>Just to get another point of view: I believe all Cyradia
>said is true, and that there is more to it than that.

There's an interesting distinction here, which I'm going to choose to comment on.

I've had some form of contact with Cyradia for, what, 15 years? It's something like that. I can't ever recall her lying about anything in that time. So in that sense, to draw the CF sphere distinction, I think what she's said is honest.

But: that doesn't mean she can't be mistaken. And to some degree, yeah, I think she is.



I was pretty frustrated to see her delete and the subsequent flameup. This is somebody I'm talking to, what, a week ago? Whichever day the misfit edges went in, because Cyradia volunteered to write the helpfiles from my half-assed notes so I wouldn't have to, which was pretty cool of her. As far as I know everything's cool, and then this, and then every person who's even worse than I am about having positive things to say sometimes is out bitching about it and making accusations.

So, yeah, I didn't handle that too well. In that frame of mind there's basically nothing I could have said which wasn't coming back swinging.

But I've had some time to mellow out and think about it, and here goes.



The first thing I want to do is set the record straight and defend Enlilth a little bit. He was Venphoria's imm and that's pretty well a matter of public record, so I don't think I'm exactly making any big revelations here by filling in that blank for anyone who wasn't already aware. Here's another side of the story from my perspective, to the best of my recollection.

Venphoria is in Empire at a time that isn't great for Empire and/or at times of day that aren't great for Empire. Basically she's a little bit of an underdog but she's putting in the effort and time and generally doing the kinds of things that make your cabal imms want to like you. When I put the wand attunement edges in, I also set up quest flags that can tell us if you've ever found each sleek wand, so if I want to reward you and I'm thinking maybe I want to give you aura attunement I can tell if that's actually a help to you or not. Venphoria hasn't found her sleek black and that's something we can tell.

Enlilth came to me and asked me if I thought giving her a hint to where it was would be an appropriate "hang in there" kind of underdog reward, and if so would I figure out where it was? I said I thought that was fine, figured it out, and told Enlilth who, as far as I understand, then gave Venphoria a hint.

I can't for sure assert that Enlilth does not have a secret wand location spreadsheet, although as far as I know he doesn't. At one point in the past I realized that an imm that's no longer on staff was keeping and parsing exacting logs of the bits of information they did get to see to draw out a bigger picture about which character was which player and made some changes to better restrict the flow of that information. If it turns out it's necessary to make changes again to that effect, I will. It's something we take seriously inasmuch as we are able. It's necessary to give a member of the staff enough power to do their job and sometimes that has consequences we don't immediately forsee.


To the comment that Twist was claiming responsibility for Cyradia's deleting as a PR maneuver: I think people can start to put the pieces together now that this was more Twist inadvertantly outing himself than anything else.

The chain of events goes something like this:

Twist's mortal kills Cyradia's mortal.

Cyradia's mortal rage deletes.

Half an hour or so later, Cyradia logs on and immediately deletes, then logs on Trabryn and immediately deletes.

Now, I don't think that death was the reason Cyradia deleted -- I give her much more credit for being level-headed than that. But I can totally see why Twist, in that moment, could feel like, "####, that was the straw that broke the camel's back." I haven't run this angle by Twist so it's possible I'm putting words in his mouth.



What else? When imms talk, do they sometimes mention who a player is? Sure, that happens. It happens more than it should and we're working on it. But let's also put this into a little context: Cyradia, for a while, has been streaky as a player. That's just what the demands of her real life are. Sometimes she had time, and sometimes she didn't. After one accidental autodeletion of her imms we jacked with the autodelete code so it wouldn't happen again. That's not any kind of a knock on her -- I've been as absent for longer streaks. It happens.

The thing about being streaky is: you lose a lot of the context and background information that other people take for granted. Sometimes you miss that we're paying attention to what a certain player is playing because we keep catching them cheating or we keep having to intervene when they die and keep calling the guy who killed them a fagtron, whatever that is. Sometimes you miss that we're not talking about who the imms know is playing a given character, but who everyone knows is playing a given character. Maybe we should take the high road and pretend not to know who the third evil dagger warrior in a row to die and tell their killer something like "Bash bash bash, all you know is one move" is played by. But you know, we don't always. If you have super obvious tells like that or only really play one thing serially we only try so hard to pretend we don't know what everyone posting on Dioxide's knows. As I said, this is something we're going to try to be better about, but I think it's easy to miss when you're logging back in again for the first time in a while that we're talking about things that are pretty common knowledge.



Moving on. Rewards and punishment are always a contentious topic. Over the years I've had the talk with various imms about being cheerleaders for their followers or cabal more times than I care to think about. It happens to the best of us: when it's your job to watch a subset of the players, you tend to identify with them a bit, and you also tend to see them at their best. Most people are cool about it and make adjustments. I don't see fit to tell all of the players or even all of the imms when I or another IMP has pulled someone aside about this or even really most issues; I think it undermines their ability to do their job. (I think this sometimes was a sticking point for Cyradia in particular; I always felt like she thought we didn't take what she had to say about someone seriously or that we didn't do anything. I may have misread her here and I don't want to put words in her mouth.)

From the player perspective, there's always the oddness that you never know really is responsible for your being rewarded. There's a character in Empire right now who has a small quest skill; although there's no reason for the player to think I was involved, as far as I know, I was the one who lobbied for him to have it and ultimately set it. There's another character in Empire right now with a custom long description; that came from Raybaer, a person somewhat infamous for not being much of an Empire fan. I'd have laid money that if you asked either of the players in question who gave them their small rewards they would have guessed wrong. Generally, the players seem to think whichever imms they personally like are behind their rewards and whichever imms they personally dislike are behind their punishments. I'm not too sure how to correct that, beyond if you read a PBF or ask in a deletion thread you usually can find out.

There's another uncomfortable situation which crops up now and again with rewards: what do you do when one cabal's a powerhouse, and some of the characters in it don't do anything wrong by way of their cabal dogma, but exhibit consistently poor sportsmanship or otherwise are unpleasant in some way?

Empire in the Ahtieli era was like this, full of tough characters who were conquering and doing exactly the kinds of things that Empire should do, yet, also full of some of the worst sportsmen among the playerbase. Enlilth got a lot of #### from people at the time any time someone in Empire got a tattoo or a title or whatever.

The same kind of thing's happening with Fort right now, and it's Baer's turn to get a lot of #### from people over the same thing.

I honestly don't think there's any way to make all of the players happy in this situation. If you're a guy who serially plays Fort and has been with the cabal through many periods in which it was a free PK farm, is it fair to you if now you can't get a title because the cabal's winning? If you're a Mochodin and (for the sake of argument, if you disagree take it to the deletion thread ) a pretty good sport, is it fair to say you can't get a tattoo despite roleplaying your heart out because sometimes you're the third guy in a gang with two other guys who are douchebags?

Right now we mostly try to judge these characters on their merits as best we can, which pisses off people playing underdog characters. If we steadfastly refused to reward whoever's winning, we'd piss off the people playing those characters. I genuinely don't know how to make people happy on this one and if someone comes up with a solution I'll listen to it.

There's more I can say, but I'm going to leave it there for now.