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Bad Staff Experiences


Morrigan
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OMFSM, the sim I left before I started my current one. This tale of woe actually started a few years back on a different sim with a lot of the same crew. A friend of mine from IRC hit me up, she's all like 'I just got put in charge of this sim, and I need a good chief security officer. Would you come join, pretty please?' So, she's a good friend, and I'd been looking for a good place to write since the place I had been at the time was pretty much dead. I whip up a character, I dive in head first, and I'm having fun. The ship was pretty much dead at this point, most people LOA or just not being active, and I'm a prolific logger, I make a bajillion NPCs so that I can in involved in all the things.

 

Her XO was kinda MIA at the time I joined, but as I started logging with people, and poking people into being active, she rematerialized and we logged together once or twice. About this time, various of her friends started coming out of the woodwork to join the ship or to come back from LOA. This was also about the time that people started complaining to my friend about my character. Incessantly, without giving me any time to convincingly work on character development to change her in a way that wouldn't offend their delicate sensibilities without actually fundamentally changing my character so she wasn't herself anymore.

 

Eventually, despite the complaints constantly being lodged against me, I'm asked to become the second officer simply because I was already doing a lot of things that command staff is supposed to. I was hosting the sim's nova, I was actively engaging players to keep them interested in the game, I was throwing my characters at the plot to help move it forward, and so they figured they'd give me the title to go along with my efforts. Except these same players who were constantly complaining about me now refuse to actually respect my position on the ship, and the XO won't actually let me help with anything when our CO's supposed to be on a three month LOA because of an internship that was supposed to keep her very busy. The XO is actually giving all these helper tasks she's supposed to be handing to me to her various friends who hate me... but she's acting all friendly with me other than this, so I'm just confused at this point.

 

I finally just reach a point of no more ducks to give, and walk away from the sim. Real life had dropped some things into my lap that looked like they were going to be keeping me busy offline anyways, and I just couldn't take the stupid drama where there was apparently no way to win these people over.

 

Fast forward, my life has pretty much fallen apart. I could go into the whole mess, but let's just say that at least I had my health, a roof over my head, and a job. I couldn't say much else at that point (still working to try to improve that situation, honestly), and the XO of the old sim had started just chatting with me and catching up with me like a few months before this. When my car was totalled also happened to be when she was made CO of the ship she'd been playing on... and gee, she needed crew. I should come play! I said yes because I needed some distraction from all the stupid I was dealing with, and the toxic friends of hers that had made my life horrible on the previous ship weren't on the crew for this one (yet).

 

I jump in enthusiastically as I always do, get people writing logs that had been inactive for months, help wrap up the plot from the previous co at warp speed, and then suddenly she tells me she's already told the head of the org that I'm her XO... and I'm just like, what? I had almost literally been press ganged into being the XO of a sim. At the time I thought of her as a friend, so instead of doing the smart thing of running away because seriously, who just forces someone to be staff without asking them first, I throw myself head first into being XO. At first it was okay, everyone's writing a lot of logs, everyone's happy... and then things start falling apart.

 

She really liked to write stuff that was way ahead of what the current action was. Like, the muse would just take her, and she'd be like $_idea tickles my fancy, I'll just write it... and not consider how it would affect what's currently happening, and just release it anyways if someone else did something that didn't work with it. So as things started to settle out after the transition, I spent a lot of time writing logs that patched together the plot with her logging efforts, or talking to players to negotiate what they were going to do with their character so it wouldn't contradict the CO's pre-written logs. And it was so bad that we're talking stuff had been written, copy edited, and sitting in the writing inbox of the Nova CMS we used for like a month. I eventually negotiated her down to only writing two weeks out.

 

About this time, we get a new player on the sim. He'd been a member of the org for a long time, though he went back and forth between being active and inactive. He proceeds to start getting himself in with the command team, both in character and out. Both of us fell for it at first, but soon he starts ruffling feathers. The first time he threw a fit over a log that was having to be carefully written because it came before a pre-written log by the CO that also involved me, I just assumed it was a communication issue and we talked through it and everyone thought it was resolved. Then he threw another fit over the same sort of thing... basically I was having to tread carefully with my character because I'd been pulled into pre-logging with the CO, and he was blaming me for it. He started to have other issues, and eventually started targeting me as the problem he wanted to see removed from the sim.

 

About the time he got serious about wanting to see me removed, the CO started having challenges with her real life. In a normal RP, the lower level staff (ie me, the XO) would have stepped up and taken care of things while the CO got their real life ducks in a row. The moment I tried to do that? She bit my head off, taking it as a personal offense when I asked crew to bring out of character issues to me first, even though she'd still be available for log writing. Never mind that technically they were supposed to bring everything to me first anyways, and all I really was asking was for them to do what they were supposed to be doing anyways.

 

By this point, problem player was getting disruptive enough that even players were starting to notice there was a problem, and I wanted to remove him from the sim. She wouldn't do it, wanting to let him hang himself. He'd more than hung himself multiple times over at that point. I threatened to quit if we didn't take care of him, and she said pretty words and didn't do anything in the end. Eventually he leaves with a burn the bridge behind you letter to the whole crew, and I was so stressed over this game at this point that I couldn't even bring myself to read the letter. He did get banned from the org at that point, but it's just such a blow to the mood of the crew, on top of the flighty availability of the CO and the fact that I was on a choke chain where I couldn't actually do anything without checking with her first.

 

I probably should have left then, and considering how activity never fully recovered from that fiasco, I probably wouldn't have been missed. Instead I let it drag on a few more months, met a few great people who are now on my new crew (and one of which I'm dating), and things just went absolutely sour. Activity continued to get worse and worse, my XO character was left out of plot elements and logs she should have been involved in... and all of her pets who made my life miserable on the previous ship? They joined up after the blow out with the problem player and proceeded to drive me crazy again.

 

The final nail in the lid for me, the thing that finally made me realize I just had no more patience for the games, the drama, and the bs... was when she wouldn't let me bring in a pet project subplot in the form of a developmental fighter wing that I really wanted. It should have been when I'd ask her to do a simple administrative thing that I couldn't do from my phone while I was at work, that would take her half a minute to do but would require her to stop writing her days of our lives logs for that time. It should have been when my XO character was being left out of logs she should have been included it. It should have been when we went months without our every other week sim report when I realized I was the only one writing it, so I just stopped writing it. But no, I forgave all those things and got upset when she shut down my idea, wouldn't actually talk to me about why she shut it down, and I was just supposed to take it.

 

I wasn't the XO, I was the gorram yeoman. So I left.

Edited by Death Kitten
typos
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i haven't really had many bad staff experiences, even in ten and a half or so years of roleplaying.  one was where a co admin was making characters but not being active with characters she already had and then getting mad when one of us other admins talked to her about it.  it wasn't like some of the ones already mentioned here but it sucked.

 

the second one is more recent and i don't even know why it happened.  a co admin just abandoned the site and blocked both me and the other co admin on aim or changed her aim.  anyway when the other co admin asked a member that was admining with mia co admin on another site she was pretty sure she was lied to about why all this stuff happened.  and then we're pretty sure the member blocked us on aim as well.  the thing that bugs me is that as far as i could tell everything was fine a week ago and then suddenly it's not and we have no idea why.

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  • 4 weeks later...

While I can't think of staff currently I do remember times before on other sites where staff would clearly show favoritism to other staff in many instances where players were not allowed to do things.  There is nothing that sours me quicker than being unable to complete whatever I had in mind because it is against the rules for me but allowed for others.

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We had four admins at one point, three of which were utterly useless. First one was your classic 'find shiny new fandom, newbies from said fandom are suddenly their new favorites, only to dump them when they find another new shiny', and when things didn't go her way she'd throw a temper tantrum on the members. Second one was barely around, but he was a manipulative piece of garbage that turned people against each other behind the scenes. Third one, a wishywashy fool wanting to please everyone to the point she ignored the bad behavior of various trolls (or maybe that was just her all 'but muh rarepair' in regards to the one idiot).

 

Thankfully, they've been booted from the site in various fashions; the only remaining admin was the one who did all the work anyway.

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To date, my only real true and honest bad Staff experience was on a site I was personally invited to by one of the admins. We were threading a lot on another site, they liked my style, and asked me to join their site. All was good for a while.

I had a character that someone wanted desperately to ship, and ship hard with, and I turned them down, said I wasn't there for that. That someone turned out to be another admin on the site. They went out of their way to bash the character for making IC choices based on IC stuff, and when I asked them to stop, they stopped talking to me entirely. I got with the -third- admin, about what it was I should do to handle the situation.

 

Third Admin assured me they would take care of it, that everything was fine. Please carry on. Awesome. I go to bed, excited to get back to plotting the next day.

 

Log in to find a message in my inbox from the Admin who invited me to the site. (not the one who started drama, and not the one who promised to fix the drama)

 

They had taken the liberty to tell me how absolutely disappointed in me they were, that I had owed them a post for a week now, and the fact that I would rather engage with others in the c-box than post, offended them to the deepest degree. If I had time to chat in the c-box, I had time to write their post. Despite the fact that up until that message, they were understanding of my not posting (work, life, family deaths)

 

I had never left a site on a bad note before, until that day.

 

I'm still pretty bothered by it. I won't advertise there, or affiliate, despite similarly run boards.

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I once had a bad Admin experience where someone who was a friend of the admin started to badmouth me towards them. Saying I was stealing their ideas and more, eventually they believed it would be best to ban me. After that I kindly requested them to take down my app as I did not want that on the site. I was fine with my posts being kept etc, just not my characters. However that was a pain in the ass to arrange because they believed the characters to be theirs and they might need to NPC them. Since there was no thread on going where it would be needed I was not very pleased, not that I could do much about it but it left a bad taste in my mouth. 

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Luckily, I have only had two major bad experiences with staff, but they were absolutely terrible and have made it supremely difficult for me to trust new staff. I'm working on this, but it is hard.

 

The first was when I discovered GOT AUs and joined a forum. I ended up making fast friends with a gentleman (We'll call him Joe) and wooed his character over via writing. I thought he was really nice and had a great writing style, but failed to notice that he was a little more interested in me than he should have been. So, I was there a couple months and, being me, offered advice to the forum owner. I've been running forums for roughly fifteen years and I try to be helpful to first time forum owners. I ended up being promoted to admin and I vouched for Joe to also be a staffer. 

 

A few weeks go by and another player joins that would best fit my plots for my character. My best friend and her boyfriend also join said site, so I discuss with Joe that I am going to be changing my characters direction a little. He effectively melted down, calling me everything but my name. He told me that I was a liar and worthless. He expressed that he hoped I would die and that if he had friends in America, he would send them to shoot me. He was severely verbally abusive, even denying my friends characters just because they knew me. Another random person had their character denied as well simply because they made their character from the same house as mine. So I see nothing wrong with telling my best friend about this. She's my bestie, my sister from another mister. She, in turn, approaches the owner of the site with me about Joe. Joe is then demoted and his character denials retracted. However, the site owner then starts berating me for telling my best friend about the situation, saying that it will damage the respectability of the forum, and that I was too thin skinned. He basically told me that it was okay that Joe verbally abused me, called me worthless, and degraded my friends because they were my friends. 

 

Unsurprisingly, I left with my friends and the poor random person who got caught in the crossfire. I built my own GOT AU and kept an eye out for Joe's IP. 

 

Fast forward about three months; another friend of mine and her bestie join Fire & Blood. Her friend, I'll call her Jane, apparently staffed and owned on a few sites over the years and was decent with code. Trusting my friend, I made Jane staff. Things were good for a few months before I realized that Jane was using Player knowledge to try an collect all the Dragon eggs on the forum for her Targaryen. She was also being extremely rude to new members and not keeping up with her eight characters. So, I confront her about it and she left the site. Our mutual friend starts spreading rumors about my Best Friend and I, telling people we were plotting to kill their characters, that we were terrible admin and didn't share any ideas with Jane, and attempting to get them to join Jane's site. There was a huge falling out where passive aggressive 'I'm Leaving' threads were made and insults were slung at my Bestie and I. In the end, we had to ban both of them and lost a friend of twelve years. It was just so disheartening that we shut down F&B for a few months. 

 

Fortunately, we have it back going, and I have come to see that for every bad Admin, there are a dozen awesome ones. :)

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Some of these stories sound so familiar. I've had the pleasure (heavy sarcasm) of the behind the scenes manipulator who took it upon herself to send messages to every new member about how horrible I was and that I had 'report cards' on every member of the site listing their many unforgivable transgressions. Imagine my shock at learning of this! I've had the fun of members literally stealing the game, up to and including the name of the game, and missing only my own original characters. I've had the admins who would manage to post for a week or two only to disappear for months at a stretch with the sob story for why they could not be online. The funny thing was, very often they'd be posting ads for other games, while claiming they could not be online to post in mine. They would screech in pain when called out on this and argue that it was somehow all my fault.

 

And in the end, maybe it was me who was the bad admin, as I finally closed the game down amid the last and final blow-up (again, the issue of report cards that existed only ever in the mind of the master manipulator and the fact that everyone was 'scared of me'). Well good, game over then. The whole debacle left a very bad impression on me.

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  • 1 month later...

I guess this is a bad experience AS a staff member, and not with staff... tho it is a little bit. Heh.

 

There is nothing quite like spending time with a newbie, helping them with their application, only for them to have a melt down because you request that they do a spelling and grammar check on their application. My site focuses on quality, not quantity, it's in our rules. Had she come to me with something along the lines of 'English isn't my first language' or something, we'd be more lenient. No, the response I got was her losing her mind in our C-Box, saying she 'should have known better' and that she was terrible at writing and she would just leave instead of literally just spell checking the application.

 

Seriously, it was stuff a regular browser would have picked up.

 

So she left, we didn't ask her to. She left on her own. Archive the app, clear out the account, all is good.

 

Not.

 

She turned around and joined another site that I was a member on, and whined to them in their c-box that she was denied from a site just now, because of her spelling and grammar. They of course comforted her and reassured her that they weren't mean like that. I did not know i had the self control that I did, until that very moment, that I just closed the tab and walked away. I couldn't believe that. Seriously? Kid, you had a meltdown and threw a tantrum because we asked for a spellcheck and left on your own. We never told you to leave, we never told you you couldn't come back. We tried to help. Now you have other sites thinking that we're elitist monsters. Wow. Thanks.

 

She then had the gall to come back onto our site, in our c-box, and say she'd like another go at the app. Sorry no. I didn't call her out on the other site, but I called her out then and there. Go somewhere that they'll tolerate that kind of crap. I won't have it on my site. It's childish, and to be honest, my member base is all older, 25~, none of us want to deal with that kind of attitude.

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  • 2 months later...

I think I shall revive this dead horse.

 

New member is... god, there isn't a way to put this that doesn't make me sound like a dick, but annoying. So annoying. Omg.

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  • Admin

That's the point of this forum @Anonymous! What do you mean? That Staff treats them like gods and are dicks to older members are treated poorly or that staff treat new members like shit.

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  • Admin

I like your post @SithLordOfSnark not because I like the situation but I appreciate the admission. What a douche.

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  • 3 years later...

The smallest thing that happened ages ago that I'm still salty about.

 

Admin of awesome site has other moderators drop. I don't remember why. Some were jerks. There was drama. It was a lot.

I get asked to be an admin. I accept. Another person does. Third person joins team.

Four Musketeers. Let's do this shit.

Get to the back end of the site.

Major secret adminy plots aren't finished.

At all.

Huge chunks of lore are actually missing.

This is a giant site.

With lots of lore built in already.

Turns out everything we knew was a lie.

But we had to work with it.

Somehow.

So we piece together shit.

But we're not the main admin so we have to run everything by her first.

She stops working.

She's 'overstressed.'

Acceptable. We continue on. Give her space. Keep advertising (a ridiculously hard schedule on top of other high admin duties. There was so much dude. Several dozen members, at least a hundred chars. Four of us. Three active. Unfinished Lore. Lore we were supposed to use to award gifts and rewards to players. Acceptance duties. Welcoming duties. Cbox duties. Discord Duties. 25 advert duties A WEEK. Updating a tarot/reward system with three three-page entries a week. Build shop from scratch. Not like IC shop. Like... Gaia rewards shop. With player currency. update directories (which was every month but still). Doesn't sound like a lot.

Is a lot when you're down the head admin and half half a board built with at least 50 highly active members with 5 chars each at least.

Who is still pushing us to do all the work. Apologies profusely.

Changes nothing.

Another admin gets burn-out. Duties for four split between two.

On top of building a site. No feed back. Have to do this lore stuff. Put up a deadline. A month out.

Remind of the deadline.

Thrice.

Deadline passes. No comments. One more push. No reply. Pass lore with a quorum vote. Post Lore.

Head Admin freaks because they didn't weigh in.

Behold the time-line.

No response.

I get burn out. Stop advertising. Continue to work on lore on the side. Work with other admin duties. Continue giant admin plot. Tons of mini plots.

Essentially running three DnD games on top of Play by Post plots. I have at least 50 open threads otherwise...

My people need me!!!

Get harassed by head admin.

You're not doing all your admin duties.

Say fuck it.

Inform other admins. Close plots.

Dip.

Second admin dip.

Head admin?

Dips.

 

*throws hands up in defeat*

 

I stopped playing for two years. Woof.

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  • 2 months later...

One time while the whole staff was asleep/AFK, we had a user come in and post 5 whole pages of furry sex gore. We had to explain to that user that "roleplay" wasn't just about sex and it was a very big trainwreck.

 

Another time, we decided to move the placement of one forum. We then had one of the staff come into the chat and start swearing and flooding at the admin and having an emotional breakdown because of this.

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So I was also staff on this site, but my god.

 

Once upon a long time ago when I was a less salty little codefish, I had a friend that started running a self-hosted site back in the daaayyye and had no idea what they were doing. This was a resource site so it was going to be A Thing, and I was already running my own server by then so they asked me to help and I said sure why not. So I get onto staff and they've got this bunch of other staff members and they've all got their things they do, so I took over the affiliates management with occasionally helping the head admin when he broke something. IIRC it was IPS like 2 or 3, so it was... a thing.

 

One day, some other staff member gets their britches in a bundle and starts screeching all over the staff chat about how "those ignorant little fuckers" are getting "removed and banned," and I'm like what? Cause I recognised the name drop and it was one of our affiliates. Said staff member explains the site was using a word very similar to an infamous racial slur that starts with N flippantly and nonchalantly in their public chat, and I was like Oh okay that is a problem, I'll investigate, like I always do because I don't trust other people, I have to see shit for myself before I make a call.

 

So I go over there and start scrolling around the cbox and I don't see this word. Except there is one in there that's similar, so I ask staff member, "Did you mean x?" and she was like "Yes." And I said, much politer but I can't remember the exact wording, "Well you're a fockin' idiot then because that's Tagalog. It has nothing to do with the English N word."

 

She lost her s h i t.

 

I was just sitting back and watching this gigantic tirade about how racist and terrible and ridiculous the blatant casual usage of that word was and how stupid foreign people are and how offensive it was and on and on and on and LAUGHING because oh my god you have no idea how racist and intolerant you're literally being right now. I refused to delete their affiliate button. She went around behind me and deleted it when I wasn't on. I put it back. She deleted it again.

 

Finally, I said, "I'm sorry my friend, but at this point, it's either me or her." Headmin chose her. I quit. They couldn't keep members very long, and then headmin finally broke something and didn't have anyone to help fix it. I laughed. A lot. If you don't know what you're on about, just sit down and have a cup of tea mang.

 

cccc:

(Fun aside: Tagalog is the national language of the Philippines. I am Filipino. ccccc: )

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