TALES OF A QUEUE KEEPER

Some of you might recognise this story. It's been brought up on occassion and it's one of my faves to break out during RM parties.

A while back now, about halfway through my current tenure as Queue Keeper, a game came through the queue which promised a plethora of amazing systems. The description plot-wise was a bit bare, which is fine for a free-roam type survival game, but the thing that tripped it up were the screenshots. The creator of the game showed off images of not only terribly used default tiles, but horrid window skin examples (green text on red background, with very fancy, barely-legible font).

Of course, I explained that the current images weren't quite up to site standards and to check out various links that I had gathered a few times in the past to give to those whose games get denied - a few of the better mapping tutorials and a link to the screenshot thread.

Cue the game being resubmitted about half an hour later, no changes made. Again, I explained that the maps weren't quite up to standards. He resubmitted again, this time with a small note in the description that he was working on custom graphics and thus wouldn't show off any other screens. Fair enough, but again, since they weren't up to site standards, I couldn't let them pass - if they'd only been bland, maybe I would have, but they were quite badly crafted, so I once more denied, again pointing him towards the links and suggesting maybe waiting until he got the graphics pinned down before resubmitting.

Then began the shitstorm. It started with a topic in which he demanded to know what 'below standards' meant, why his game wasn't accepted, and what the standards were. I replied, and he went a bit crazy about how he'd 'been making games for 9 years and no one ever complained about my mapping before and how dare you not give me a detailed account of why each and every screen isn't good enough to be on this site!!!"

So feedback was given, he pressed the issue by citing the fact that his game was a WIP that and you can't expect decent graphics from a game that is still in production (like that stops anyone else on the site at all from posting decent or semi-decent images of their games), he growled a bit, I cited the bad content ban which allows us to deny any submission to the site that we see fit and the topic was locked.

Then came a new topic where he publicly called me out (he also resubmitted his game yet again), telling us to kiss his ass and that if x game of mine was considered high quality mapping vs his own, then he could see why it didn't fit in, and insinuating that for some reason my pride was bruised. (Which is hilarious as he picked one of my prettier games as an example, instead of the couple of shit games I do have on the site.)

He was promptly warned, to which he sent a PM: "Haha, hope that ego feels better now, good luck with your "high quality" game there buddy...", then began to spam the queue with his horribad game over and over again, despite warnings not to. He added small jabs in the description like "To reviewer. please improve your perception and downgrade your pride before denying. Thank you." and even replied back to officially being warned with
"Ha, that's not demeaning in any way. If anyone took the time to actually read the description they would realize it was a tech demo. I've already started work on a tileset that is not RTP and revising it to the map of the tech demo. These will not be uploaded on the site out of shear principle, you can continue your better than thou attitude, and the stroking of your own ego all you want. But whats there already with RTP is a damn sight better than what I've seen from your games. So you can spam your terrible tutorials all you want but I'll keep submitting on this account and new accounts, I'll mask my IP address a million times over and for the rest of your miserable 8 year old life you can continue hitting the deny button. I don't care one way or the other."

By this point it had been going on for a few weeks. I was even quoted at one point as saying: (I'd swap him for S4D any day. Xand, come back. All is forgiven!)

Finally, after that, we banned him for it.

But that wouldn't stop him. Oh, no. Not a bit. Not this man. This was the super spammer of 2014, after all, and the holder of the record for most account evades thus far.

I warned the team he'd be back, guessing at within a week, and not even a day later... http://rpgmaker.net/users/LibertySucks/
His very first account evade was created. And thus, did terror rain down from on high - the first boss battle of the submission queue had begun!

Every day or so I would find a new game in the queue... with the same description and screenshots. He never tried to hide that it was his game, he just kept making new accounts and resubmitting - no comments, just that game, in the queue, day after day.

I have to admit, I liked his naming style for the new accounts. Some great names there:
i_get_knocked_down
and_i_get_up_again
i_am_resolved
a_matter_of_principal
a_matter_of_pride
dabestmapping
sk8trboi
ForTheHorde
gamer4evs

And a bunch more. Every day, for about half a month, he submitted his game and created a new account. At about 9 we started a betting pool to guess how many he would make. Eventually the fight ran out of him at 18, giving kentona the win.

He finally capitulated with one last PM, saying that he'd lost the will to fight, that he is not nor had ever been a troll but was extremely stubborn and that if I wanted to ban his new account he'd just leave. While he admitted that he'd gone out of his way to be difficult and aimed at me personally and that it had been a matter of pride for him, he never actually apologised for any of it, but I let him know that the act of actually creating new accounts was what was seeing him banned this time, but that if he wanted to return in the future he was welcome to do so, after his ban ran out.

And thus, the many-headed hydra was finally laid to rest. He has yet to return, probably (hopefully) finding a new lair in which to show off his game. I do hope he used that stubborness he showed in order to improve on his game and create something awesome, though.

Sometimes we get quite questionable games come through. As Queue Keeper, certain combinations of words in the description of a game will have me sending a PM off to the creator, asking for more details on what, exactly, they meant by what they wrote. Usually it's when they mention mature humour, rape, sexual content and the like. I have to make sure that certain standards aren't over-run.

Most of the time, there's no issue. There's a few sexual jokes or there's scenes of rape, and they're good about adding tags and not going too far with the content. Sometimes, though, it gets a little... questionable. And sometimes? Sometimes people lie.

Case in point.

We had a game come through the queue that I was iffy about at the time due to the mention of rape and sexual content. When I got in contact with the creator, asking him to detail some of the scenes (I have learned not to just ask about them in general or people will downplay the scenes - you gotta ask straight up for detailed explanations of the lead-up, the scene and the fallout) he mentioned a few sexual encounters with women that were basically just fade-out scenes and one mention of rape when it came to a monster. I asked him to tone that down a little, then, when he said okay, let it on the site.

Little did I know...

About a month later I got a report from one of the members about this game not being properly tagged. Checking it out, I found the game I'd been initially quite iffy about. The comments on the page were quite shocked at the content in the game and how the game got accepted to the site - especially with no warnings being added to the page. Curious, I jumped in and checked it out.

And was subsequently horrified by just what I'd let on the site.

See, one of the issues with the amount of games that come through the queue (and how they're handled) is that you really can't play them all - indeed, you can't play most of them as downloads have yet to be added - so you're stuck judging based on what is presented to you. If the creator decides to straight-out lie to you about the content, even when you ask them for more details about questionable stuff, there's not much you can do. You haven't played it so you can't say whether or not the game is as it has been advertised.

And this game... wowsers, this game. For one, the scene where I'd asked him to tone down the rape mention had instead been amped up quite a bit. For two, there were many, many more instances of straight-out rape and the whole game revolved around sexing up every woman you came across - crassly and with no consideration of them being anything more than pieces of meat with which to grow a new race of your people. Hell, most of the women didn't even have names, instead being called things like 'bitch, whore, prostitute' and the like.

The lying, the lack of clear warnings, and the extreme misogyny and sexual content saw it removed from the site until such time as it was reworked in a way that it wouldn't offend half the world to play.

A funnier case, this time - sometimes I get it wrong. I'll admit to that. I try hard to make the proper judgement on games, and if I'm at all worried that I might be wrong about something, I'll make sure to ask for more examples to better judge by.

The game in question this time was one that I've since grown to love (and recently streamed for some of you on the slack channel). It was a case of a badly-presented image in a game that reeked of questionable intent. A dating visual novel, that looks badly put together, it included an image of a scene with a black bar across a couch. The way it read seemed to be pornographic in nature, so I was worried about what, exactly, was hidden behind the black box.

Thankfully, that game had a download attached to the game page, so I gave it a download and learned that it was a spoiler that was hidden, not porn. That game went on to be my pick for GOTY 2014, and has become beloved by quite a few people on the site, even spawning a few taglines for the site (OK CAN and YOU CANNOT GUESS THIS PLOT TWISTER!!!).

Sometimes good things come from checking.

Anyone else remember that time in Gaming World where some guy took maps from Ara Fell and tried to pass them off as his own? No? Just me? Well, Pepper-ridge farm remembers. So do I.

It's not often that we get people who steal others' work in the community, and when we do it usually results in them being called out or having an instant ban applied. We don't have a lot of time for people who steal from their peers, after all, especially as a lot of us are game creators ourselves.

This is a short case. I was going through the queue not long after being promoted to it, when a game came to my attention with some pretty bad mapping. I gave the usual 'game currently doesn't meet site standards when it comes to mapping, please check out a few tutorials and make use of the screenshot thread for feedback' spiel, denied the game and carried on with the rest of the queue. Very typical stuff.

The next day I checked the queue only to find the game resubmitted, this time with a new set of maps. A very pretty new set of maps. One of which looked passingly familiar...

Now, something a fair few people don't realise is that there are ways out there to check images to see where they came from, and the few times I've questioned the validity of a game's maps, I've used this method (also to check where certain images come from when people claim them on their game pages). Thinking it odd that this game, which only the day before showed some very, very bad mapping, I checked out the images to see if there were some matches, and boy howdy were there ever!

The creator of the game in question had grey-scaled the images, but the details were still there, and easy enough to match up with their full-colour versions, which, shock of shocks, came from a bunch of different games. Of course, this wasn't going to stand, so I happily sent him a deny, told him that we don't tolerate thieves on the site and reported him straight to kentona to take care of.

He went without a fight. Most people do.

This is a more general case and one that happens pretty often. People find it hard to say anything about their game for some reason, often giving one sentence about the general plot then nattering on about either:
= how they got in to game making
= why they made the game and how
= LOOK AT ALL MY SYSTEMS AND HERE ARE ALL THE CREDITS FOR THEM!!!
= asdjlfahsdgha;sdhgahghasd;lalsjdrajsdghasgbhaohgaw;oehtfiahrgkhasd;lfjla;dsjflasdjglasdthere that's 500 characters right?
= page stretching letters

Today, someone even added a random youtube video to their page in order to make up the word count. Not their own video, just something they found on the internet and thought was funny.

I find it a sad state of affairs when people want others to play their game but can't find anything to say about the game to get people interested at all. If you can't find something to say about it, why should people bother to play it, after all? There's really no incentive.

Sure, you do get the occassional game where you really can't say much about it because of the type of game it is - a minigame or tech demo, usually - but for the most part it's horror games, RPGs and the like, usually with gameplay of up to an hour or more, that have this issue.

I like to try and prompt some ideas out of the creators - tell us a bit about the hero, why they have to do this thing, what the thing is they need to do, what their aims are/were whilst doing/before doing this thing, something about the setting or world in which it's set... etc.

3-5 sentences is the minimum I ask, and it's pretty short, all things considered. One paragraph about who the characters are, why they're doing shit, what shit they're doing and maybe where the shit is going down if they need to reach a bit. Give the player something to latch on to so that they know the basics before going in.

Instead, sometimes I just get this:
Jack has to save the world and his sister and the sword he found of his dead dad.
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