Best Of

Do you have a favorite person to stalk via COMMANDS and other methods?

How often do you find yourself following people around and just seeing what they get up to?

If you could create one prog or mob or what have you with absolutely no oversight, automatically approved, what would it be?

This is kind of a serious one, and it's something I've struggled with since coming back, but it's something I think about a lot: what is the best way for people who pay for a product to criticize the product without crapping on the unpaid labor that is used to make that product?

• Context: Players, volunteers, and administrators have very different takes on the game, and are motivated by different incentives. The oversight and general knowledge of the game we obtain as volunteers, as well as our admin/mod duties, lead us to examine the game in a fundamentally different way. It becomes very easy for volunteers - to say nothing of the paid staff - to lose touch with what it's like to be a player, especially as the game changes and the player experience shifts with it. Our frames become increasingly outdated the longer we're upstairs, and we begin to see a different side of the playerbase, not least of all the ugly things that some players will say about us because we're considered customer service. Every group of people in this game has their own context, their own set of takes, and their own set of shared norms and language, which can diverge a lot.
  
• Empathy: Following from the above point, I think that these fundamental differences of context - which I observe as occurring between different player in-groups - make empathizing across these divisions more difficult. Our NDAs isolate us from other players with whom we used to discuss the game in-depth, and cause us to form an in-group in which our assumptions, and our discussions, create a cohesive model of the game which makes sense to us. What I think we can sometimes forget, upstairs, is that all groups of players have these models. Sometimes they're based on outdated lore, sometimes they're based on lore we've forgotten about, and a lot of the time, when good-faith interpretations of the game conflict or some seemingly nonsense point arises, we're quick to assume that there's no merit to it. We can also assume the worst of someone's tone, particularly if it seems blunt and sharp, which leads me into issues that impact how we read people...
  
• ESL (or ETL, or EFL...) people: Not everyone is a native English speaker, and this can cause quite a bit of confusion all by itself! They might not parse a sentence the same way, or phrase themself the same way, as a native speaker might. This isn't just a language issue, either. It can easily be a dialectal one, between speakers of the same language.
  
• Mental Illness: I don't have statistics on mental illness vis a vis IRE, but I think most of us can agree that a disproportionate amount of us are, in some way, faced with mental obstacles that make our worlds more difficult to navigate on a day-by-day basis. My impression is that 2020 and COVID-19 have heightened this issue beyond its usual background levels, and that it is an issue that people upstairs and downstairs both struggle with. Two garden-variety mental issues I deal with are depression and anxiety, and the impact that these can have on my day is sometimes debilitating. A lot of our players have clear manifestations of these symptoms OOC, for all that it gets joked about.
  
• Neurodivergence: Some people's brains are just different. There may be nuances and aspects of conversation that they are not only misunderstanding, but missing - completely. This is only worsened by the fact that text, a medium in which styles of writing can range quite subjectively, is often limited in its ability to communicate tone and ideas unambiguously, a realm in which many neurodivergent people already suffer. This might, for example, produce what seems like a non sequitur in response to what you might think is a reasonable point.
  
• Values: We all play (or volunteer for, or work for) this game for different reasons, and these different reasons lead us to emphasize different values in our playing experience. One person might prioritize fairness, another consistent lore and narrative, and yet another might prioritize player agency. Some people might regard rules with greater or lesser value...