We hear you.

VELP-One
Apr 19, 2024
7 min read

We started VELP for three reasons

As venue surfers…we were tired of attending venues and finding them to be nothing like their advertisements on sites like FFXIV Venues (which is an amazing site) or Party Finder advertisements

As venue owners…we wanted to hear about the experiences of people at our venues, because we wanted to find the things that worked and didn’t work and capitalize on the knowledge, and,

As community members…we wanted to highlight venues that really provided great experiences.

We want to be fair

For that reason, we chose to attend on anonymous alts, so the treatment we were given was genuine and so that we would not be penalized for stating our opinions.

We want to be kind

We made the decision early on that if a venue experience was wholly awful for us, we just wouldn’t write about it. If staff were awful, we wouldn’t write about it. If owners were jerks, we wouldn’t write about it. We would write about venues that had major things going for them, and hopefully provide constructive feedback about places where they felt challenged.

We want to be inclusive

We wanted to find LGBTQTIA+ venues, or adult-themed venues, and include them as well. So many venues are excellent roleplay places but are omitted from reviews or are otherwise dismissed as ‘just another erp place.’ (As an aside, we stand by the opinion that erp is valid rp and if you enjoy it, and your partners enjoy it, good).

We want to be transparent

For VELP to work, we needed to maintain a standard that applied equally and have strict rules about which of our members could review a venue. So we created rules. Then we forgot to post the rules anywhere that non-VELP reviewers could see. We're going to remedy this -- these will be listed on the updated rubric page (more about that later). Here's the rules we follow when reviewing:

You may not review a venue if you have previously attended a venue within the past three years.
You may not review a venue if you or close roleplay partners work for or previously worked for the venue.
You may not review a venue if you have a ‘beef’ with staff or the owner, or if you are friendly with the owner or staff. They must be strangers.
If you find a venue and feel like you cannot review it, you must tell VELP.One and remove yourself from the review team attending the venue.
Reviews happen in teams, with one person attending solo and two or more people attending as a group. Reviews are then written from a collective point of view whenever this is possible. If additional reviewers are unavailable, reviewers are expected to attend on multiple alts exhibiting different behaviours to review the treatment provided.

We want to be approachable

There is a contact page and we respond promptly on our social media accounts. We have discord accounts and try to join servers of places we review so people can speak with us if they choose to do so. We are currently debating how to operate a discord server as we are wary – we do not want to open ourselves up to personal attack, nor do we want our discord server to be a place where players can weaponize our reviews and our team to cause harm to others.

We want to be accountable

When we get things wrong, we want to fix them, adapt our policies, and be transparent about where we make changes. Any major changes to a review results in a notification about an edit from the original describing the changes made. For example, you can see this on Steppe Ramen, which clearly notes we accidentally listed the wrong day and it has now been fixed. This fix was made after the owner contacted us.

We’re human and we get things wrong

So let’s talk about that. As a venue owner I am fortunate enough to experience the powerful support of the community at FFXIV Venues for my venue, staffing needs, special events, and more. This website is friendly and easy to use and a great tool for venue surfers and owners alike. But as a venue owner, I’ve also been privy to the conversation about VELP in the owners’ section of discord (which I disclosed to a moderator of the discord). I haven’t chimed in on this conversation as it would obviously remove the anonymity I (even more than ever) cherish, but also because it would be unfair to defend to speak up as an uninvolved party when I am obviously very involved.

The conversation continues to be very enlightening about things we’ve gotten right, and things we’ve gotten wrong. It is going to result in the change to some ways we do things at VELP. Let’s talk about these changes:

We will no longer review adult-oriented venues or LGBTQTIA+ venues. We really wanted to shine a light on safe places for people to roleplay their genuine selves, but we were perhaps naïve about how the people working at or visiting these venues would feel. We will be removing the reviews that fall into these categories. We will still review NSFW venues, as many are given this tag for violence or language (see fight clubs, gambling dens, criminal venues, etc.). Venues that are specifically LGBTQTIA+ or offering erotic services will no longer be featured.
We will ask for consent for photos or take photos from the venue websites. We are working on leveling a visible VELP alt who will attend venues after the reviewers have moved on and will ensure consent is obtained. This is a challenge for Shirogane and Empyrium venues but we’ll figure that out. As a journalist in the real world, it never occurred to me to ask for consent at what is, essentially, a public-facing venue. We do not need to do that in the real world with rare exceptions where privacy laws exist (i.e. Schools, hospitals, daycares, etc.). The response though has made it evident this is something that matters and we are going to do our best to respect this.
We are going to review language on one of our reviews, as it became clear to us that the word choice was poor and that it reflected negatively on immersive venues, which was not our intention. However, rereading the quoted section from the viewpoint of the individual raising the concern we concur that the choice of words was very unaligned with our meaning. This will be clearly explained, as well, in an editor’s note at the start of the article.
We will better codify and explain our rubric to ensure that it becomes clear what we are judging and how it affects a review. We won’t retroactively adapt reviews, but it will be updated on the website and used going forward.
We are creating a form on our website where venue owners can ask us to not review their venue.

In the future, it’s my hope that concerns like these are brought to our attention, rather than in conversation in which we are, theoretically, excluded. We want to be a positive feature of the roleplay community, not a piss-on-our-enemies tool. It can be so easy for a review to come across that way and we’re working to adapt our language and policy to clearly reflect to readers and venue owners/staff our policy is positive-forward.

I have three last points I wish to make

VELP operates as a collective. This means we will never affect immediate change. We discuss matters internally until we find a path with which we are all comfortable. If you choose to contact us about matters, understand this means there will never be an immediate affirmation of your concerns, and rarely will there be an immediate change. The discussion could take minutes, or days. It depends on the complexity of the matter. We will discuss concerns with open hearts and never dismiss someone's concerns as 'just another whiner.' Even if we end up not agreeing, we respect that not all opinions are the same.

Consent to Review. While we are providing venue owners an option to opt out, we are not going to request consent to review a venue. If a venue is open to the public, it is open to review. People leave messages in message books, they post about venue experiences on discord, they talk amongst friends. In our opinion, by opening a venue to the public, you open yourself to critique. If venue owners have particular issue about reviews, they may reach out to us and have a conversation. This has resulted in changes, adaptations, and corrections to venue reviews already, and we’ll always be open to these conversations.

Finally, please do not overshare with us. If you or your staff are uncomfortable, you are welcome to share that with us. You are not welcome to share whether your staff are diagnosed with neurodivergence or anxiety or depression, or if they have recently lost a job and are stressed about that, or if their babies are not sleeping at night so that’s why they were a bit short-tempered. All you need to do is say ‘My staff are uncomfortable.’ The oversharing has happened, though not the weaponization As someone who has experienced in the past, I want to stop it before it happens.

As a person with neurodivergence, career-ending anxiety, OCD and depression, I can certainly empathize with the challenges faced by people like me in navigating a world that is not made to make us comfortable. When you come to us and share all this personal information with us, you burden us with the responsibility of confidentiality, and you burden us with the uncertainty of not knowing if this information was shared with consent. You further weaponize the real challenges experienced by people with challenges in an effort to force us to either stop writing or change how we operate.

We are happy to discuss concerns and adapt our practices. I hope that has been made clear. We are approachable, and reasonable, and will always listen with an open mind and heart. The feedback we have received to date has been very helpful – it has helped us recognize blind spots in our process and ideas, and we are adapting to and effecting change.

You can reach us:

Discord at velpffxiv.1
Facebook under velpffxiv
X under velpffxiv
Do not use instagram.
- I am an idiot and I have no idea how to reply to messages there.
The contact form on our site (link here).
We are currently debating having a discord server. There are so many challenges and risks inherent in this so at present we do not have this, but if this changes we will announce it.
I am also trying to figure out how to make it possible for people to reply to posts here on the site. As mentioned, I am an idiot. This may take time.

I try to reply within 24 hours. I am in a NA time zone and work daytime and evening hours so usually cannot reply during the day.

Thank you again to everyone - those who have raised concerns, those who have said kind things, and those who have made efforts to talk with us before judging us. Play on, and be kind.