Recently a poll was started on the official DM forums if people would like me to return to DM.
http://www.darkmists.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=10092&start=0&S=fe0bf5f7d586caeea603ad63ab37ed4f
First of all, I want to state that I had nothing to do with that poll. Some random person on my IM list (yeah, I don’t keep up with all of you, but you’re there) asked me what I thought about returning to DM, and I said of course I would like to but the current IMM staff wouldn’t allow it. Then later I hear about this poll, and then even more later after that I learn of Xurino’s comments. Since I can’t post on the forums, I have no current DM character, here’s my retort:
I did leave DM several times as vowing never to return because of my constant head-butting with the administration. Frankly, we didn’t get along. I don’t work well in a “protecting my rice bowl” high school environment, and I had a bad habit of calling people out for what they were and what they did. On several occasions I said to myself “This isn’t fun, why am I putting myself through this?” because I was passionate about DM, and I hated to see the things happening to it behind the scenes. The IMM politics of DM is brutal, and you wouldn’t understand it unless you were there.
Not many people know this but I was made an IMM by Styx, he trusted me and my methods. Yes it’s true that as a player, I found loops holes and exploits and even flaws in the hosting server, all of which I reported directly to Styx. Shortly after Styx left, there I was with the most powerful house in the game and an IMP staff that didn’t really like me. I always liked to think of myself as a players advocate because I always considered myself a player, not an administrator. I always tried to give people a fair chance, hell I gave some people multiple chances. Many of the hard core players would say “Why did you give this guy house powers/brand/favoritism, he sucks as a player. Look at him he dies 5x a day,” and it was simply because the player asked, they wanted it and tried hard for it. My power tripping was always IC, OOC I always wanted people to have fun. I wanted lots of wars and conflict and good story lines.
It’s interesting to me that Xuri called me and Wervdon out together. Me and Werv were pretty tight when it came to our passion for DM, and we disagreed about a lot of things but one thing we did agree on. The admin staff was difficult to work with. I still remember the day Xuri was making changes behind Wervdon’s back, going as far as modifying his pfile so his trust level was higher than Werv’s just so he could hide… Wervdon was watching him edit his work on the server level and just about blew a gasket. Yeah Wervdon worked on his own pet projects… but so did Xurinos. That guy was gone for a long, long time… coming back on occasion to code some board game idea or something that wasn’t even remotely on the list of things that needed to get done. Hey Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
One thing that always annoyed me was they wouldn’t give me access to the code. I knew how to code, I even submitted code for some of Legion’s skills so Wervdon wouldn’t have to do it with his work load, but I was never given access to the code. Anyone of the admin staff can attest to that. I have a lot more skills than “can lead a House”, “can run a religion”, this old piece of crap website I made over a decade ago gets more views for information that DMs current site (sans forum).
I did have a bad temper, and I’ve mellowed out with age, but I am still the same guy. Everyone needs to remember that DM is a family game, and we’re not part of the family. Spectemur agendo.
