MidnightCreature

So originally I wasn’t going to say anything here at all, despite knowing about the existence of this board for awhile now. For a guy who(reportedly) famously likes to complain, I generally am not the sort of person to come post it here on Complain Zone Dot Com.

What changed my mind was finding out that are still some unpleasant things are still happening on Liberation specifically regarding work that I created for the project. I want to highlight that this was a pretty persistent and thorny issue long before my removal for at least but not limited to a year, and it bothers me that it continues to be an issue after my ban.

The two things that brought me here are as follows: Firstly I was informed that Siren had picked up a very specific plot I designed and decided to run it herself after keeping it in an administrative bottleneck for well over a year that prevented me from bringing it to a conclusive end. Secondly I got a ping notice to the gmail account I have tied to the game that the email that Siren used for Liberation MU adjacent activities was trying to access my Google Doc files where I had a huge amount of game related information stored.

I would really rather that she didn’t do either of those things and I would prefer the plot notice be taken down. To me that would be the simplest and most respectful course of action.

Will she? Probably not.

I’m also here with the bias that I have been working in the same space as Siren for a long time. I was a long time contributor to the game and someone that Siren frequently tried to minimize the contributions of, despite knowing about those contributions.

So in the scope of typical MUSH operations I was not just some random player she had infrequent contact with.

With that bias I have to express that while she has a pleasant “customer service” approach to how she speaks/types to people but that presentation doesn’t always reflect or translate to a genuine commitment to treat people with a respectable amount of dignity or provide actual support to people when it is most needed.

I think if there’s any credibility behind that the staff was earnest in how difficult banning me was the right choice should be fairly easy. But these are also the same staffers that rammed one of my game lore write-ups through an LLM and posted the sloppified version of that document up on the game boards so… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Whatever anyone thinks of me personally or of the decision to ban me from the game, I do think the current staff should be capable of creating their own material going forward without immediately resorting to the cannibalization of a full storyline written by someone they have just removed.

The plot in question is currently this one, but I wouldn’t be surprised the other ones had also been seized upon as well…

@Third-Eye

I have the receipts from that particular incident, including examples both documents.

Kraken particular has been heavily promoting LLM usage over there these days, which is one of the many things I was in disagreement with. I was also not the only player that found the uptick in LLM use concerning.

@Third-Eye !

So I was looking for a version of this that still had the timestamp in the screenshot from when I uploaded it to the game boards. The images under the Spoiler tags are INCREDIBLY large but I am but a forum noob so I’m not sure how to break up the formatting.

Here’s my write-up…
||SeptWriteupShuffle Version.png||

Soon after I uploaded this, it was removed by Siren. Who then responded to me in a hostile way about it.

Sometime later this version appeared…
!||SirenVersionPart1.png||
||||

I paged her soon after her version went up on the boards…
||18:00:24.290 You paged Siren with ‘Aside from the part about Only-Ghosts that is almost identical to what I wrote.’.
18:01:05.286 Siren(S) pages: Well I’m glad we’re on the same page! The only part I remembered from yours was the ‘Don’t fuck it up’ part, which I included as a nod to you for your amusement.
18:06:10.734 You paged Siren with ‘Thank you, I guess. Though I might have liked a drafting credit for the work I put in?’.
18:07:06.141 Siren(S) pages: We didn’t use your work, Addison. That was created by Kraken and I, and neither of us have access to what you wrote.
18:07:37.810 You paged Siren with ‘Are you saying you don’t have access to the logs from when you read it?’.
18:07:59.983 Siren(S) pages: No, I don’t log things outside of scenes. And by the time we started writing it, it was lost in my backlog.||
(I know I have a screenshot of this transcript from somewhere but I haven’t found it yet.)

Siren initially acknowledges having seen my original manuscript and even says that she remembered a specific part of it well enough to deliberately incorporate it into the new version. Once I ask about if I could be given drafting credit, however, she becomes noticeably more defensive about it.

It could ~in theory~ have been rewritten entirely by hand, but there are several red flags that resemble typical LLM-assisted rewriting, especially the kind of output produced when a source is fed into ChatGPT and asked to be condensed or given a different tone. So believe they did, knowing what I do about how LLMs process files.

Siren’s version repeatedly uses “it’s not X, it’s Y” phrasing and there are several places where one of those statements appears to connect two ideas that don’t really logically follow from one another, along with vague affirmative language about hope, unity, growth, etc etc. This is, in my experience, consistent with the kind of stuff you get that shows up when an existing document is run through an LLM and a rewrite is requested. (This is too tragic! Make it sound more affirmative!)

I don’t know which one of them fed my write-up to the Slop Machine, Siren claims that they both worked on it together.

After this happened there have been plenty of other posts showing up on the BB which showed suspect signs of LLM use, or at least extremely low effort. (ChatGPT give me ten plot hooks!). There have been multiple instances where Kraken spends time game on praising the use of LLMs.

Kraken mentioned on channel that he intended to use ChatGPT to rewrite or rework the website/wiki. The website contains close to six years of accumulated design work, setting material, independently developed content, and project history from various people. Even as a “joke” I find it deeply disrespectful to the hours of labor and love people put into the project. Effectively stripping down years of setting material and replacing it with low-effort slop.

In a different conversation with him, he told me that creating new content was a waste of time and he was fine with borrowing material from other games. I am pretty well aware of how Sundance would feel about this(Badly!). So he’s gone on the record to say he’s pretty fine to helping himself to other people’s work even when it doesn’t relate to an LLM.

Unfortunately this is not the only issue I’ve had over the years in regards to how Siren acknowledges(or more appropriately doesn’t) me and my work for the the game. This is simply one of the more annoying incidents.

@nobody said:

so you get banned from a game and then start writing up paragraphs on paragraphs about how they’re totally plagiarizing you and stealing your work and chatgpting everything.

I haven’t played there in ages but I got curious after reading, so I hopped on to look and-

Well, you certainly have an awful lot to say for someone who supposedly doesn’t care and seems to feel very strongly that I shouldn’t care either, but I’ll humor you…

“I ran it through an AI detector and it didn’t ping!” doesn’t address I what actually presented and I’m not especially when you didn’t even care to mention what detector you used or how you reached that conclusion. I never claimed a detector proved anything.

My claim was based on the relationship between the original document, the surrounding circumstances, several very obvious LLM-style rewriting tells, and staff’s open admission to using LLMs in later conversations.

The fact that this happened four months ago is equally irrelevant. I’m discussing it now because it fits into a larger, continuing problem: the people running the game still seem perfectly comfortable helping themselves to my work and attempting to access my Google Docs after removing me, and after a year of minimizing my contributions to the game.

Would this complaint somehow be more legitimate if I had immediately rushed here four months ago and blown everything up publicly? Or is it possible I tried other avenues first?

Ultimately, your response boils down to “my AI detector didn’t flag it” and “I personally don’t care about this, so you shouldn’t either.”

People put enormous amounts of unpaid creative labor into these communities and generally do care about what happens to that work. If you admittedly don’t participate much, don’t contribute, and generally exist outside the MUSH ecosystem, maybe you should be the one to go outside and touch grass.

Telling someone how much they’re allowed to care about something admittedly “barely participate in” is just condescending.

@voiceinthevoid

I don’t believe he’s been banned, but he did tell me he’d left the game.

I’ve also been watching this exchange, and I don’t think what he was trying to get across was that the staff were specifically mean or targeting him, but that it’s part of a much broader problem.

@gashlycrumb can really only speak to his own experiences on this forum, but he’s not the only person I’ve heard who has had similar experiences to this. Lots of people have remarked to me found it very difficult to get Siren to do anything for them, even if it was a minor sheet correction or a bug fix.

I also assume you’re speaking in good faith here, but…

I’m a bit fatigued by how often the “volunteer” label gets emphasized when talking about game staff. Not just from you but I’ve seen this argument before. Like, yes, you’re taking on a second job that you don’t get paid for, but lots of hobbies are like that. A lot of hobbies take time, effort, and consideration, and they can be frustrating.

There is also a lot that game staff have to do that the average player generally doesn’t.

But I still don’t exactly vibe with leaning so heavily on the volunteer aspect of it. It’s not as if game staff are performing a service in the way that going and working at a food bank or an animal shelter is. It’s more like going to a theater group and offering to work as part of the stage crew to help put together free community performances.

So a person shouldn’t staff on a game unless they’re actually into doing the work of being a GM/Storyteller/Dungeon Master. Like, if you don’t enjoy being a storyteller and interacting with players, then you probably shouldn’t be staffing on a game.

This can explain why people have limited time, why things sometimes take longer than anyone would like, or why a hobby has to come second to real life.

But I don’t think it should be used as a blanket response to criticism about someone consistently not doing the basic things attached to a role they voluntarily chose to take on or when they break their own rules with the regularity of the tides. If someone wants the authority and control that come with staffing a game, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for players to expect them to actually perform the functions of that role.

@nobody

So basically, you read some bad things other people had said about me and decided that gave you a get-out-of-jail-free card to come in, make assumptions, and talk down to me, and then claim you’re not here to stir the pot. Reducing everything I said to sour grapes because I didn’t post about it on your preferred timetable.

If you genuinely had a “too old for this shit” disinterest in engaging, you could simply have not engaged in the first place.

@Pavel

I largely don’t disagree with you here. I obviously don’t expect the game runners to go through and scrub every trace of material I ever contributed. I was working with the understanding that much of this was collaborative work intended for the game. I worked like this under Sundance and Griffin for years. I understand what this sort of collaboration looks like.

A lot of what is currently sitting in my vault is material I developed while Sundance was still active, including systems she had approved or wanted implemented as far back as 2024, along with plot scripts I was unable to progress because of administrative bottlenecks and +jobs that were never actually handed over to me.

That’s a small facet of what I mean by minimizing my contributions. A lot of my work spent months or years sitting in administrative limbo instead of being implemented, even when Sundance had already approved it or specifically requested it be put up on the game-site.

Links to some of these documents were actually sitting in the +jobs system so they could actively be viewed, reviewed, and used by Sundance. Kraken closed all of those jobs a couple of months ago, effectively tossing all the +job side development communication in the garbage, and said they could simply borrow systems from another game instead,

The issue here is that there suddenly seems to be renewed interest in that developmental material now that I’m no longer around to participate in it or be credited as a contributor. Which was also an issue for Siren while I was still there.

@Roz said:

okay i don’t think this is great behavior. but not every instance of someone ignoring you is abusive. the silent treatment can absolutely be abusive in intimate relationships – familial, romantic, friendship, etc. but it is utilized for specific purposes when it’s abusive: controlling someone, breaking them down, punishing them, belittling them.

a hobby acquaintance ignoring you because you’ve made yourself repeatedly unpleasant for them to deal with could be immature, it could be irresponsible, it could even be assholeish. but i am hard-pressed to call the specific scenario you’ve described as abusive.

I’m generally in agreement with this but with the caveat that the the dynamics are often askew when you’re dealing with a scenario that involves a power imbalance. Namely between someone equipped with a staff tag and administrative privileges.

Ultimately I have no idea what @gashlycrumb was so persistent about or what their particular situation was but added context there could potentially be meaningful. I am going to assume good faith and the Crumb was reaching out to Siren in a way that was perfectly normal for a player to do.

@junipersky said:

Clarification is @gashlycrumb the person that was banned from the game in question or did I miss a plot point somewhere?

No. That would be me.