Sigh… The Saga Begins
This post has been a long time coming, but even as I write it I have this feeling that this is just the surface of the whole thing.
Back in October 2005 I joined a reasonably popular Harry Potter university roleplaying game. The game was/is Ardnieu University, and despite what is on the surface, the whole thing is a steaming pile of shit. It may not have been so bad when I started, but by the time I left… whoo boy.
Before I go into the whole thing, let me go into a few of the cast of characters with you. As I add more and more posts about this whole festering shit-hole, I’ll describe other players to you.
Root Admin: Although she’s generally referred to in chats by many other names by the many people she’s offended over the years of her tenure, I’m just going to call her that today. I have plenty of other words I would like to call her, but I won’t.
The main problem I have with her is her favouritism. Most of the players I will list below are members of what we have come to term “the Mod Squad”, because despite obviously points lacking in their moderating ability (like basic spelling, or understanding of canon…) she moves them up the ladder and lets them get away with everything. They are, ICly and OOCly, allowed to break rules that would be enforced on others. Spelling, massive amounts of characters, copying, OOC harassment, IC rape, IC use of Unforgiveables etc. And whenever someone complained about things, Mod Squad was always favoured.
Princess MadeUpName: Known for making up names and playing characters who belonged as members of the real-life royal families, Princess MadeUpName is one of the Mod Squad and has been favoured many times. When “elections” were held, the polling was closed several days later than they were supposed to, without public explanation. Those who paid attention would note that they were closed the moment Princess MadeUpName’s character moved into the leading spot.
Princess MadeUpName’s worst habit - besides the flat characters, the wangst, and the bad English (any forgiveness for her being ESOL is dashed by her correcting other people’s English), amongst other things - is her nasty habit of IMing non-Mod Squad players under fake identities, and pretending to be other players in order to extract information out of them.
PeeGeeThirteen: PeeGeeThirteen, interestingly enough, is not Mod Squad, but she’s one of the subjects of today’s rant as I could simply say “it’s all her fault”. She kept us censored on everything that she didn’t like - on our occassional F-bombs, on our dislike of George Bush, on any sexuality other than hetero etc - but had free reign on everything she did like. She got passive aggressive towards the end, and is now happily at Ardnieu with her characters filling in the spaces left by mine.
Back sometime around April, a group of us were getting really sick of what was going down at Ardnieu. There were several of us and occasional off-hand comments to the tune of “we might as well leave and start our own” were made. PeeGeeThirteen took this to heart and raced off to start a new game, lifting a good chunk of Ardnieu in the process (The Room of Illusion, the war plot, the Tritons etc, Horus and the tower system etc). The rest of us disagreed with this and together we built a new game which we named Wydan University. At this time, PeeGeeThirteen was in charge with the rest of us helping. I had access to the admin panel and had volunteered a premade character of mine to sit in as Chancellor, as no one else had one. I also had access to the admin CP for skinning purposes.
I come back from a weekend without internet to find several angry PMs and emails from Root Admin, the final one (delivered at 2 in the morning, no less) stating that I had 2 hours to reply or be banned. I didn’t bother to open these emails as I had received them over a day after the two hour time limit had expired.
Not long after this, PeeGeeThirteen left the Wydan project in my hands and I actually became the person in charge - the reason I had been banned from Ardnieu. PeeGeeThirteen still has her original game with ideas copied wholesale from Ardnieu, while Wydan has made a point of rejecting anything too similar. Beyond the idea of a university (which, contrary to what Mod Squad believes, they were not the first to come up with - there are more than a dozen games older than AU, and several more contemporaries) and a similar set of classes (most of which are Hogwarts classes anyway) there’s not much similar, and no direct rippings a la PeeGeeThirteen.
The other big difference is that Wydan is actually Harry Potter, not some barely fantasy university drama game masquerading as a “canon Harry Potter game”. Well, that and we actually enforce our rules fairly and are what we claim to be.
Originally published at Disdainful-Soul.net. You can comment here or there.