@Lemon-Fox said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

So, this is part of why I feel like old salt is interfering with giving stuff a chance. I’ve been on the game for a while now, and I’ve not experienced…hardly anything listed here. And while I play flirty characters, I’m rarely in the mood for taking anything further. And no one has creeped on me, which is actually really refreshing.

Hi there.

I was on the game for about eight years. I was staff for close to five years. The people that are on staff now are the ones responsible for much of the sex pesting. Hadrix, in specific, had so many complaints over the years that I tried to address and it was all swept under the rug. I personally had many unpleasant experiences with him. It’s very easy to say, well I don’t experience it so maybe it didn’t happen, maybe it’s all better now. It’s not. You just don’t know about it because that’s the nature of the game culture.

Current members of staff have either outright abused systems and cheated to the point that they were set suspect up until they were abruptly put on staff. They have been complained about for harassment and manipulative behavior. They have been repeatedly accused of sex pesting. They have a long history of sweeping harassment claims under the rug, because they don’t want to deal with it, and when asked to even be allowed to address it, was met with a firm no we’ll wait and see if it stops answer. For years. This is every member of the wiz staff. Every. Single. One. I was there to see every bit of it, deal with many of the complaints, sift through the suspect logs, try and reassure players that I was listening to them.

When those are the kind of people that you put into the position of power, the well is poison. Don’t see it now? Cool. You will. You can ignore it, but the thing is, all of the things warned about here? They’re true. Eventually the shine is going to wear off on the game, and you’ll start to see what’s underneath.

They can only hide the rot for so long.

Good luck.

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Just why does the grid need so much sheer STUFF to play a pretendy funtime game IN SPACE?

I can tell you exactly why Cujo deems it necessary. It was somewhere to sink your coded money because it would bother Cujo if people accumulated too many credits. He would ask on the admin channel for more ideas for money sinks so people had to burn money, which is why there are things like pay bacta tanks, why you have to buy bacta now, why there are ship mods, and weapon mods, and fuel. All because Cujo created a system where people earned the credits, then he got mad that people had credits, so he had to force them to spend them.

That then led to him being mad that people obsessed over vendors and shopping, and punishing people for doing the thing he was pushing them to do in order to burn the credits he didn’t want them to have. He created the system, hated the system, got angry at players for using the system, then created more barriers in the system that he then turned around and hated. He’s not a good leader.

@Trashcan said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Jax
These are the mechanics the sex pest in chief pitched a few years ago, so.

Can confirm.

Haxrix pushed this nonsense years ago and it was dismissed because no one is going to use a system that requires they follow so many uncoded rules. Cujo would probably have ship to ship space combat right now had he not set fire to his own game by empowering the aforementioned sex pest in chief, and lost the only person on the game that was capable of coding it.

@Meg said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

but when you have a culture of rot, then is more rot really contributing to it when it starts at the top?

Yes. I’d say any rot deserves to be pointed out from the top all the way down.

I think it needs to be emphasized here that isn’t people being being squeamish about seeing underwear a couple of times. It was clearly a fetish for the player, and it was one that they forced people to be a participant in. Over and over. Consent didn’t matter, stating outright that you do not consent didn’t matter, public, private, event? It didn’t matter. If she was in the scene, you were likely going to be subject to her pants magically coming off and oh my god isn’t this so embarrassing. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that it probably happened on a hundred occasions or more.

If that’s your thing, fine, but these “accidental” scenarios need to happen with people who actively consent OOC to being a participant in it. Most did not, and that did not stop her. Telling her not to do it anymore didn’t stop her. She didn’t care. That was the problem. That deserves to be highlighted.

@Ashkuri said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

On this game if you are harassed, and particularly if you are harassed by a popular player who appears to generate activity, there is no help for you.

Cujo doesn’t need to be like “guyz you can have your toon back,” Cujo needs to be here saying “I won’t tolerate bad behavior, I’ll take it seriously, this is my house and I’ll keep it clean.

Especially since one of the worst offenders is on staff as Reverberate. The only people Cujo has ever treated harshly are people who have been critical of the game in some way. He’s also never going to clean house because he knows he’d have to take himself out with the rest of the trash.

@SqeakyClean said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Wait what was even the fucking point of the sith take over then? (We know the reason) Why not just have a drawn out war between equal powers?
Sound like some old school back tracking.

So initially the point was supposed to be digging Cujo out of the hole that he’d gotten himself into with the First Order not being defeated once we got past canon movie stuff. There was a push to try and make it restoring order against pirates and warlords and stuff, smaller scale story, but he didn’t want that. So we wound up in this protracted fight that no one was interested in fighting because, what was the point? Cool the First Order wins this, the Resistance wins that, there’s no point to any of it, this is the war that never ends.

It was going to be a clean slate where players could affect the story, and build a new resistance to eventually defeat the Sith. Except that Cujo drove out the people who actually generated roleplay. I don’t just mean the events, but the day to day scenes and little one off fun things that @Ashkuri was so fond of running.

Cujo never saw the importance in the day to day on the game. He and Banshee both argued with me that posts were enough in the main story and people should just be cool with those and RP off what they read, offering no avenue to actually participate in it. They don’t know how to deal with the social side of the game, because everyone on staff now is either antisocial, or hateful.

They poisoned the well, and now they’re shocked that everything is dying.

@Jennkryst said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

NOT ONLY THAT, but there used to be a secret vendor with crazy mark-up prices… so that you could buy, say… 10 personal scanners for 2,000 each, then sell them for 25,000 each. Or some similar crazy markup.
Who needs to abuse the trading system, when you can abuse the vendor code, instead?

That wasn’t a thing when I was staff, but personal scanners had also been long removed. I’m not surprised that they’d do that though. They also have it set up so that you can always see who purchases what on a vendor at any time, and for how much, so buying things for cheap and selling them for more had been eliminated for the most part, outside of a few instances that were unintentional and fixed. This is all outdated information by a year and a half though, I haven’t been on the game since then so who knows what other gross ways they’ve found to screw people over.

@Anony-Mouse

The real reason Cujo refuses to remove transit times for space flight is because of how many planets have vendors on them, and how many people are insanely obsessed with going to as many vendors as possible. Some went to so many planets that he actually has the how many planets a player has landed on in a day tracked, among many other things.

Ironically one of the absolute worst vendor obsessed people was given a staff bit and now likely has access to seeing the entire list of valuable vendor items that are on vendors at any given time. Which he had made so that he could see what was where and could remove really valuable items from that vendor if someone he didn’t like was heading there.

Dude created a system that forces players to visit vendors to get items, and then he punishes them for it. Just another of the AoA puzzles.

@imstillhere said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

Did you know that one of the staff fucked with it to Anonymously give out “CharacterName’s Used Dirty Panties” gifts to various people, including me? That was @Zephyr 's char, she can verify that it was very much without her knowledge or consent.

I can back this up. It was the inactive staff member Halcyon that decided it would be hilarious to abuse his continued access to his staff charbit/powers and log into a long time idle feature character, then give out anonymous gifts in the form of my characters ‘used panties’ to several people. I know because I happened to be in the room at the time and saw several people opening them. There were quite a few more gifts that the coder of the game, Yeti, had to go in and manually remove before they were opened. It was not great, especially as it was the first year the tree was ever put up for players to give silly gifts to one another, and it kind of ruined the whole thing for me.

I will also note that this wasn’t something like ribbing between friends. I had maybe two or three brief interactions with Halcyon in my entire time on the game because he was part of the original game, not the revamped version for the last trilogy. He hadn’t been active staff since probably before 2010. This guy was basically a stranger to me, and when given even the most mild of push back against it, rather than apologize the dude just fucked off the game and didn’t log on for a year. Cujo claimed he told him to apologize, but there were never any consequences to not doing so. Cujo flat refused to do anything about him having a staff bit, or staff powers even if he didn’t want to take the entire bit away. I don’t think he viewed it as a problem at all other than it became something that someone complained to him about, and he was annoyed that he had to do something.

@Roz said in Pax Republica - Discussion:

Please note that what will happen if you ban the existence of any TS on a game while allowing underage players is that there will be people who target the underage players to involve them in sexual stuff and then put them in a position where they can’t go to staff about it without the fear of being banned. That is: you make it more difficult to report.

Yeah. That change just makes me even less inclined to think this is going to be a good place. We all know TS is going to happen, it always does and you’re unlikely to ever stop it entirely. Especially with manipulative and predatory sorts, of which there are an abundance in this hobby.

I really hope they read this and take what’s being said to heart, because otherwise they’re going to see an influx of bad actors showing up.

@Pavel said in Pax Republica - Discussion:

Even if certain species mature at ages humans would consider ‘under age’, I’d still suggest mandating an 18+ (for players and characters) limit.

Sure, Mission Vao might have technically been an adult at 14, but she was still child-like in many aspects and there was no romantic nor sexual content involving her. You can’t say the same for people on your game.

There were always excuses like that from people who wanted to play/play with underage characters, and 99 times out of 100 they wanted to do so for creepy reasons. I could not care less if it’s canon, opening that door is inviting bad things to your game.

Having previously been staff on a Star Wars game for many years, let me just emphasize that having minor players or characters is asking for a world of trouble. More than once I had to put a stop to some real sketchy stuff from people trying to skirt the rules against underage characters that we did have. I don’t want to imagine the trouble of minor players and characters being welcomed on a game.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

That seems dumb to me, but I can’t quite articulate exactly why…

It is absolutely dumb for exploit reasons, but they’ve got someone who was caught more than once exploiting systems on staff now, so clearly none of that matters.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@TNP I don’t quite remember how their code works, but I’m fairly sure they use virtual items: Usually set as an attribute on your character rather than an @created object.

They do have virtual items. Some things like ammo are always virtual, and then items that are placed in containers like bags and lockers are converted to virtual when in there. When removed they’re given a DB# again.

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

A number of SerenityMUSH players/staff migrated there years ago after the most recent reopening, which is probably why the game has been ‘blessed’ this way.

I believe nearly every Serenity MU player has left, the last few in the last mass exodus. As far as I am aware none of the staff from Serenity were on staff on AoA, and almost all of the nitpicky code or abundance of items has come from Cujo’s obsession to turn AoA into a video game. Which he then gets absurdly angry over because people start collecting and hoarding items. He’s made it so that people are tracked for what they buy, how often they land on planets so he can watch for people who are obsessed with buying things in the system that he designed. He also made it so that he can manually set vendors to prevent people he doesn’t like from seeing the more valuable items.

@Warlander said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Zephyr Was wondering about something… does Civilians count player bits that are solely Civilians, or any player bits that just have the Civilian group label? 'Cause a lot of players are Civilians that belong to other groups/orgs, like Mandalorians and likely Clan Kora… so a Civilian posing might trip another group or two as well.

It only counts whatever group they’re focused on, so unless they’ve changed it, it should only be counting one group. My info on this is based on how it was back in January though so I’m unaware of any changes they might’ve made to make them look better. I wouldn’t put it past Cujo to try that, but he doesn’t have the skill to do that himself.

Daily pose numbers by group.

Number of poses by month.

There have also been roughly 3 bbposts since June, and there is currently only 1 event posted, run by Hadrix himself on his Reverberate staff bit. Only two people have signed up, and one of them is a different staffer.

Looks like things are going super well over there.

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@BloodAngel

This is more the angle I was thinking about ‘cup’. But, you know, that’s the angle I’m always thinking.

You’re not wrong. Each nom level had a description, and Cujo’s Cup said something like “Think about it” as its description.

@Third-Eye

He was more prosthetic than not, and for a while regularly lost those in combat too. He’s been mostly gone from the game for the last couple of years at least, in spite of the fact that he continues to log on and stay on for weeks at a time.

@mietze said in Asking for RP:

My suspicion is that most of the people who seem that way are in fact other askers so the appearance isn’t the reality and that is helpful too.

The only people I’ve known that get asked often are the ones that engage with a lot of people and ask others for RP often too. It’s a hard energy to match because it takes charisma and the drive to ask ask ask without worrying if people will say no. I usually ask about half the time and that gets me ok results, but it can be hit or miss.

@Roz said in TV series, news, recommendations:

Severance is AMAZING. Like — one of the best things I’ve seen in years.

Agreed!

I started watching it, and at about episode three I recommended someone else in the house watch it because it was so good. They started it after me and finished it before I did because they got so caught up in it.