Mon Feb 19, 2018 5:17 pm
I remember long ago a GL player (great RPer, sorely missed) who went into hospital IRL. Eight or nine months later, they returned and were upset that we had removed them for GLing practically the day before. "Why?" he demanded, "I was in the fucking hospital!"
And here I was, having taken eight or nine months to feel the evidence had stacked up enough to warrant removing that player's GLship, put in a position to defend the decision.
"Because for eight or nine months, every player in my game who had an interaction with that GL role was left high and dry, and I'm responsible for TI's environment. Your being in the hospital was sad and unfair, but our having to deal with the fallout of that was equally sad and unfair. We held the role open for far more than a reasonable amount of time." The player left, and that was fine - their leaving had minimal effect on the game at all, they were already gone aeons prior, and after that long, I was highly skeptical that their hospital stint was the only reason they'd been gone. If nothing else, I was relieved that we could replace a player with a dubious sense of responsibility and a high sense of entitlement with a deserving member of our active pbase.
This doesn't mean I wouldn't happily have that player back, or even in a GL role in the future - but hopefully they'll have learned something from that incident about responsibility and entitlement both.
Life moves on for other people when someone isn't around, whether they're not around for good reasons or bad reasons. Yes, the people with good reasons have my sympathy, but be that as it may, the game MUST be able to move on. My duty is to TI and our environment on the whole, we can't be responsible for other people's good reasons. Life isn't fair.
Arguably, non-GL and non-critical role players being inactive hurts less than a GL role, but it still smarts in a dozen little ways. So long as people are hanging their hats on those players returning, there's a problem. It's not a death knell to be deguilded for inactivity - as mentioned above, the worst thing they have to do is deal with a little inconvenience, but I think it's far better to ICly deal with a long, unexplained absence than to just assume it meant nothing OOCly and have that be okay.
I do think GLs should have to make some hard decisions sometimes. That's leadership, and it's a skill. It's sometimes painful, but it's also a gift to be put in a position where people can learn it. By necessity, leadership roles are comparatively scarce, and it's rare to find places where a person can practice with minimal life-affecting penalties for failure. I know it sounds crazy, but in my professional career, it took me two years to become a senior manager and I greatly attribute my early professional leadership skills to what I learned managing two guilds on TI.
Staff deem four weeks inactive as a player leaving the game. This may or may not be exactly correct, but it's a line in the sand we drew long ago (with player help on these very forums). It's our rule, it's a necessary rule, and we live by it.
