Unpopular DWRP opinions, but I've been out of the hobby for awhile and also I mostly had good experiences so it's hard to get super angry.

I think the primary one I never could wrap my brain completely around was the cognitive dissonance of how OCs were treated in a lot of cases, either with a ban for the longest time or a pretty heavy bias after that.

When in almost every game it was like: okay, so you're taking this canon character, in most cases taking all of their memories, powers, pertinent knowledge and abilities away, in some cases giving them fake cover memories or alternate power sets in lieu of the original, and then putting them in situations and with casts that in no way match their canon.

Let's be real the app for canon characters has always had fuckall to do with how the game goes, it's basically a summary of how they're supposed to work and a statement of intent about how you're going to take it.

mood

Apps in general got ridiculous after awhile, tbh. I literally have a degree in composition and I remember thinking "okay this is excessive for what the purpose of this is."

Actually so did CR at a lot of games. A lot of the same games. DWRP was a weird land of contrasts in that regard.

Er, not CR. Activity. I was thinking AC not CR.

I guess to bring this around to opinion: Every game I ever saw that tried to have a super complex AC system so it would be more fair and less easy to cheat with cliques, in fact ultimately encouraged putting together a clique of friends to cheat to bypass all the horseshit.

And in fact if you were a primarily OC player like yours truly you basically had to do this to survive.

Uhhh, let's see, what else vintage can I dig out...

Trauma games were a cool and vital concept executed absolutely piss poorly in almost every situation because the game either spiraled into nothing but trauma games or you did the in retrospect hilarious thing that people in Kyr did.

Where there was a mandatory month between trauma games.

So people would go hard as hard on them as they could, then basically flail about rolling around in how fucked up they had gotten... typically getting dragged by their CR and the game's pace back to about normal right in time to be in the next trauma game.

"What's your character's arc here?" "Uhhh falling down the stairs in slow motion."

"You know that Greek myth about the guy forced to push a boulder up a hill until it slips down at the last second for all eternity and he has to start over again?" "Yeah." "Yeah that, but emotionally."

/stares dead-eyed at recolle

I wasn't gonna name names but yeah ReColle definitely struck out hard in both those first two points, Jesus. I've never had a mod team be more passive-aggressive about not wanting to accept someone but not having a reason before in my life.

For the record I got hit with multiple revises, including contradictory ones, and the mods took so long between responses that it precluded me from the new player CR planning/meet-and-greet and in fact actually would have made AC impossible if not for new player clemency.

And the only reason we could ever figure was that some other guy had been a major creep and played male OCs and uh... I apped a male OC and was a relative unknown...?

Which like, I'm not unsympathetic to the idea they were worried I was some guy trying to creep back in but I'm actually fairly public about who I am it would have taken like one conversation to clear this up.

Which was kind of the flipside of the thing that happened a fair bit in ecats circles where when I was publicly a dude playing a dude I suddenly had a lot of people who were like, beelining toward me for smut? Gay smut, universally. That was weird.

(If you can read this you were not a problem. I did in fact play relatively flirty guys. Nobody who got creepy about it is on my plurk list. We're good.)

mark... the yaoi god

I legitimately think people just assumed I was gay and given ecats it wasn't unreasonable.

I mean I think mostly they assumed you were 'safe' and played dudes who were more compelling than the typical yaoibait and also like...didn't freak out or get weird about the thirst coming your way.

also hot dudes.

you were a pioneer of hunks/twunks in a time period where 'twas a sea of willowy bishounen.

what a hero