I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them. I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.

@Clarion said in AI In Poses:

They just absolutely are not trustable, and I think human intuition of “wait, this writing feels wordy and bland and disconnected from what’s actually happening in the scene” is both more accurate and more useful right now, because if a person isn’t using AI but does sound wordy and bland and disconnected from the scene, that’s still worth checking in about.

Wordy, bland, and disconnected? Shit. Now I’m starting to think that they trained the AI on my poses.

@MisterBoring said in Prove Tez Wrong:

Tangentially, it strikes me that Blood on the Clocktower could easily be hosted using a MU codebase.

Before BotC was a thing, I thought about running a short-run server about a town fending off secret baddies, such as werewolves, witches, a cult, etc. However, the RPI server, the Inquisition, was a thing and I figured that niche was likely well covered

I also think murder mystery/whodunit would work as a short-run server too.

It’s also good advice for Blood on the Clocktower.

@Pavel

Touché

@Pavel said in Prove Tez Wrong:

@Ominous Of course not, she never uses three words when a grunt and a withering look would do instead.

@Yam said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

Do we ever learn anything? Ever?

Yes. I learned that a few people are actually interested in a ridiculous 3-month server surrounding the antics nobles trying to get chosen as a spouse to a head of state to be.

@Pavel said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

@Ominous I think there was a guy who was quite successfully roleplaying as a… I wanna say washing machine? Something like that.

I will say this of Shang. It may be the Mos Eisley of the MU* world, but I have encountered and heard of some the most creative RP there.

I’ve also encountered some of the worst. The place tends to house the extremes.

@Pavel said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

Well that’s kind of yet another crux of the matter. What counts as being a dick for you isn’t necessarily going to be the same…for whomever is running Shang, etc, etc.

I suspect that being a dick or any sort of phallic object is celebrated on Shang, as is being one of the various orifices or phallus receptacles.

@Pavel

That’s not how your mom described it.

@sao It depends on who’s offering and what they’re into. I lean more vanilla and am a 1 on the Kinsey scale.

@Roz said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

idk i feel like my counterpoint for this is “if you don’t want to get banned early and often from a public game, might i suggest simply being on your best behavior?”

I don’t think “best behavior” is a realistic standard for a recreational hobby. How about “decent behavior?”

@Pavel said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

I think this may be another crux (can an argument have more than one crux?) of the argument. The difference between something being right and someone having the right – and in this instance whether there’s a difference at all.

Civil Law countries have the Prohibition of Chicane which holds that using your rights to inflict harm on another is illegal. So, people have to use their rights right for it to be alright, right?

@Yam That’s not unsurprising. The majority of people are understanding and considerate, so they want people to be direct and honest with them. However a minority of people are not understanding or considerate, and the understanding and considerate people don’t want to roll the dice on whether the person they are being direct and honest with is the former rather than the latter.

@Wizz said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

@Ominous said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

you’re in the minority there for a reason that I’m not going to spend pages and pages spelling out for you.

A rather sizable minority. It’s not like I am dying on a hill alone here, and a few of those taking similar stances as me are not members of the forum that people would normally tag as “unreasonable” or “a nuisance.”

“made me feel a certain kind of way” does not translate to anxiety, it translates to frustration, as he explained himself. it’s just a passive aggressive way of saying “it pissed me off”

I just reread all of Warma Sheen’s posts. I do not see them stating at any point that “made me feel a certain kind of way” was a statement of frustration. In fact, they state it was exactly what I read it as:

@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:
And I felt weird about having a bunch of open jobs cause I thought maybe I was being too much of a burden, so I closed a bunch of them down.

That seems like anxiety not frustration. Maybe I missed something. Can you point to me where Warma Sheen says that was a statement of frustration?

you’re irritating more people than you’re probably aware of.

Probably. I don’t read social situations very well and will ask out of the blue whether I am bothering someone just to make sure that hints aren’t being dropped that I am impervious to.

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication, which is hard enough in person when there’s also body language and facial expressions and tone to pick up on. Text has none of those things. Don’t drop hints, cross your fingers, touch your toes, and hope the other person clues in to what you’re (not) saying. Say what you mean. You can be nice about it! But say what you mean. The internet is not going to burn to the ground if you tell someone “Oh! Thanks for the offer, but I’m not really up for that.” or even just “No, thank you.” the way we were all taught when we were, like, five.

Yes! Exactly!

You dropping what would be a very clear hint to anyone else that you aren’t enjoying our interactions:

Me who is terrible at social interactions:

@Faraday said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

@Tez said in Banning Bad, Actually?:

that we might all be coming into this from different perspectives based on our own experiences with the people involved and the situation at large. I don’t think it’s really a pure abstract thought exercise here. This is coming from a very specific example.

Can’t speak for anyone else obviously, but I have been approaching it as a purely abstract thought exercise. I don’t know the game in question or anyone involved in the original situation, and the log we saw alluded to some degree of prior history that we have no context for. Maybe there was just a bad vibe. I have no idea.

Same.

For those who are on the side of ban early and ban often, might I suggest running private, whitelist server for just your friends? Or maybe have a rigorous review process requiring an interview between staff and an applicant before they can CG?

Anyways, I am all for banning someone when they’re being a shit. I just didn’t think Warma Sheen was being a shit in the text provided.

@helvetica

I am pretty sure that’s implied by the fact that I made the demand. Either that, or I’m too lazy to do it myself.

I demand to be allowed to write in Ralph Nader as my vote.

@bear_necessities said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@Ominous said in Empire Discussion Thread:

If Pyre were to ban me right now, it would have a negative effect on me.

Respectfully, this is you perceiving Pyre’s power and giving them a great deal of power over you, vs them actually having power over you.

Perception doesn’t figure in. I’ll believe perception is reality when a crazy person jumps off a building while flapping their arms, and they actually fly. How much you let someone’s power affect you psychologically is under your control, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have power over you. If someone can keep you from doing something then they have power over you whether you care a great deal or not at all. It’s like people saying “You can’t fire me; I quit.” Regardless, your employment is over, security is showing you to the door, and you’re never getting hired by them again whether you care or not.

If Pyre banned you right now for doing absolutely nothing except responding to a post, there would undoubtedly be backlash and it probably wouldn’t hold (although half of us would say you deserved it, then another half would say Pyre’s power-tripping, and there’d be a ton of back and forth about the perception of your tone and what you SHOULD have said vs what you DID say along with a disseration-level deep dive on what you implied with your perceived tone like we are literary scholars … sound familiar?)

Maybe. Until the decision is rescinded, if it gets rescinded, their power is keeping me from the server.

@DrQuinn said in Empire Discussion Thread:

@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I cancelled a bunch of others cause having a bunch of actions open that we’re being addressed was really making me feel a kind of way.

This is the key bit of that log for me. It seems like this person was already being kind of passive aggressive and establishing a bad behavior pattern over waiting five days for a response from the lone staff member running the game. And it sounds like the other characters hadn’t even weighed in on the action yet for the staff member to even respond.

I don’t think log/no log was the real issue here.

This may be the key to my not understanding why people think Warma Sheen was being pushy. I do not read that as being passive aggressive at all. I read that as “I am uncomfortable having a bunch of requests in the queue that are all related and are potentially creating needless work, wasting your time, and delaying other players’ requests being acted on, so I deleted them.” But I am an incredibly anxious person who thinks he is a waste of space and needlessly wastes people’s time, so that’s automatically where my mind goes when reading that because I can see myself writing something like that and that’s what I would have meant by it.

@Pavel said in Empire Discussion Thread:

No, I disagree that staff and players aren’t equal parties and that staff is the only one with responsibility for clarity in this or any other situation. Any power staff has is miniscule, as I am an adult with other things to do than worry about what an internet person thinks about me. Staff are just players with a job, worthy of no more and no less respect than anyone else.

You may not be personally bothered if someone ends your access to an internet server, but it’s still a power over you that you do not have over them, a monopoly on the power of coercion. You will adhere to whatever they demand, or you will not be there anymore. That is power and that is authority, even if it is on a silly thing as a MU server.

But this seems to be a fundamental disagreement between us, so we’ll just agree to be ambivalent about it 'tween us.

Apparently. I almost said “clearly” but that’s come up a lot.