On behaviour and attitudes toward staff and volunteers
Hey folks,
While we do not generally publicise or announce administrative punishments, it is almost inevitable that you will end up hearing rumours about a recent high profile shrubbing. We want to clarify where we are coming from with this and hopefully avoid a game of telephone situation in the process.
I mentioned recently that one of the reasons volunteers leave or may be hesitant to take on a certain god role is that the environment in an organisation tied to that role is less than welcoming or is unappealing in some way beyond simply the themes or the god itself.
There can be numerous reasons for this, ranging from a low period of interest in the org’s rp all the way up to being outright toxic or otherwise abusive to volunteers. The problem, especially with the latter, is that this does not only impact the volunteer in question but actively harms your own organisation. It can and does result in fewer people (staff or volunteer) willing to interact or engage with you or your organisation, fewer god roles to rp with for you, fewer opportunities for events, Order membership, patrons, and org-requests all as a consequence of a bad attitude.
This is an absolute morale killer because frankly if nobody on my team wants to play with your city because of the people in it, then it becomes less fun for everyone involved and starts a bit of a vicious cycle that I would always prefer to avoid. Our general stance on this has typically been that while it is unfortunate, we can’t really interfere directly most of the time because it steps over into interfering with your organisation, or telling you how to play the game, or sometimes there’s no rule technically being broken.
Moving forward, however, we’ve concluded that it’s impossible to ignore certain problem behaviours forever without unfairly punishing everyone else that surrounds the problematic individuals. This means that if you display a history of (OOC) harassing, insulting, belittling, or otherwise discouraging volunteers from even looking at your organisation, you may face actual punishment. You can expect similar if your raison d’etre is to continually berate the staff and make it impossible to engage with you in a reasonable, rational way.
** Please note that having an in character opposition to a God is not what we’re talking about here. You’re free to, in character, swear vengeance upon an opposing divine, to work to thwart their plans, and so on. You will only be in trouble if you go after volunteers or staff themselves or play in such a way that your disruptiveness is impossible to separate from OOC disruption. **
** Similarly, expressing negative feedback, having an earnest complaint, or disliking something in the game is not at all an issue here. But it’s entirely possible to communicate that in a constructive and mature way without feeling the need to (for example) levy personal insults or attacks against the event runner, concoct and spread false narratives of bias about volunteers that are not even involved in the matter being discussed, or respond to genuine attempts to buy in to your IC actions with world-impacting consequences with a tirade of curse-laden abuse. (All of these have happened recently) **
Rest assured that it is practically impossible for you to ever run into issues with this by accident. Unless you have explicitly and knowingly gone out of your way to make volunteers feel bad for playing with you (and this is a very small number of people who can even debatably be on this list) you are probably 100% fine.
I want to close with a reminder that at the end of the day, I and my team want absolutely nothing more than to make the game fun for as many people as possible. As always, I strongly counsel that treating everything that happens in the game as part of the IC narrative will result in a much more satisfying experience for everyone. I can offer my personal promise that nobody is out to get you or invested in seeing your experience as a player be an OOC-negative one.
– Icti
Penned by My hand on the 5th of Scarlatan, in the year 987 AF.