Not engaged with the forums in years, tend to keep to my own things anyway, but some kind of culture war seems to be happening on our server and I feel like maybe I can offer some words of caution.
AD is not my first server. I came here from DMF where I was hounded and bullied for stepping out of line. Short version: I joined a guild that had some strict ways of RPing in /s. I asked, politely, in /g, if other approaches might be considered, and was told firmly but kindly no, so I gave my nicest apology for wasting their time, wished them the best, and quit the guild. About an hour later the griefing started. See it turned out that roughly half the guild had seen my suggestion and its rebuttal, and they left too. Which is a shame - it wasn’t even like it was a bad guild. But I became the focus of a hate campaign. I had threats sent to alts, I had creepy /w threats. At one point a lengthy ooc note saying it was from the guild head’s brother, threatening all kinds of hateful creepy stuff in the ingame mail. I quit the server shortly after.
I encountered something similar a few years later. I wanted to join a guild on AD that looked like my kind of thing. They wanted a semi IC interview, during which we were meant to duel. Their actions all started “Captain Spanky would……” Every single one. My actions started “Pip tries to…”, “Pip aims at…”,”Pip attempts to….”
Every time I was told I was wrong. That actions had to start with “would”, without variation. Saying “tries to” was god emoting. Obviously I walked the heck away. I am not going to go into mad detail over what I think of that “would would would” crap but it looks awful to me and I can’t stand it. Fortunately there are lots of approaches to RP and none of them are wrong as such. Fiction, especially cooperative fiction, is a matter of taste.
So anyway, I urge you all to look past differences of style and ignore people telling you what is the right way or the wrong way.
Why I am writing this now is that I am a little disturbed by reports of people who have created little RP hubs being forced out by bullying from players aligned with PCU. I had never up until that point even heard of the PCU. In particular a friend of a friend who has run a bar for over a year feels that they no longer can because of pressure from PCU aligned guilds. For the sake of the health of future RP I hope that these reports are misunderstandings or exaggerations. I am not in with the “in crowd”, and only have what I hear to go on. I’m not on the forums or even AA much these days and I avoid large events due to MH factors so I am way out of the loop. And I’m also not in the habit of pointing fingers or laying blame. It’s not how my head works. But prescriptive rules about how we RP will never be accepted by everyone. Bullying people who disagree will never result in a better, happier server. Let’s all try to play nicely with each other.
Pip x
P.S. To anyone who is part of the PCU can I just say that the scope of what I believe you are trying to do for RP on the server is awesome. I hope that people can overcome their differences and get along. But I also ask you try not to make the game a hostile environment for people who are doing their own thing. I hope that is OK. I really didn’t come here for a fight.
I don’t recall having a list of people to ignore and I’m an officer. I’m afraid people who say we blanket ignore large groups of players aren’t being entirely truthful to you.
Don’t OOC in /s, /e or /y
Don’t grief
Don’t ERP
Those are the rules given, beside basic human, that we enforce.
If somebody is harassing you please name them and provide screenshots so we can deal with it, thanks and have a nice time on AD!
Hey, I’m from the PCU, and I just wanted to say that a lot of the stuff you hear about us is generally wrong when it comes to bullying, we rarely go out of our way to bully anyone and usually only defend ourselves when we get provoked by people who dislike us.
The problem is that people who don’t feel they can rp around us because of feeling pressure usually feel that way because of rumours they heard or mistaking intent, PCU does not go out of their way to pressure anyone, we all just want to RP and we’re willing to RP with everyone, the only people who this doesn’t count for are people who are either so obsessed with hating us that it’s mentally toxic for us to interact or people who blatantly and openly go against our main rule. (Don’t erp)
Hope I’ve been able to clear up some things for you
Also this is plain crazy, “would” is not at all a necessary prefix to emotes and any form of attempt that could be perceived as something you can dodge are usually fine for rp battles.
Hey thanks for these replies, it is certainly reassuring.
@Rynore I didn’t mention blanket ignoring. No one has said that to me : )
@Dorlas I am not naming names on here, I am not into stirring. I have wanted to ask the mentioned friend of a friend for clarification but they havent been on in weeks. I don’t know Perroy or their officers, I wouldn’t know where to start.
I will say though, that while you can say that PCU are not doing x, you can’t speak for all of their membership all of the time. I’m not trying to be picky, I am just very very wary of absolutes. I also prefer the word “evidence” to “proof” for the same reasons : )
@Danwick thank you. I have no issue with any of the rules I have come across. I am just wary of any kind of prescriptivism. I am not into ERP, but if other people want to do that in private it’s not any of my business really.
PCU is large but only because we’re a band of a lot of guilds, every guild has their own officers that deal with their own members, so it’s not that far from just a regular guild times 23.
We’ve cracked down on people in the past and will continue to do so, sadly people who say we harass them never give names or details, it makes it very hard for us to do anything about potential trouble or even take their word for it.
Not everybody can get along sadly and I’ve been in a similar position you have been in with pathetic harassment and accusations etc. I’m sorry to hear it’s happened. Lots of people on WoW -are- vile but you will meet as many nice ones. It’s just a case of finding who you click with.
@Croecell hey, I get what you are saying but I’ve not heard rumours about how awesome PCU are. I had to go look for that myself. I hadn’t heard of them at all up until that point. The friend is someone I trust. As is their friend : )
I do take your point though. You’ll note that my OP doesn’t say that I believe it, only that that is what I have heard. I’m not here to pick a side, just to ask people to play nicely : )
I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of decent and sensible people will agree with this sentiment, and I do too - we should definitely all be getting along. It gets tiresome when certain individuals insist on creating rifts between parties over something as ultimately minor as roleplaying in the game we collectively enjoy. As for this instance in particular:
I’ll be brief in regards to this; it feels like something that’d benefit from having a little light shed without mentioning names, etc
The person in question had a gripe with my guild in particular because they seemed to expect us to inform them of whenever we would be present in this particular inn, even if we were simply partaking in some quiet, social roleplay. We disagreed with that and felt we weren’t obliged to do so, and ultimately the person in question didn’t have very nice things to say about us as a result. We chose to ignore one another when in the presence of each other, and that’s that; we’d obviously rather not result to essentially “voiding” other people as it can ultimately be quite jarring, but our interaction wasn’t exactly a pleasant one and it’s what we’d rather do
Again, it’s ultimately a shame to have happened, but all-in-all I think it’s safe to say everyone with some common decency share your sentiment Pipsquirrel, myself included - hopefully we can all get along and make RP even more mega epic
Not something I’ve witnessed in my time in AD is the case.
Hey, we all try to be friends around here. I mean, there are some bad apples around, but otherwise people are trying to be helpful. Not sure about those about “Would” thing.
First off, apologies to making all of my replies like this, I have tried to reply to individual comments but I just keep getting an error message.
@Gallvin Genuine thanks for giving me a different side to this.
@Syanidi Hi, I’m not sure what you want me to say. You genuinely haven’t Rped with people that put “would” at the start of every /e ? I’m jealous : D They make my head spin.
I didn’t come here to say that PCU are bad. I came here to share this observation about prescriptivism. I don’t think anything in my OP suggests that I think PCU are villains. Just what I have heard, which I hope I was clear about in saying that it was all I had to go on. I apologise if that wasn’t clear : )
@Gallvin I have also been at pains to avoid naming anyone. Thank you <3
@Syanidi I was thinking next time I am in SW I will take screen shots of wouldsters and share them to you but that feels mean. Plus I can barely work out how to do proper replies on here so sending a screen shot in a message is probably waaay out of my league : D
Thank you again for civil replies, and apologies again for making my replies like this. It has been years since I was on the forums and tec is not my thing.
