Cut and Dry

I am so disguisted right now. I am watching MTV’s made. Normally they do things like “I want to be an ice skater/rapper/dancer/editor etc..” and they get an expert to come in and whip them into shape and give them the skills they need to succeed. Its normally pretty interesting and sometimes the people throw a fit about getting up at 6am to train. Its pretty straightforward. THIS episode is making me so pissed…

So theres this high schooler. Hes you classic nerdy guy. Hes got a bunch of comic books, costumes, memorbilia etc… He acctually seems like a really nice kid. But he wants a relationship and has a problem talking to girls and such. So he wants to be made into a ladies man and be able to talk to women. They get this BITCH who has come in saying “Yes, I am trying to change him.” and tells him to get rid of any and all comic books stuff, saying they are “childish” and straight up wanted to take his costumes. While I admit dressing up for everyday use is a lil odd, but hey, if it makes you happy. Not only that but the bitch coach makes him leave his school comic book club meetings in which hes the president. Thats just bitchy for the sake. Then the club gets tired of him not showing up for meetings, and decides to kick him out of the club. FINALLY they have him talk to this guy who was nerdy in high school (and still is a litlle nerdy as he owns a magic shop) who has a serious girlfriend. That guy teaches him a couple magic tricks to give him an icebreaker and some confidence. He speaks more about the inside condition than what hes wearing, and the kids did really well. The guy stright up told him “Be yourself.” So then the kid gets the message that hes been kicked out of the club afyer missing meetings for weeks. He staight up tells his teacher he doesn’t want to be a ladies man if it means losing his friends. So she says, well then they can be your entourage and makes him get dates for his friends too. One nerdy friend gets a date by having a lightsaber duel with a girl who thought it was great. Then other two just be themselves and meet these girls at a dance class and they just are their normal, geeky selves. They take the girls out to a habchi and they love it. The guy uses the confidence he got from the other man who grew up and owned the magic shop and he asked one girl out to the dance and she said yes. Two boys down, now just one of them needs a date. He met a girl in acooking class they did and he calls her up and gets a date. They all got dates just being themselves, not clothes or anything on the outside. That bitch coach did nothing but give them some nice clothings to wear to the dance, thats all. Congrats bitch coach, you gave them outfits.

What pisses me off is they are saying “This is bad. No one likes this. You must conform.” I personally love all the nerdy things that Gino has… including his extensive D&D book collection and our display sword collection. I love him with all my heart and the nerdy stuff is not only tolerated, but ENJOYED. I think its ridiculous to say “All girls like X” and focus on the outside.

No, not the magic skills. But for anyone looking for a quick Illindir history lesson check out my new Illindir video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWyjjDGxumk

Ok, now I am pissed. Pissed and hurt. This has gone way too far, and I am sick of just sitting on my feelings. I am about to call out the biggest load of horse shit I have ever seen in my entire life.

This is blog by Crystal, a former friend that I worked for on Advent about me:

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Whatever

December 30th 2008

Give me a break. If you don’t have the common courtesy to tell someone you’re no longer involved in a project for over a month, then when they find out you’ve just up and left with no word and delete your account because you yourself said you left to other people, you don’t have any right to cry foul. Bitch and moan about how childish it is that your account is gone, tell the world about it, I don’t care.

-You- left.
-You- didn’t tell anyone you left.
-You- have no right to complain that your account is gone because -we- assumed -you- left because -you- said -you- left to other people.

This is exactly the kind of childish made-up bullshit I don’t want on the MUD anyway. I could care less who is admining or building on what MUD with whomever. For you to sit there and bash my game when I have never said a negative thing about yours?

You had every opportunity to email someone that you had left, and if your husband was so active on the MUD he could have sent a tell. His character was deleted because he wasn’t RPing, I imagine because……his wife left the MUD. I have no quarrels with him, I know he can read the forum, I know he -does- read the forum. I’m sure you can read it too through his account, I’m not naive. But I -am- setting the record straight. Why don’t you tell work that you’re leaving and then get upset at them because they remove you from the employee roster.

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Yes, she was someone I considered a friend and she wrote that. I wrote that I thought it was childish she delelted my account, and she writes that. Let me break some of this down for everyone. I never said I quit. I told people that I was acctually still planning to build on Advent and wasn’t just going to abandon the building part of the game. I did tell people I didn’t have time for a character. I’d like to point out one particular thing in that lovely rant she has:

“This is exactly the kind of childish made-up bullshit I don’t want on the MUD anyway. I could care less who is admining or building on what MUD with whomever.”

I call bullshit, plain and simple. I even have evidence to prove this.

One of the other builders that I consider a friend came to me saying he/she was nervous because Crystal had changed her title to something to the affect of “Some builders will be going, others will be staying, but we will be moving foward.” Ok, first off, if you want to be non-dramatic about letting someone go, CHANGING YOUR TITLE ON THE BUILDER PORT IS NOT THE WAY TO GO ABOUT IT. Thats causeing drama and uneeded stress on your builders. You can easily TALK to the people you are going to fire. Now, who did she let go? Just me. Yes, just me. She made a big huff about it so all the builders knew -I- had gotten removed by her. Now, if I had quit, why would I be going aka getting fired? Hrmm… perhaps because I HADN’T QUIT. Isn’t that a nifty concept. So, evidence of uneeded drama! One instance of blatant hypocricy, but no no, it doesn’t end there.

She doesn’t want to cause drama or like to deal with it… really? Hrmm weill heres more evidence to the contrary. Nice lil fact about Word Press. It tracks views on your blog AND off-site links to your blog. Hrmm… what are these pictures?

Why, that first one looks like the statistics for the views on my account. Click it, you’ll see a HUGE spike (46 views to be exact) the day AFTER I posted my blog. Notice the lack of activity before that? The only other increase is the day I posted that blog. Now lets look at the second picture. Thats a snippet from my referal gallery. Is that… why yes it is, an advent.org forum link. Now while this may not be accessable to all the players (because my hubby followed the link and said its an off-limits forum post) This means Crystal posted this either in the Builder or Staff only section of the forums. I am going to assume some explination came with it that would warrent people coming to my blog 46 times in one day. Not causing drama? Why would you perpetuate that and if you were SO OFFENDED why would you ENCOURAGE other people to go look? That seems quite dramatic indeed. Now one would think that this is enough evidence of such over-reactions and drama, but no no, theres more… so much more.

Lets look at this little snipet posted on the Advent forums by Crystal where ANY player (or anyone who registers for the forums) can read it:

“Due to an ex-player flipping out because their forum account was deleted, despite them declaring publicly that they had left, I have done some adjustments to member groups.”

I wonder who that ex player is… hrmm… lets see, who’s account was recently deleted… ohhh thats right, it was MINE. Was that really needed? Couldn’t you just say “Hey, I am making some changes, here they are.” I can someone understand your personal blog and EVEN a locked part of the forums, but spewing that bullshit on your players? Wow. I have never ONCE posted on Illindir blogs what I think of Advent. In fact, I think we have a FREE LINK up to her game, encouring people to go check it out, so how is that BASHING YOUR GAME?

Anyway… using Crystal’s anology of the “if you don’t show up to work” thing, if you’re the boss don’t you CALL that employee? Don’t you ask them YOURSELF “Hey, whats going on?” I know working for several jobs, if someone didn’t show up for work, we called. We called a lot. She has my AIM name, my email, my husbands AIM, his email AND knows which mud I am on. Is it REALLY that hard to get ahold of me to ask me that? But lets go on to more personal accounts with Crystal.

For all those Advent people wondering why the HELL hasn’t any areas been added to the game, don’t look at the builders. When we got an assignment, we did it. Sometimes I will admit it took us longer than she thought it would and sometimes they ahd to bring over more builders, but lets go through a couple instances:

First off, the ONLY reason we have Maitland Valley is because I built that single handedly. Period. No one helped me with that, not one bit. And originally it was much bigger for those of you that complain there isn’t a lot of animals or space. It was originally one big area, not a ring, and there were rooms in the center of that. But that was fairly quickly put into the game. Now shortly after that I left Advent for… ohh about a year. School got tough and I was in a new relationship with Gino. I had other priorities. Recently I returned to Advent, not expecting anything. But I applied to builder and eventually got pulled up.

When I say eventually, let me clarify. She told me she would pull me up to builder. Almost a MONTH later I finally bothered her enough to ger her to give me access to builder port so I could help out the other builders. Help out? With what. In the time that I had been gone, the theatre and temple in Thelasia (the only city in the game where players have access) had been REDONE. Yes, they were already there, but they redid them. Wow. A whole year and thats what got done.

So I got an assignement with another builder. I am not going to be a douche and tell everyone what it is. We’ll call it, Area 1. Now I had to map area 1 myself. I put up a map, but it wasn’t what she was looking for, so I made another within a day or two and posted that. A week or two later I FINALLY got her to say “Ohh yah, you can map that, its fine.” (paraphrased). We had been waiting and waiting and then it was like “oops, forgot about that” So we set off to work, and when I say work, I mean WORK. We completed that area which was about 80-100 rooms in a about one or two months, maybe. And I mean finished. We had all the objects, mobs room descripts and had even posted the programs and quests we needed on the forums. Crystal promised up and down she was going to check it. When I left, it still hadn’t been checked, and we finished that back in… September I believe.

So after that project I was moved to an already existsing project, we’ll call that Area 2. It was a bit bigger, probably 125-150 rooms, but there had already been people working on it for months…. only one part of it was done. I finished another section along with most of the objects and mobs for the whole area while the other builders either sat around or worked on other sections. We were given a deadline since it had taken so long, but we made it, just before the last day of October. Now, she was supposed to check it. Last I looked, she had checked 24 rooms before she told me she thought it was a “big disappointment” What? A staff memeber had not bothered to check since the area was ASSIGNED back in late June/early July. That staff member looked at the few rooms that were done and said it looked good so far. Now its a disappointment. To my knowledge, she never even bothered to check the rest of it.

THATS why that game moves so slow ladies and gentlemen. NOT because the coding is flawed (because, honestly, the code is really amazing) NOT because builders aren’t willing and eager to work. No no, its because no one runs things properly. The builders don’t even have basic consistancy guides for armor, weapons or even a pricing guide. You are shooting blind and hoping you got it right.

Now I am not heartless. I understand people had IRL issues and problems and things get a jumbled mess. But when I politely spoke with her AFTER she called the area a disappointment and pointed out that maybe in a future a staff memeber (not JUST Crystal, ANY staff member) could come in and check more often so we didn’t have that same problem. She started to go on a tyrade saying that she had moved and such and she couldn’t be around and, I quote “I don’t care” Yup. That IS indeed her attitude. So in a way, I am glad I am rid of that. Why would I want to play on a game or even help build it if the person who owns the mud (and yet doesn’t pay for since she takes donations all the time)  doesn’t give a damn. She threatens on a regular basis to shut down Alpha testing. Heres and example from a forum post on Advent posted by Crystal:

“The fact that we let players roleplay during alpha testing is a privilege to the players, and does not benefit the testing phase at all.  In fact it’s somewhat of a pain in the ass for us while we’re in development because players are always asking for mobs to be puppeted, bug reimbursements, etc.  But we do it anyway because the players enjoy it (and I occasionally enjoy watching), despite it being such a distraction to us while we’re trying to do administrative things.  This too has also been talked about before among the staff on whether or not it should continue, but no decisions have been made.”

Wow. Your own players you see as a “pain in the ass” How do you expect to keep players if you treat them like a HANDYCAP. That sounds like to me: You’re screwing up my progress and slowing everything down, so you should feel HONORED I even let you play my game.” Well, I guess that ‘honor’ isn’t mine anymore. I have chosen to play on a game where we value the players, and don’t intend on openning the game to players to test things until we think we are ready to, so as not to waste the players time.  It sounds empty and hollow to threaten to shut down a game to players and then do nothing. Its the same song and dance everyone has heard, and eventually people get sick of it.

*whew* Now that its off my chest. I just couldn’t help it. I was so upset and hurt. I’ve known Crystal for YEARS and this the way I get treated. I dedicated my time and energy to helping her with her mud and this is the thanks I get. She can’t even be bothered to send an IM to see if I had indeed left or not. But what can you do. I am so… thrilled doesn’t even describe what I am about Illindir. The staff regularly tells me I am really doing a good job and we all work together as a team. Not only that, but we are making HUGE strides in both code and building. I can’t give away any secrets, but this is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Its… stunning. I am honored to be a part of that staff. Its filled with pleasant, easy to work with people who love what they do and treat you like a human being with feelings and not a toy to be used, broken, and thrown away.

So the interview went really well and I’ll know Wednesday or Thursday if I got the job. I’mm keepnig my fingers crossed, but the guy seemed to really like me, so hopefully I get it. I would love love love that job… the starting pay is either $7.50 or $8 bucks an hour! Thats a huge increase from my minimum wage job. So heres to hoping!