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    Recent Best Controversial
    • RE: MU Peeves Thread

      @Pacha Part of why it stands out so glaringly here is that it is pretty commonly accepted on comic games in GENERAL that people are gonna hook up how they’re gonna hook up, and canon pairings don’t - really, CAN’T, given the myriad of logistical/interpersonal headaches it would cause - ever be assumed to stand. This includes slash-y romances: FC orientations fly pretty wildly, and for the most part nobody cares.

      So to see a game in this genre that probably ought to be even more lax, more open to experimenting with orientations, relationships, and - yes, bodies, up to and including sexual characteristics/gender identities - leaves a strange taste, compounded by the flimsy nature of continuity there meaning that nothing is actually ‘lost’ long term in the sense of changing a character beyond a point of being appealing to hypothetical future appers. Opening OCs would help solve the specific issue of there being nearly no viable trans characters to app, but not the greater break with the norms of the genre or the inherent disappointment of being able to tweak a beloved FC to fit personal tastes in a dozen ways EXCEPT one fairly significant one.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: MU Peeves Thread

      @Prototart It’s absolute dire, and the funny thing is that several of the already meager list of options are off the table because they’re villains.

      Like, having had more time to sit with it: it’s a tacit ban on trans characters. OCs are not available; outside sources offer a handful of extra options (most notably/readily offhand: Viktor from Umbrella Academy) but are subject to approval. So maybe?

      I don’t want to ascribe malice, and, I don’t, but this is not a well-reasoned policy at all.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: MU Peeves Thread

      AS A TRANS PERSON…

      I get the argument, vis a vis fetishization and I’m certainly not unsympathetic to it. I think it’s worth considering in plenty of contexts when it comes to constructing characters/stories/et cetera.

      It’s just odd for me to square it in THIS specific case, at least for the reasons stated. Ultimately, it’s not a big deal to me - I have removed the offending penis! - so much as a weird one. It’s a game where the primary thrust is ‘what if we just lean into the usual environment on cape games and acknowledge that people like writing smut’, with lax theme/continuity policies to accommodate such, so while there are definitely arguments to be made about fetishization, it strikes me that they by rights ought to apply pretty broadly here, shouldn’t they?

      Or, to put it crassly: If I can do a series of scenes in which Wonder Woman sets up shop at a truck stop men’s room for funsies, and that is not disrespectful, inappropriately fetishistic, et cetera, then drawing the line at one of the sets of dangly bits aboard this hypothetical train being Hawkgirl’s feels weird, to me personally. It would probably feel LESS weird if it were not inherently a game where players are encouraged to fetishize a myriad of other aspects of comic book characters for the sake of titillation-- or even if the line was more along the lines of ‘don’t JUST shuffle parts around, put like five seconds of thought into it’, I would get it.

      (For the record, ‘how exactly does this make sense’ was indeed part of my thought process, because I’m the kind of weirdo that likes to be able to tie her smut-writing to, like. SOMETHING tangible.)

      Anyway, all that having been said, to reiterate: I as one of the affected parties am not ANGRY or whatever, so much as a little bummed/bemused. Nobody was banned. Trans characters are in theory appable, but given how few such characters there are, it’s a very tenuous theory. Pls don’t send hate at these people who I am charitably assuming made a well-intentioned but clumsy decision against the backdrop of being a small staff on a game that wasn’t expected to take off at the rate it did. Choices get made quickly sometimes under those circumstances, and they aren’t always ideal.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: MU Peeves Thread

      @bored John Stockton

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: MU Peeves Thread

      @bored said in MU Peeves Thread:

      From the other thread I get that you’re a squad and I have no interest in litigating shit on those games I had no part in,

      I dunno, man, you seem pretty invested in uncritically taking serial liars who you don’t know, at their word about a situation you weren’t involved in, involving someone else who you also don’t know, for being uninterested in litigating shit you had no part of.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: MU Peeves Thread

      @bored You’re crossing streams or something, because I can pretty safely say that Tart’s biggest ooc room crime is posting lots of panels of her characters. Unless ig she ONLY behaves this way when I am not in her presence, which is possible? But feels unlikely?

      Let’s be clear: She was banned from HAM because she sent a complaint about Chaucer.

      Why did she send a complaint about Chaucer? Because he enthusiastically approved her pitch for Miss Sinister, saw a sheet that placed her at ‘pretty powerful; limited by extreme inexperience and not actually being Essex’ on a game where Jean Grey is fully integrated with the Phoenix, Kryptonians abound, and Selene is freely avail, then promptly denied the app and told her thar she was not sufficiently worth his/the game’s time to warrant going to the trouble of revising.

      Oh, and prior to that, he refused to let her pick up Titania because he felt that she should branch out from what he felt her norms were.

      So she complained, left when nothing was done, came back months later to try again with friends, and then was banned upon picking up a character (played by one of Chaucer’s friends in the sense that a dog plays with the drool-saturated, shredded and discarded doll it remembers it left behind the couch once a month or so, and on the idle list as a result) due to her past disagreements with him.

      As for the thing about trans characters, that had nothing to do with her. I wanted to play Wonder Woman as (probably??) trans on a game where the central premise is that it is a sex positive environment to the extent of it being a free for all of posting ts logs to the wiki, and canon is otherwise extremely loose and improvisational. I was told that a ruling had been made that characters would need to be adapted according to their canonical gender/bio sex traits; I am going to change it at some point today when I get to a keyboard. She posted it bc I vented to her about the situation and she had Feelings about it.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Roz She isn’t staff, at least, so that’s something.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      I mean, listen, we can debate the merits of where precisely the lines should be drawn in specific real or hypothetical situations like this one all day. That’s fine and fair.

      But divorced from all of that, my gut feeling is that Rogue is some kind of weirdo chud or consciously covering for the feelings of one, so while I’m happy to not get wildly political in public, I am also never not going to find it funny that her knee-jerk reaction was to clutch her pearls over the very controversial statement that Alex Jones Is Bad, Actually.

      I’ll also note that there are players who have cart blanche to whine about how sensitive people are nowadays, and how there are too many genders, and pronouns are hard - all of which feel like more inherently political dog whistles and/or statements than acknowledging that a lying scam artist is a lying scam artist - so while I do appreciate the value of not talking about certain subjects because they can cause friction, it’d be nice if that standard was applied more evenly.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      The context for the Alex Jones stuff:

      <Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Alex Summers wishes he was a telepath, he’d fix the world.
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “I wish I could forget that Alex Jones exists.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “Eh, well.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Anyone for arpee?”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Probably best to just realize there’s a lot of people in the world you probably would like not to exist.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “Is it with Alex Jones?”
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Fair enough Rogue.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Resident Talia Wagner says, “I listen to far too much Knowledge Fight, which started out as two comedians tearing down his bs and making jokes and now one of them made a deposition at one of the sandy hook trials and is regarded as the foremost expert on his grift. It’s still hilarious.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane says, “Some people just shouldn’t be allowed to have platforms, alas”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Lets talk about something else.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Dongers?”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Resident Doug Ramsey says, “I went to an edible book festival earlier and made myself sick. I got Bookitis :(”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane says, “I don’t think ‘people who deny horrific tragedies and encourage others to hate minorities’ is controversial, but sure!”
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter says, “Really?”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Poor Doug.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane says, “*are bad, even.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Julio Richter hugs Lorna
      <Xaviers-OOC> College S. Patty Sloan says, “>.> This is why books are a nasty habit to get into :p”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “See, Lorna, you turning it in to that, is what I’m trying to avoid.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Guest Lorna Dane just sips on her tea and writes her pose.
      <Xaviers-OOC> Teacher Rogue says, “Excellent plan.”
      <Xaviers-OOC> Resident Betsy Braddock grins and protecc Lorna with her alt. 😛
      <Xaviers-OOC> Resident Betsy Braddock says, “Since apparently Bishop can’t handle Philly girls.”

      And then, a bit later that day, I made a petty crack in reference to it:

      <X-Men-OOC> \/// SNIKT Logan says, “I’m going to this UN thing. Any other X-Men want to pretend we’re part of the world and come with me?”
      <X-Men-OOC> GreenPeace Lorna Dane says, “Sorry, I just got done fight Hydra outside. :(”
      <X-Men-OOC> GreenPeace Lorna Dane says, “Not to get too political by talking about fighting nazis or anything”

      Making a remark about it wasn’t really the best choice, I don’t mind owning that. It’s still really strange to me, though, for the reasons outlined by @Apos/the reason I tried to get at: Alex Jones is pretty objectively a shitty, fucked up person. It’s weird that just saying that much is controversial and considered political, because one would think that if someone is now legally proven to be an entertainer/liar who makes shit up to scare people into paying him money, acknowledging it ought to be fair game.

      But it’s not my monkey or circus, so, whatever!

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Roz It was in the post that I, uh, deleted after getting enough perspective to feel uncomfortable with dumping a large quantity of barely contained spite directed at one person, in public.

      (thank you, @bored!)

      I’ll edit this post with that snippet when I’m at a keyboard though. Sorry for the confusion.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Apos said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

      Politics rules really aren’t about what is considered politics. They are about what is considered controversial politically, and what is likely to start a fight, and to avoid anything that’s going to start an argument or make someone feel unwelcome.

      It is manifestly obvious that Alex Jones is a far right wing extremist and conspiracy theorist. I don’t think anyone could look at him saying Sandy Hook was funded by the Democratic Party and George Soros as a false flag operation and think that is in any way apolitical. But what I think feels off is that he’s so far outside the normal range that condemning him should not be considered controversial politically, anymore than claiming that really hateful ideologies are bad. It’s just too uncomfortable a move of the Overton Window.

      this

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @GF

      It confused me in the moment, and it still confuses me now. Making weird comments about there being too many pronouns is NOT politics as far as I’ve seen, mind you, which does help with figuring out where the line is.

      I guess politics are in the eye of the beholder.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @bored said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

      @renaveleigh re: the Xaviers stuff, this is tricky. I think your frustration is valid but that you’re probably misreading things a little, including the idea that Shakespeare is actively protecting Rogue.

      So, for the record, I don’t have any opinion one way or the other on whether Shakespeare is protecting Rogue. That was Prototart, above me.

      My understanding is that they’ve long since fallen out. Shakespeare’s only friends are her ever-shrinking personal RP circle.

      I clicked over to the MSB log linked up top and reading myself talking to Ruby about UH is mind-numbing. So I appreciate frustration in dealing with her. But Jean & her alts and Nathan & his alts are among the tiny few players left on the whole damn game running actual comic book stuff with any kind of regularity or quality, and they’ve both seem like shockingly sane, adult people in every interaction I’ve had. It’s notable you give him a pass while turning on her, even though you admit he fundamentally agreed with them.

      Thank you for being straight up, first of all. I wanted to try and be as honest as possible about things from my perspective, including the parts that make me look bad, because at this point, I’m old enough to at least attempt to be, like, mildly self-aware about being way less than perfect.

      I didn’t really focus on Nathan’s part because - while I don’t agree with his POV on things, and do believe that it plays right into the same theme of ignoring the actual, stated issues as the posts that I chose to focus on - Nathan isn’t a leader of the group, as far as I know. My primary point, and the reason that I give any kind of a shit at all about random people not being able to behave themselves, is that the leaders of the group seeing a post from the admin citing recent complaints about the atmosphere and responding by first ignoring it, then turning around and biting at those who speak up about their concerns is, well. Concerning. I was less interested in interrogating every single dissenting opinion than I was in focusing, specifically, on the screwed up attitudes that seemed liable to conflict with my own broader self-interest of having a functional X-Men/Xavier group to interact with. I don’t care if someone’s got a different opinion from me; that’s fine. It’s not something worth worrying about in and of itself, here.

      So it comes across as personal vendetta & hate directed at Rogue/Ruby, and anyone else who dares be friends with her. In this, I urge you to reconsider your zeal, because it’s easy to pick a side in these these fights, stake your hill to die on, and end up not looking much better than the other guy (I used to do this a lot). For instance, that log involves 1) people talking politics, which they’re not supposed to, 2) Rogue asking them to stop, and 3) you sniping back at her instead of stopping when asked. To be clear, that means Rogue’s the one following the rules in the Shakespeare post you supposedly agree with, and you’re the one violating it, right? So are you toxic? Or would you agree with Jean/Nathan that maybe people just sometimes get emotional.

      I would definitely agree that - objectively speaking - I should not have sniped at her about Alex Jones; that came from a place of genuine bewilderment at the premise that saying he’s a bad person could be offensive, more than any real malice towards her. Not talking about anything political on the channel is a rule that I’m happy to abide by.

      And I would also agree that people do get emotional! I broke the post buffer limit here because I got emotional. I’m not an unbiased actor here in the slightest, and I don’t mind copping to that because beyond whatever lingering distrust I might have had for Rogue/Ruby based on past exposure, I have felt uneasy and uncomfortable in the wake of my own hubris earning me a faceful of gaslighting directly from her. I think that multiple things can be true: it’s true that people can be emotional and act rashly because of it; it’s true that more open communication would be a great way to avoid interpersonal issues, because they’re rarely so serious that they should need more than that to resolve them; it’s true that I do not care for Rogue’s player in the slightest; and it’s true that her approach to managing a large group of people is, to say the least, flawed to the point that it’s worth commenting on.

      Not to come down too harshly, and to tie it back, I’m going to reiterate that this is all Shakespeare’s fault. Shakes is 100% checked out, and has been for much of the game’s existence. Without knowing all the grudges, I can imagine that there are many valid and real things that you are upset about, that Jean is upset about, that Warren is upset about, etc., but that all of them have been left to fester because Shakespeare will never take action on anything, ever. That’s really something you have to internalize, especially when taking her ‘side’ in that argument. Understand, that post is a nothingburger, and it’s her usual MO of shifting blame to the players rather than taking any responsibility for staff action.

      I think that you’re broadly right that this is a lot of energy expended over something that isn’t worth the trouble, and going forward, I’m not going to sweat this stuff. It’s pointless: at the end of the day, all I really want to do is eat hot chips, be magnetic, charge my phone, and compact Purifiers. I reacted so strongly here, I think, because while I saw the initial incident that spurred that post, I wasn’t around while it was happening; it bothered me then, but I let it go. So once it was clear that nobody was going to address any of the various elephants on the room, I got frustrated and started Posting.

      Whatever comes of Xavier’s and the X-Men and such as a whole is super not my problem. I hope things keep working out well for them, and am just gonna do my best to play with the people I do vibe with.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Roz Thank you so much! I went through and fixed all the blocks. Spacing is off, but I will take that a million times over those unscrolling blocks.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Coin

      Is there a better option than the code blocks for pasting long sections of text in a way that’ll offset it from the rest of a post? Annoyingly, they wrap just fine in the preview, but not in the actual live post.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Prototart said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

      @Popes said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

      The current Xavier’s drama is hysterical, but I’m not on the channel, so I don’t have receipts. I know others do, because I’ve seen them.

      Funniest shit.

      fr, Rogue/Ruby having the audacity to pretend to be the adult in any room is seriously just the most deranged shit in the world I stg

      I know for a fact people have involved Shakespeare in her shit but shocker nothing happens bc the game was literally made for her she is protected from on high and is subject to literally no rules at all

      There was a much (much (much)) longer post here. After taking time to sit with it and think about it, I just am not comfortable with dedicating a manifesto’s worth of words to one person over this stuff, even if it’s one who I thoroughly dislike and distrust. It feels weird and gross. The highlights:

      • The Xavier’s School group has a real fucked up atmosphere, to the point of making people drop characters to avoid it.
      • The people in charge of the Xavier’s School group are fine with this, or at least willing to behave as if any and all issues faced by people who have dropped characters due to feeling uncomfortable with said atmosphere are solely the fault of those people.
      • I really ought to work on controlling my temper, because I acted like an asshole in reacting to the above two points.

      That said:

      @Prototart is one hundred percent correct that Rogue/Ruby is an awful excuse for an ‘adult in the room’. She’s the sort of person who thinks it’s fine and normal to throw sexually tinged jokes at virtual strangers, then double down when they show signs of not appreciating it. She’s the kind of person who, from her position of acting as the volunteer organizer/coordinator for a large faction on a MUSH, is perfectly alright with dodging accountability by any means. She’s a habitual liar and gaslighter who is best given a wide berth.

      I’ll leave my other related posts up because whatever, I feel less weird/gross about those ones.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      @Apos said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

      @renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:

      These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity

      okay okay but we’re talking about running a MU right, the bar is so low most people trip over it but I think any game runner would die of cringe if someone described them as a serious person because they ran an online roleplaying game well

      Shit’s relative. ‘Serious’ for this dumb dying hobby is ‘does not perpetuate the abuse of people who choose to spend their time playing on an online roleplaying game’ and ‘will probably not behave like a raging asshole if disagreed with in any way’.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!

      So, beyond the sins of HAM itself - of which there are clearly many! - I think it’s important to bear in mind that it’s just another link in what is swiftly becoming a chain of games created exclusively to house the right abusive staff and player figures.

      Like Prototart said, Heroes Assembled MUSH was the result of the very same people who aided, abetted, and participating in sexually harassing and/or emotionally abusing others on United Heroes MUSH objecting to no longer being allowed to do so with the same impunity, or guarantee of safety from the same treatment they visited upon others. Crucially, its main driver - the aforementioned Chaucer, AKA Halicron around these parts, I believe - was someone well aware of the kind of place that United Heroes before finally leaving in protest-- because years prior to doing so, he’d already left in disgust and protest due to the entirely unrelated scandal in which Ditko’s abusive tendencies, and the rest of the United Heroes staff’s apathy towards the same was initially exposed. In doing so, he began nurturing the seed that would eventually bloom into his beloved thicket of a theme, but not without facing obstacles. Among the moderately sized group of players his morals apparently drove him to leave beside, the sentiment that his theme - which at one point attributed the entirety of the fictional African superstate of Wakanda’s technological prowess and bloodline connection to the special herb that empowers its rulers to the presence of a race of (predominantly white) alien colonizers crashing there in ancient times and interbreeding with the local populace, uplifting them into a hybrid race capable of fully accepting their gifts, alongside a host of other bizarre additions driven primarily by his simultaneously disdain for comic books and blind confidence in his own abilities - was in fact a confusing, unwieldy mess that would prove a detriment to incoming players not already familiar with its bare bones from previous exposure (or willing to overlook its egregious flaws due to kinship or other such factors) almost immediately drove him directly back to United Heroes for the run that would ultimately culminate in-- leaving, in disgust, because the same people who had already proven to be abusive shits were still abusive shits.

      The main difference, of course, is that the second time around, he was happy to bring along some of the very same untrustworthy personalities who’d proven themselves abusive or supportive on the first go 'round, because this time they were his friends.

      On Heroes Assembled MUSH, Halicron’s ~decade long pattern of being a player and occasional admin characterized primarily by narcissism neatly tucked beneath a veneer of personability reached what felt like a zenith. Beyond the behavior which Prototart outlined - his love of treating people who were interested in taking inspiration from comic books like idiots; his willingness to directly insult the ones he didn’t feel like processing apps from - he made a habit of refusing character claim requests (read: requests for the passwords of previously created character objects, so that players could go through the app process on those objects) from people who he felt ‘shouldn’t’ play those characters for whatever reasons he deemed fit, including feeling that they should ‘branch out’ and try someone in one of the two or three fiefdoms of the game he felt were worth exploring.

      His takes on long-established women characters like Janet ‘The Wasp’ Van-Dyne seemed to stem primarily from his own natural ignorance of the source material combined with barely latent misogyny: Janet for example, a character mostly depicted as a fiesty, big-hearted and ballsy heroine with an empathic streak became a bitter billionaire drug addict with sociopathic tendencies under Halicron’s pen, a take which he was not only deeply proud of, but insisted was the only logical understanding of a character who dates back to 1963, despite it not lining up with any version of the character published between then and now.

      When confronted - multiple times - with the news that two of his good friends (Vorpal, a player who inspired a generation of comic MUs to ban original characters for the express purpose of keeping him from bringing yet another iteration of the tiresome self-insert he has been playing since 2013 or so; and Wolfs, a player notorious in comic MU spaces for trying to coerce strangers into engaging with their latex fetishes) were responsible for bullying a long-standing player off of the game, his initial response was to get angry at me for bringing it up (publicly, granted); his subsequent response was to close an official complaint on the matter roughly five minutes after its submission with a tepid promise to look into it which was never again followed up on. Whether this is because he’s friends with these players, he disliked me for making A Problem out of it in the wrong way, he disliked the person being bullied, or some other, unforeseen factor, I obviously can’t say; I was never given any indication that he did indeed care, take the issue seriously, or say a word about it to any of the involved parties, though.

      Why bring all of this up in a long-ass reply to a long-ass post venting about someone who has already flounced away from a game and inspired his cronies to do the same, poisoning the well as they go? Because like Prototart said, they’re gearing up to do it all over again. If there’s anything you take from anything that’s been said about this game, these people, and their future endeavors, please let it be this: do not indulge them. Do not waste your time and energy on a space that exists to give abusive people a fresh hunting ground. Do not confuse a game with explicit carve-outs…

      Each player may have one character on +reserve. When a character opens or hits +idle, reserves are processed on a first come, first serve basis. The first player in line has one week to claim the character. At the end of a week, or if the player declines, the reserve goes to the next player in line. If no one claims the character, they are set Open and are available to app.  There is a 24 hour window after opening to allow any interested party a chance to pitch for the recently opened character. 
      
      The original player must wait one week before they can put a new +claim on the character. 
      
      To +claim a reserve:
      
      *Player must not have any idle characters on their account.
      *OCs and NCs have a +kudos in the last 21 days.
      *Player must have sufficient space in their roster for the new character.
      
      +Interest
      
      Players may express interest in up to three characters at once. Reserves take priority over interest. Players may check to see if their character has any +interest flags. This means another player is potentially interested in playing the character. If these flagged characters start having issues with their activity or +kudos requirements, staff will approach the player to discuss whether or not the player wishes to retain the character. EFCs and MFCs must submit a plan of action to improve their activity in the next 60 days. This is primarily a tool for Staff to gauge interest among players in writing the character.
      
      -----
      
      One of the things that will impact this system is how we're going to kind of overhaul the +idle system. Things are going to be handled on a case by case basis, and we aren't going to just reap a list of characters because they've hit idle and have a reserve.
      
      While I can't necessarily give any hard numbers yet, if someone has been playing a character for a long while (or alternatively, have been playing characters plural for a long while) without any issues, we will at the very least want to talk with that player before opening the character.
      

      … to create exceptions to its activity rules for the benefit of staff and staff’s friends to either hold onto their own characters in circumstances when inactivity should lead to losing them, or claim desired characters from others on the grounds of expressed interest for one that is in any way conducive to cooperative storytelling. On at least two occasions, Chaucer has personally seen to it that players who claim characters played by one of his friends when they fall idle under Heroes Assembled’s similar ruleset for activity are banned soon after doing so; in one case, this meant ignoring multiple accounts of a player being a sex pest until they had the temerity to claim a character and post that they were new to that character, and planning to depict her in a gentler way than the previous player did, at which point the sex pestery was suddenly exposed and used as grounds for banning.

      These are not serious people. These are not particularly GOOD people. These are not people who are equipped to acknowledge the contributions of anyone outside of their orthodoxy of mediocrity, and Halicron in particular has demonstrated a complete inability to serve as an unbiased, approachable, or even particularly useful staff member on every occasion he’s attempted it. I realize that this is not an audience that’s all that high on comic book games to begin with, but for any lurkers, or any occasional 4 color fiends out there: do not go there. Do not go. Break the chain and let it dangle uselessly until it rusts away.

      posted in Rough and Rowdy
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      renaveleigh
    • RE: Discussion - Excelsior

      @Coin

      From our General FAQ:
      Q: How do I get that one character I always play/have always wanted to play?
      A: It depends. You can always ask us if we have plans for a specific character. If we do, we’ll let you know; if we don’t, it might be a character we’re really not interested in including. On the other hand, it could be a character we’re not too invested in but don’t mind bringing in. It’s a toss up. You’ll have to ask. Just remember that either way, the character will be written to fit in our world.

      I’m currently on the website without being logged in and the Character Openings board is locked, which makes it rather more difficult for a person without a character on the game to keep an eye out for those 48 hour pre-opening notices-- assuming that that is, indeed, where that information is posted. I couldn’t find it elsewhere, but I might not have looked enough.

      I don’t have any particular dog in this race beyond being someone who periodically checks the roster for signs of someone who might be interesting to try, but it does seem a little counterintuitive to gate those opening notices to the existing players, given that the roster setup means prospective players without any appealing options otherwise have to scroll through all of the roster tabs every few days/weeks/(insert other interval here) in the hopes of seeing something that appeals to them. Being able to get some advance notice of character availability seems as if it would be a boon to anyone in that position.

      posted in Game Gab
      R
      renaveleigh