May recs: 3 QSMP recs + thoughts
May. 31st, 2024 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkI almost forgot about May recs. So I looked at my to-rec list, found a QSMP fic in "MCYT – miscellaneous," wrote a rec, and then thought "huh, I wonder if there's more like that." (I found one more I really liked.) And then "I still have thoughts about the whole sad QSMP story." And "I wish there was a r/hobbydrama write-up I could link to." Buuut looks like I'll have to do it myself. Not an actual write-up, just a summary. (Please at least one person tell me they read it otherwise I'll be sad. You can lie.)
Minecraft is an open world game where you can mine things, craft things, build things, fight monsters, and, if you're on a multi-player server, you can do that together with other people. So-called "survival mode" means you can die and don't have certain "cheat" commands. An "SMP" is a Survival Multi-Player server.
The QSMP began in March 2023. It was founded by the popular English/Mexican streamer Quackity and it was advertised as the first multi-lingual SMP: there was a translation software that would automatically translate what people said into other languages and display it above their characters' head. It was a cool idea to get people from different communities together, and Quackity managed to get some very big names both from the English and the Spanish-speaking Minecraft creator scene. Not too long after they also added creators from Brazil and France (and at the very end Germany and Korea but they barely got to play.)
Some SMPs just release players on a world and let them do what they want, but it was immediately apparent that the QSMP offered more than that. The world already had big buildings in it, and it had "NPCs": characters played by admins that played specific roles, some helpful, some antagonistic. Most importantly, soon after their arrival players were assigned "eggs" that they had to take care of: children characters in the shape of eggs, also played by admins.
Personally I'd never seen an SMP with actually acted NPCs before and I thought it was brilliant. It meant that the players always had someone to interact with even if no other player was online, the relationships that developed with the eggs were often great, the whole mystery of where the eggs came from and, soon afterwards, who wanted to harm them provided great tension, etc. etc. And because the eggs only communicated via writing, if one admin wasn't available another admin could take over that character. There were frequent new quests for players to do on their own or with their eggs, new NPCs with questionable goals were introduced, it was all very exciting. (Also very gay sometimes. There was on-screen gay sex RP in the first week. There was also a drug storyline, corruption, character death, impostors, etc. etc. - a lot happened.)
Additionally, unlike some SMPs were players started as a blank slate, so to speak, the QSMP was explicitly a roleplay server and many players brought character backstory from previous servers/games, giving their characters added depth.
Of course the server had its fair share of controversies: sometimes new storylines introduced by the admins didn't seem to consider players' own storylines, some events were announced at very short notice to the players, two players were kicked off the server because of their offline behavior, some groups were sometimes overlooked or featured less in announcements than others (e.g. the French.) But there were some very cool and dramatic storylines, the multicultural aspect was great, players and many viewers became acquainted with other cultures and there were even several real-life meetups by players.
And then, a few months ago, former volunteers started to speak out about bad working conditions. I don't remember the exact chain of events (and can't be bothered to look it up rn,) but at first some volunteers complained about terrible communication, unclear rules, not being allowed to contact players or even other volunteers outside of the server. And then it turned to the question of compensation: some volunteers were promised payment at a later date that never materialized, some were expected to put in way more work than a volunteer should, others were compensated but at very low rates. An actual French union got involved and investigated workers rights violations. Some volunteers/workers were "let go" for unclear reasons. Several others left.
And finally more people began to ask where the money for the QSMP was coming from. At first people simply assumed (or it was even outright stated) that Quackity was paying for it all. But with the amount of work that the server clearly required, server costs and translation software costs but more importantly in labour, in organization and coding and acting, there was no way that was in any way sustainable with the money Quackity made from streaming. There was no Patreon, no merch (until the very end), as far as anyone knew the other creators didn't pay anything – there had to have been a plan for how to finance the project, right?
…yeah. If there was one at any point I haven't heard of it. From what I've seen, the QSMP was organized like a small fan project instead of the massive business that it clearly was, with unclear communication via Discord and completely insufficient structure, HR, payroll, and probably more. And it's an international business! Sounds like a nightmare tbh.
At that point it was unsurprising that the QSMP first paused and then officially ended about a week ago. It left the option open for an eventual season 2 but honestly I'd be very surprised if it happened.
It's honestly such a shame. It was a very ambitious project with cool goals and it accomplished a lot of that, but it collapsed because it was badly set up from the start. I think what might have played a part is that several streamers don't want to appear too "corporate" in fear of alienating their viewers; and also simple naivety. Most servers don't have a better revenue stream than the QSMP: players make money from people watching their streams and videos, and one or some of them pay for the server behind the scenes. (Hermitcraft, for example, only disclosed that some players chip in on server costs, and players pay for their own special models etc., but not in detail.) But most servers don't require near the same amount of labour.
…I don't remember if I actually had a point to make. This could maybe be better if I took a few days to think it over but it is the last day of May and also it might not. But I'm glad I wrote it down in some form. I never watched a lot of QSMP because I find stream-only (or -mostly) SMPs to be exhausting to keep up with, but a lot of former Dream SMP fans and also Philza fans became QSMP fans so I could follow along pretty well via osmosis, I enjoyed the art and the thoughts and the screaming, and when something especially cool happened I sometimes looked for clips or watched specific streams. (I never really got into QSMP fic, the few times I went looking most of it wasn't the kind I was interested in.) Unsurprisingly, as a Phil fan (though not to the degree I used to be), I was especially interested in the Death family (Phil and his fighter son and the abandoned-by-her-original-dad daughter he adopted later and his mostly absent wet cat husband) and Codebreakers (warriors and brothers in arms – Etoiles saying he's Phil's arms and just to tell him who to kill was very good and then it just got better), and then Etoiles who's so funny that I actually considered doing some French practice again to watch his museum tours. I really enjoyed the multilingual/multicultural aspect. I hope that eventually there will be a similar project again, if QSMP 2 or something else, but this time set up better from the beginning.
On to the actual recs!
oblivious to what the trigger does by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Odaigahara (QSMP)
4.3k, gen, Chayanne & Technoblade, Purgatory
Summary: “Take off your shirt and wrap it around your nose and mouth,” the shadow instructed, and that sounded like a great idea, yeah, Chayanne could do that. He wriggled out of his shirt, gasping in shallow little inhales as it caught on his wings, and tied it around his head. It bumped weird against his skull mask, so he had to take that off, but when he put the mask back on top it kept the cloth in place.
“Good,” the shadow said, and Chayanne couldn’t make out what it was, except a blurry figure with a deep voice who sounded very stressed, but he could tell it wasn’t anybody he knew. Couldn’t be a normal person, either, because there wasn’t space to stand on the tower he’d built. “Keep doing that. If you breathe real slow, most of the particles should get caught by the cloth.”
Chayanne nodded, eyes watering. He wiped them with the backs of his hands, fingers twinging, and managed to sign, “Are you real?”
Why I like it: Even just following QSMP by osmosis I caught a good amount of Chayanne feelings. Overprotective older sibling who puts a lot of pressure on himself in hard situations and who hero-worships Technoblade, no surprise. This is very good h/c and I love this take on Chayanne meeting Techno.
Foam on the Stony Shores byunderoriginal
1.5k, gen, Chayanne & Technoblade
Summary: Chayanne hears a strange voice of his own while fighting his father for three days. Based on Phil saying that Chayanne didn't get injured because Techno was there to guide him.
Why I like it: Another "Techno supports Chayanne," this time while Chayanne fights possessed!Phil, again with very nice h/c too.
this barbie likes to fight codes by![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
shblackwoodart
digital art, gen, Etoiles
Why I like it: Some cool art of Etoiles with his won and the spreading code corruption. (Minecraft lore is weird sometimes and Etoiles is canonically a cucumber, which in practice only means that artists give him green skin and it looks cool. The "barbie" comes from Etoiles changing his character outfits frequently, and "likes to fight code[monster]s" - well yeah, that's Etoiles.
Minecraft is an open world game where you can mine things, craft things, build things, fight monsters, and, if you're on a multi-player server, you can do that together with other people. So-called "survival mode" means you can die and don't have certain "cheat" commands. An "SMP" is a Survival Multi-Player server.
The QSMP began in March 2023. It was founded by the popular English/Mexican streamer Quackity and it was advertised as the first multi-lingual SMP: there was a translation software that would automatically translate what people said into other languages and display it above their characters' head. It was a cool idea to get people from different communities together, and Quackity managed to get some very big names both from the English and the Spanish-speaking Minecraft creator scene. Not too long after they also added creators from Brazil and France (and at the very end Germany and Korea but they barely got to play.)
Some SMPs just release players on a world and let them do what they want, but it was immediately apparent that the QSMP offered more than that. The world already had big buildings in it, and it had "NPCs": characters played by admins that played specific roles, some helpful, some antagonistic. Most importantly, soon after their arrival players were assigned "eggs" that they had to take care of: children characters in the shape of eggs, also played by admins.
Personally I'd never seen an SMP with actually acted NPCs before and I thought it was brilliant. It meant that the players always had someone to interact with even if no other player was online, the relationships that developed with the eggs were often great, the whole mystery of where the eggs came from and, soon afterwards, who wanted to harm them provided great tension, etc. etc. And because the eggs only communicated via writing, if one admin wasn't available another admin could take over that character. There were frequent new quests for players to do on their own or with their eggs, new NPCs with questionable goals were introduced, it was all very exciting. (Also very gay sometimes. There was on-screen gay sex RP in the first week. There was also a drug storyline, corruption, character death, impostors, etc. etc. - a lot happened.)
Additionally, unlike some SMPs were players started as a blank slate, so to speak, the QSMP was explicitly a roleplay server and many players brought character backstory from previous servers/games, giving their characters added depth.
Of course the server had its fair share of controversies: sometimes new storylines introduced by the admins didn't seem to consider players' own storylines, some events were announced at very short notice to the players, two players were kicked off the server because of their offline behavior, some groups were sometimes overlooked or featured less in announcements than others (e.g. the French.) But there were some very cool and dramatic storylines, the multicultural aspect was great, players and many viewers became acquainted with other cultures and there were even several real-life meetups by players.
And then, a few months ago, former volunteers started to speak out about bad working conditions. I don't remember the exact chain of events (and can't be bothered to look it up rn,) but at first some volunteers complained about terrible communication, unclear rules, not being allowed to contact players or even other volunteers outside of the server. And then it turned to the question of compensation: some volunteers were promised payment at a later date that never materialized, some were expected to put in way more work than a volunteer should, others were compensated but at very low rates. An actual French union got involved and investigated workers rights violations. Some volunteers/workers were "let go" for unclear reasons. Several others left.
And finally more people began to ask where the money for the QSMP was coming from. At first people simply assumed (or it was even outright stated) that Quackity was paying for it all. But with the amount of work that the server clearly required, server costs and translation software costs but more importantly in labour, in organization and coding and acting, there was no way that was in any way sustainable with the money Quackity made from streaming. There was no Patreon, no merch (until the very end), as far as anyone knew the other creators didn't pay anything – there had to have been a plan for how to finance the project, right?
…yeah. If there was one at any point I haven't heard of it. From what I've seen, the QSMP was organized like a small fan project instead of the massive business that it clearly was, with unclear communication via Discord and completely insufficient structure, HR, payroll, and probably more. And it's an international business! Sounds like a nightmare tbh.
At that point it was unsurprising that the QSMP first paused and then officially ended about a week ago. It left the option open for an eventual season 2 but honestly I'd be very surprised if it happened.
It's honestly such a shame. It was a very ambitious project with cool goals and it accomplished a lot of that, but it collapsed because it was badly set up from the start. I think what might have played a part is that several streamers don't want to appear too "corporate" in fear of alienating their viewers; and also simple naivety. Most servers don't have a better revenue stream than the QSMP: players make money from people watching their streams and videos, and one or some of them pay for the server behind the scenes. (Hermitcraft, for example, only disclosed that some players chip in on server costs, and players pay for their own special models etc., but not in detail.) But most servers don't require near the same amount of labour.
…I don't remember if I actually had a point to make. This could maybe be better if I took a few days to think it over but it is the last day of May and also it might not. But I'm glad I wrote it down in some form. I never watched a lot of QSMP because I find stream-only (or -mostly) SMPs to be exhausting to keep up with, but a lot of former Dream SMP fans and also Philza fans became QSMP fans so I could follow along pretty well via osmosis, I enjoyed the art and the thoughts and the screaming, and when something especially cool happened I sometimes looked for clips or watched specific streams. (I never really got into QSMP fic, the few times I went looking most of it wasn't the kind I was interested in.) Unsurprisingly, as a Phil fan (though not to the degree I used to be), I was especially interested in the Death family (Phil and his fighter son and the abandoned-by-her-original-dad daughter he adopted later and his mostly absent wet cat husband) and Codebreakers (warriors and brothers in arms – Etoiles saying he's Phil's arms and just to tell him who to kill was very good and then it just got better), and then Etoiles who's so funny that I actually considered doing some French practice again to watch his museum tours. I really enjoyed the multilingual/multicultural aspect. I hope that eventually there will be a similar project again, if QSMP 2 or something else, but this time set up better from the beginning.
On to the actual recs!
oblivious to what the trigger does by
4.3k, gen, Chayanne & Technoblade, Purgatory
Summary: “Take off your shirt and wrap it around your nose and mouth,” the shadow instructed, and that sounded like a great idea, yeah, Chayanne could do that. He wriggled out of his shirt, gasping in shallow little inhales as it caught on his wings, and tied it around his head. It bumped weird against his skull mask, so he had to take that off, but when he put the mask back on top it kept the cloth in place.
“Good,” the shadow said, and Chayanne couldn’t make out what it was, except a blurry figure with a deep voice who sounded very stressed, but he could tell it wasn’t anybody he knew. Couldn’t be a normal person, either, because there wasn’t space to stand on the tower he’d built. “Keep doing that. If you breathe real slow, most of the particles should get caught by the cloth.”
Chayanne nodded, eyes watering. He wiped them with the backs of his hands, fingers twinging, and managed to sign, “Are you real?”
Why I like it: Even just following QSMP by osmosis I caught a good amount of Chayanne feelings. Overprotective older sibling who puts a lot of pressure on himself in hard situations and who hero-worships Technoblade, no surprise. This is very good h/c and I love this take on Chayanne meeting Techno.
Foam on the Stony Shores by
1.5k, gen, Chayanne & Technoblade
Summary: Chayanne hears a strange voice of his own while fighting his father for three days. Based on Phil saying that Chayanne didn't get injured because Techno was there to guide him.
Why I like it: Another "Techno supports Chayanne," this time while Chayanne fights possessed!Phil, again with very nice h/c too.
this barbie likes to fight codes by
digital art, gen, Etoiles
Why I like it: Some cool art of Etoiles with his won and the spreading code corruption. (Minecraft lore is weird sometimes and Etoiles is canonically a cucumber, which in practice only means that artists give him green skin and it looks cool. The "barbie" comes from Etoiles changing his character outfits frequently, and "likes to fight code[monster]s" - well yeah, that's Etoiles.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 10:32 pm (UTC)I read a few accounts when the stuff with the Eggs' admins was first going down but this was a much clearer summary. I had no idea there was *no* revenue stream! I'd been assuming it was something like Vault Hunters where the streamer server was publicity for public subscription servers that let you use the translation (and other) mods easily. That's nuts!!! It gave the impression of being such a well-organized project when it started but apparently not. I hope it doesn't poison the idea of the translation mods because that seemed great.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 10:54 pm (UTC)Yeah, the translation mod was very cool but it did mean that I had to pay closer attention when watching QSMP streams than other Minecraft streams, and there was so much of it that I concluded that it was impossible for me to follow pretty much immediately.
To be fair, there might have been other plans for getting money that they did not get around to (because of the other problems.) At some point there was a second translation mod some streamers used that they had to pay for but I was under the impression that that was an external service and not QSMP, though I might be wrong about that.
I think it's connected to how most streamers don't pay their stream moderators: it's volunteer labor done by fans that's too often taken for granted. Many former volunteers/workers talked about how they were willing to invest a lot of work and put up with a lot because they loved the project so much, to the point of struggling with burn-out. As long as they're willing to keep going the project will keep running, but at some point it'll collapse and you can't run a business like that.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 11:02 pm (UTC)I hope the full-time Hermits chip in at least something for the people who do lots of behind-the-scenes work for the server but I've never really wanted to look to closely, tbh. At least it's way, way less intense than the QSMP work, and many of the people doing the admin work also stream.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 11:31 pm (UTC)I haven't looked too closely at the other Hermits tbh. I hope they treat their mods as actual volunteers, i.e. only when they want and happen to be available; I have no idea e.g. how many mods the bigger streamers like Tango and Impulse even have.
Most Hermits are full-time right now, no? Apart from Skizz, and I think xB and Wels and maybe Keralis, and then some others have side jobs like Mumbo. I always assumed that the more popular Hermits like Grian and Mumbo pay more, but I have no idea, and we know little about who does what behind the scenes. I have no idea how much it even costs to run a server like Hermitcraft.
The Life series is probably more expensive to set up in terms of external labor because it requires mods and stuff, I wonder if they're all contributing to that? And other somewhat modded short-time servers, like SOS SMP? The economics of content creation are interesting.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-01 12:10 am (UTC)But at least I haven't heard about any scandals with hermits mistreating their mods (so far...) I think even the biggest hermits have a lot less mod work needed than many of the QSMP folk do though - the really big ones rarely stream, and a lot of the regular Hermit streamers have orders of magnitude fewer people than the really big-name people on QSMP.
I don't think running a small modded server is that much more work than a vanilla server if you're using free mods and are reasonably competent with them, and a small server like the Life series shouldn't be that expensive in server costs, but the more scripted ones that have a lot of structure, custom areas, and events, and that code their own custom mods, have a lot of behind the scenes work that somebody ought to get paid for! Even the Life servers do a lot of playtesting in advance and have several non-player admins who are there for all recording sessions (I have no idea if they're paid.)
no subject
Date: 2024-06-02 10:48 am (UTC)I forgot about Wynncraft - come to think of it it's odd that I don't see Grian being involved in a fantasy server like that come up sometimes in fanworks ^^ Probably because he rarely ever mentions it in videos but still. It could be c!Grian's weekend hobby.
Also true, I rarely see Hermitcraft streams get over 5k viewers (I think Tango had more a few times during DO2) and several QSMP players routinely had much more than that, very different environment. (And I want to say a different degree of wanky fanbase but it might just be the typical "1% of every group are assholes" problem of larger size.)
I've not heard any stories of Hermits mistreating mods or other contributors either, thankfully. The only topic I've seen come up is skins and I think icons once or twice, i.e. asking fanartists for specific skin designs and then backtracking when reminded that they ought to commission artists if they want specific designs (tbf I can see how that could be overlooked in the moment when often they just need to mention ideas on stream and fanartists will come up with something. And for events like MCC the general expectation even seems to be that the skins are there explicitly for players to use and asking permission is not required.)
no subject
Date: 2024-06-01 09:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-02 10:55 am (UTC)Yeah, it's a typical problem of some fans happily offering volunteer labor and that then being taken for granted. Also some smaller streamers can't afford to pay moderators so they feel like they "have to" use volunteers, while bigger streamers have so many people offering that there's no "need" for them to pay, etc. etc. The controversy comes up semi-regularly in the streaming scene from what I've seen.
I hope so too!
no subject
Date: 2024-06-03 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-03 09:47 pm (UTC)Fingers crossed. I've seen a few Minecraft events with both English- and Spanish-speaking players in the last year or so so that's pretty cool.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-03 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-03 09:50 pm (UTC)Heh, the big overview of what it is is not that complicated, but once you get into the characters and storylines, i.e. what people are actually fannish about... I left that out for good reasons ^^
I hope so!
no subject
Date: 2024-06-19 08:20 pm (UTC)