Oh well, one of the good fun Imms who put the game of fun ahead of everything else is now gone.

As opposed to the anti-fun imms, I suppose.

From the logs and emails I have handy, two things stand out:

1) Aarn was spoken to about spending an inordinate percentage of his active time hounding one player. The gist of that was basically "We get it. Not a great character. But there's a lot of other things you could be doing that would be more useful than pounding on him more, and you're usually great at those, so do those." The overall drama attached to that strikes me as more than slightly overwrought, even considering other situations I had been keeping tabs on.

2) Aarn was also, for some reason, passing his negative opinion of this guy along to you. For a more boggling reason, you thought it would be a good plan to paste this trash-talking of an active character to your IRC knitting circle, until at some point it echoes around more and eventually someone contacts me with the details and says "This isn't good." This was in the "mulling over" phase when Aarn made the exit he did, which rendered the whole issue moot, but it wasn't promising.

Neither of those issues make things "fun" for the players. Take yourself down from your cross once in a while and consider the overall impact of what goes on.

You had a lot to say in your farewell about me driving the other imms too hard. Why the #### do you think I pushed for you to finish your 5-year-old area project or run a global-scale quest once in a while (etc.)? Because I don't have enough summer reading material? Or because new material for the game is fun for a lot of players, yet you sitting around and doing the minimum isn't? I'm sorry, but a staff of 30 Ordasens would have folded in 1995 or so. Someone has to get their hands dirty.

The game is fun for the players when all of that machinery is working. Class revamps and new abilities have fun results. Storyline quests have fun results. Keeping the game from crashing has a fun result even if the task is invisible. Publicity work that brings in fresh faces has a fun result. Imm-wrangling makes sure the game stays fun for everyone, and that the staff is working on stuff that matters. It's always been our core administrative philosophy that all of that is needed. One-on-one immteraction is crucial to our model, but it's not the only thing needed for "fun".

valguarnera@carrionfields.com