Former ST

Yes, apparently they can have up to 3 different PCs (at the same time) and are granted 8 karma after a time/waiting period or something. Also they probably do, but Amanda/Anaiah would know better than me.

  Much as I'd love to agree with the question (because of its implications that Nyr was the one mad enough to do this, it was an email from the Producers themselves, which according to the signature, Nyr is not one of. I knew that being banned was very likely if not guaranteed coming into this. It's a thing that, by the time the thread was posted, had really gone too far to be avoided. That said, if things can be kept positive and out of the realm of spoilers and trashtalk here, we can (everyone on -these- boards) show a positive display of how both sides could benefit from a level of transparency that was increased, but still left them with a wall of privacy to hide behind when they wanted or needed to, and show by example (on all our parts) what that sort of a more trusting and honest but still (as) professional (as possible in this case) relationship can look like. Whether or not the current staff of the game chooses to follow it. Because the hundreds of players that come to these boards daily (more than their weekly accounts played numbers) can see it, and will see it. And it can, and will, give more credence to the very real fact that none of us are here because we are infants or don't know how to have honest communication that respects each others boundaries, but because of the fact that the same thing can so often feel like it is missing elsewhere.

The rules may be different for admins or above (I would not know), but for ST's at least, you make a second account, seperate from your mortal account which the staff avatar is the first character on. This is the account that is set with multiple slots if you request them, not the mortal account. And as to stat bumps or skill bumps: Only if it's an avatar pc created specifically to drive x or y plot, but I never saw any of those happen. Outside of that, they, too, would need to put in a special application if they wanted such stat or skill bumps.

Kind of proved my point. Thanks. What they should do (if they were serious) is have NDA's (non-disclosure agreements) sent to your house and get it signed. But that would legally bind you.

Nyr might be the poster-boy for the problem but he isn't the only one. The problem is not only a lack of communications skills, but also this pompous elitist attitude that makes them some staff members feel like they have a right to talk down to players or treat them like idiots. The reason for this is very likely because they can criticize us but we cannot criticize them in return without punishment.

There is nothing wrong with calling Nyr a jerk or a prick when he is in fact very well being one.

In equal fairness though, some players suffer the same problem. For example, if I was staff and I politely asked someone to stop doing something while giving them reasons as to why, and they responded to me with a terse one liner such as 'disconcerning', I would have probably banned them too for a short time. Sorry but fair is fair.

In order to be able to best flesh this out, let's suppose we're talking about a situation here where I somehow got my hands on Arm 2's codebase and managed to get permission etc to open up 'Arm 2' myself.

1. New accounts, I would close off nonhuman races with a note explaining that this will last only for the first (1-3, depending on how difficult the psychology/representation of other races was) character that they would be limited to human, because they needed to review the racial documentation at link.racialdocsforarm2.com/the-race-you-want (fake url, but you get what I'm going for, I hope).

2. Do away with karma. And all ability to automatically choose nonmundane guilds. Give a small random chance of, say, .1% that you start with the 1-10 spells (chosen at random from the starting spells of different nonmundane guilds), and allow those spells to branch as they would in arm into more magick power than you started with. You would have a reroll of this on any birthday along with the stat rolls that come up at random already so that 'established' pcs could find themselves manifesting at random, and it would also make magick users rarer and more frightening. Allow anyone to put in an application via the request tool to play a 'magicker' with only the magickal guild skills and start with them all cohesive and of the same element. Same with sorcery. Limit this to one every 3 months to keep the numbers down.

3. Do away with a need for admin and higher approval on everything a ST wished to implement. If they can trust you to make every guild, see all the secrets, have access to every possible tool that could help you cheat, etc, then they can trust you to make an npc. If they can't, then you probably should not be on staff to start with. But let them prove this to you over time. Start with the presumption that everyone is trying to better things, not worsen them, and let people -start- with trust and earn the -distrust-. The part related there refers both to staff and to fellow players alike.

4. Make it easier to start clans by putting the 'recruit soandso 1000' or 'recruit soandso 4043' etc to more use. You don't have to code special names for every clan, or even have to have special boards for all of them, but things like this would allow you to, say, rent clan compounds with guards and have only clan members allowed to enter/exit without staff having to manually set up apartment setups and/or relegate things to a warehouse and renting up 10 different apartments. This would also allow clan members common use of a bank account. Which would be unBELIEVABLY useful in many situations. This would also make it easier for players to forge ahead or fail on their own with less staff intervention dictating their success or failure in the long run. This would encourage players to work cooperatively to make the big changes that they want to see, and create groups that they want to, while also encouraging allies or enemies that the clan-to-be might have to work with or against them, allowing for more middle-scale plotlines that are larger than 'Go get me 100 spider fangs' and smaller than 'I need you to arm the three units under my command'. Which is where, in my perception, at least, most people would like to see things, and it would, further, shift the focus to the mundane by empowering people to have the ability to affect mundane things in more diverse and meaningful ways.

5. While the noble houses are a 'little' too untouchable for what is good for the game, the Merchant Houses are much too untouchable for the good of things, in many cases. Make them less infallible by lowering the amount of power that they have, the infinite rescources and being the sole owners of wagons and compounds. Allow players these same tools with a REASONABLE amount of work and roleplay. And when they find the exact chink in the armor of the Merchant House they want to go up against, let them exploit it and destroy the House to the level that is reasonably feasible with their resources and tactics. If one settlement or another is without a ready supply of npcs selling weapons, this will encourage more interactions on a player to player level, allowing crafters who make such to step in and offer their wares. This would allow PC organizations to step in and try to fill the niche, and/or leadership/sponsored roles much more to do in the catching the other pcs and making their life hell or perhaps even helping them achieve their new aims.

6. Don't continuously retcon and remove things to try and steer the playerbase in the direction you want or toward the ends you want. (As an example, creating new caves and wilderness hideouts was on a to-do list for the current iteration at one point. Now people want to try to squeeze all the players into cities or coded tribes if they are outside cities, and they are systematically changing and unlinking these same areas)

7. Be sincere, courteous, and accountable in all interactions, be they as player to staff, staff to staff, player to player, or staff to player. Show others the respect you'd want to be treated with, in a very general way, and if the people who were representing the Powers that Be running the game world would not or could not do that, replace them.

I've staffed twice on another RPI MU* - once as a Storyteller, and once as a position similar to an Administrator in Arm (I made decisions for a large portion of the playerbase, generally ~40-50 active characters at a time) where I was more concerned about regional affairs than local affairs. I also handled complaints and staff/player interaction issues for my area. For ease of use, I'm just going to use the Arm position names, otherwise that might give too much away.

There's several problems, some of them with players, some of them with staff.

From players, I found mostly:

* Rebellious attitude: Like I said, it was an RPI MUD. If you aren't roleplaying according to the given documentation, something bad may happen. We didn't have Account Notes like Arm does, but we had a forum where we kept notes on players that staff could check. This was actually good because if, for instance, I made a negative observation and one my staff knew the reason or the counterpoint, it was more in the open than the Account Notes system, I think.
* Sense of entitlement: A player generates a storyline, a hundred players may generate a hundred storylines. Players all believe that their storylines are best, that they roleplay according to the documentation, because they don't have an objective overview of what's going on in an entire area that an admin or a high-level storyteller might know about.
* Bad History: If you've been playing MUDs longer than 5 minutes, chance are some staffer, somewhere, has been a dick to you (in totally inappropriate ways). A lot of players carry that forward and assume (and treat) other staff like that either are that way, or are teetering on the edge of being that way. They typically come off very abrasive and terse, and often downright rude.

From staff (in general), I found mostly:

* Sense of entitlement: The idea that somehow staff are 'better' at roleplay, or something like that is often a misconception that most staff have. In general, staff are selected (at least staff that I and the other 'admins' selected) based on characteristics that would help their role - a storyteller, for instance, should be good at roleplay, but mostly they should be good at thinking about plots and detached from the outcome. An admin should be impartial. When we interviewed people for an admin position, some questions I would ask are, "Do you know what confirmation bias is?" If the answer was no, my vote was no.
* Elitism: This ties into entitlement, but staff, simply because they're staff, often feel like their opinions matter more than players. In a sense, they are correct (they can make game-wide changes, where players cannot) but the good ones remember that a game without players isn't very fun to staff at all.
* Reaction to players: Same with players. I have seen a lot of staff that just can't handle dealing with players - they get so upset because player X said thing Y that they then take it out on player Z. Sometimes it's extremely difficult to separate that, and not enough people take a few steps back, regain their composure, and then re-engage with players. Not doing this is probably the worst thing I've seen staff do. I'd rather see a staff member cheat (because I can handle that easily) than engage with players where their head isn't on straight.

Armageddon staff have all the same problems as staff everywhere else. Armageddon players also have all the same problems as players everywhere else (I would assume). The way I tackled some of these issues was communication. OOCly, players could wish up and have a conversation with me if they wanted, where I'd pull them into the OOC section of the gameworld and talk about what's going on. Having more open communication worked well, but also documentation - we had a custom jobs system where players could send up requests, in-game, that were documented and staff could make notes (visible to players and not) in the job. It meant I could weigh in on something immediately, in-game, and have my staff respond to it - and have it documented. I would say the request tool in Arm is probably better than what we had, because we lifted it from a pretty sketchy codebase ourselves, but it was nice that it was in-game and I could reference it immediately on demand.

Having said all that, I will say the primary thing that I've seen that causes staff/player interactions to fail is assumptions on both sides.

If a player gets a terse answer from staff, they assume that staff is being an ass. If a staff-member sees a player do something questionable, they assume the player is a problem player. In either case the situation can be resolved by either: not making that assumption in the first place, or speaking with that person about it directly. The non-interaction between players and staff is something I have a difficult time with. As a former staffer, there's a time to email me, a time to send me a job, and a time to send me a wish.