Civetta's post in 06/13/2020 / Header Plot Experiences And Issues

[Yinadele]

Civetta takes a deep breath in before starting: "A caveat before I begin, this is a rough topic, I
volunteered to fall on this sword because every time it's come up in the past it's been either shot
down or so completely misinterpereted as to be rendered pointless so I am going to try to clarify
some of the points after having talked with a variety of people."

"1) Many of the GLs, and people in highly politicized positions like knights, inquisitors, civil
servants have begun to feel like they have a lack of agency in the world and affecting kingdom
politics. A couple months ago this got spun out into a really distracting conversation about whether
or not Ducal capitals should be built out. Which I feel was the wrong focus entirely.

As an example of this powerlessness Lyonie is a member of the Royal Council an advisor to nobility on legal,
historical, millitary, and civil administrative topics, but in court settings has been expected to
act like a glorified guard which is honestly the least interesting and compelling part of the Reeve
universe. The previous two court sessions have been extremely stifling in terms of RP hooks and the
message has been you the players keep the city metrics stable (always unstable by design) and let us
the NPCs handle anything not immediately involved with grid.

This frustration with feeling impactful
lead to one player sacrificing their character (Ianthe) with behavior that caused staff to change
travel policy in a way that is quite possibly going to negatively impact the horizons of roleplay,
because they literally tried everything they could possibly think of to affect a positive result on
a plot header. Which brings me to:"



Civetta continues, "2) With regards to the current header and earlier related ones, most of the
players interacting with it have expressed frustration that it's impossible to get a positive
response to plots or plans, the whole situation has the deck stacked to neutral or outright
negative. This has caused frustrations: the Samael Dynasty is a product of years and years of player
and staff cooperation in changing the history of the world.

The new focus on harmonism feels like
it's come out of left field in the context of sevenish years of similar headers that have been
focused on how to let players collaboratively influence the world, this feels wholly antagonistic
but antagonistic in a way that's patently unwinnable. On a concerning note all of this stuff seemed
to crop up around the same time S. was banned and has felt like a concerted effort to systematically
erase every single one of her contributions to the game world.

Even if this isn't the case, there has been frustration with the way in which plots have unfolded:
a deeply disliked GL acts alone with limited resources in the middle of a gambit against her leadership
and immediately changes the face of the game world in a matter of days, uprooting and undermining
months and even years of planning and RP that characters have been looking forward to.

Contrast this to dealing with the current
header: a plurality of players and a majority of deeply beloved and well connected GLs have poured
thousands upon thousands of silver, hundreds of IP and QP into plots to affect this header and have
been progressively losing ground over the better part of a year."

Civetta claims, "It's frustrating even trying to rope anyone into such a header because every NPC
seems to be infuriatingly neutral so you try to find a tailor made PC and their NPC family and find
a place in this world and these problems for them and then they too start hitting these brick walls
and having trouble finding reason to continue. Long, convoluted but brings me to:""



Civetta continues "3) Staff has increasingly been turning the focus of the game towards automation
and gamification by virtue of being a small group of volunteers with busy lives. This is fine if
these systems work or make sense.

A few examples here :

A) Theodora is an Entrenched GL, she starts a
plot to interact with one of her subordinates the Court Bard of Vandago and is informed that said
subordinate will not cooperate with her interests or provide her with information. She now has no
recourse to leverage her authority as GL vis a vis impacting the world.

B) GLs have a number of
guild specific mechanics they can use to impact the world. Guilds have used every single one of
these with global effects in regards to the current header target; Exile, Excommunication, Warrants,
Redlist, and Blacklist. These have had entirely negative affects with regards to the progress of the
header. Doing nothing would appear to produce better results.

C) NPCs are supposed to be living
breathing people with aspirations, ambitions, connections and interests yet in plot after plot NPCs
have either supported Roland outright or been neutral on the matter of Roland. The few exceptions
are the Lithmorran domains immediately connected with the current dynasty.

We're told that x, y, and z domains support Roland but when we dig down and look at the history of those domains they actually
have a reason to support the current dynasty: a player was astonished to discover that the Sevois of
Endridge have been backing Roland and that if all the knights venerable supported Estella that would
also include the Sevois and the likes of Paer de Laern (and those who were trained by him) if he yet
lived who were all outstanding supporters of the present dynasty. Which leads me to:"


Civetta concludes, "4) This is about player agency writ large. TI is so outstanding because it has
been so comitted to creating a world that the characters that we play can leave an oversized impact
on if we make a concerted effort to. It feels, playing these days that there's a concerted effort to
move the theme of the game away from this central conceit and that the interactions between staff
and players as far as the -story- we are telling is concerned have become antagonistic instead of
collaborative. Whenever this gets brought up here in the weekly meetings we are asked to stop
because it negatively impacts staff morale but by shutting down such frustrations player morale is
diminished and so we end up talking around each other instead of addressing what's really getting
people chapped.

"In conclusion, I'm hoping discussing these problems with communication can fix it in terms of
feedback and staff reaction going forwards, and that maybe we address what can be done if fatigue is
an issue for staff. I do want to express that managing a rump state in decline with player agency
seeming to have no impact, isn't fun. Some of us feel we're being denied a chance to explore and
celebrate the theme that we got to watch our predecessors create."


Civetta adds "Some personal caveats here, social RP, political RP, player history and metaplot are
my favorite parts of games, this isn't 'plot fatigue' so much as a lack of feeling like big
important characters doing big important things is doing a heck of a lot of nothing anytime it comes
up. I think some of the previous instances of 'plot fatigue' have been this too, and someone asked
me to bring up this post from last october:
https:/ti-legacy.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2163&start=10"

Civetta chirps "Second, a reminder to players.
You get a free plot against headers while they're active every week. I know most of the GL players I
have been playing with do their best to involve characters with kingdom scale headers but you don't
need them to do that if you wanna do stuff. If you are having trouble thinking of ideas of how to
into politics stuff grab a GL or, if any show up, grab an apped in titled noble, they are constantly
in need of engaging RP like that to keep them from fading away into nothing."

Civetta winds down,
"Lastly from me and I'll shut up and let everyone else talk, stuff going on in the world has been
big and incredibly stressful and life changing and things going slow is completely understandable,
this isn't necessarially about pacing either, it's about having at least a few crunchy next steps
and things we can latch onto and have as RP hooks when we engage with NPCs instead of every response
appearing as noncomittal neutrality."

[Yinadele]

I ended up talking about this topic a bit myself with others, and I would like to personally add, after what Temi said at the meeting.


Temi, I do respect the work you do on the plot and consistently while facing IRL stress. I think everyone does.

However, almost all latest header responses have fallen into this, beyond 'sacrifices must be made to succeed'.
Players feel, across the board, angry not at the IC, but adverse to interacting with a plot due to the stick coming out constantly without a carrot.

I feel it would help to provide more positive outcomes, and NPC support where it would be rational to be more explicit. Players have an aversion to Roland, the character, due to the OOC surrounding him more than the IC. The idea of plot armor isn't just from 'unlucky rolls', but players feeling discouraged on even smaller plots from getting consistently negative responses.

The problem as seen by players isn't that things are too negative, than not positive, ever. I think staff can reach out. I'd like to give the most recent example.

Everyone negative against Lithmore or negative against Roland for the schism, without any backlash to Vandago or support against Roland being noted. Players did not get any positive feedback for this action, despite having paid for it.

This feels bad after players are using their gamified actions and support, and consistent PC teamwork, effort, and consideration.

I feel firmly that if players felt like their mechanical contributions and RP got more personal acknowledgement even with losses, there would be so much more PC interaction with the plot, and people feeling more willing to reach out to smaller PCs.

My experience playing Eiphraem was just the idea on my part of making a plot made people OOCly cringe and ask if I really wanted to do that, as previous, though different, attempts got negative replies. The players did not want to see me experience the same negativity, and do not hate you personally. They feel a pavlovian aversion to interacting with the main plot.

They feel like every action they take gets punished, so the winning move is nothing at all.


Please do not accuse these players of doing something wrong- It is negative reply in response to negative feedback, and if we hold bad feelings towards each other, that causes a breakdown of cooperative story writing.

Can we help staff exhaustion? Is there a direction staff wants to see players go, and feels players are not pursuing? Being more straightforwards on this and making suggestions to players and talking it out without rancor feels very necessary in a situation like this, and like we could get a happier interaction overall with it that way. I want to add that I appreciate OOC meetings and the willingness of staff to speak with the players on issues like this, and I think we can make things better by focusing on these questions.

[Kinaed]

I am having a lot of trouble getting through reading this post to separate what is a real issue staff need to look at, and what is a mish-mashed conglomeration of player spin out of dissatisfaction.

There's comments about quashing Serril's player's stuff as if this was somehow wrong or a biased staff action. Rather, it was an agreement between staff and impacted players about how to handle wide-scale misuse of a staff member's powers to read cnotes accompanied by solid proof of that info being taken IC. It was to the extent that other characters were actually killed on the back of that information. Staff are in the process of compensating those victims.

There's a commentary suggesting that Ianthe's behavior and subsequent "sacrifice" is somehow a heroic act against an unfair system rather than the result of their own choices and behavior, that they walked eyes-wide-open into despite multiple attempts of staff to manage their expectations and extremely passive aggressive behavior on their part.

Beyond that, there is just too much in this one post to unpack, and... intended or not, the wording does come across as deprecating to Staff, particularly at the start with how we're always ignoring things and/or shutting them down - which I don't think is a fair assessment of our behavior or intent.

In order to address this properly, I think we need to break it down somehow. Meanwhile, both myself and my staff put in very long hours on TI on the behalf of players. I have put in at least an hour a week into this game for 15 years, and my total hours on just Kinaed are 40,108, not including my hours from TI2. Right now there are well over 300 OOC Chat logs of us spending an hour each week listening to player concerns to see comments led with things about how we're consistently "ignoring, misinterpreting, or shutting down" players' concerns. So, please be careful and respectful with wording and behavior people use when posting about their dissatisfaction. Please ensure posts are constructive and free from insulting assumptions about staff intentions or making negative judgments regarding staff in general. We are people doing the best we can, and this process can be extremely hurtful as we try to sort the wheat from the chafe.

[Yinadele]

There's comments about quashing Serril's player's stuff

At no point is Serril/Erika mentioned in Civetta's post. I believe she refers to Cellan's player.

intended or not, the wording does come across as deprecating to Staff, particularly at the start with how we're always ignoring things and/or shutting them down - which I don't think is a fair assessment of our behavior or intent.

I feel like when players are putting out examples of why they feel this way and it's a player wide issue, boiling it down to 'player negativity' is a defensive reaction and doesn't contribute to something several people in the meeting expressed. Players feel discouraged from interacting with staff on this topic due to exactly what you're bringing up: 3 people with increasingly less time are contributing on this, primarily Temi.

I feel like if this is hurtful, stepping back may be important on this issue. It tries to stick with the problem with individual outcomes and a feeling about plot responses that most players who have read through agreed with at the meeting. It does not attack or strawman them.

[plague]

As someone who has been adjacent to a lot of "plot-important" characters but has never really interfaced with the plot, I would like to state that I have been playing the game for three months and I have never felt any incentive whatsoever to interact with the overarching plot, with any of the game world outside of Lithmore City, or with Roland and Amir, each of which are very little to me other than names. The game does not encourage me to care that much about the conflict with Vandago, despite the fact that it should be very important to my character.

Plots are opaque; a significant amount of players at the OOC meeting just a few moments ago had no idea that they even existed, had no idea what a header was, and didn't know who Roland or Amir even were. I'm really not that far off from them, and I've been playing this game for three months (a mere babe by most measurements), with somewhere around several hundred RP hours. To hear that those who are "at the top" and who should, theoretically, be people at the head of organizations that span the known world have been achieving little effect in any way, shape, or form in affecting the plots that they do put effort into and care about is discouraging to my attempts to approach serious interaction with the themes which shape this game, as far as they expand behind the player characters I interact with. I made significant parts of my character *about* the conflict in Vandago, though it was largely set-dressing. To know that the people most intimately familiar with the system, and with the characters at play, for the people for whom these characters represent decades of IC and almost a decade of OOC, achieve little... leaves me asking why I should go beyond sipping vodka at the Queen's Inn and listening to a Bard playing a ditty, despite the fact that these events should probably be pretty central to my concerns.

While the plot is interesting to me - enough that I did try to incorporate it into my character's background as a core inspiration - and while the world is incredibly deep and compelling, there is a significant barrier of entry to interacting with it beyond PCs *before* the frustration I hear others feeling. It just leaves me more reticent to try if the risk is dire and the benefit is, historically... nothing or worse than nothing, for the best of folks trying their best.

[galaxgal]

I feel like there are 3, maybe 4 separate issues all going on at once here, which are related but independent moving parts:

1) The prevalence and presence of the 'plot' system itself, and the amount of influence it has over the game;

2) The ongoing story arc of the header, which is the primary 'hook' of current Council RP;

3) Ongoing back-end player grievances, one of which, I will note, do repeatedly get aired over OOC channels in a way that is frankly inappropriate and leaves a bad taste in the rest of these discussions we are trying to have around player impact and agency;

4) A smaller grab-bag of items that regard things like pbase culture and expectations.

[Murrmurs]

I am having a lot of trouble getting through reading this post to separate what is a real issue staff need to look at, and what is a mish-mashed conglomeration of player spin out of dissatisfaction.

There's a commentary suggesting that Ianthe's behavior and subsequent "sacrifice" is somehow a heroic act against an unfair system rather than the result of their own choices and behavior, that they walked eyes-wide-open into despite multiple attempts of staff to manage their expectations and extremely passive aggressive behavior on their part.

We are people doing the best we can, and this process can be extremely hurtful as we try to sort the wheat from the chafe.

I'd like to start on this note with these sentiments copied over, Kinaed. Some folks have acted out toward staff in rude, mean, and nonproductive ways in the past. That should never be considered acceptable action by the player base, and I am sincerely sorry that this abuse toward volunteer staff occurs and has occurred. However, on the other end of the spectrum as a player who has grown to be very tired with the way conversation has progressed, and who does try to interact respectfully, it feels awful to hear earnestly given points being dismissed due to their association with previous bad actors.

Additionally, I am sorry if the following criticism comes across as hurtful and depreciating. It is not intended to be. However, if we avoid having any challenging discussions openly in the name of avoiding discomfort, they instead shift to what Galaxgal pointed to:

3) Ongoing back-end player grievances, one of which, I will note, do repeatedly get aired over OOC channels in a way that is frankly inappropriate and leaves a bad taste in the rest of these discussions we are trying to have around player impact and agency;

Where bitterness tends to foment more bitterness and bad taste without producing any actionable change or shared insights to be exchanged with staff. I hope that this thread's conversation at least offers our community the chance to step toward solving this together.

For my contribution to this discussion, I would like to specifically bring up staff-player disconnect:

Satoshi states, "I think even just an acknowledgement of the issue might lessen some of the more aggressive people, instead of focusing on different topics"

Wight claims, "I'd like to emphasis yina's point here. I don't think this is deliberate by staff, but I do think that something has broken down communication wise for everybody to get to the current point."

A foremost challenge I see is that there is little sympathy or understanding expressed toward collected sentiments that near every player I have spoken with about the current state of play feels at this point in time:

• Character's impacts against the header plot over the last months have ranged from impotent to actively counter-productive.
• Players who are not in a powerful role feel both that the plot is inaccessible and opaque.
• That there may be a win-lose trade off, but they are only ever seeing the lose-lose end of it and are getting tired.

This is not a dog-pile on Temi or how she intends to oversee the execution of a plot. However, this is an explicit comment on the way that it is currently being executed. As matters stand today, this is a plot that drives involved players to wanting out of it, and does not make itself available to those who want in. Regardless of intent, that is the sentiment that has formed around it.

When players see replies from staff that boil down to 'sorry, this is how it is,' it reads as being disconnected or disinterested in the current played experience. If something is not working, it should not be a question of who is at fault, but what is wrong and what can we do together to fix it?

I do not have my own answer to that question fully sorted out yet --- I will edit or comment further on as it comes to me, but would like to tender this question to the community as a whole.

[galaxgal]

To be clear, I do not think that it is appropriate framing to even bring the Ianthe situation into the wider conversation of plots.

It is possible to be dissatisfied, annoyed, or even angry at the state of the game and still express that in a constructive, non-abusive manner. It is obvious that it is a sore point for both players and staff, and adds an unnecessary element of volatility to a discussion that is already clearly sensitive.

[Yinadele]

To be clear, I do not think that it is appropriate framing to even bring the Ianthe situation into the wider conversation of plots.

It is possible to be dissatisfied, annoyed, or even angry at the state of the game and still express that in a constructive, non-abusive manner. It is obvious that it is a sore point for both players and staff, and adds an unnecessary element of volatility to a discussion that is already clearly sensitive.

I do not think that it is abusive to cite situations.

It's an example of something that caused players upset. It is being brought up in context of topics making players and staff sore, which this topic and post has sought to discuss without rancor.

It would be counter-intuitive not to name names and examples, and would be passive-aggressive to reference without naming so as that the other parties cannot respond. It is constructively criticized, not 'thrown shade on', 'strawmanned', 'used as an attack', or 'abusive'.

[Asteris]

To be clear, I do not think that it is appropriate framing to even bring the Ianthe situation into the wider conversation of plots.

It is possible to be dissatisfied, annoyed, or even angry at the state of the game and still express that in a constructive, non-abusive manner. It is obvious that it is a sore point for both players and staff, and adds an unnecessary element of volatility to a discussion that is already clearly sensitive.

I do not think that it is abusive to cite situations.

It's an example of something that caused players upset. It is being brought up in context of topics making players and staff sore, which this topic and post has sought to discuss without rancor.

It would be counter-intuitive not to name names and examples, and would be passive-aggressive to reference without naming so as that the other parties cannot respond. It is constructively criticized, not 'thrown shade on', 'strawmanned', 'used as an attack', or 'abusive'.

As a clarifying point, I didn't ever mean to excuse the behavior of this player or character, players also made it clear that what she was doing was not productive. But I did want to demonstrate that there is a feeling of powerlessness strong enough to elicit bad behavior in some, surrender in others, and just quiet anguish in others. And that this player, bad behavior aside, is not the only one feeling this.