Servie abuse
Consequences will never be the same!

Working servie isn't a death sentence like people are making it out to be.

What IS true is that a lot of disgraced corpies and fuckup mixers go work servie and bring their pasts with them.

If you're a player who harshly abuses servies for no other reason than reflex against servies as a class, is that something that you think is an example of theme that you're supposed to follow? Do you think that servie abuse which you have seen is occurring in a vacuum, regardless of the individual targets?

Learn more about why exactly it is that specific servies receive the hate that they do, and, let the rest off easier. I'm not saying don't haze them, but don't make their life out-and-out impossible unless they have earned it.

I mean, sometimes they do.

Hazing, not scorching the earth.

There are service workers on Blue, Green, Gold and Red, in every imaginable context. Everywhere, millions of them. It's not thematic to target any one class like this is Call of Duty: Neuromancer Edition, it's smallworldy and illogical. Immersive roleplay is more than Red vs Blue.

Character conflict should arise out of social nuance and conflict between actual characters themselves, not out of binary logic for who is good and who is bad.

To my mind, RPing from your character's (potentially) limited perspective is much more IC and themely than using broad-vision OOC understandings of how Withmore "works".

WCS and Chex are perfectly 'acceptable' places to work service for, according to mixers, apparently.

At the same time some of them sometimes appear neglectful toward their duties to the corporations as a result/personal safety concern.

For a while now I've thought that if it weren't widely accepted that servies had to be in love with the corps, mixers might get more use out of them. There's a lot that could be done if these servies everyone likes to beat down so often were given a chance to actually prove their worth, rather than be forced to eventually go corpie because the mix is no longer safe for them.

They should be seen as a resource to be used by both sides, instead of one side seeing them as potentially useful and the other side choosing to only see them as walking pinatas.

Being targeted for labels is 90% of the game, whether you're Topside or Mix.

The IC theme is all about sides and factions and conflicts, but it's up to players to understand the OOC distinctions between what drives conflicts and plots, and what snuffs it out. It is necessary to allow for plots to arise from roleplay before just snuffing someone out because they got X job.

Is it possible to justify forcing players to avoid certain jobs based on the theme? Yes.

Does that drive further conflict or does it act as a chilling effect by cutting out an avenue for it? I'd argue the latter.

Setting aside all the philosophical or theoretical arguments about there being millions of service embedded in every level of Withmore society, as Necron very astutely notes, the bottom line is it's just good gameplay to incorporate service into plots as tools towards a further end.

The key to any conflict is contact and although strides have been made to push Mixers and Corporate characters into uncomfortable proximity to drive conflicts, service mixers are the ones best positioned to bridge the gap and start shit in both directions. No one is doing themselves any plot favours by treating them like the enemy wholecloth.

It's also completely untrue that certain jobs are stigmatized because they're too powerful otherwise. Anyone can go corporate, there's no 'ride to the top' because there's no 'top'. It's all just different gameplay, corporate characters aren't 'winning' Sindome any more than anyone else is.

That's essentially misunderstanding the IC theme as an OOC mechanic -- as a general rule the jobs people are persecuted for are not very good, because the actual good service jobs are packed with players who have handwaved their positions as being 'exempt' from any class conflict.

And it's only up to characters to manage their own impressions if players aren't marshalling conflict against them en masse on the boards instead of pursuing their own personal conflicts IC. Service mixers are mixers, period.

If someone doesn't like characters who work at KMB or SAR or Grunen's or wherever else, they have all the means they could want to pursue that IC.

And I am going to make a proposition here that some will immediately dismiss but I will throw it out anyways.

There can be degrees of dislike and a lot of fun RP can be born from the escalation or even the deescalation of your dislike levels. Murder and robbery can and should always be a part of the game but I personally think it's fine to start lower on the hate scale (give dirty looks, short responses if any, talking shit about them, refuse to share a room with them) then escalate or deescalate as the RP dictates.

I am not saying reduce conflict. I am suggesting that there should be MORE conflict and that conflict can happen ad many, many levels.

I played a PC who many would call the worst of the servies. They lived and played in the mix. Never even came close to running topside. Of all the hate RP directed at them, by far my favorite was a simple bartender refusing to serve them at the bar and generally avoiding contact while openly trash talking my PC.

That was some great RP for both of us. It was super themely. It went places.

No one is prejudiced against Clone Angels, Chex, SkyFox, WCS, or even Sing-A-Rong. The difference is that the latter set of jobs serve either primarily Mixers or both classes. The latter serve only corpies.

The expectation is that someone working at KMB/Bizou/Grunens is trying to ingratiate themselves with corpies and become corporate. These characters are then ostracized by the Mix, targeted for extortion and often end up becoming corporate as a means of escaping their now awful circumstances.

That's not the only way of dealing with those characters. Your Grunen's bartender could be selling data on corporate relationships and conversations back to the Mix. They could be serving as a middleman to shift drugs up from Mixer labs to their patrons. Your KMB bartender could be representing the Mix on TV for the whole Dome to see.

Instead we often fall into the easy trap of casting suspicion and aspersion on these people because "corporate bad". What could be good paying, desirable jobs that you need some measure of influence to obtain (maybe you're the topside agent of a crime family and this is your thinly-veiled but accepted cover) are instead ghost towns because people treat Gold and Green sector bartenders as corporate citizens (and believe me, the corpies don't treat them that way.)

Conversely, though, another issue is corpies being surprised and/or offended that their bartenders are living in the Mix and have Mix friends and sometimes hang out in the Mix rather than huddling alone in a cube on Gold and that can be just as much of an issue.

I don't honestly see a problem even if all service mixers are treated like pinatas filled up by Corpies and sent back down to the Mix to be slapped around until all the goodies fall out.

Almost all of the serious jobs available to Mixers are service (or secretly outright corporate), but this often gets ignored in these discussions -- often because some players have no idea which jobs are which or how the city actually works OOC or IC.

All of the 'end-tier' roles in the Mix are effectively corporate. Most of the jobs that players and characters actually want to have are service. Many of the roles you think about as being 'Mix' are not -- Red Sector is not some foreign enemy nation in contrast to topside sectors, it's as much a part of the system as any other.

As I've said before this has been done, and it went nowhere. No one is going to push for players to leave the jobs with the best gameplay en masse for some backwards ideological OOC reasoning, so the end result is always going to be a few less-wanted jobs are singled out as 'the corpie ones' and all the good jobs will be handwaved as acceptable.

It's so frustrating dealing with this when it's specifically contrary to what was discussed at length by staff when the division went in. Service are part of the Mix, and corporate characters are not supposed to consider them corporate as a way of enforcing that.

Can a character on their own think all servies are too corporate? Sure, but trying to call for this to be the general theme or marshalling other players to do on the behalf of some call to thematic action has been arbitrarily killing off segments of the game through isolation and neglect for no reason at all.

'Kill all the Bratva' is not an appropriate thematic discussion any more than targetting any role or player OOC is an appropriate thematic discussion.

Anyone marshalling forces against other specifics players or factions OOC is effectively metagaming for IC advantage under the guise of discussing theme.

It's already been established over the past two years that players will twist this kind of conflict so that they don't have to do the parts of it that disadvantage themselves, all the while draped in the flag of 'playing to theme' and punching down all the way.

It's unthemely to OOC paint certain factions or roles as the enemy contrary to the specific instructions given by staff as to how the divide is implemented. This is using IC reasoning to make OOC arguments which is completely backwards and self-serving.

Maybe it's because I am newer here, but I do not see SPECIFIC instructions on how to view and interact with specific characters in specific roles provided by staff.

I see guidance dictating the differences between classes, and a broad expectation of how the world treats these facets of society.

I don't know if I could keep up with the game and RP if i had to specifically treat different types of people certain ways in spite of organic RP developments.

If one interaction with a service mixer makes me character absolutely hate the whole class of people, and other people vibe with that sentiment, that's kind of just roleplay isn't it?

This is a theme issue that needs some enforcing.