Post by BitterFlashback on Nov 3, 2016 18:08:58 GMT -5
Since I created Gems From The GDB to celebrate those moments when the players grew some balls and made a case against the staff/policy, I suppose it's long overdue that there's a thread for examples of the staff publicly crying their eyes out over fucking nothing.
With that in mind, I'll kick things off with two posts of Nergal taking his shit and going home because of unimportant leaks.
gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,51862.msg965858.html#msg965858
As GMH admin, I made it a point to start running season-long plots to encourage competition between the GMHs. The first such plot involved a newly-revealed cave filled with rare, but dangerous, animals. The GMHs were thus encouraged to find a way to make the cave useful to them. Numerous possibilities were open to them - they could find a way to breed the animals and make obtaining their parts more reliable, or they could wipe out the whole nest and keep the parts rare. They could work together, or alone. Anything the GMHs came up with, we were willing to support. There was a catch, however - one end of the cave had a bubbling pool of lava, and so the plot had to be completed before the cave filled with lava. (Hence, the "season-long" aspect of the plot, vs. one with indefinite length.)
There was some discussion and competition between the GMHs. Eventually, House A got very defensive of the whole area and Houses B and C decided to team up, to cut out House A. This led to a bit of a stalemate, with House A establishing a home advantage. Then the playing field changed. The leader of House B hired a magicker to kill a leader of House A with a spell that switches the caster with the target. The end result: the leader of House A was eaten by gith, while Houses B and C could sit back and enjoy their victory.
At this point, you might think that this is standard Murder, Corruption, Betrayal. And you would be right, except for one slight hitch: the player of House A's gith-food leader, or someone purported to be them, played that death beep in a Discord chat set up by members of jcarter's forum and declared that their PC was finally dead. Within minutes, the full details of the death were circulating, and details and speculation on the mechanics of the spell were posted up.
The player of House B and C's leaders, locked into their alliance and receiving a morale boost from this small success, pushed for the cave again. But they ran into hurdles. Separately, both players sent requests to staff with similar wording and arguments, faulting the players of House A for not reporting things accurately and faulting the staff of House A for loading NPCs to support A's PCs when Houses B and C were not getting a similar amount of support (although they were, and could ask for more if they needed to). The player of House C's leader was known to have coordinated requests in the past with other players, and it was not too much of a stretch to assume that other things had been coordinated too. When questioned, both players, of course, admitted to being friends but did not admit to collusion of any kind. The phrasing, organization, and timing of the complaints, however, told a different story.
After a roll call was put out to replace a leader of House A that had stored after the death of the other House A Leader, the drive to win (and frankly, there's nothing else that it can be called) led to the leaders of Houses B and C to plot more killings of House A's PCs so that they could not report to House A's leader's replacement on the behavior of House B and C, completely disregarding the fact that House A had the virtual knowledge of B and C's actions already, and NPCs could easily pass the knowledge of the behavior to the PC replacement.
The plot was ultimately a failure, spoiled by OOC news of Leader A's murder and spoiled further by evidence that the two IC allied Houses were talking out-of-game at the same time. The plot was always on a timer - and the timer was sped up, ending the plot before it could be ruined further by out-of-game meddling. We specifically waited for characters to die or store before running the next GMH plot.
Edit to add:
There are more stories where that came from. I'll write more examples every day or two.
And a reminder:
Don't identify yourself or other players if you feel you're a star in the story, or if you think someone else is. My goal is not to start a pity party or a witch hunt. It is to explain that plots are still ruined by OOC and on a fairly regular basis.
Edit #2:
In case it wasn't clear, there were multiple leaders in each clan at the time. The actions of one leader of a clan doesn't reflect on or state the actions of the rest of the leaders.
tl;dr version:House A's leader whined about how he died to J-FUCKING-CARTER, and the leaders of B and C each put in a request to staff for more NPCs with similar wording around the same time. We killed the plot because these CHEATING CHEATERS FUCKING CHEATING WTFBBQ!!1! BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
BadSkeelz and Armaddict, among others, attempted to point out how fucking stupid this was. After several posts of, "Seriously, you idiots cancelled a plot because one person cried about dying and two others might have coordinated using the request tool to at the same time for similar things?" Nergal followed up with this:
I hope you all learned the dangers of talking OOCly. It ruins the game for the staff. You selfish fucking cheating fuckers.
With that in mind, I'll kick things off with two posts of Nergal taking his shit and going home because of unimportant leaks.
gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,51862.msg965858.html#msg965858
nergal said:
Here's a story from earlier this year:As GMH admin, I made it a point to start running season-long plots to encourage competition between the GMHs. The first such plot involved a newly-revealed cave filled with rare, but dangerous, animals. The GMHs were thus encouraged to find a way to make the cave useful to them. Numerous possibilities were open to them - they could find a way to breed the animals and make obtaining their parts more reliable, or they could wipe out the whole nest and keep the parts rare. They could work together, or alone. Anything the GMHs came up with, we were willing to support. There was a catch, however - one end of the cave had a bubbling pool of lava, and so the plot had to be completed before the cave filled with lava. (Hence, the "season-long" aspect of the plot, vs. one with indefinite length.)
There was some discussion and competition between the GMHs. Eventually, House A got very defensive of the whole area and Houses B and C decided to team up, to cut out House A. This led to a bit of a stalemate, with House A establishing a home advantage. Then the playing field changed. The leader of House B hired a magicker to kill a leader of House A with a spell that switches the caster with the target. The end result: the leader of House A was eaten by gith, while Houses B and C could sit back and enjoy their victory.
At this point, you might think that this is standard Murder, Corruption, Betrayal. And you would be right, except for one slight hitch: the player of House A's gith-food leader, or someone purported to be them, played that death beep in a Discord chat set up by members of jcarter's forum and declared that their PC was finally dead. Within minutes, the full details of the death were circulating, and details and speculation on the mechanics of the spell were posted up.
The player of House B and C's leaders, locked into their alliance and receiving a morale boost from this small success, pushed for the cave again. But they ran into hurdles. Separately, both players sent requests to staff with similar wording and arguments, faulting the players of House A for not reporting things accurately and faulting the staff of House A for loading NPCs to support A's PCs when Houses B and C were not getting a similar amount of support (although they were, and could ask for more if they needed to). The player of House C's leader was known to have coordinated requests in the past with other players, and it was not too much of a stretch to assume that other things had been coordinated too. When questioned, both players, of course, admitted to being friends but did not admit to collusion of any kind. The phrasing, organization, and timing of the complaints, however, told a different story.
After a roll call was put out to replace a leader of House A that had stored after the death of the other House A Leader, the drive to win (and frankly, there's nothing else that it can be called) led to the leaders of Houses B and C to plot more killings of House A's PCs so that they could not report to House A's leader's replacement on the behavior of House B and C, completely disregarding the fact that House A had the virtual knowledge of B and C's actions already, and NPCs could easily pass the knowledge of the behavior to the PC replacement.
The plot was ultimately a failure, spoiled by OOC news of Leader A's murder and spoiled further by evidence that the two IC allied Houses were talking out-of-game at the same time. The plot was always on a timer - and the timer was sped up, ending the plot before it could be ruined further by out-of-game meddling. We specifically waited for characters to die or store before running the next GMH plot.
Edit to add:
There are more stories where that came from. I'll write more examples every day or two.
And a reminder:
Don't identify yourself or other players if you feel you're a star in the story, or if you think someone else is. My goal is not to start a pity party or a witch hunt. It is to explain that plots are still ruined by OOC and on a fairly regular basis.
Edit #2:
In case it wasn't clear, there were multiple leaders in each clan at the time. The actions of one leader of a clan doesn't reflect on or state the actions of the rest of the leaders.
tl;dr version:House A's leader whined about how he died to J-FUCKING-CARTER, and the leaders of B and C each put in a request to staff for more NPCs with similar wording around the same time. We killed the plot because these CHEATING CHEATERS FUCKING CHEATING WTFBBQ!!1! BAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!
BadSkeelz and Armaddict, among others, attempted to point out how fucking stupid this was. After several posts of, "Seriously, you idiots cancelled a plot because one person cried about dying and two others might have coordinated using the request tool to at the same time for similar things?" Nergal followed up with this:
nergal said:
I'm not sure how to explain that talking about a plot OOC is a bad thing to people who seem to think that there is a workaround even in the face of cheating. Avoiding IC eavesdropping, coordinating the timing of actions, and other things are made extremely easy with OOC communication, and I tried my best to explain that that happened. It's obvious when you're looking from the top-down, and I'm not going to explain how it's obvious because that gives cheaters a way to hide their behavior.I hope you all learned the dangers of talking OOCly. It ruins the game for the staff. You selfish fucking cheating fuckers.
