@MidnightCreature All your years of hard work snatched up by staff, your name stripped from it and your character banned? Maybe some of the current staff did learn a thing or two from Sundance before she " " “left” " " (source: literally happened to me and my IRL partner a few years ago, though the attempt to access your Google Docs is a low they didn’t even try with me). And now with LLMs slithering into the mix? Talk about a race to the bottom.

Crazy the amount of validation I feel reading recent sentiments and secondhand stories about that place. Wish I could bottle and sell it. Also wild to see folks feeling like someone has found out how to do a worse job than the previous wiz.

@hellfrog Costume designer for The Carol Burnett Show and the spinoff Mama’s Family season one, the latter leading to one of his ten Prime Time Emmy awards. Mama’s Family is still comfort food TV for me 40 years on. Rest easy, Bob, and thanks for the memories.

@catzilla If staff can puppet the NPC kid and their activities are transparent to other staff including pages and room activity, even makeshift rooms, sure. Games being kidless always weakens the immersion but people get up to some dumb stuff (using them as shields against plot and consequences comes to mind as readily as ickier things).

If someone is gonna make the room for kid NPCs I’d hope they’d make the room for the proper measures to keep it from encouraging stupid or inappropriate behavior. If done right I think it could certainly help a game feel more vibrant and emotionally real!

@catzilla “Be my prop/audience so I can me,” is one of the most dispiriting behaviors possible in a co-op improv environment.

@junipersky While IMO best practice is to delete any of their offensive posts if they earn a ban, I’ll admit there’s something delightfully petty about editing them instead. Enjoy your upvote!

Huh, kinda heartening to realize there was at least one exploitative online RP experience I didn’t get mauled by. Saluting you vets of that era.

@Jennkryst Do a video about Jill in the style of those Jeff the Killer or Slenderman videos. 🤭

@Juniper Here lies one of the major differences between community management (porous, vulnerable, compromised, lowest common denominator rule, familiar enough to bad actors to be easily abused) and community curation (protecting the spirit of the game, choosing staff who “get it,” erring on the side of caution, trusting your gut, being willing to reprimand or eject parties who aren’t acting in good faith, cultivating the players you have instead of obsessing over the players you don’t have, saying “no” now so you don’t end up with a Pandora’s box later).

Curated communities are inevitably smaller but because staff and players have relationships instead of businesslike interactions, they’re more like a friend group than a job. Because there isn’t a rush of newcomers or a draining backlog of jobs, there is room for intuition to lead to inspiration and the development of an accord between the the various people in the game regardless of their status.

This very watershed (and the post-mortem examination of my past MUSHing experiences) is what led me to join this forum.

@Kestrel You remind me of the endless disappointment my younger self felt when creating and trying to promote sophisticated RP on Age of Conan, a game with some neat stuff but also with fatalities, PvP and boobies. Looking back I’m surprised how high my hopes were; true, it was based off complex mechanics and the dizzying world building of Robert E. Howard, but on the other hand a lot of people just saw it as a platform for Skinemax horror and power tripping. Guess which player base dominated the game at the end.

So yes, amazing and high quality stuff can come from horror settings, but some people will only see them with the dimmest, most self-serving eyes.

@Tez The Administrator’s Thinly Veiled Fetish! That means every time you interact here…🫣

@Pavel I shuddered IRL.

@helvetica They can’t say thank you with words, but I will. Thank you for helping those furry babies.

@Tez Trust a private party with my government ID in exchange for the privilege of using their role play space? I don’t even trust the government with my government ID. Hard pass.

@Tez I think that with the collapse of regulation in the US, you can probably cover your ass with a weasely enough “terms of use” mandatory click through if you’re the kind who cares about such things. I agree that especially in this hobby the chances of encountering underage players is slim, but I also wouldn’t neglect to have at least a stated age policy that reflects whatever level of intensity my game’s plot and themes would include.

Players are always going to TS, and that’s not a bad thing, but one who claims responsibility for a game (which not all game runners will do!) should at least make reasonable accomodations to their game’s longevity and success that include dealing with the potential for inter-player abuse. Then again, for many I’m sure the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

@RightMeow Discord tried to roll out user age verification by ID or facial photo in the US and were met with massive backlash, partially because the company they were using to do the verification had ties to Palantir and partially because the stored data has been hacked with a few guesses and was breached totally. Sadder still, this isn’t the first time they had stored ID info hacked and pushed to the web. Further, it exposed the fact that they’ve been using “AI” to make dossiers on their users and determine their likely age based off behavior and what they engage with, which they are still doing. They said they will push for some kind of age verification again down the road. Totally enshittified.

@hellfrog If they already think the rest of humanity are NPCs then it’s real easy to make the jump to outsourcing their writing to a plagiarism engine.

@Prototart How fucking dare you call me out like this. I mean, what?

Every single time I discovered that a staffer was behind an unmarked player character I felt a sense of violation. I felt like players were automatically presumed to be guilty of something so bad it mandated a system to allow them to be spied upon. Distrust as a default.

I absolutely believe staff deserve to play on the game they help run. I absolutely also believe that they are to be held to a higher standard that should not make them afraid to reveal who they are. If they want to play without that pressure they can go to other games or they can find other outlets or just become a regular player. Nobody forced them to be staff.

Please consider my remarks in light of the notoriously OOC masq-heavy WoD games which make up nearly all of my MUSH experience. And thank you to nearly all staff of the games I’ve been on, because the majority of them were open about these things and their hard work and trust made the fun for me and countless others possible.

@Jennkryst