@xCroaker From my personal experience both as a staffer and as a player witnessing things:

1. Answering questions that are already covered in the game’s documentation. I have been on plenty of games that have excellent documentation both on their wiki and in the game, yet people will still constantly ask questions that have already been answered elsewhere.
2. The subgroup of players that exist across all MUs that I refer to as “The Job Mill”. These players will generate more jobs than the entire rest of a game’s players combined, in some extreme cases multiple jobs a day. They are few, and usually just very invested in the game they are playing, but holy cow can some of them clog up a job queue. The frustrating thing is they’re almost always not malicious about this. It’s just what they do to show love to a game. And holy crap is it frustrating. Even more so when large amounts of these jobs require scenes and NPC support. (And now that I think about it, this could almost be it’s own topic.)
3. Continuing to work on build / code stuff. A lot of games start allowing players onto them well before their grid & coded elements are actually ready to go, and this will generate a lot of extra work where staff is trying to finish their baseline game and people are breaking things already.
4. Dealing with OOC drama. (This one probably feels like the worst even though it’s mathematically not.) Having people get into an OOC argument, or finding out that a player is a sex pest, or is exploiting the game code to their advantage, is rough on staff. It’s 100% guaranteed to require some level of confrontation about it, and that shit is draining.

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Are people trying and failing to run live scenes? If so, why? Perhaps there are tools to help.

Or are they just annoyed that they want to join live scenes (i.e. they expect someone else to run them) and are annoyed that nobody is catering to their preference. That is a very different issue.

It could potentially be that Ares has gained the reputation of being the place for asynch. It has definitely done that for me, and it’s probably why the few Ares games I’ve joined I’ve eventually idled out on.

It’s not whether it is or isn’t able to do live scenes, it’s more that people view it as mostly asynch. I know it seems to me that a lot of people praising Ares do so for the easy way it enables asynch, so I just assume all Ares games are mostly asynch, and I say that having attempted to play a few.

@Juniper said in MU Peeves Thread:

Without that crucial context, all this reads as a bunch of people vagueposting past each other and probably not even imagining the same people as they do so.

I don’t think we’re actually talking about specific cases. Just the general “Staff that ignore problem players is bad” + “Players that refuse to believe they’re an issue when they really are is bad” concepts.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

Then people in authority need to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.

Let me fix that for you:

Then people in authority need to grow up and communicate, or fuck off.

I’ve seen plenty of examples of people who have developed a bad reputation in our hobby that have been told they have a bad reputation, with receipts, and they just dismiss any argument in that regard. Sure, there are plenty of staffers who are non-confrontational, so they just ignore the people that have a bad rep, which is a problem in its own right, but largely it feels, to me at least, that the people with the bad reputation are just as guilty of bad communication skills as the staff.

I guess after watching other staffers on other games attempt to communicate and get shut down, staff on the games these people are currently on give up on attempting to talk it out. Communication is a two way street, and what it seems like we have is problem staffers who aren’t willing to talk it out, and problem players who aren’t willing to accept constructive feedback.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

I do not believe that every time, (or almost every time, or even a majority of the time) a player finds staff chronically unresponsive it’s because the staffer is justifiably annoyed with the player, or the player has a bad reputation.

I think our hobby is getting small enough that it’s getting more and more common.

For me it’s probably the 7-10 minute pace. I don’t like asynch because of several bad experiences I’ve had where players would put their characters into multiple scenes that would twist up the narrative chronologically and require retcons and other stuff to fix. In one extreme case, a PC died while asynchronously participating in 3 other scenes with wildly separate chronological order to them, and the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

I would say that I’d be okay with asynch or slower if the game had a rule that any given PC could only participate in a single scene at a time.

The whole 0-3 minutes thing seems like it has it’s own pitfalls, but even in my 30 years of playing I can’t honestly remember more than a handful of people attempting it.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

There’s also the whole concept of reputation in our very tiny community. If you have a reputation of being someone difficult to deal with, that may manifest in ways you don’t anticipate. Something you gotta’ just roll with and improve upon. People forget as folk cycle in and out, but I wonder how many people will forget Polk trying to torch 2 game servers in like… 1 year.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

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.

@sao said in Tips for GMs:

Having a set solution to a problem is a way to frustrate yourself AND your players!

I agree, but I also feel the exception to this is scenes where the players are all on board for a very very specific resolution from the start. The easiest example of this are those one off scenes where a GM gets a bunch of the more combat oriented PCs together to blow off some combat steam against nameless minions of evil. In those situations, trying to find an alternate route to resolution will also frustrate everyone involved.

@Yam said in MU Peeves Thread:

Ask any staffer who was DEDICATED to prompt, “fast”, consistent responses how long they stuck around. How long the game existed.

I can count the number of staffers that were dedicated to that stuff that also stayed through the end of the game and did not contribute to the game’s ending on one finger. It probably didn’t hurt that the person in question was on full disability with a lower back injury and so didn’t actually have a day job.

The closest thing I will ever get to paying to RP is the entry fee to gaming conventions.

Thankfully I’m social enough that I have several MUs to play when I want online RP, and a reasonably sized local tabletop scene for in person RP.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

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

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

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.

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

1. Some players will rub staff in a bad way, but not go so far as to do something bannable. The staff in question isn’t trying to generate unnecessary confrontation, so they just sit on those jobs until they have nothing else to do to limit their interaction with the player, when they should honestly just sit down with the player and say something like, “We believe that our staffing style and your playing style are not compatible, and for the sanity of both ourselves and you, we need you to exit the game.” This can even extend between games (as a lot of staff are forever-staff and may know a given player from previous encounters).
2. Some larger games generate hilariously large amounts of jobs in very short time, even with a good number of staff working on them and set policies regarding job response times. If your job is #293 out of 480, it’s gonna be a while before you see a response, even if they’re using buckets and queues and notifications and stuff. I have totally seen players get irate because they don’t enjoy the speed at which the 200 jobs in front of theirs get resolved.
3. Staff might be having a bad month, week, day, or year. This can result in players feeling unnoticed by staff. Staff R People 2.
4. Staff have their own availability schedules, and getting mad that no staffer showed up to ST and provide Staff NPCs for the scene you scheduled for 4 PM on Christmas Day is just a waste of everybody’s time.

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

I never hear people complain about staffers having PCs in general,

I’m glad you haven’t had my experiences.

@KarmaBum said in Tips for GMs:

I know it’s a writing hobby, and sometimes we’re trying to establish a mood so we’re including evocative details, but if you mention that this obsidian cave is carved with ancient runes, has a brazier spewing purple flames, smells faintly of candied apples, and I can hear an old woman singing from the mouth of an adjacent tunnel, all of those elements should be open for some sort of follow-up.

You can even cheat in this scenario and have all of them be open to the same follow up of “You realize as you investigate further that this entire cave, this entire space, is entirely illusion.”

@Pacha said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

I kind of get what you’re going for here, but in this day and age when most of us have less, not more, time for MU, basing advancement on activity is a recipe for disaster, as only the players that are either on all the time, or crawling up staff’s butt to get in all the plots are going to move forward. Perhaps that is what you want, but I wouldn’t play on it.

I can agree with this, and I’m looking at a flat XP model for the game I’m tinkering on in my spare time. All characters will earn the same amount of XP each month, regardless of activity levels, and new characters will come in at whatever the total is for all characters, so that if the game does go for years, PCs created in year 4 won’t be confused as to why their brand new PC is involved in storylines built around characters with dozens or even hundreds of XP more than them.

@Pacha said in Tips for GMs:

Please try to keep a consistent emotional tone throughout the plot.

I would go one step further and say “Please try and be responsible with emotional shifts in the plot.” The emotional tone of the plot changing is fine, but when it rollercoasters seventeen times in a single scene, that’s just too jarring.

@Jupiter said in Brainstorming Game Ideas:

The idea that I keep circling around is a CK3/Vampire styled game in an original setting; where, instead of using +vote as XP-generation, it’d be activity based. XP is generated by spending blood and dice-rolling in Staff-run activities.

Players would try to acquire swarths of territory to fund their own rise and the rise of loyal vassals.

But, again, I don’t know how popular of an idea that would be; text-based gamers are notoriously anti-change.

My thought on this would be that a lot of people still in the hobby are very PVP-shy, even when the narrative should result in two PCs fighting to a terminal conclusion. I think you could do this and have fun with it, but you need to accept that you’re probably not going to have more players than the average multiplayer game of CK3 anyway.

All of our games are, at their core, improvisational dramas. A given GM/ST may have a general idea of how they would like plot events to go and the players have a vision for how their characters would mold those events. In that regard, my tip is to resist the urge to force events in the direction you want, especially when your players are throwing amazing ideas into the narrative. Don’t be afraid to take a tip from stage improv and say “Yes, and” when a player attempts to inject their own ideas into the narrative. Use what they give you to evolve the event into something more, and give their character agency in the game world. Do this even if it means admitting that the players came up with a faster solution to a problem you’ve presented.

@xCroaker said in MU Peeves Thread:

I agree 100%, so staff enjoys playing, and wants to keep games open, and wants to continue playing and running games.

I agree as well, which brings up another peeve for me.

When players complain about staff having PCs. Yes, in some cases, it’s warranted, especially in games where a staffer’s personal PCs seem to get the focus in 100% of plot 100% of the time. But in the majority of cases, it’s the staffer in question taking some time to enjoy some RP for themselves, and some player somewhere is offended that the staffer is not actively working on requests or builds or fixing code bugs or running plots or whatever. Sometimes they even claim the staffers are ignoring their duties to the game, which usually isn’t the case.

#GiveStaffersBreaks