jeshin/qwerty derail

Yes, but it's been a couple of weeks and not a single staffer has so much as bothered to send me an email saying that they're sorry it came to this. The response to the staff complaint I put in was resolved with a snarky remark. They had every opportunity to try and resolve it, or if they feel that they're in the right, to try and talk me out of my position. Yet they don't care.

In a thread a year ago (where I outed myself) I said:

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If your expectations are that you're playing a fair game, well, you're going to be pretty disappointed. All of the rules are arbitrarily enforced. There's a caste system between the old players and the new, the "new" being anyone who hasn't played for 10+ years. Understand that you are there to be a redshirt for the stories of the old players and either have fun within that system or go find another game. I've tried to find another game, and there isn't one that's coded as well or as active. So each time I come back to Arm. And I tend to have fun UNTIL I bump up against that glass ceiling of "you're not one of our favorites so we're going to ignore you at best, or shit on you at worst."

But I'm not willing to cut off my nose to spite my face. Until the game becomes unplayable, I find something better, or staff does something so egregious that I can't get over it ... then Arm's my game.

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Sometime between last year and the current present I changed my expectations of the game. That's where I went wrong. And I think, "why did I bother playing nicely?"

When Polain and his crew had Morghu injured and on foot outside of Allanak, I had managed to evade them long enough to have noquit wear off. I could have just quit out in the wilderness there and waited until the next day to log in. But I didn't. I thought that wasn't fair to them. They'd set a trap, they'd roleplayed their parts and they'd all shown up to kill this northern dwarf ... let's let them have a fair go at it.

Even with my very last character, the "aging, derelict of a man" I was the same way. I escorted two elves to Red Storm to rob some apartments and Mors caught them. Mors and some other guy were waiting at the gate at dawn to kill me and I thought, "I could just go back to the stable and quit out, come back tomorrow." But no, I thought, "it's more fair to make a run for it and give them their fair chance." And so I lost my third character to Mors.

And now I question why I ever bothered at all. All those characters that I let live in PK situations who simply went out and got someone bigger to come after me ... or all those times I said, "*I* know it's a trap I'm being lured into but my character wouldn't so I'm going to roleplay my character instead."

It wasn't noticed. They didn't care. I should have just played to have the fun I wanted to instead of trying to play fair in a crooked system.

I just used Mors as an example. He's so long lived I've interacted with him through MANY of my characters. I've been against him, I've been on his side, then I've been against him again. As many times as he's killed me ... he's also helped me.

It's the same with Nektol. It seems like he either kills me or orchestrates me being killed a lot because he's just a glass ceiling for certain elements of the game. You play in/around Red Storm? Mors and his coded power are your glass ceiling. You play in Allanak? It's Nektol. You play in the north? It's Nine.

My style of play was always "punching up". Sure, some people with lesser coded power than me would get killed, but I radically preferred being the lone guy going after an entire organization. I never had expectations that I would succeed at that. I like stories of characters who challenge power structures.

When I got into it with Shalooonsh over the Two Moons bullshit, Shabago Brokkr and some other storyteller both pulled me aside into a non-gameworld room to talk about it. No, I didn't log it because that was a private conversation not a game event. Shalooonsh was rude and abrasive, accusing me of gaslighting the whole issue. Brokkr was conciliatory but absolutely disinterested. He left early in the conversation to go do something else. And the other storyteller was very sympathetic, but absolutely powerless, just trying to convince me not to quit. At the end Shalooonsh got to do what he wanted and I was told if I didn't like it then I should just leave. But I foolishly felt honored that they'd at least taken the time to discuss it with me, not realizing the discussion wasn't genuine.

I do take this personally though. They said, "do this" and I made a huge effort to do this. I got responses back from them that indicated I was succeeding at what they told me to do. And then at the end they told me I hadn't done it. I have felt like I was a good member of the community and added a lot to the game. Someone had even talked me into applying for a helper role next month and I was going to do that since I'd noticed that helper chat was almost always empty lately. I feel like I put my best foot forward and I was not only shit on, but those who also felt like I was being shit on didn't care enough to say anything about it. Not even in private.

ETA: Checked my notes and it wasn't Shabago. He wasn't involved. It was Brokkr. Turns out I did have a log of this after all.