Med inspired me to reply. So I will. Firstly, thanks for writing this! It was an interesting read.
For the sake of remaining objective to the point, I feel some things need to be stressed. Generally speaking when making an analysis, it's required that adequate information and arguments to support a point are presented. For the sake of perspective, I'm going to toss up the idea that you're only exposed to a small quantity of players, roleplay very limited times, not even in prime time, don't participate in events, or generally keep your scope limited to what you're comfortable with. That's totally okay, after all, players aren't required to engage with anyone more than they want to or can. But it presents a bit of an issue in terms of making sure the information is accurate and engaging. I've gotten into personal essays/rants in the past but I've always felt it was always just affirmation or speaking to the choir. A whole bunch of people who share this opinion will flock to your banner, cognitive bias if you want. They want to believe everything here is true to avoid taking any responsibility for the issues they may have been part of or caused. Note all of this doesn't mean your points are invalid (if I'd claim that, I'd fall into the ad-hoc strawman anyway). Before stepping into further reply however, I wanted to establish a perspective or relativity to opposing opinions/supporting opinions etc.
On the case of your optimism. Totally. But. I hope you're not offended if I say you let yourself get walked all over by anyone and their grandmother. Often when it comes to being exposed to negative behavior from others, it's important to put boundaries on what is okay and what isn't. The only way people can improve themselves is if they specifically know what they are specifically doing wrong. In the case of being so "Optimistic/Permitting", you're assisting in setting a standard as well. If a situation technically makes you uncomfortable but you just reply to it with "sure x3" to avoid making the other person sad or causing conflict, they are just going to do that same thing with others as well when those boundaries aren't set. To make a more practical example, I'm not going to point fingers, but I'm sure you remember a person who discussed killing your character with theirs. This subject was then levied from you, to your friends. Then from your friends to the Lore staff. Then from the Lore staff to me. Then eventually about a week later, I talked to the person who made you feel presumably uncomfortable about talking to everyone and their grandmother about how you and they were going to kill your characters together. On a different Teamspeak. When you back paddle and see the roller coaster that took, the piece of information passed trough at least 3 or 4 circuits of people/groups of people who didn't want to/didn't have the courage to be confrontational with the individual and thus just relayed responsibility over to others. I, a person who was completely unrelated to the matter, in a communication circuit unrelated to MassiveCraft almost, had to confront this person to try and correct their behavior, by telling them it's not okay to start parading around someone else's character death. This obviously probably made the person feel sad and made me look like a mean and down putting person because I criticized them. Now I'm the bogeyman, this person probably carries the belief that the "rumors" about me are true, all because along that entire line of people nobody could just say "Dude, stop it please, I don't want my/her character to die".
Your post was wonderfully written, and true in so many ways. It's just too bad the same thing as the above applies. People shoving responsibility from one ping pong to the other. Your appeal was open and non-directly accusatory. A whole wash list of replies after it instead were one directional. "We are not the problem, everyone else is. We are clean of any guilt and blame!" It's the general problem of people making a smart and well written post that causes people to feel personally addressed. They flock to the thread to convince themselves and others of their innocence in the matter.
For the sake of keeping an open perspective also, please be aware that this statement is totally not true. For yourself and your immediate surrounding, Minecraft may be a hobby, but this is only limited to your scope. Between myself, Cayorion and Thortuna, we have all poured almost 15 combined years into the server that is MassiveCraft. For the lack of a better description, for some of us MassiveCraft (and by extension Minecraft) is out life's work and our business. Cayorion and myself purely survive income wise on MassiveCraft (I of course to a much more limited scope than he does), but the end point remains is that most of us wake up, and go to bed with Minecraft/MassiveCraft. Then we're not talking about the people who use Minecraft as an escape mechanism to whatever they deal with in the outside world, and to say Minecraft is just a "hobby" for those people who come home from school and immediately jump on Massive until they go to bed, loyally for nearly 2-3 years. They check the forum every waking half hour. Can this really be considered a hobby anymore? People are creatures of habit. When a habit defines how you spend your time, it means it's become part of your life. It's both a wonderful realization in that something I've worked on is so important to hundreds of people, but it's also a scary realization in terms of how worked up and emotional people can get over it.
I'm totally supportive of your anti-bullying undertone. I don't think anyone can actually disagree to say they haven't been bullied. God knows I've had to endure two years in early high school. I was friends with a popular kid. Eventually we fell out because I was a bad friend to him (too much taking, too little giving) and bullying became the new cool thing. Ten years after that fact, I can look back and admit I caused the whole situation by behaving anti-socially and being a general twat when it came to academic pursuits in school. Note I'm not voiding any blame on the other subject, but we were both 13 at the time and obviously didn't know how to communicate as adults or talk about our wubby feelings, nor did I have introspection capabilities as a teenager. The same thing sort of applies to whatever bullying may occur on MassiveCraft, and in many cases even the term itself is being misused. Bullying, to me anyway, is someone being targeted for what/who they are instead of what they behave like. Say I target
@SupremeCripple and make wheelchair jokes at him all day long. I've got a certain leeway since we're friends, but let's say for the sake of the argument, I'm not. If I ridicule him for that, I'm bullying him. If however I criticize the person next to him by saying "I don't like your roleplay, it's too sexual", and I then avoid said person because I don't want to get involved with their roleplay, it's not bullying. The world isn't a utopia and one of the highest roleplay liberties players have on Massive is that no one can force roleplay on anyone else. Laissez-faire is a wonderful political ideology that we largely follow in that regard. But it does really challenge.
People don't get bullied for no reason. I refuse to believe any Human can inherently be so evil that they will just randomly target a random individual and start causing shit for the sake of it. Instead of jumping the whole "I'm being bullied!" train. Spend a hard time thinking why you're being sidelined or rejected. Did you disappoint them after making promises? Does your roleplay simply not appeal to them? Don't they like how you disrespect something they like? Do they dislike how you constantly try to seize the attention in any group you're in? Don't they like how you always require the world from them, but don't give anything back yourself? Are you just a drama queen? Did someone else spend a lot of effort to please you and you just brush it off? Do you take them for granted? It's always necessary to introspect. Reflect. Babayonce recently linked me to this video, and I think it carries an important message,
and particularly focus on the very last sentence of the video:
I'm going to toss up one final subject before making a conclusion.
I think the best way to reply to this isn't that you've become estranged because you've shifted in server preference, but particularly because your server preference has shifted to /that/ server. I don't think I need to cite any reasons why I used "that" in this example. But that's just conjunction on my side. I have no clue if anyone actually alienates you, just taking a random stab at a possibility. We've never actually communicated or interacted much personally. On the note of server preference though, I frequently swap server. I don't play for very long, but let's for the sake of remaining transparent I'll call them all by name because I often specifically decide to play on another server to pick up new ideas for Massive or learn what mistakes not to repeat. I played on Asmalur for a while with some lore people. It was a wonderful learning experience about what /not/ to do in terms of player rights, server white-listing and plugin support. Throughout our experience there we were upset because the players got upset at us for destabilizing the status quo of the roleplay world. (admittedly, we wanted to conquer the known world, but you can blame
@Shuikenai for that). It was still fun to some degree though. The next server I went on was Uthrandir. I had less than a favorable experience there. Obviously when you join a smaller server, you get really welcoming messages, but that was about it really. Nobody made an effort to include me, educate me or be helpful in any way, which is a stark contrast to people like
@Suzzie who are always ready to jump in OOCly to educate a new player on Massive, even when she isn't roleplaying at all. Then I went to Aetherys Ascended. That server is down now. I think. Some big drama spiel about the server owners ripping off thousands of dollars from the player base and then just ****ing off. I could never really get into roleplay there because death perms didn't exist and you could just kill anyone nilly willy in pvp. And then finally I've gone around Lord of the Craft as well. My experience on that server was really short because a staff member immediately came down on me asking for a "private conversation" because he had "heard things about me". I was like "Yeah **** that" and only came back once after that to check out their new builds.
The point is, elitism/cliquism/veteranism isn't unique to MassiveCraft. It happens literally everywhere, and I am in fact of the opinion it happens less on Massive than everywhere else because MassiveCraft is a white list free server and still successful in terms of roleplay (god knows many other server owners hate us for it). Note this is no way a claim to say "Ohlol, everything is fine here, there is no room for improvement". There is ALWAYS room for improvement. But I feel some people replying here are acting like MassiveCraft is about to descend into civil war because of some sort of toxic hold that has suddenly and magically grasped the community. In this case I'm going to be adding water to the vinegar /and/ wine by simply saying that there is always room for improvement, but nobody should act like the world is about to end, because it really isn't /that/ bad. Obviously when you compare it a server that runs 20 people that is largely founded on a tight knit group of friends, it's worse. But really. Consider the server you currently play on. Fast forward 3 years into the future, assume the server starts running for commercial success and you have on average 80-100 players on prime time. Do you really think it's still going to be the same? MassiveCraft started out that way, a server hosted between friends and some acquaintances. Everything was cooperative and friendly. MassiveCraft became what it is now, it grew, became more competitive and with competitive strangers comes salt. It almost argues in favor of just capping your server to 20 players and keeping it that way forever, but then MassiveCraft is ran different and couldn't comply to that.
So. On a concluding note (note this is an open appeal, not aimed at anyone in specific):
- Wonderful post, well written, well explained, supportable opinions.
- When reviewing these opinions (mine/op/posters) please keep perspective in count, and don't automatically assume all opinions are true. Remain skeptical. Require information and evidence. Then reflect again.
- Do not fall into the victim complex. Being criticized for behaving like an asshole or in a way people don't like is not bullying. Take a hard look at yourself, realize your flaws and then understand why you may have been alienated or what you consider as "bullied".
- Do not come to this thread professing how this server "needs to change", when you yourself have never given any inclination to change your deemed undesirable behavior/traits.
- Do not shove all responsibility onto others.
If anything is to be taken from my wall text of death, it is this: Responsibility is something that is equally shared by all. Staff members have a responsibility to support a better atmosphere by punishing elitism. Players have a responsibility to support a better atmosphere by setting boundaries, being clear and supportive. Staff members have a responsibility to be nicer to players. Players have a responsibility to assist staff members in being nicer to players by being more understanding, treating them less like the enemy and having some faith.
If you have a problem with someone or a group of people FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TALK TO THEM. If you are afraid of them, ask someone close to them to do the talking for you. If you don't trust either to be decent Human beings in the conversation, you're already disrespecting them and kicking yourself in the shins to sabotage your own means to having a better experience.
If you come to this thread as an (ex-)player just to tell me/us how much is wrong about this server and how we need to change because you were the victim, then you honestly have something to think about in my opinion.
