wankgate | 239: how does one become popular on dreamwidth rp?

maybe it's because of the person previously mentioned but in the faq now you can't even interact with or mention duplicity's children population without being auto warned/banned

on one hand it's a good way to avoid creepy convo but... who is having the creepy convos that need this weirdly rigid rule?

iirc this rule was put in place when a pc opened an orphanage the mods were okay with that but didn't want any actual interaction being played out with the kids or the kids used in general threads

not in dup but this is so fucking bizarre to read?? if they didn't want kids to exist in the setting then just don't put them in the setting. tanagura had all their kids sequestered off to be raised in an inaccessible facility. there's no reason dup couldn't just do the same if the mods were gonna be weird about it.

i feel like it's way more weird for the mods to just assume by default that people are going to be weird about it instead of, idk, having their character kick a stray soccer ball back to a kid or something.

This. Their reasoning is bizarre as well. It leans heavily into the Natives not trusting the PCs. Natives absolutely won't allow PCs anywhere near their kids.

Which, the Native trust thing is pretty bizzare in general. PC are allowed to handwave quota by saying they're getting their rocks off with NPCs. So, the Natives refuse to trust them but will still fuck them??? And it doesn't take into account that some PCs have been in the game for literal years now.

A PC could totally integrate into society and the NPCs still won't trust them. Added with that, the citizenship granted after a year means pretty much nothing. There are zero perks to "graduation". It doesn't leave a lot of motivation for characters to toe the line or even try to integrate.

that's... weird. i can understand why they would nix it for any sexy or adult-themed threads but what's wrong with interacting with kid npcs in a 100% gen thread?

I think it's bc in a setting like Duplicity's even 100% gen threads are sort of...not? Because the natives are all born either marked as Submissives or unmarked as Dominants, that whole D/S system extends even to the children. But what does that mean in terms of actual interactions between people?

As soon as you let players interact with children even in gen ways, you open the door to players asking questions about this whole side of the city's culture that I think the mods really don't want to do any world building on. And ok, fair enough, they don't want to touch that or risk being pressured to pin those elements down.

Hostile and unreasonable as the mod team is now, I also always try to remember that this is a game whose creator and original head mod died, and it passed into the hands of other people. I don't want to speculate too much but it's not too hard to imagine that at some point the will to do any world building around that aspect was just lost with changes of leadership. Personally, I don't think it's a big deal because this isn't a game where anyone needs to be interacting with the kids.

I think just saying no children is much less an issue than all the weird and contradictory micromanaging about interactions with adult NPCs, gangs and gang members, this stuff with the SIN guards, an economy that's supposed to be incomprehensibly ring-fenced, the flip-flopping on npc-run businesses, and so so many other things.

'a game whose creator and original head mod died'

oh whoa that's so sad. :( i hope the family and friends of the head mod are doing well.

it was in october 2020. i think it's easy to forget that she created the whole game and the premise was essentially just handed over to the helper mods, which might explain why they're unwilling to do much with it. people who criticise the mod team would do well to remind themselves of what circumstances they've been working under.

personally i think the whole game could do with being rewritten from the ground up and the setting revived but times being what they are i can understand why nobody has the energy to do that.

no, sorry, the head mod dying (while horribly sad) is not a reason not to criticize the current mods for being rude, unresponsive and unhelpful when their player base make requests, or for letting the game grow into a rut. it was over a year and a half ago and they also recruited new mods several times since then, so many of the team won't have worked with the former head mod at all. based on what other players are saying about the early days of the game, it doesn't seem like the current mod team are following the old head mod's example in terms of responsiveness and adaptability either.

if they're unhappy or don't want to put the work in anymore, hand the game over to someone else. i know there are people who'd step up.

but hey pour one out for that one time the whole game got a lecture on how we could ruin future plots because some characters made their magic cupid wings a color other than white.

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but then they could easily deal with that by coming up with a reason not to have kids in the city in the first place so that it wouldn't even be an issue

There are no truly gen threads in a city where at any moment a dominant could be flogging a sub in the streets.

The rule came to be though after a problem player wrote a post up that was so creepy about their muse interacting with the kids and making the kids the focus of the post. Not surprising this player is the reason behind a lot of rules now including the assets ruling. They felt more open to ideas and giving players an inch until that bitch kept taking a whole mile every time they tried to be accommodating.

that player and some others who had absolutely ridiculous houses and businesses their first month in the game. i dropped not too long after all that went down for unrelated reasons. there were a lot of problem players and a lot of players being assholes when asked to dial it back.

as much as it sucks that a whole player base gets restrictions based on the actions of some persistent bad faith actors i can also see the other side of it. when you give people an inch and they take a whole mile sooner or later you get tired of dealing with it so you close the loopholes for everybody.

deets on the post or character? I'd be interested to read it

the existence of child npcs in a city where there are regularly adults (and underage characters) fucking in public in broad daylight isn't a concept that a lot of people want to engage with for obvious reasons

this is actually one of the areas of the game where i 100% agree with the mods decision. there's no way to include kids in the setting that isn't creepy to some degree

then why not say there aren't any kids in the setting at all instead of saying "kids are there but you're not allowed to talk about it"

bc it's a city

because at the start of the game it was said that kids exist

it was grandfathered into the setting and now taking it out would be way more trouble than just saying "ok, it exists, we're not touching it"

keep up would you

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i'm just imagining the little german boy getting lost at the folsom street fair

oh mein Gott zees is ein Strasse full of Kinkenfücken

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the irony when half the ocs in game use pbs that look underage.

lol where

looks like a bunch of generic twenty somethings and a cat

"looking underage" is a creepy thing to say about real people's faces too if they use LA PBs. like im not sure why ayrt is so obsessed with children to say an adult looks like one.

You sound defensive.

IA there are a couple of characters I thought were minors. Idk though I'm not going to search the ages of LA PBs I don't care about. I just avoid those characters as their posts make them sound like they've been dropped on the head.

Don't play OCs, don't even know the ones you're talking about. It's just weird to be focused on someone having "young features". And if they're in a smut game with an underage PB then that's something you should take to mods. If you "don't care enough to look into it" you're just bitching impotently.