dick about it, because that’s definitely going to inspire any positive change. I’m super thrilled that activity had skyrocketed and people are gearing up for a giant offensive to finally take back the galaxy. The rebels are having fun. The imperials are having fun. Aryn has been huge in fostering RP for the conflict, and us captains have been having a blast with tongue-in-cheek rivalries and for-fun shit talking.

So why are you such a sourpuss about this? Okay, you had bad experiences a long-ass time ago. Can’t you let anything new happen without blowing a trumpet asking other people to be outraged with you? Like, damn, come check it out for yourself if you like. I play Roan and Nika! Hit me up if you want to talk. But don’t just start wrapping the whole thing in shit because you are salty.

@somasatori I just had my first Jill encounter over on Age of Alliances! I was so excited! Paged me right out of the blue.

Guest (G1) pages: I think my most awkward RL experience was getting check ups from a doctor in my high school as part of the tryout for joining sports
You paged Guest with ‘Jill! Hello!’
You paged Guest with ‘I wondered if it was you!’
Guest (G1) pages: oh hey. sorry, I didnt remember talking with you
You paged Guest with ‘We haven’t! This is the first time.’

Sadly she vanished right after that. It was like encountering a cryptid in the wild.