I want to preface this by saying, I don't like giving crit and I hardly ever do. I don't take roleplay that seriously and it doesn't really matter to me what happens in the end while playing internet barbies, so to speak, as long as the overall result is fun and a good time. You can throw my character out the window and I'm all for it because I just really don't care. But the way things have been handled OOCly really came to light for me these past few days and it's not something I can just keep quiet on. This extends beyond roleplay nonsense into just being treated like shit OOCly because my character is ICly an asshole. That's unfair.
So, in the end, this is mostly for Anna. I think Eski did a fantastic job for someone who was a) ridiculously busy with rl obligations during the duration of her modship and b) a first time moderator. Eski was always willing to put the players and their enjoyment first and it showed in the way she handled trials and fielding questions on plurk and just general interaction with the playerbase. Eski deserves thanks all around and I'm very grateful for what Eski has done as a mod.
Now, for Anna. I understand that modding can be a hard job, I have done it for many years in the past and I know how stressful it can be. I also understand balancing the story you want to tell with the story the players are creating and finding a middle ground there and also feeling an affection for your own creations that you don't want to give up or find diminished. These are things I sympathize with and you've already received other more thought out comments about game mechanics, the NPC presence, and the way the story was told. So, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to focus on the biggest point of contention in my experience and how you used that to derail the entire end of the game -- that is Rhys and Miata and how your overattachment to Miata as an NPC became a driving force in ruining my characterization and ruining endgame for Rhys and his CR.
Since the beginning of the game there were a lot of ways you interacted with me OOCly that you let leak into IC interactions that very much skewed the way my character was perceived. At first it was light jokes (the “weenie” joke in particular) which I was fine with because seriously, who cares? But over the course of the game, it spiraled into something that was really inappropriate and I think was a contributing factor to how messy endgame got considering how involved Rhys was in the plot.
When you first contacted me about letting Rhys become a mole, I explained that Rhys would help if he thought it was in his best interest and that he wouldn't turn on Miata if he thought she was the good guy. I also explained to you both OOCly and in my application that Rhys #1 trigger is dying, that his main goal is self-preservation. This is a trait I thought would make him especially interesting to play in a murdergame which is a big part of why I apped him. Yet, your reaction when I said that was instant wariness that he would go against Miata. I really didn't think it was a big deal at the time but as the game played out, I thought about it a lot and honestly, that was a really big red flag.
As the game progressed and the development between Miata and Rhys continued, your behavior in the PPs between the moles and how you played Miata jerked back and forth in ways that seemed to sway with your opinion of Rhys and myself. It was very hard not to perceive this as OOC bleed when there would be times Rhys would say something in a tag, I would make a joke in a plurk, and suddenly Miata's reaction to Rhys' tag was… as if she were reacting to my joke and not the actual words I wrote in the tag. This happened constantly.
Now, I know there have been criticisms about how the metaplot became entirely NPC focused. I agree with those criticisms and the type of character that Rhys is, there was no way he couldn't see the metaplot as just something that had nothing to do with him in turn. At this development, the odd jokes and weird reactions towards Rhys ICly and me OOCly just increased. For instance, Miata's entire reaction to Rhys dragging Break to the moles was… weird? She was very antagonistic towards Rhys suddenly when Rhys outright explained to her what was going on in Week Three. Miata told Rhys to come to her if anything bad happened and he did. Then when Gilbert dies and Rhys comes to Miata, she was incredibly antagonistic towards him -- even going so far as talking to Lithuania in Lithuanian about killing Rhys while he was in the room! This was… baffling to me? I wasn't sure when Miata's opinion had soured on Rhys so quickly when there was little to no build up to this? Suddenly, everything was Rhys' fault out of nowhere and that's when OOCly, I began to feel very uncomfortable.
Now, I understand that this feedback is based more on the personal than the actual roleplay and I can't help it because of how strong the OOC bleed came from Miata (and by extension, Lithuania, but this isn't about Mel). Ever since then, things just seemed to go entirely two directions. There was how I was playing my character, reacting to what was ICly said and ICly given and then there was whatever you felt my character was actually doing and running on those assumptions, despite not even being canon familiar. Miata constantly calling Rhys an asshole while all he was trying to do was help her was pretty strange after what I thought was fairly positive development between the two and then when he reacted ICly at being called that, you OOCly shrinking away and avoiding confrontation and dropping the threads. It left me feeling very jerked around and actually kind of guilty! “Am I not explaining Rhys' motivations right? Is my tag too obscure? Did I misread her tag? Should I explain this OOCly with canon examples, since she isn't canon familiar?” It was, again, uncomfortable.
Then there was the thread where Miata revealed the in game plot to Rhys. This is what I know from IC interactions: Miata told the moles at the very beginning of the game that she needed them to do recon and help her break the game. Rhys was all about that! He doesn't want to die! Then she tells him, nine weeks or so later, that she knew why they were dying the whole time and the reason has nothing to do with him. She also says this after saying she's going to quit as Overseer after ICly having a crying fit over a character that was barely even connected to any of them as far as Rhys could tell -- since Miata still hadn't explained anything ICly. In the thread, Rhys has the equivalent of a panic attack at this discovery. Miata is very cruel in response. Here's where it gets weird.
You PP'd me during this thread to tell me you were stressed out over PvP. You also asked me to tell you how to write Miata so Rhys could respond positively to the metaplot. This was inappropriate. I tried to be nice during the PP but even after explaining how OOC it would for Rhys to be sympathetic to this type of plot, you OOCly guilt tripped me about it and continued to insist that the outcome of the thread was positive. I offered at least four times to just kill Rhys if he was that troublesome for the plot but each time you turned me down and again tried to figure out a way to make Miata sympathetic for Rhys, despite me still telling you that wasn't going to happen because it was OOC. I don't understand why I had to butcher the characterization of my character while you weren't able to use your mod powers and your NPC to kill my character. Why couldn't Miata kill him? Why couldn't Leviathan kill him? Everyone knew if he left, he was going to go to Katerina and yet you refused to bend your NPC even a little to stop that while begging me OOCly to change Rhys' mind. Luckily, I was able to find a solution in the fact that the hostages were still in the game but it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences in all of my years of roleplaying.
This is where the fact that you weren't paying attention to the game at all if it didn't have anything to do with Miata and her positive CR became a huge factor. Rhys was not happy with this metaplot. He also did not think it was fair that he was one of the only ones in the entire game who knew this metaplot, especially since quite a number of characters still thought they were dying for reasons that weren't what Rhys perceived as “petty revenge”. He knew Miata was still trying to fix it, to send them home, but he didn't want Miata to be perceived as a hero for it because he considered her just as culpable as Katerina. This is how his opinion developed through IC development and fueled action he took ICly (going around with the recording of Miata and Katerina's conversation to talk to other characters privately and try his best to drop hints about the metaplot, quite vocally opposing Miata in public and private, etc). This is a perfectly fine IC reaction to IC occurrences.
But you turned it into an OOC thing, Anna. Becoming increasingly passive aggressive at me in PPs, dropping threads with Rhys left and right, suddenly coming to me because Rhys “needs” to be killed off when it was obviously not a RNG death and didn't make much sense since ICly, he was one of the few characters aside from Break who knew the entire metaplot and had a connection with ghosts. It would have made sense for him to survive if your plan for the last week was to have the characters investigate the town. At this point, it was pretty clear you just wanted to get rid of me? I was fine with dying but it was a surprise and combined with everything else, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Why didn't you just kill Rhys during that argument beforehand? Was it because Miata would be the one to do it? She had ICly threatened to kill him a few times before that and now, she couldn't? The back and forth of Miata's opinion on Rhys with little to no explanation or logic to it just really threw me for a loop.
Then the fact that you completely stopped the investigation for the survivors when Rhys and Break decided to give the ghosts an IC summary of all the knowledge they knew when this had nothing to do with the living, that was baffling. So what if the ghosts knew the metaplot? It was about the survivors now. They were the ones who had to discover the mysteries and save the game. It was in their hands. Why did you completely halt the plot just because Rhys and Break told the ghosts… why they were dying, basically? That wasn't fair to the players of the ghosts and that wasn't fair to the players of the survivors.
And now we get to the plot lockout. There was nothing about this that made sense. Rhys had never once breathed a word about killing Miata, only disliking her. Those aren't the same thing. I have explained to you many times that Rhys isn't really capable of murder. If you had been paying attention to the game, you would have noticed he talked to quite a few characters about doing his best to save their hostages and bring them back from the dead. He didn't care about Miata and Katerina's revenge plot at that point, he only cared about helping everyone survive because Rhys is a good guy. You fundamentally misunderstood core factors of my character because you didn't like how they fit into your plot. You aren't canon familiar with my character yet assumed how I was playing Rhys and went ahead with your assumptions instead of ever stopping to ask me what was going on. You locked out me and my CR from participating in the end of the game because of how badly you misinterpreted my character despite my many explanations to the contrary and IC threads outright contradicting these assumptions. That wasn't fair to me, that wasn't fair to the players of Rhys' CR and that was just a dick move all around.
This was my first experience in a murdergame and while I really liked the players I met and the CR I made, the fact that all of my attempts at getting involved in the plot were faced with such weird responses OOCly and then thrown out the window for a version of my character that was completely OOC and going against everything I had threaded to that point -- it really soured the whole experience for me. I didn't do anything wrong. I played my character ICly to the best of my ability and did my best to help the plot along and be active. I was up for Rhys being killed and I didn't even care if he was a survivor or not -- but the fact that so much of the endgame was derailed just because Rhys ICly did not like Miata, that wasn't fair to any of the players in this game.
I know I haven't talked about game mechanics or trials or anything else but I think everyone else has covered a lot of what needed to be said for that. Instead, I want to explain my side of this whole debacle and how I'm really honestly very sorry to everyone if anything I did OOCly or Rhys did ICly contributed to the implosion of the endgame. That wasn't my intention and as you all can see now, it wasn't anything I even tried to encourage.
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So, in the end, this is mostly for Anna. I think Eski did a fantastic job for someone who was a) ridiculously busy with rl obligations during the duration of her modship and b) a first time moderator. Eski was always willing to put the players and their enjoyment first and it showed in the way she handled trials and fielding questions on plurk and just general interaction with the playerbase. Eski deserves thanks all around and I'm very grateful for what Eski has done as a mod.
Now, for Anna. I understand that modding can be a hard job, I have done it for many years in the past and I know how stressful it can be. I also understand balancing the story you want to tell with the story the players are creating and finding a middle ground there and also feeling an affection for your own creations that you don't want to give up or find diminished. These are things I sympathize with and you've already received other more thought out comments about game mechanics, the NPC presence, and the way the story was told. So, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to focus on the biggest point of contention in my experience and how you used that to derail the entire end of the game -- that is Rhys and Miata and how your overattachment to Miata as an NPC became a driving force in ruining my characterization and ruining endgame for Rhys and his CR.
Since the beginning of the game there were a lot of ways you interacted with me OOCly that you let leak into IC interactions that very much skewed the way my character was perceived. At first it was light jokes (the “weenie” joke in particular) which I was fine with because seriously, who cares? But over the course of the game, it spiraled into something that was really inappropriate and I think was a contributing factor to how messy endgame got considering how involved Rhys was in the plot.
When you first contacted me about letting Rhys become a mole, I explained that Rhys would help if he thought it was in his best interest and that he wouldn't turn on Miata if he thought she was the good guy. I also explained to you both OOCly and in my application that Rhys #1 trigger is dying, that his main goal is self-preservation. This is a trait I thought would make him especially interesting to play in a murdergame which is a big part of why I apped him. Yet, your reaction when I said that was instant wariness that he would go against Miata. I really didn't think it was a big deal at the time but as the game played out, I thought about it a lot and honestly, that was a really big red flag.
As the game progressed and the development between Miata and Rhys continued, your behavior in the PPs between the moles and how you played Miata jerked back and forth in ways that seemed to sway with your opinion of Rhys and myself. It was very hard not to perceive this as OOC bleed when there would be times Rhys would say something in a tag, I would make a joke in a plurk, and suddenly Miata's reaction to Rhys' tag was… as if she were reacting to my joke and not the actual words I wrote in the tag. This happened constantly.
Now, I know there have been criticisms about how the metaplot became entirely NPC focused. I agree with those criticisms and the type of character that Rhys is, there was no way he couldn't see the metaplot as just something that had nothing to do with him in turn. At this development, the odd jokes and weird reactions towards Rhys ICly and me OOCly just increased. For instance, Miata's entire reaction to Rhys dragging Break to the moles was… weird? She was very antagonistic towards Rhys suddenly when Rhys outright explained to her what was going on in Week Three. Miata told Rhys to come to her if anything bad happened and he did. Then when Gilbert dies and Rhys comes to Miata, she was incredibly antagonistic towards him -- even going so far as talking to Lithuania in Lithuanian about killing Rhys while he was in the room! This was… baffling to me? I wasn't sure when Miata's opinion had soured on Rhys so quickly when there was little to no build up to this? Suddenly, everything was Rhys' fault out of nowhere and that's when OOCly, I began to feel very uncomfortable.
Now, I understand that this feedback is based more on the personal than the actual roleplay and I can't help it because of how strong the OOC bleed came from Miata (and by extension, Lithuania, but this isn't about Mel). Ever since then, things just seemed to go entirely two directions. There was how I was playing my character, reacting to what was ICly said and ICly given and then there was whatever you felt my character was actually doing and running on those assumptions, despite not even being canon familiar. Miata constantly calling Rhys an asshole while all he was trying to do was help her was pretty strange after what I thought was fairly positive development between the two and then when he reacted ICly at being called that, you OOCly shrinking away and avoiding confrontation and dropping the threads. It left me feeling very jerked around and actually kind of guilty! “Am I not explaining Rhys' motivations right? Is my tag too obscure? Did I misread her tag? Should I explain this OOCly with canon examples, since she isn't canon familiar?” It was, again, uncomfortable.
Then there was the thread where Miata revealed the in game plot to Rhys. This is what I know from IC interactions: Miata told the moles at the very beginning of the game that she needed them to do recon and help her break the game. Rhys was all about that! He doesn't want to die! Then she tells him, nine weeks or so later, that she knew why they were dying the whole time and the reason has nothing to do with him. She also says this after saying she's going to quit as Overseer after ICly having a crying fit over a character that was barely even connected to any of them as far as Rhys could tell -- since Miata still hadn't explained anything ICly. In the thread, Rhys has the equivalent of a panic attack at this discovery. Miata is very cruel in response. Here's where it gets weird.
You PP'd me during this thread to tell me you were stressed out over PvP. You also asked me to tell you how to write Miata so Rhys could respond positively to the metaplot. This was inappropriate. I tried to be nice during the PP but even after explaining how OOC it would for Rhys to be sympathetic to this type of plot, you OOCly guilt tripped me about it and continued to insist that the outcome of the thread was positive. I offered at least four times to just kill Rhys if he was that troublesome for the plot but each time you turned me down and again tried to figure out a way to make Miata sympathetic for Rhys, despite me still telling you that wasn't going to happen because it was OOC. I don't understand why I had to butcher the characterization of my character while you weren't able to use your mod powers and your NPC to kill my character. Why couldn't Miata kill him? Why couldn't Leviathan kill him? Everyone knew if he left, he was going to go to Katerina and yet you refused to bend your NPC even a little to stop that while begging me OOCly to change Rhys' mind. Luckily, I was able to find a solution in the fact that the hostages were still in the game but it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences in all of my years of roleplaying.
This is where the fact that you weren't paying attention to the game at all if it didn't have anything to do with Miata and her positive CR became a huge factor. Rhys was not happy with this metaplot. He also did not think it was fair that he was one of the only ones in the entire game who knew this metaplot, especially since quite a number of characters still thought they were dying for reasons that weren't what Rhys perceived as “petty revenge”. He knew Miata was still trying to fix it, to send them home, but he didn't want Miata to be perceived as a hero for it because he considered her just as culpable as Katerina. This is how his opinion developed through IC development and fueled action he took ICly (going around with the recording of Miata and Katerina's conversation to talk to other characters privately and try his best to drop hints about the metaplot, quite vocally opposing Miata in public and private, etc). This is a perfectly fine IC reaction to IC occurrences.
But you turned it into an OOC thing, Anna. Becoming increasingly passive aggressive at me in PPs, dropping threads with Rhys left and right, suddenly coming to me because Rhys “needs” to be killed off when it was obviously not a RNG death and didn't make much sense since ICly, he was one of the few characters aside from Break who knew the entire metaplot and had a connection with ghosts. It would have made sense for him to survive if your plan for the last week was to have the characters investigate the town. At this point, it was pretty clear you just wanted to get rid of me? I was fine with dying but it was a surprise and combined with everything else, it left a bad taste in my mouth. Why didn't you just kill Rhys during that argument beforehand? Was it because Miata would be the one to do it? She had ICly threatened to kill him a few times before that and now, she couldn't? The back and forth of Miata's opinion on Rhys with little to no explanation or logic to it just really threw me for a loop.
Then the fact that you completely stopped the investigation for the survivors when Rhys and Break decided to give the ghosts an IC summary of all the knowledge they knew when this had nothing to do with the living, that was baffling. So what if the ghosts knew the metaplot? It was about the survivors now. They were the ones who had to discover the mysteries and save the game. It was in their hands. Why did you completely halt the plot just because Rhys and Break told the ghosts… why they were dying, basically? That wasn't fair to the players of the ghosts and that wasn't fair to the players of the survivors.
And now we get to the plot lockout. There was nothing about this that made sense. Rhys had never once breathed a word about killing Miata, only disliking her. Those aren't the same thing. I have explained to you many times that Rhys isn't really capable of murder. If you had been paying attention to the game, you would have noticed he talked to quite a few characters about doing his best to save their hostages and bring them back from the dead. He didn't care about Miata and Katerina's revenge plot at that point, he only cared about helping everyone survive because Rhys is a good guy. You fundamentally misunderstood core factors of my character because you didn't like how they fit into your plot. You aren't canon familiar with my character yet assumed how I was playing Rhys and went ahead with your assumptions instead of ever stopping to ask me what was going on. You locked out me and my CR from participating in the end of the game because of how badly you misinterpreted my character despite my many explanations to the contrary and IC threads outright contradicting these assumptions. That wasn't fair to me, that wasn't fair to the players of Rhys' CR and that was just a dick move all around.
This was my first experience in a murdergame and while I really liked the players I met and the CR I made, the fact that all of my attempts at getting involved in the plot were faced with such weird responses OOCly and then thrown out the window for a version of my character that was completely OOC and going against everything I had threaded to that point -- it really soured the whole experience for me. I didn't do anything wrong. I played my character ICly to the best of my ability and did my best to help the plot along and be active. I was up for Rhys being killed and I didn't even care if he was a survivor or not -- but the fact that so much of the endgame was derailed just because Rhys ICly did not like Miata, that wasn't fair to any of the players in this game.
I know I haven't talked about game mechanics or trials or anything else but I think everyone else has covered a lot of what needed to be said for that. Instead, I want to explain my side of this whole debacle and how I'm really honestly very sorry to everyone if anything I did OOCly or Rhys did ICly contributed to the implosion of the endgame. That wasn't my intention and as you all can see now, it wasn't anything I even tried to encourage.