For the first time ever I, as owner of the game Birds Of War, have asked a player to leave of his own accord. I have done so because I felt that Aventinus, over the time he has spent on the game, has become so incredibly negative and unhelpful (Or at least unwilling or unable to rectify the problems he sees) as to generate a bad mood.
I don't enjoy asking someone to leave my game, it's a bad feeling. I also know that by doing this I will generate unhappy feelings towards my actions, both by third parties and Aventinus himself. This pains me, but I felt it necessary for any future achievements to actually feel like achievements.
The discussion that this came from does have merit. Aventinus outlined something I already knew, if a bit extravagantly put, that activity was on a steady (if minute) decline.
I don't think it's becoming of a staff or administration to blame players for the problems the game has, and as such I take full responsibility for any lack of activity you or others may have seen or felt.
Rest assured, the game will remain open no matter what and that any and all opinions, advice, and concerns are valid and will not be treated with the same response as I have given Aventinus. Aventinus has been in a position of leaving for quite a while now, and to quote him:
that the only reason why I am so critical and wanting large, sudden action on your part is because this is going to be my last MU* ever and that it's either fixing this now or getting out of MU*s completely.
Aventinus, Public Channel
If other players feel I have acted far too harshly, or done incorrectly I will remove the request for him to leave.
Aventinus here. I was hoping to be afforded a chance to tell my side of the story.
I have no intention of staying beyond the time allotted to say a personal goodbye to a few folks and wind down my participation in this game. The offer to remove the request for me to leave, which is effectively the same thing as a banhammer in a pretty euphemism, even if certain players feel that, as I do, that SP has handled this incorrectly, is ultimately a hollow gesture. No one wants to return to work after getting a pink slip. If you want to read what was exchanged between SP and myself in a log, I can certainly make that available. The best thing in this situation, provided players think SP has gone out of line (and violated his own POLICY), is to page me a wave (I'll be on practically 24/7 for the next week or so before I'm booted out) and go on playing the game.
Contrary to belief, SP, I wanted this game to succeed BECAUSE it was going to be my last MU* ever. I wanted someone to help me help the game and every time I voiced any concerns, since I actually voiced them, I was shot down as being overly negative. Well great. Saying everything is peachy keen doesn't always make it so.
For the record, I had NO intention of leaving Birds of War. As the significant source material I have posted regarding Asia and even fiction on my end, I had hoped to be here for the long haul. I have invested a lot of time and energy and effort on this game, eagerly waiting for some quality time with RP and people I generally enjoyed RPing with while studying for the bar. I put my heart and soul into crafting Leo and my little underutilized villain and indeed, a lot of pointless energy developing a setting that got resistance and heartache with every turn from all sorts of folks. Hell, I desc'd a bunch of the rooms and certainly popular rooms like the Henrietta. Such is life.
Don't you DARE put words in my mouth, SP.
This was special to me too, SP. You have no idea.
Never once have I sought to diminish what SP has done in terms of building Birds of War, contrary to his remarks. What has so far been done in Birds of War is nothing short of impressive. That said, I have been a vigilant trooper in pointing out what is deficient and needing some patching up. All I said that resulted in the long, meandering conversation which led to my being 'asked to leave' was a suggestion that the old guard of players who first chargened… or at what's left of 'em… should meet up sometime and have a town meeting, discussing what has so far gone well and invariably what has not.
Sure, I admit I have been a critic, but that's what I do. Would it be better for valid criticism to be made that the momentum of the game is quickly fading or to just stand there and not say anything except behind someone's back? I stated my opinions because I felt safe knowing that my thoughts were going to receive a modicum of respect and consideration. Apparently that point had long been out the window by the time this conversation took place.
I can honestly say that I have never made an ad hominem attack on SP, at least one that was not intended to be a joke. I have, whether you believe me or not, put my best intentions forward in trying to make Birds of War a great place to RP. This has meandered a lot longer than I wanted (as WORA would say, tl;dr) but this game meant and still means a lot to me. Thanks for reading.
Best of luck, all.
Leo's Player, Aventinus.
A critic's job is a difficult one, one which most people are not suited to. A summary of the job, as cited by Goethe, is, in brief, to answer the following three questions:
What you were doing, Aventinus, was not critique. It was a bastard blend of whining, back-stabbing (not of Sky Pirate but of others) and, in your own, eternal, inimitable fashion trying (again) to take control of a game that wasn't yours to control and make it into the game you wanted. To hear that this is your last MU* ever is a piece of news that actually makes me sigh in relief. It means I won't have to avoid playing in MUSHes anymore because I won't risk running into the drama you invariably raise on games you're part of. You killed one game in front of me already. I'm glad this one didn't die because of you too.
Sky Pirate, I'm not letting you off easy either, though. You know what Aventinus has done in the past. You know that his personality is unsuited to working with others (he'd rather that others work for him as his remote keyboard). You know all this and yet you let him worm his way into an influential spot on your game. He may be unaware that many of the missing people are a result of his abrasive personality in action, but you should not have been.
http://ecce-dramarama.blogspot.com/2009/08/log-dramarama-on-birds-of-war.html
"If you don't know what you're talking about, go back to the kiddie table." I made every thematic change and room desc to what people wanted - I not only got authorization from Sky Pirate, I had his blessing to change certain components of the theme. If some people paid attention to the conversation, the theme was not at issue. Sky Pirate repeatedly asked me to finish these things. The request was a simple one: let's have a town meeting to talk over what went well and what did not, and get Birds of War up and running again.
Ironically, I had guarded optimism about the viability of the game. Dire and gloom actually comes from Sky Pirate's own mouth:
To be fair in this discussion, he had a bounce of optimism in his following post:
For the players who actually played the game, the question remains about how to stabilize the population and restore the early momentum the game had to sustain RP. I'm sure plenty of people will now speak up and voice their concerns and suggestions for the game now that we're all out in the open. I hope that this situation can bring up new and innovative ways to fix up Birds of War for other people to enjoy.
Going from the log that you bizarrely think vindicates you:
Hint: yes. Yes it was.
This wouldn't have anything to do, though, with you going around paging people how much you hate Jack and how you avoid RPing with him ever because he annoys you so much, right? (Wow! I'm getting echoes of another … expansive … game here.)
There we have the overweening sense of self-importance and superiority. You know better than the plebeians and you're just doing your best to help them understand things the right way, right?
And then the crowning touch: you specifically opened up a blog to bitch about a pretendy fun time game whose owner has decided that your contributions are no longer welcome. You'll make a positively great lawyer. You have the requisite reality distortion field, the smug sense of being superior and the ability to lie with a straight face.
The blog was out of convenience and it was going to be taken down after I left the game. I wouldn't read too much into it.
Rest of that is tl;dr ad hominem venting. That's cool man, but I hear there are better sites for that.
How is telling you that your comment about "quality control" was "too forward" (your words, not mine!) ad hominem?
Do you really want me to pull the pages about Jack out of the logs or will you just concede now that you've been going around "subtly" trying to get people to not RP with him? A factual statement about your activity and its effects upon other players of the game is not "ad hominem" in that it directly addresses, you know, your negative influence on the game which is kind of the reason you got asked to leave.
Describing your attitude in telling people that they don't "realize the situation we're in" as self-important and smugly superior is, too, not ad hominem. It is, once again, a descriptor of your words (and indirectly your attitude).
Indeed the only ad hominem in that response was the last sentence. One sentence is tl;dr? I take it back. You won't make a good lawyer at all. (That, just so that you can calibrate your sensors, is another real ad hominem as opposed to the fantasy "ad hominem" attacks you saw earlier.)
My animosity with Jack has been out in the public and is indeed a single line in the entire conversation. If you didn't realize it before, the conversation is not about him. It was an attempt to get Sky Pirate to not be complacent with mere numbers when a good chunk of the 16-18 players are de facto inactive.
If you also read the entire log in context, Sky Pirate called me as being too negative after I offered what I felt to be a means of constructive brainstorming, even though he himself conceded in his own BLOG that he felt that BoW was in trouble. I never ever said the game was dead or dying. If I am at fault, I will concede that I was really out of any ideas to help his game at this time in the conversation. If I felt that BoW did not have its own achievements, I would NOT have couched the request for a town meeting with the objectives of "seeing what we did right and what we did not." I'll also concede that I'm not terribly diplomatic. But I have been uppity about the fact he needed better character retention policies (which he said was not a primary concern because it's Pulp as a theme and we were attracting enough people) and about facilitating RP (which he felt was unnecessary since he was creating the best possible forum for RP and it was the player's duty to RP).
This is how I solve problems: I like brainstorming with the people that do play and the people that have invested a tremendous amount of time in making BoW as it is, to see what we did well (and keep doing it) and what we did not do well (and fix it or stop doing it). A public forum with a goal in mind is often a way to voice grievances and to find solutions to collective problems. Also, quality control is important. Even a free chargen system needs rudimentary checks. That's why we have people inspecting our shoes before they go out of the assembly line. There has been a remarkable number of complaints about all sorts of RP-related activity that turn off MU*ers from playing. Not all the active players have a desire to be GM staffers. Some just want to play like the other person next to them. People want to play in a game environment that does not cause headaches and habits that result in a Pavlovian dissatisfaction with RP.
Ad hominem? You've been doing nothing but stretching things and assuming things to drag me into the dirt. I get it, you don't like me. If you also want to blame me for the collapse of Corporate Expanse, fine. I won't say I did not have a part in it. I posted the log and a copy of Sky Pirate's blog on a fakeblog because it was readily convenient for me instead of forcing people to read the entire log HERE. I COPIED AND PASTED straight out of Sky Pirate's blog with no thought about his RL name being posted until it was pointed out to me. I don't owe you an explanation and I've already given my apologies about it to Sky Pirate.
I've tried to prod Bane into more than just making a beautiful game on technical aspects. Hell, I helped him out on some of the descriptions and thematic stuff. MUSHing is about people first, not amazing code, perfect theme, or a good grid. If he is actually prodding people to start RPing and getting plots up and running, great! But he also needs to have a talk with more active players to find out what they have liked about the game so far and deconstruct problem areas to fix.
Instead of being Sky Pirate's personal defender and rabid watchdog, may I suggest taking an hour out of your day and playing with people who really want RP? You clearly have enough time to watch this blog thread and jump on every opportunity to reply.
Quit making me care, both of you.
Newsreel on Tuesday!