Playmyth.net EMERGENCY!

[Frumius]

Uh, oh, look what's on pmnet's front page:

End Of The Line
Posted by: PMABlades on Monday, July 11, 2005 - 07:01 AM
Hey Everyone;

Sadly - it's come to this. Neither Alan, Bloo or I really have the time, or intestinal fortitude to deal with this anymore. The amount of stuff that unpaid administrators and other volunteers have to deal with has become so much and people have become so abusive toward the people who give their time to give you a place to play that we've decided that we're done doing it.

You - the users of PlayMyth.net - are thereby formally notified that PlayMyth.net will close on August 1, 2005 unless there is a dramatic change in the atmosphere and level of respect toward administrators and other players.

You've been warned - the bullshit is over. Take responsibility and pride in the place you like to play or it will soon be gone. I'm in a unique position in that I have physical access to the power cord of this server - and I'm tired of it being the waste of electrons that it has become.

So fix it - or it's gone.

Have a nice day.

Blades

[Monstertool]

pretty sad really, and to make things worse quite a number of people in the playmyth forums are still acting like jerks. like they don't even really care. hopefully they won't pull the plug. i've really enjoyed playmyth, and i'd hate to see it go away.

[Baak]

Appears to be settling down already and apparently it's happened a couple of times before.

Probably the folks at PlayMyth don't get enough appreciation/positive feedback and something tipped them over the edge. Sounds like people aren't reporting abuse enough and they're fed up with it.

My guess is everything will be fine and it will probably happen again next year.

[vinylrake]

I don't know - the frustration is probably cyclical - but people can act like such wankers - as MT noted a fair number of posts on the playmyth forums are blaming the administrators and the people who run the site who picked the administrators for the abusive tone and mood on playmyth - they claim there is an abusive tone and people act like wankers because the admins "aren't doing their job". As I said on the forum that's like blaming the police for crime, "if the police were doing their job there wouldn't be any crime" - doh! If people didn't break the law there wouldnt be any crime.

Given past history of the individuals involved - Blades, Clem (not related to playmyth but is working with Blades on M3 projects I think and after *years* of putting up with complaining and bitching they pulled the plug on The Mill (and on Blades' Myth Maps site)) I wouldn't be suprised to find out that on August 1 the playmyth gameserver dissapears. If the server goes I would expect the website to dissapear as well.

My advice would be grab anything from the site you want before August 1. I'll be reviewing the map archive to make sure I have copies of everything before then.

Also, if anyone has had any prior pleasant relationships with Blades or other PM head honchos might be a good idea to work on building those relationships. Might help in the future when OoH establishes our own game server. ;)

If nothing else drop them a line and let them know they are appreciated and that there are lots of non-wankers who use PlayMyth.

I didn't want to mention it on the playmyth forums but it seems the tone and abuse they are talking about occurs entirely in the ranked rooms. An obvious (if divisive) solution would be to just shut off the ranked rooms and make everything unranked. It would still effect a lot of innocent players who play ranked civilly, but it wouldn't effect a person's ability to play Myth on playmyth. And of course most importantly (the world revolves around me after all) it would have very little impact on me or the people I play myth with.

heck, maybe I will suggest this after all.

[Frumius]

I didn't want to mention it on the playmyth forums but it seems the tone and abuse they are talking about occurs entirely in the ranked rooms. An obvious (if divisive) solution would be to just shut off the ranked rooms and make everything unranked.

I thought of that too, vr. What I think would happen is that the people who are jerks in ranked would either move on to a new game or move into unranked an be jerks there. The ones with bad attitudes who stayed would still have bad attitudes.

Mb I'm just pessimistic.

[vinylrake]

well, i thought about ranked people moving to unranked and continuing to be jerks, but I think the vast majority of jerks in ranked (not implying that there are more jerks in ranked than unranked, just addressing a particular identified problem) won't bother being jerks in unranked.

Why? A) People who are more concerned about skill and ranking than about having fun aren't likely to hang around unranked long unless they learn to enjoy playing the game more than getting nice icons next to their usernames. and B) there won't be anything at stake - if people act like jerks because they get annoyed at people in ranked who don't play up to their level and who the rankers blame for losing team games - and resultant points in the playmyth scoring pantheon - they aren't going to have anything to get upset about in unranked. There's nothing at stake, there's no lose of face or reputation or score penalty for failing to win.

Heck maybe eliminating ranking will help everyone relax a bit and stop stressing about a game - maybe that's the solution to making the world just a little bit nicer a place...

everyone sing along "I'd like to teach the myth world to play, in perfect harmony"

[Two Saks]

I don't know much about this problem, but from what I've gathered there is a cyclical element to it, but it also has been getting increasingly worse and coming to a head.

So the playmyth community get the "shut down or else notice" - which gets everyone's attention. They express their frustration. Frustration with the abusive players and frustration about the chronic complaining about them, or other things. These guys do not get paid to run the server for us all. It's volunteer time and resources. It grows and grows and reaches a breaking point.

Now they have banned the worst problem making repeat offenders. They laid down the law to an abusive few AND told the complainers they are part of the PM Admins grief too. But my guess is when the smoke clears, PM will remain. I hope so anyway.

BTW...from what I've seen of these few jerks, GOOD Riddance. Reading some of what they write in forums...what absolute morons. Hopefully this will be the solution for everyone: Let em create their own community - it will attract people like themselves and make PM a better place for rest of us?

[sillek]

As much as some of them care about points, they are there for competition. Unranked is mostly third party, fooling around, and coop. There just isn't the same level of competition. There would actually have to be an increase in ranked players getting on to keep them online. They'd have to gather all their friends up and go to an empty room and host their games. Most of the people that would join their games would be very inexperience and get yelled at.

Basically, they'd just quit. Now, while..I wouldn't mind 95% of those people getting the hell out of here, it just wouldn't work. I don't see a "nice guy" community with ten to twenty people online at peak hours doing very well. Unfortunately, we need these jerks. Not because of their personalities, but simply because they are bodies.

Well, maybe I don't need them. Maybe OoH doesn't need them. But the rest of the people that don't have 10+ set friends that they play with at a set time will need them. I mean, if PlayMyth.net dies..I don't see it affecting OoH games. Click "Server" at the login screen, select MariusNet, wait for it to load.. click MP, click Login, and there you are..look for what room the Saturday night game is in.

Because of this I believe that your perspective is completely different than others. I'm not sure how much ranked or even unranked you've played, but it is to my belief that it's not a lot. That's not an insult. I think only playing with friends in a passworded game is far superior than dealing with others. Even if it's just because of the third party maps.

Suuuuuuuch a pain in the @$$ getting people to download something. They pay $70 a month for spangly dangly 8meg downstream connections but refuse to download a 10meg plugin. They'd rather play the same Co-op that I've been playing since 1999. Landing at White Falls is like that prostitute that nobody wants to be with. She's just been used so many times that playing her just doesn't feel good anymore. Sorry, I can't think of anything funny.

I could say a lot more, but I think I'll refrain to avoid offending people.

[Two Saks]

Good points Sill, you are right about my perspective being skewed since I nearly always play with OoH or with Frum's unranked games. No question about it. I can't speak for others in OoH, but I played some ranked games semi-regular about 5 years ago. So, I have basically stayed in the OoH niche, I don't feel part of the current drama, but still curious what the hell is going on.

[vinylrake]

Hey Sill, I think your perspective is worthwhile - you are a lot more out in the community than many of us are these days.

fwiw, I used to play coop, ranked and unranked games a *lot* before I was assimilated by OoH. More unranked than ranked, but back in the bungie.net days it wasn't uncommon for me to be on the server 2-3 hours at a stretch several nights a week.

What really turned me off to ranked games was a lot of combined experiences, probably the two most severe were a 4 person 2-2 team game I was in with someone much higher rank on Raid on the Plains (I know I should have known better). We were in position on top of a hill waiting for the approaching enemy team and he took all my units away because my units apparently "weren't in the right formation". wanker. When he let me know he wasn't going to let me control any units for the rest of the game I dropped the game rather than let him get any points for a win.

Another incident that stands out was a game of (I think it was) Assassin on Gimble. Again I was one of two players on a team and after repeated nicely worded requests for units the capt still didn't give me any units - he told me to just watch and I would get points for his win. Other players were yelling at him to stop being a wanker and give his teammate some units, he refused. So I spent the game yelling out the location of "our" assassin target and other units to the other teams. We didn't win that one, but other than the one amazingly flukey time I beat the top ranked assassin player on Bungie.net on a game of Assassin Float(or Chest I always confuse them), that Gimble Assassin game is probably the most fun I have ever had on ranked. The guy I was playing with didn't seem to enjoy it, but all the other players seemed to really enjoy that game too.

And yes, I am a traitorous, petty bastard.