Don't Play in the Arm of the Dragon.

Not that I'm supporting the view that staff can do no wrong and should never be punished, but ostracizing or making public any sort of punishment staff-side would have some side effects. 1.) No one on staff would ever want to do anything for fear it was "too risky". 2.) Staff who took risks or received complaints would be left to the wolves and consequently: 3.) No one would join staff except for sycophants or boring staff who never did anything.

Argue what you will that staff is already filled with sycophants fulfilling X or Y's every nerd fantasy, but... making staff business public in regards to complaints would have more negative effects than positive. Replacing staff isn't easy and creates a lot of rifts in staff-player communication, halts any ongoing plots, and starts players over in their relationship. Those are not good things.

For some reason I see it turning into a "the customer is always right" situation. I don't like the implications of that.

I had a long post prepared but lost it due to a less than stellar connection.

The gist: You were in their good graces Asan and you fucked up. After reading your complaints/demands I don't feel sorry for you in the slightest.

I really can't believe what I'm reading. I was all fired up just reading the OP without context, thinking this would be some kind of great scandal, and I must say, the reality is highly disappointing.

So, first of all, we had a death due to staff error that was promptly and preemptively reversed. Great!

You follow up with a--frankly--slightly paranoid inquiry that is addressed politely and reasonably. Now, I'll grant you that you might not know exactly how staff avatars and animation work. When I staffed, I had an immprompt that was blatantly distinct from my NPC prompt, which cut down on this kind of stuff, but no MUD ever made is immune to user error.

On some level, though, you should realize that if this was some intentional vendetta and not an honest mistake, you wouldn't have been swiftly resurrected with an apology. It was obviously a mistake that was more embarrassing to Euronymos than anything. Sure, as ex-Tuluk admin, he wanted to animate a refugee NPC for some mild hijinx that would not have seriously harmed you in any way. That's one of the things Storytellers do, they animate NPCs and bring some life into the world. Sometimes they make mistakes, because they are human.

Your staff inquiry shows a startling lack of insight into the viewpoint of others. You persist in feeling wronged, even after you are preemptively made whole, and develop a theory to make it personal, informed by GDB speculation (and not by any actual pressure placed on you by staff, as far as you disclose--so you inadvertently validate quashing discussion on the GDB since you have let it inform your imagination to your own detriment), which corresponds in no way to the actual events that transpired. Do you understand how that, by itself, would be tiring to deal with? Yet you are treated with the utmost respect and consideration throughout.



Fast-forward to the event in question. What happened was messy, and maybe you could argue that those recruits should have lived, because the soldiers could have extracted the giant with surgical precision without harming. Or maybe recruits should have let real soldiers do the job, because melee combat in crowded surroundings is how people die, sometimes by accident, and sometimes because maybe just killing everyone swinging blades near that Templar is a perfectly fine way to defend that Templar. They decided to jump into the fray, and that's great, very courageous, and perfectly IC, but it has risks, and those risks played out in a pretty reasonable way.


But let's even grant you that you're right in your read of the situation. Your own correspondence is damning, but not in the way you think it is. You come out of the gate smug and demanding, bolds and italics and underlines smattered about like a high school biology textbook. You hold the previous incident over their head as if that should force them to acquiesce to your desires here. About the most positive thing I can say is that you use the word "request" (in a very insistent manner). Even your pleasantries are some variation on "I hope you are smart enough to agree with me." And here, you have the gall to call this complaint "polite" and say that you only became angry when that didn't work--i.e. you escalated out of all proportion when you didn't get your way--see below. The fact that you point to these documents and encourage people to read them, as if they support your version of events, displays a worrisome lack of self-awareness.

You receive a courteous and diplomatic response, and you fire back harder. Finally you receive one little bit of blunt honesty in that you need to get over it. But you don't. You hit the roof over this small slight. It's clear that if you don't get your way in a dispute, you escalate further and further and further until you've burned all bridges and are posting embarrassing logs on the shadowboard. You get all the way to actually ordering staff to fire other staff. Ordering. Actual imperative sentences. Like you are a military commander in some Jack Ryan movie, or a kidnapper holding some blonde chick for ransom or something. Your demands have become so ridiculous that you force staff to tell you to fuck off. Give me a break. Life just isn't like that. Fair or not, you don't always get your way, and you need better ways of coping with that. Man the fuck up.

It is obvious in this correspondence that there is no end to a discussion with you until you get your way in everything. It exhausts me just reading it and I only slogged through folders 1-3. Of course you "felt the need to retort." It's abundantly obvious that you always do. I am certain that is why staff does not think they can work productively with you.

Understand that players outnumber staff by a great margin, and there are many other players that also have demands, and who have the potential to be just as vociferous about their demands as you are about yours. Often, those demands will conflict with the demands of other players. And everyone thinks theirs are the most important. You need to understand that staff literally cannot spend the time responding endlessly to every player's rambling complaints. There aren't enough hours in the day to give long thoughtful responses to every single one of these screeds, for the simple fact that the players that write this kind of screed inevitably respond to a thoughtful reply with yet another screed, usually longer. There is literally no end to it unless you eventually tell the person who needs to grow up that they need to grow up. In this case, that's you.

I understand that it is great to have players around that are good leaders. I have played a few successful leaders of my own, and I know it's challenging. But there is one thing you need to learn, both for Arm and life: no one is irreplaceable. You being a leader for a while does not put you in a position to treat staff like your errand-boys and monopolize their attention endlessly when you have a gripe. Staff is far from perfect, and there are many ways they could and should stand to improve. But in this case, Asan has no one to blame but himself for his predicament. This is not a damning expose of staff. It's a case of someone who lacks social skills.

"Pretty reasonable" shows just how invalid your opinion is.

Looks like a shitty situation that you made a lot, lot worse than it had to be.

That's right. You cared about the other players. You felt responsibility for them. Everyone here, who is worth a damn, and who has ever played a leadership role, remembers the attachment they felt for the first characters they ever recruited and trained up. You went to bat for them.

I completely understand it, and I've been there as well. That's why I haven't bothered much to comment on the email exchanges. If the staffer in question had any great empathy, they would have understood where you were coming from, instead of just getting pissy and offended about it and taking it personally.

I don't think rezzes should have been forthcoming. It sets too much of a precedent, and I'm anti-rezz in general. And your own rezz, (the lack of which you initially shrugged off) was probably what set up expectations of getting three more rezzes. You didn't realize how rare rezzes should be.

But the staffer should have taken responsibility and admitted it was fucked up. They shouldn't have acted arbitrarily like everything went perfect, they were perfect, and the players were morons who got what was coming to them by daring to defend their boss.