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Shades of Grey
Shades of Grey is a WoD MUSH started by people fleeing Thunder Bay's Shifter sphere to set up their own sandbox. The game uses a consent-based policy, with players able to veto changes or problems for their character. This policy is explained in five out of twenty-one news files, and in five separate bbposts. It may also be mentioned elsewhere, in case someone missed it the first ten times. Conflict is also flatly discouraged, due to the head staffer (Queen_Elizabeth) having problems with dominance; Queen_Elizabeth has had difficulty with a wolf-pack dynamic. Her attitude, shared by most of the senior staffers, interferes very strongly with the idea that In-Character Actions Equal In-Character Consequences. This lack of hierarchy and accountability has lost the game players and cut down on new log-ins, and those who stay tend to be people who love the idea that they will not have to deal with the problems arising from their stupidity. One player apped a rather... socially difficult (think Tourette's Syndrome) M+. Two days and one vampire later, said M+ is targeted for Ghouling. 'Sea Witch,' the M+ Wizard, arrived to judge the scene and asked the M+ player if it was OOCly okay for her character to be ghouled. Said M+ player answered, "Yes." Sea Witch then asked the loaded, "Are you sure? (insert long explanation of adverse effects to M+ character, such as loss of numina, etc.)" Said M+ player answered, "Yes," again. The scene begins, is interrupted three more times to re-confirm, the re-confirmed OOC consent. (Re-re-confirmed?) On the 5th such inquiry, M+ player said, "Actually, no," and logged out, never to return to this particular game. In this player's own words: "They browbeat you into not doing anything interesting." Examples include a Bone Gnawer who revealed their Garou nature to a human played by someone unaware of most of the rules for Werewolf, including the concept of Delirium. The situation was 'fixed' by retroactively declaring the human a kinfolk and the Garou being knocked down to cub rank. He regained his rank after a few months of play. This same character had previously destroyed part of a mall with explosives and been taped doing so as his idea of a prank, but did not lose renown and was ruled to have only had to serve a few months of community service. Other characters liked by staff and coddled for their actions include a Pooh-Bear stereotype of a Gurahl consistently written with poor grammar and no writing skill. Another example is Indy in the Changeling sphere, who is playing a childling cat pooka with no mentor and claims not to know very much about Changeling either IC or OOC. He doesn't reply to suggestions that he get the book. He poses badly-typed single lines, often trying to be 'cute' by demanding hugs or to make himself the center of attention, and he's driven people into logging off rather than deal with him. His faedesc gives a good idea of his style:
(Incidentally, this is the same person that plays 'Hayden' also 'Katie' on Cajun Nights, and this editor suspects played "Jeffers" on Fallen Leaves) The staff of Shades of Grey wanted to make a place for people who did not fit on other MUSHes. Unfortunately, they failed to take into account that these people might not be welcome on other games for reasons such as idiocy or complete disregard for rules. The MUSH is unlikely to succeed unless it gets better players or a complete change in philosophy. The Shades of Grey grid is impressive, not in a good way. It's a large grid for a small playerbase and has many street rooms with nothing connected to them. It's difficult to find any grid room desc without at least one grammar or spelling error; there are usually several. To top that, the entire freehold was stolen without permission from MoB, although when the original builder discovered that he ended up graciously giving the game permission to use it. Just ignore that the freehold is Mediterranean and the rest of the Dreaming is arctic. In late 2009 Shades of Grey suffered an irreparable database crash, with staff claiming all available backups to have been rejected by the server, and so underwent a reboot of the game, with old characters brought back from the players' or the staff's backups, whichever is more recent. The grid has, for the most part, been rebuilt, and new code foo (to replace the old defective code that was the cause of the crash) is being either sought or written from scratch. The game is accepting applications for new or returning characters, and is currently in soft-roleplay mode until the code system has been sufficiently restored or replaced.
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