Idle Speculation: Lazy Role Call Edition

It goes beyond perception, it happens often and it happens to an absurd degree. It is the reason why clan alt accounts are so popular on the GDB. Other games do just fine with people knowing who other people play because they have a mature player base. One must wonder why Armageddon's player base seems to run on a steady source of intimidation and shows of force.

Profound.



I'd be happy to, as soon as I have time to trawl through years of GDB posts. I vaguely remember the topic, though, so it should be easy enough.

I don't mind showing proof of staff's deceitful tactics. However, it's probably true that I'm not going to find a staff member's player account supporting their own staff account's statement. Not because I am a liar, but because it simply doesn't work like that.

Staff have a policy about who can post under what name on the GDB. Normally, administrators and producers are the ones answering players on the GDB, and storytellers are told to get permission from a higher-level staff member before making a game-related statement on their staff account. However, they don't need to get permission to post as their player account, so what they will often do is use their player account to back up an administrator or producer's statement or provide a show of support. This usually follows with other legitimate players falling in line to voice support for something, because the original sockpuppet already turned the conversation in that direction.

If anyone here ever wondered just how the GDB became so sycophantic, now you know the tactic to watch for.

Barzalene is good people.  She's a military veteran, cancer survivor, and is not a reactionary 30s-something guy with autistic tendencies.

I've said it before and I'll say it again about Nergal, but cutthroat as a poster on the GDB was a Good Dude.  It's quite possible that inheriting the mess Nyr left behind was just too much for him to fucking handle or deal with; you have to admit, it was a big mess.  In all of my years of reading GDB posts by Cutthroat, he was not only funny and genuinely nice, but he was never really an asshole to anyone at all and seemed like someone who'd be good to smoke a J with.  I don't think anyone could have walked right into Arm's staff as some kind of face of the game after Nyr and handle it well.


As far as imms helping their friends goes, look... I have had multiple people that I was friends with over the years eventually become staff.  Even one or two that I introduced to the game in the first place.  One of these is even one of my *best* friends to this day (we're 32/33 and starting playing when we were 14), and do you know how many times I asked/he offered to share OOC info, just to have something to talk about?  Not ever.  Not once.  Never, and the same goes for all of the rest of the players I've known who have been staff.  You mentioned Barzalene.  I knew her when she as a player, have met her in person, and knew her when she at one point was on staff.  Just like when other IRL friends of mine were on staff, not people I knew solely through the game, it always just seemed like an unspoken thing that what they were doing as staff wasn't a conversation point.  It just seemed like an *extremely* taboo thing to do, and it is incredibly unfortunate for *everyone* who plays the game when trust like this occurs, especially given how small the playerbase is and how serious the IC/OOC line SHOULD BE... *especially* when you're staff.

But that's just my experience, you know?  I hope it helps explain why, in part, I find the idea that staff members actively interfering OOCly or helping out their friends to be hard to swallow: because, despite knowing a lot of people who've historically been on staff, I've never experienced it much.  Then again, it has been a long, long time since I communicated OOCly regularly with Arm players.

Anyway, thanks for answering my questions, mehtastic.  The hate boner comment was because you've said that you would like to, uhhh, destroy the game, if I'm remembering correctly.  I think, maybe, a few years ago, when Nyr was still basically the face of the game and things were really messy all over, I called for a boycott once?  I have hated various aspects of how things were handled in Arm and originally started posted here to help bring attention to those deficiencies after exhausting other avenues, but it's hard for me to say that I've just wanted the game to end.  Instead, it goes back to the whole "light is the best disinfectant" idea:  if corruption is happening, it should be exposed to as many as possible (these forums provide, objectivelly, the truest manner through which to accomplish this, for better or worse), and the problems should be repaired.

Only because of these forums, some of that has already happened on ArmageddonMUD.  Personally, to some degree, I'm proud of that, and grateful for an uncensored place where people have been able to collectively call BS on unfair practices. 

Let's face it:  Ranging back to probably the inception of ArmageddonMUD, there have at times been staff members who abused their positions to increase their own IC/OOC power, the IC power of their characters, and the IC/OOC power of their friends, even at times going as far to abuse IC information to PK characters, help their friends PK other characters, levy unfair treatment due to positive bias, drop items for their own characters or the characters of their friends, and more.

Unfortunately, the player base has close to zero percent capacity to know when it is happening, save in the form of leaks posted here or, in previous cases of Halaster and Bhag (and to some degree, Nyr), the problem becoming so pronounced that players start to put things together for themselves, resulting in an outcry, whatever the platform might be.

Further complicating these issues is the fact that, when there are instances of staff facing punishment for breaking the rules, the staff do not disclose such information to the playerbase.  To some degree, this is understandable, but it does absolutely nothing when it comes to staff accountability.  Players hearing about staff members abusing the game second-hand and not knowing whether or not they were punished or otherwise held accountable is disconcerting.  The problem is complex because no producer would want to publicly lynch a player who became staff yet fell short or cheated as humans in general are suspectible to, but players having to learn that problems like this have occured or are occuring through leaks or whistleblowers serves only to foster distrust.

We are at a time, in history, where most progressively-minded people hold whistleblowers like Snowden and Manning in high regard.  Yes, in terms of severity, warcrimes are a lot different from suspected abuses on a text-based game. Despite that, in any network of social relationships where corruption/unfairness/arbitrariness/abuse may be fostered by an only-infrequently porous wall of secrecy, those who give up perks to expose rule-breaking should not be crucified. For fuck's sake, even Manning was pardoned by Obama for exposing problems that had been going on, so, as a game played by mostly fairly intelligent people, it should be hard to justify removing the karma of, brickwalling, banning, or otherwise holding bias toward people who have demonstrated abuse of power or any of a number of problems that are hard to hold people accountable for.

It is important to note that there, to me, is a stark difference between exposing abuse and, say, releasing a leaked version of the game's code to the public.

Whistleblowing, when it comes to OOC abuse by staff, prejudices, cheating, etc, is very different from spoiling ongoing plots, IC info about contemporary PC/PKs, posting secret documentation, or otherwise ruining secrets of the game.  Personally, I have not read the code, the leaked wikis, or much along those lines.  For example, when jcarter pointed out that the Muark documentation was available several days ago to call it a Mary Sue clan, i was previously unaware that those documents were available to everyone, now.  I have no idea about the extent of what the code leaks or wiki leaks reveal because I would rather remain as ignorant about IC stuff as possible unless it relates to abuse/staff cheating/fundamental problems.  

I don't think it's about the black moon. I'm not in the rolecall so I don't know for sure, but I've seen a couple of weird things while I was roaming around in the wilderness. New and interesting things that weren't there the last time I went through and seem to tie in.

I'm hoping it's something cool.

This isn’t about that though.

It’s about staff cheating, sockpuppeting, and using alt handles to deflect. In some cases they might not be related, but at worse they are.

Let’s not forget a lot of threads get deleted, particularly when someone rages out. Usually when that happens there’s some pretty strong accusations in there, if you’re lucky enough to catch them.