Staffing Weirdest Complaints You've Recieved

[Guest Archaic Cyborg]

An oldie but a goldie.

 

At the time I had a DC villain Canon role. A new person joins my rpg, we plot out a basic premise which had some red flags, but she assured me she would   remember the boundaries.... 

 

Cut to her trying to derail the thread to fuel her, uh,  fantasy. I quickly dropped the scene, then she proceeded to try and tear me & my site down because apparently I am a bad player, and a pig, for not raping her character.  There's no reaction gif that's good enough for how off the wall she was.

 

[Honorem 219]

The complaint that my fantasy board isn't actually fantasy, because "fantasy doesn't restrict creativity". Came about because we have a set list of species to select from (human, elf, dwarf, orc, etc). But I apparently should just let them create their neko/catgirl species, lore be damned. Because fantasy apparently means no restrictions or in-world lore rules.

[c.widow 123]

On 9/6/2018 at 3:06 PM, Garmr said:

Accidentally called a player by the wrong gender pronoun and got informed I'm mentally ill and nobody likes me. When I stated "I don't have time for this shit" and left the cbox watched as the other players groused about how rude I was. 

 

I am guilty of doing this a lot, I forget the sensitivity of pronouns and my brain is quick to type one out that may not be proper though it is never on purpose. I have been bashed myself for this and even drug through the mud for it, even after expressing my apologies and non-purposeful ill intentions.

[JD Hart 72]

On 11/24/2018 at 2:15 AM, Honorem said:

The complaint that my fantasy board isn't actually fantasy, because "fantasy doesn't restrict creativity". Came about because we have a set list of species to select from (human, elf, dwarf, orc, etc). But I apparently should just let them create their neko/catgirl species, lore be damned. Because fantasy apparently means no restrictions or in-world lore rules.

 

This really IS one of the weirdest complaints I've heard :S

 

I've had someone annoyed that they couldn't play a celt in our Ancient Greece forum? Does that count as weird? :S

[Robyn 54]

One member kept telling others that certain members stole their art ideas.

By itself, not that weird, but ...

1. This member had not linked any art gallery of their own on-site or our discord.

2. Hadn't posted any art onsite (or even indicated they were an artist outside the complaints)

3. Most of the 'stolen' art was on the site months before the member was.

 

Oh and one against me personally
Apparently I'm not welcoming enough to new members if I don't want to disclose if I'm single or not in our first conversation.

[Shades 676]

Oh, boy. Remembered some nice ones.

 

1- I was humiliating a member by eventually correcting his grammar. He was constantly correcting me even on things that weren't wrong, and his excuse was that English was not his first language - when it's not mine either.

 

2- I was making the same member's depression worse because I wasn't constantly available for him when his preferred partner wasn't around, because he needed to be kept entertained at all times or he would be depressed.

 

So glad I left that site, I'm a staff member, not someone's mom.

[Foxypaws 44]

I've got two that are tied.

1) New member joined the site and literally the first thing she said was 'I don't like how thin and dark your scrollbars are. Change them to be wider or I am leaving this site.' And I'm just sitting there like '...Okay?'

2) We had a member who was obsessed with the idea of having a wolf character. It wasn't a wolf roleplay. He complained, moped, and hinted at it for weeks before being coaxed into making a non wolf character. Proceeded to post with them twice in total...and any time that he came into the chat he'd just...'I sure wish this place allowed wolves. Sigh.'

I eventually flat out asked him why he didn't join a wolf RP on the side if he wanted to play one...he told me that I was insulting him. This went on for about a year or so. He was totally harmless, he'd just show up every few months to mope in the chat about how sad he was with the lack of wolves and then he'd be gone again.

And when I say mope, I mean he was a total Eeyore. Always sighing and saying things like 'well that's life I guess.'

[Libby 100]

I need to meet this bee kid... LOL


I recently had a person log on, get super hyped about our plot and lore and how new and interesting and different it was... Then tell me flat out I was doing the hunters wrong.  No explanation, just... "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" before rage quitting.

 

[Aoife 1]

A wannabe member complained that they couldn't make their own type of fae.

 

Dude.  We have over a dozen.  It's way more than a small site needs, but we're still allowing plenty of options.  Sorry, but you and your snowflake character can go elsewhere.

 

It's never been so satisfying to use the "I don't think you will be a good fit for my site" line, after spending two hours having to shoot down his ideas that would have broken the site lore.

[Jiro 10]

Backstory for Context:

 

Okay so back like 10 years ago when I first started RPing, my first RP I created was a 1816 Regency Era AU. We had a site canon-list and all that good stuff for nobility and the royal family. Guy joins the site and snatches the role of King. 

 

King was in his 40s, married with 4 children. Guy asks us if he could make the king gay. I said making him gay was okay but remember in 1800s England, being homosexual was still very taboo so he had to be discreet. He complained to my co-admin thatI was homophobic....while me and her were RPing an intense gay love affair between an earl and a physician. 

 

He also tried to make the king 20 years old and kill off the wife and kids....it was a mess.

[Gothic 307]

That I am not contactable. 

 

My computer is only off when I'm sleeping and I always respond to messages. 

 

Apparently not answering questions 24 hours a day is the worst crime an RPG admin can commit. 

[Rugs 63]

Our Discord has a bot in it that users can, if they want, play silly games with. I don't care a rip about it personally, but some members were pretty into it after we introduced it and that was cool.

 

Some of the staff, in one of the bot channels we have, had a daisy chain going to give themselves ":Discord dollarydoos" as they called them. Again, nothing particularly serious. Just a fun thing they liked to do. 

 

One member comes to complain at me one day and calls it corruption. Keep in mind, I've had the damn bot channels muted since we introduced them cause they don't have any real impact on the site and other staff were more engaged with them. So I was obviously confused about all this.  I ask the member if they had asked to be included in the daisy chain, and of course, they had not. They then tell me that we should instead be using the fake Discord bucks to encourage/reward good behavior because yknow, a stupid daily round of tagging each other is corrupt but there's no way policing behavior with electronic Monopoly money could go sideways.

 

Keep in mind, the Discord bucks can only be used to customize the profile in the bot thing or play some of the games. They served no purpose for the site proper. It was so odd.

[The Seven 32]

A member once complained that a new character that could psychically read people shouldn't have been approved as their character, an actress, could only read body language. You see the new character would be better at reading people's motivations so it shouldn't be allowed because it invalidated their character.

 

Worse still when she made this case in the chat she asked another member who played a healer how they would feel if there was someone who was a better healer than their character. The other player agreed that would be bad and shouldn't happen.

 

This was several years ago now and I still think about it.

[msfoxtrott 25]

Oh man. My co-admin ran a site a while back with a very particular member base. I can't mention putting a new link or button up on the forum without her having flashbacks.

 

She added a button on the sidebar of her original site. All it did was link to a group plot for a site-wide plot run by staff. People went NUTS and DEMANDED! their own miscellaneous group plotters get a sidebar link as well, how dare she show such blatant favoritism, she was discriminating, etc etc. So "linking to a site-wide plot is unfair" is my favorite complaint so far.

[Jaxx 317]

A while ago I adminned on a site that had some in-depth stats on what genders, ages, species, and such were around because one longterm member was a stats nerd who offered to keep things up to date. It was pretty neat to be honest, and there was no "make two male characters before one female" rules or any shit. It was just a fun extra thing that tbh half the site probably ignored. One of the parts was characters by gender - male, female, and genderqueer. 

 

We had a guest in chatbox insulting us and cursing at us and demanding we remove it because it was transphobic. They weren't going to even think about joining, but we better suit things to their tastes anyway! One admin was trans, one was nonbinary, and I identified as trans at the time (I now identify as genderfluid). One of my co-admins explained staff identities and that we understood some people didn't like gender ratio type things, but we were comfortable with it as a group of non-cis individuals and had no intention of changing it. 

 

The guest replied that what we identified as, and what we were comfortable with, didn't matter because they saw it as wrong and wanted it changed. So that was pretty weird that someone said it was wrong for trans and genderqueer individuals to be comfortable with a stats area that mentioned gender, and that we needed to change it to make them comfortable when they weren't even going to join the site. 

 

 

And one from the member side - a while ago I was playing a canon character that had a few children, and at some point someone apped one of these children. That was all well and good, but unfortunately I had to tell them I couldn't write with them because I was way too busy as it was and couldn't take on another thread. They seemed kind of sad about that but they accepted it, only to post hours later in the plotter of my other character. I said something about how "hey it's Jax who plays [other character] so I can't thread right now but in the future sure!" 

 

The new player went off and found themselves other threads and did their thing for about... oh, six weeks or so. In the meantime I'd allowed them to post a starter for me but had repeated that I wouldn't be able to reply to it until some threads wrapped, at least a month, which they said they were okay with. Then ended up posting a long message in the Discord about how they were leaving, didn't explicitly say why but made a couple of those "you know why/you know who you are" statements. I ignored it and I was pretty sure everyone else did too. 

 

Except the head admin, who DMed me an aggressive message about how [new player's name] was an example of how I was driving people away from the site. I was pretty baffled and asked what they meant. Apparently the new member told staff that I'd promised them threads only to ignore them and post to other people. I showed screenshots of how I'd told them I didn't have the time to write with them until some of my threads wrapped and bluntly told the staff that if someone had chosen to flounce off because one person wouldn't write with them immediately, I wasn't going to take any responsibility for it. The admin kept saying it was my fault and they expected me to apologise to the member for ditching, and to them for arguing with them, then banned me when I refused. 

 

So one of the weirdest complaints I've had was that I was responsible for driving someone off because I told them I was too busy to write with them until I wrapped some threads... and was an asshole because I wouldn't apologise to an ex-member who lied about me. 

Edited March 28, 2019 by Jaxx