...Really?
So, at the beginning of this year I started up an RP board, intending for the members to primarily be myself and a couple of my close friends. One of my friends (also my co-moderator) started inviting people from another RPG that he frequents, which was fine by me when it was just one or two people.
At first, the people weren't so bad. They were actually pretty polite and seemed excited to play, so that was awesome, since it's been a very long time since I ran a game anyone was excited about.
Then came the members that wanted to "help." One member insisted that I let her (I'm not actually sure of the gender, but for sake of ease I'm just going to pretend it was female) "help me out with the plot," which was annoying, but even more annoying was when she demanded I let her friend create a battle system for the boards.
Now, I don't like battle systems in forum-based games. I find it clunky and awkward and it just does not mesh well with how I write, and most of the people I'd invited to the boards personally felt the same way. I said no.
For at least a couple of weeks, I had the new members (who were the majority at this point) fighting me tooth and nail about it. They insisted that I would be "forcing" players into boring, repetitive battles without a battle system and that the battle system would make things more interesting. I tried to tell them that the game was primarily for character development and interaction and the battles were really a non-issue, and I was accused of making a "stupid teenager game."
Eventually, I guess we all got sick of fighting one another, because everyone just stopped coming to the boards. I was pretty much the only one checking the boards for a full month, and this was before we had even gotten anywhere with the plot! Assuming the board had died, I just left it there, meaning to come back and delete it after I had made sure my friends had backed up anything they might have wanted, or whatever else they might want with it.
Well, real life caught up to me and I never got around to deleting the boards. Around the end of July, I started getting emails from members at the old boards, telling me that they had taken over and that they wanted admin privileges on the board if I wasn't intending on coming back. Now, at this point my co-mod and I had been discussing deleting all the posts, banning all the old members who had caused such a problem, and just starting over from scratch, and I really was not in any mood to hand over all my hard work to these people. I didn't respond for a while, as I was trying to figure out what to do... until I got the message on my deviantART begging for admin privileges.
At that point, I snapped, telling them that I had intended to delete the board in the first place, we were starting over elsewhere, and that I really did not feel like giving them administrative privileges in the board that they'd more or less killed. I told them to make their own game, since it was really nothing like the one I had created anyway, and leave me the old boards so I could delete them like I'd intended to from the start.
Thankfully, they listened.
Not so thankfully, as I found out later, they stole everything from the old boards. The plot was the same. The location names were the same. They even took the profile forms, down to the little notes I'd made at the end of the posts.
...Really, people? Really?
Well, at the very least, poking around their character profiles I have discovered it to be full of Mary-Sues. That's enough to brighten my mood about the whole ordeal, but still. Ugh.
At first, the people weren't so bad. They were actually pretty polite and seemed excited to play, so that was awesome, since it's been a very long time since I ran a game anyone was excited about.
Then came the members that wanted to "help." One member insisted that I let her (I'm not actually sure of the gender, but for sake of ease I'm just going to pretend it was female) "help me out with the plot," which was annoying, but even more annoying was when she demanded I let her friend create a battle system for the boards.
Now, I don't like battle systems in forum-based games. I find it clunky and awkward and it just does not mesh well with how I write, and most of the people I'd invited to the boards personally felt the same way. I said no.
For at least a couple of weeks, I had the new members (who were the majority at this point) fighting me tooth and nail about it. They insisted that I would be "forcing" players into boring, repetitive battles without a battle system and that the battle system would make things more interesting. I tried to tell them that the game was primarily for character development and interaction and the battles were really a non-issue, and I was accused of making a "stupid teenager game."
Eventually, I guess we all got sick of fighting one another, because everyone just stopped coming to the boards. I was pretty much the only one checking the boards for a full month, and this was before we had even gotten anywhere with the plot! Assuming the board had died, I just left it there, meaning to come back and delete it after I had made sure my friends had backed up anything they might have wanted, or whatever else they might want with it.
Well, real life caught up to me and I never got around to deleting the boards. Around the end of July, I started getting emails from members at the old boards, telling me that they had taken over and that they wanted admin privileges on the board if I wasn't intending on coming back. Now, at this point my co-mod and I had been discussing deleting all the posts, banning all the old members who had caused such a problem, and just starting over from scratch, and I really was not in any mood to hand over all my hard work to these people. I didn't respond for a while, as I was trying to figure out what to do... until I got the message on my deviantART begging for admin privileges.
At that point, I snapped, telling them that I had intended to delete the board in the first place, we were starting over elsewhere, and that I really did not feel like giving them administrative privileges in the board that they'd more or less killed. I told them to make their own game, since it was really nothing like the one I had created anyway, and leave me the old boards so I could delete them like I'd intended to from the start.
Thankfully, they listened.
Not so thankfully, as I found out later, they stole everything from the old boards. The plot was the same. The location names were the same. They even took the profile forms, down to the little notes I'd made at the end of the posts.
...Really, people? Really?
Well, at the very least, poking around their character profiles I have discovered it to be full of Mary-Sues. That's enough to brighten my mood about the whole ordeal, but still. Ugh.