#habitrpg

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Plus, the selection of past Backgrounds in the Customization Shop has rotated, now featuring scenes from June and December.

To @habitica staff (and in the interest of notifying Tumblr users who may not have realized anything was happening at all who may want to integrate this knowledge into their understanding of Habitica’s landscape going forward--open letter and all that jazz):

On Tuesday, January 31, you said that conversations in the Tavern had been disruptive and alienating to fellow Habiticans. You directed this at socialites.

So let’s talk about that.

On Monday, January 30, a troll targeted me and others in the Tavern for over two hours before you finally completely put your foot down regarding it.

Except you didn’t. You saw that I had tried to give their story the benefit of the doubt and tried to politely note some problematic phrasings of theirs and you decided sending the convo to PM was okay. Because, IDK, you didn’t see the flags from earlier where they were trying to gaslight me or whatever.

The user tried to strong-arm me into letting them share my words in a TikTok they claimed was about their autistic sibling’s “coping journey” (something I was not keen to be part of considering what I know about the kind of person who is likely to post autism-related things phrased that way). I know you know this because I reported the messages to you and you responded to those flags with clear understanding and took action (I presume a mute but I don’t actually know).

...And then the user took it offsite. They made a post about me on Twitter and by the end of the day I had several flames to fics on my AO3 account. (I “know” this was a tweet despite not having concrete proof because I am choosing to believe the least hostile (even nice at the end of the day) person who commented to my fics and who I was able to reply to and get a reply back from is telling the truth.) I was afraid to check my email for three days straight.

All for something I firmly believe the mods would have put a stop to and evaluated the full situation of far before it could have become that kind of problem. But there are no more mods. Only you.

Do better.

You said that comments posted in an effort to incite a hostile or contentious environment in public spaces in Habitica are unacceptable. You implied that PMs about it are also unacceptable. You directed this at socialites.

So let’s talk about that.

Since December 5, 2022, your treatment of sharing the reasons the mods were gone and why, after their strike and subsequent removal, has made everyone feel like anything they do or say or feel about the decision can’t be discussed without fear of account consequences. That is a hostile environment in public spaces.

In late evening January 31, you--at least temporarily--unhid a post that clearly did not comply with ultimatums you had just laid out in the very same chat, despite receiving reports that it was directly hurtful to other users and violating the ultimatums. There is no clear reason this was done unless it was because it was declared to be okay because its ire was directed only at contributors and not at staff. That is a comment that incites a hostile or contentious environment in public spaces in Habitica.

Between January 31 and February 2, you have muted and even full-on banned people without clear explanation of the things you believe they did wrong, and sometimes with a flimsy, nonsensical, or even nonexistent explanation when you were pressed for one. People are afraid to do anything now lest a staff that is employing increasingly totalitarian consequences to actions that shouldn’t call for consequences that severe prevent them from accessing the site at all. That is a contentious environment.

On January 31, you posted a message to Aspiring Socialites declaring these ultimatums but also suggesting we “do better”. This message, crucially, was describing something that not all socialites did something to cause (I know this because I asked point-blank and you (eventually) answered), but yet its words apparently apply to all socialites. But if that’s true, we can’t all need to “do better” unless you thought we were all “doing worse”--and this was a public message directed to all socialites and not individuals who exhibited behavior you thought to be bad, something I witnessed little to none of, anyway. That is a comment that incites a hostile or contentious environment in public spaces in Habitica.

Do better.

You are making people scared. You are letting people get hurt. Your moderation practices since the mods’ removal have resulted in noticeable changes to chat that have alienated many long-time Habiticans. You don’t seem to even want a community so much as an army of underlings who will never say anything that might challenge you to think about what you’re doing or to reflect on your actions.

For the past few days, I’ve started calculating (as a negative habit) the number of times on Habitica that I gave myself a reward I didn’t have enough gold to earn. I did the calculations today and, in the past few days, I’ve rewarded myself an average of 3-4 times per day without actually completing tasks I need to get done to earn those rewards. And that’s just the times I was honest enough to check it off--I know for a fact that there were several days where I fell into a hole and then pretended not to remember instead of logging it.

I know, from past experience, that if I ignore the value of the rewards it impedes my capacity to get things done since I know I’ll just give myself the reward whether I’ve earned it or not, so I’m committing to work hard on this. I also know that the crowning jewel of my undiagnosed-but-very-likely ADHD is a complete lack of self-control, which is why this is so important to me. I find it very easy to fall into spirals, and I’ve found that for every one instance of engaging in a bad habit, it takes me approximately 2 weeks to get back to a period of consistent non-engagement with that habit, which I try to remember when temptation hits. Is it worth it to spend 2 weeks getting out of that spiral? No way.

Especially since I go back to teaching in about 3 weeks, and I have a to-do list as long as my arm that has to make itself happen before then. I don’t have 2 weeks to do anything but be awesome!

Reposting here because guild chat is ephermal; I’m not sure if my guild chat post will be deleted for length, tangentialness to the guild’s subject, arguing with mods, or any other reason, and because it’s applicable to more than far more than just Habitica anyway:

Context: I made a snarky aside about the phrase “ran out of health,” as a euphemism for “died” (that was not always used) when reporting a bug involving duplicate death notifications. One of the mods replied:

@osberend : The "ran out of health" message was added to replace the death message when we received a lot of feedback that "death" was unmotivating and was causing some users to abandon Habitica. It's not intended as a euphemism but as a way of making more people more comfortable with using Habitica. For those of us who weren't bothered by the death message, it's not a significant disadvantage to read "ran out of health" instead. If you'd like to suggest changes, Help > Request a Feature would be the best place. For the trouble with the death behaviour, please report it to the app developers through the app's menu at About > Report a Bug.

This was my response (not blockquoting because it’s long, and runs through the end of the post):

I'm not going to try to argue whether the change was on balance a good one or not here. I know that it's useless, it's either banned or close to it, and, in any event, doing it properly would depend both on statistics that I don't have, and knowledge priorities that I have never seen explicitly laid out.

I've stopped posting messages just to complain about that sort of thing, although I do occasionally put a mildly snarky aside in a fundamentally informative message, like I did in my last post. If necessary, I can try to stop doing that too.

But even if it is the right decision, I still find the "there are no real costs to this"--type rhetoric very off-putting and, well, demoralizing. You say "For those of us who weren't bothered by the death message, it's not a significant disadvantage to read 'ran out of health' instead." And I'm sure that's true for you. It's very likely true for a sizeable majority of people who weren't bothered by the death message. But it's not true for me.

Every time I see that "ran out of health" message, it annoys and repels me. Every. Single. Time. (And my combination of playstyle and level of executive dysfunction means that "every single time I die" is *a lot*.) It actually makes me less likely to promptly open up Habitica in the morning if I know that I took lethal damage at cron, which is of course a very bad thing, in that it means that being badly unproductive on one day increases my chances of being badly unproductive on the next.

I have a very strong negative reaction toward the use of euphemism in an attempt to avoid upsetting me, or to avoid upsetting anyone who may be upset in an audience that includes me. (That last isn't quite optimally phrased, but I'm not sure if there's a terse way to express the intension of what I'm reacting to. If you actually want me to elaborate, I will.)

And it is a euphemism: The mechanism is a fairly typical RPG "character death" mechanism. It was called "death" initially, and how it works was not changed when its name was. You describe it as "death" yourself in some other posts on this page. Etc. I understand that it's meant to avoid demoralizing players (which is a commendable goal!), but that's kind of what a euphemism *is*: Not calling something what it really is, to avoid listeners having some sort of negative reaction, whether that's anger, offense, fear, or anything else, including demoralization.

I'm autistic, and I suspect that that's connected to, but not the sole element of, my reaction. I used to get angry back in pre-school when the teacher would say "I need you to sit down," in an attempt to soften what was effectively a command to sit down, when I didn't want to. Because she didn't (at least absolutely) *need* me to sit down, she just *wanted* me to sit down, and she was *lying to me* in an attempt to get me to do what she wanted. I'm told that the phrasing she used tends to *mollify* most children. That baffles me.

Again, my purpose in this post is not to argue that the change was bad on balance, really. The fact that it was bad for me doesn't necessarily mean that. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and in this case, you can't *not* make an omelette without breaking (a different set of) eggs, either.

But as one of the eggs getting broken (or at the very least a bit bashed-around; it's not like this is making it impossible for me to use Habitica at all, but it does genuinely make Habitica less useful for me), I find it offensive and upsetting when people react to complaints by saying "This helps some people, and it's not like it really hurts anyone." It hurts *me*. And just switching to a justification more along the lines of "There were a lot of people who found the old message deeply upsetting and/or demoralizing, and who are fine with the new message. While we recognize that there are some people who were fine with the old message but are deeply upset with and/or demoralized by the new message (either the message itself, or the decision to switch to it), it is our belief, based on number of comments received, that there are many fewer of them than there are of the other group" would at least avoid adding insult to injury. (Actually doing a poll to try to establish the truth of that would be even better, as would adding some sort of toggle to allow people to choose between a softer, fuzzier Habitica, and a harsher, blunter one. If and when I ever get around to setting up a local installation of Habitica (executive dysfunction, again), seeing about adding a "language" ("blunt English?") to at least approximate that is on my long list of changes and subsequent pull requests to make.)

This same sentiment also applies (at least for me) to a number of other changes meant to make Habitica friendlier to new users (and to plenty of things unrelated to Habitica at all; this is a broad social trend that is very upsetting to me): It may very well be the case that the the number of people you're seriously helping is substantially greater than the number of people you're seriously hurting. But don't dismiss the latter's existence out of hand, just because there are fewer of them, or because it's harder for you to imagine *how* you're hurting them than it is to imagine how you're helping the others. Don't add insult to injury.

And especially please don't, as I see happen a lot on other sites (I haven't seen it happen here, though a few responses I've seen from other mods to various complaints have gotten kinda close for comfort), declare that anyone who's hurt must be a gatekeeping elitist who wants to keep others out, and that their pain is just them getting butthurt about efforts to be more inclusive.

HAPPY ORCA DAY!

APRIL BACKGROUND AND ARMOIRE ITEMS!

We’ve added a new background to the Customization Shop! Now your avatar can travel through space while Riding a Comet!

Plus, the selection of past Backgrounds in the Customization Shop has rotated, now featuring scenes from April and October.

BALLOON, SHIMMER, AND GLASS POTIONS NOW AVAILABLE IN THE MARKET!

Stop into the Market and browse this month’s Magic Hatching Potions! From now until May 21st you can snag the Balloon, Shimmer, and Glass Magic Hatching Potion and add some neat new friends to your stable!

Magic Hatching Potions work on any standard Pet egg. And Magic Hatching Potion Pets love every kind of Pet food, so they can grow into Mounts fast!