Just got to hear the episode. Very good stuff.
I try my best not to label people as "good" or "bad" players -- or, indeed, as anything at all, if I can help it. But then again, I'm one of those annoying bastards who tend to be appallingly neutral when it comes to conflicts between people.
(Yes, this would include the apparently widespread and deeply raging conflict between people and their grandmothers in their local fight clubs...)
After reading this over, I see that this will indeed be covered in a later episode, but I'll go ahead and add my support to the idea of heading things off at the pass when you're setting up your gaming group in the first place. I am hoping that what I'm doing is not "velvet-roping," though, as Zeke puts it, because since he mentioned that I begin to wonder if that might be the case.
Well, here's an example. I recently had a friend text me asking if I'm looking for more people for my tabletop game. I told him yes, but wanted to know who it was he was thinking of inviting along. When he told me who the two people he'd been talking to were I let him know that I don't think I have the necessary patience to deal with those particular guys as players in a tabletop game. He responded by telling me he understood and would tell them that the game is full. I did not stop him from doing this.
Now, these are a couple of guys whom I consider friends but whom I'd prefer not to have as players in one of my tabletop games because they have personality quirks that I get frustrated with very quickly and I know that it would cause the game to suffer -- particularly since I know some of the other players get frustrated with those guys pretty quickly as well. Now, I'm not saying that I don't want to interact with those guys or anything or that there's anything inherently WRONG with them, just that I don't want to deal with the problems that I know would come up if I tried to run a tabletop game with them in it. I'm trying to help prevent them, myself and my players from having a bad gaming experience by recognizing my own limitation in this respect (namely, my lack of patience for those particular personality quirks) and keeping it from coming into play.
And that said, by the way, I am working on trying to become more patient with those individuals when I see them socially so that I can ultimately come up with better ways to handle it. And heck, this isn't even a case in which I've invited someone into my game or even been talking to them about it -- this is just something that happened to arise from a private conversation between them and one of my players. Is this velvet-roping? Or is it genuinely heading issues off at the pass?
Ah, and as for the respect thing, I have to agree with Lakira. Without getting into the semantics of it (since I know that different people and indeed different dictionaries will disagree about the meanings of words -- and heck, without differing definitions of things language would never evolve and we'd probably still be speaking Latin or pseudo-Germanic or something), I try to be courteous to people regardless of what degree of the emotional response associated with respect I may or may not be feeling, simply because it's part of treating someone like a person instead of a thing. Treating a person like crap just because they haven't yet "done something to earn your respect" seems to me more just an excuse to treat them like crap than anything else. It kind of makes it sound like earning respect is a specific item on a list that can be checked off as soon as X value is reached, when really I think it's more to do with the randomness of emotional response. I can't decide to feel respect for someone any more than I can decide to fall in love with them. Although I suppose it's possible to decide to have sex with them without either of those two things having happened, but that's another topic entirely...
Oh, and about the editing! I noticed the difference with the song playing longer behind the intro and then under some of the outtakes. I kind of liked it. I'd probably fade it out earlier at the start of the show (like it was before), but having it run under the outtakes seems like more of a natural extension of the kind of thing you were doing before when Josh and Zeke would make funny comments in between Meg reading the ending notes. It kind of works. For me, at least.