Identifying Major Issues
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These really are good points. MUers change emails so often, and plenty of burner emails are given out to games because no one wants their game stuff intermingling with their actual RL identities. This his how everyone on SerenityMU ended up getting a LinkedIn request from Mal @ SerenityMush.
There's an imaginary line for most MUers. My game stays on one side, and my RL stays on the other, so there's no reason to give an actual, useful email address to a game when your IP is marked every time you log in with a bit. IPs are used to block players, not email addresses.
There may be some useful contact/notification purposes for having emails, but the stance I sense from most players is I will decide when MU is important, and I don't want MU chasing me down when I'm not choosing to log in.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost said in Identifying Major Issues:
There may be some useful contact/notification purposes for having emails, but the stance I sense from most players is I will decide when MU is important, and I don't want MU chasing me down when I'm not choosing to log in.
That would be why...
@surreality said in Identifying Major Issues:
allow people to OPT-IN to get a notification if one of their characters is going to freeze soon
...is always relevant.
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@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:
There's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address.
You mean except for all those @surreality listed above?
It's not a bar for entry. Plenty of things require your e-mail address when signing up for an account (android phones, most things that require account creation). Sometimes, even your phone number. (Google, anyone?) This is pretty standard fare for most things now.
And if I'm running a game? Honestly, there are things I will want for my own security and game features that will require this. And if you can't trust me enough to even provide a burner e-mail for that, fine. Play elsewhere. There are other options.
The staff of a game are not your martyrs, and can impose requirements on you since they are incurring costs to provide you something for free. This is a perfectly reasonable requirement to be able to benefit from that.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@Derp said in Identifying Major Issues:
@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:
There's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address.
You mean except for all those @surreality listed above?
Those aren't needs. Those are tools that can be handy for the player. I've never asked a player to prove that they were who they said they were with an email address, though I can understand if someone wants to. Need? No.
So no, nothing Surreality said is a requirement. As she said, and even stressed, they are OPT IN systems. Last I checked my definitions of things, this doesn't mean "need".
It's not a bar for entry.
So?
I'm serious. So what? Something not being "a bar for entry" doesn't make it a good idea. Your logic is flawed and you should feel bad, or whatever Dr. Zoidberg says,
And if I'm running a game? Honestly, there are things I will want for my own security and game features that will require this. And if you can't trust me enough to even provide a burner e-mail for that, fine. Play elsewhere. There are other options.
Your logic is still flawed and etc. etc. I don't need your permission not to play your game (something that drives me nuts; staff, I know that I can log out, and I will decide if I'm going to or not, the ball's in your court if you're going to throw me off your game).
You either missed or purposefully ignored the initial point I made: Making a burner email is not in everyone's interest, nor in everyone's capabilities. Expecting people to do so to get around a system is pretty much admitting that the system is flawed. Why not, instead, like Surreality says, make the system OPT IN. This part has nothing to do with trust.
Also, I'm sick and tired of people demanding that trust is binary, that you either trust completely or you don't at all. This logic is bad and ... you know the rest.
The staff of a game are not your martyrs, and can impose requirements on you since they are incurring costs to provide you something for free. This is a perfectly reasonable requirement to be able to benefit from that.
Wow. You think you're a martyr, now. Look at you, pretending you know what that word means. I'll look impressed just for you.
No, it's not martyring asking players to do something, but don't pretend it's because it's a) easy to get around therefore it's perfectly sensible to demand it, or b) that it's necessary for 99% of Mu* systems. It's not.
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extremely important addition: It's not. It's a staff edict, a "because we say so". Go team.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain I'm not a fan of some of the auto-approve registration options for wiki, so at some point, since the wiki is required for access to the game... I'm going to need an email.
It is just easier to have people email to request a login, and get the login on game and wiki in one go, and since I need an email anyway, that's the ID to link alts/track whatever as needed per player.
Some stuff is opt-in, yes. Any and all fluff -- freeze alerts, 'this other game would like to use the creature you created, how do you want us to put them in touch with you/you can just tell us to hand it along/etc.' credit/usage requests, etc. These things are all intended as staff-to-player courtesies available exclusively by request of the player, intended to respect their work and contributions and avoid easily avoidable and needless hassles.
Sending somebody their reset password if needed wouldn't be, though. The reason for this is pretty simple... they can't get on the game to ask for it. I mean, I suppose this could be set up somehow on the cron to newpass them again at the end of the temp-ban to something you tell them in the initial temp ban warning/email, but the odds of somebody remembering that, and the hassle involved in setting that up, are a code nightmare. I've asked for code assist on things like this over the years and it's cricketsville, for the most part.
To many people share IPs with roommates/spouses/siblings/family for me to be comfortable banning (even temporarily) by IP these days, as this punishes more than just the offender. @newpass and restrictions on account creation are it, for me. While there's an argument to be made that this is incentive for people in those environments to behave themselves more because more people's fun than just their own is riding on them not doing ban-worthy crap, I'm not keen on the idea of it: if somebody's getting banned for being a dick to (reasonably) innocent parties, being a dick to other innocent parties is not a viable solution to me. A VPN will get someone around an IP block easily anyway, as will a jaunt to the nearest net cafe or wifi-enabled lounge somewhere.
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@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:
@Derp said in Identifying Major Issues:
@Thenomain said in Identifying Major Issues:
There's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address.
You mean except for all those @surreality listed above?
Those aren't needs. Those are tools that can be handy for the player. I've never asked a player to prove that they were who they said they were with an email address, though I can understand if someone wants to. Need? No.
So no, nothing Surreality said is a requirement. As she said, and even stressed, they are OPT IN systems. Last I checked my definitions of things, this doesn't mean "need".
In her system they are not. Her system is not all systems. I will decide, as a game owner, what I require from players who want to play. You can play the semantics game all you want to here. What a game needs from players is whatever the game owner decides the baseline is. Players can choose to join in with that or not.
Car dealerships don't need to see your identification before you buy a car, either, but good luck finding one that won't require it. They may be out there though. Happy hunting.
It's not a bar for entry.
So?
I'm serious. So what? Something not being "a bar for entry" doesn't make it a good idea. Your logic is flawed and you should feel bad, or whatever Dr. Zoidberg says,
It doesn't make it a bad idea either. Again, it depends on the goals of the game.
And if I'm running a game? Honestly, there are things I will want for my own security and game features that will require this. And if you can't trust me enough to even provide a burner e-mail for that, fine. Play elsewhere. There are other options.
Your logic is still flawed and etc. etc. I don't need your permission not to play your game (something that drives me nuts; staff, I know that I can log out, and I will decide if I'm going to or not, the ball's in your court if you're going to throw me off your game).
No. But you do need my permission to play on it in the first place. You can choose to leave at any time, but my options expand beyond 'am I going to throw you out or not'. I can choose not to let you on in the first place.
You either missed or purposefully ignored the initial point I made: Making a burner email is not in everyone's interest, nor in everyone's capabilities. Expecting people to do so to get around a system is pretty much admitting that the system is flawed.
Look, if you are so bad with technology that you have trouble making an e-mail account? These games are not for you. Your argument there is just flat out weird. If you cannot follow thise kinds of simple tasks, there is no way in hell that you will get a game system, or the complex structure of MU commands, and you damn well know it, so why are you even going there?
Also, I'm sick and tired of people demanding that trust is binary, that you either trust completely or you don't at all. This logic is bad and ... you know the rest.
Who said trust was binary? Show me. I don't recall making that argument. But someone said that trust flows from players to staff, when it in fact goes both ways.
The staff of a game are not your martyrs, and can impose requirements on you since they are incurring costs to provide you something for free. This is a perfectly reasonable requirement to be able to benefit from that.
Wow. You think you're a martyr, now. Look at you, pretending you know what that word means. I'll look impressed just for you.
Really? Because it seems more and more that staff are expected to exclude themselves from things, work in a timely manner for no compensation, and generally take all kinds of blows from players because of 'trust'. How many games keep staff pcs from having positions of power for instance? Or expect that staff gain no benefit from being staff?
There is an expectation now that staff should be less empowered than players, should sacrifice their own fun and expectations to make players happy, etc, and it's frankly bullshit. Players are not customers, a MU is not a business, and this 'the customer is always right' attitude is a bunch of crap. It's someone's digital house that you are a guest in. If you don't agree with the house rules, don't come in.
No, it's not martyring asking players to do something, but don't pretend it's because it's a) easy to get around therefore it's perfectly sensible to demand it, or b) that it's necessary for 99% of Mu* systems. It's not.
Easy to get around or not, it is a reasonable requirement. And again, the game owner decides what is necessary for their game. Players can agree or disagree.
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@surreality That's completely fair, and like I said in my post if it's a primarily PvE game I would have much less qualms about it honestly.
Just was throwing out why I thought it could be an issue on certain types of games.
Hello! Long time listener, first time caller...
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@Lithium Yeah, I think for heavy-duty PvP games it could arguably be an issue. I just have less than zero interest in running one of those.
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While I'm not saying that you can't have a preference for not giving out or just having an extra email that you use for unimportant shit, the strong resistance to simply giving an email is still one that's very strange to me. It's one that I've literally only encountered here and WORA, like, even outside of the hobby it's not a thing I've really heard before. I've heard of having separate emails for different levels of importance for things (IE: A porn email, a business email, a general personal email, etc, which is what I do), but like... the super strong resistance to having to give an email out at all, which is one of the most super standard things on the entire internet, is really, really weird to me.
Maybe it's a generational thing that I just don't get. Sure, there's a ridiculously unlikely chance that your email could get mishandled because the headwiz is a moron (re: The Linkedin thing, who uses a personal email for handling apps? That's fucking ridiculous), but it's such an infinitely mild inconvenience, on top of being an unlikely one, that the fact that it's even being debated seems like having a strong opinion about M&M colors or something.
Of course no one uses their business email to sign up to MUs, or literally anything else on the internet, because it's a business email (if you're using your business email to sign up to random shit on the internet but have a strong opinion about MUs, I don't know what to tell you), but since when is it controversial or even unlikely that people have alternate emails to use for unimportant shit? Obviously normies don't, because they don't know wtf they're doing at any given time, but they're generally not the sorts of people who take up RPing, let alone MUing, and are half the reason phishing exists.
How does literally anyone survive on the internet, even outside of the hobby, with one email address? And not just a burner email, but like, if you don't have two or three permanent email addresses, that's kind of a problem.
Having only one email is a security concern that I'd address before even considering the mild inconvenience of giving an unimportant one out to a MU.
Incidentally, I actually give out my casual shit email to MUs, which is actually the second oldest active one I have (I got it when you still needed to invite people to Gmail). It's not my business email, porn one, or any of my branding ones, it's just for random casual shit. I have yet to receive any spam from a MU on it since 2005 when I got into the hobby and first had to use email in it, and I'm certainly not going to get scared away by wildly exceptional but still incredibly mild cases.
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This reminds me to make some throwaway emails. I've been stalked off- MU* before by MUers (one is still at large); and have seen others' offgame accounts get stalked, too (by folks still in the hobby).
People decide your wrongfun personally offends them so they have to chase you everywhere when you escape them (when it gets to that point, the real problem was them all along, they are addicted to the bullying), or they decide they must own you because they got too fixated on the you behind the character; both impulses come from the same lack of boundaries. Email is a boundary.
Not sure why folks are surprised at the resistance, gamers are batshit.
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@Paris Mostly because, while this is definitely a terrible thing to happen, it's an incredibly exceptional case. It's kind of like not going outside because lightning might strike you dead.
The only explanation I can come up with for why this seems to be a problem I've only seen mentioned here and on WORA, is that I'm guessing at some point WoD games used to do emails and a bunch of predictably batshit crazy stuff happened.
Hell, I've used my email on games with batshit crazy staff when I was younger and didn't know any better, who I pissed off, and I still didn't even get so much as a peep by email. A lot of big games use email for apps and it's just considered totally normal in a lot of places, while some places don't use email because they've moved to fully coded chargen apps. In my opinion it mostly comes down to personal preference.
I will say that when I started back in 2005, I could have definitely imagined it being a higher possibility that people might abuse email and such, even though I never saw or heard of it happening outside of these forums, but like, we're such a different hobby now that it wouldn't even close to be my first concern.
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@HelloProject In fairness, LinkedIn will not ever stop emailing you ever no matter what once they have your email. I am pretty sure someone could carpet bomb every one of their server farms and corporate locations and they would still never stop sending email constantly, nagging the shit out of you that don't you know Bob, that guy you met that one time when you were 12 who just can't resist the urge to connect with you? WE KNOW YOU KNOW BOB, YOU UNRESPONSIVE, UNPROFESSIONAL WRETCH!!! Ahem. I might just hate LinkedIn, and want to set everyone who ever farmed their address book to try to get me to sign up and add me to it. Anybody who hands out a list to LinkedIn like this should be thrown into sludge pit full of electric eels and have their corpse displayed publicly as a warning to others.
I am really not kidding. I sincerely mean that. That company is a plague. I've seen MLM schemes less tenacious.
What makes me shake my head about this is that so many places get email addresses in a manner much less secure than what I'm suggesting every day via wiki login requests, which reveal that information potentially to the entire staffcorps of a game, since these jobs tend to go to an all-staff-viewable bucket, rather than one game gmail account maintainer, with a designated alternate headstaffer who also has access in case the other vanishes or has to be away for whatever reason.
We do not have widespread problems from this information being shared to potential entire staffcorps the way it's regularly shared now. This is, I think, a much more significant indicator of how people handle this information when it's available. (Read: with a very low incidence of troubles stemming from it.)
Hell, what I'm recommending shares it with fewer folk than it currently is normally on any game with manual account creation and a staff corps of more than 2, so the flinch factor seems disproportionate to reality to me. Sure, it's a fairly occluded reality, but it's still the reality of things.
In the end, if people aren't cool with it, they won't sign up for a game that asks for it, and life will absolutely go on.
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My personal feeling is that there's such a low amount of people who give a shit about using their email in a MU, that it's kind of an insignificant concern. This isn't to say that their concerns aren't valid, it's mostly that I don't really see why a game should go out of its way to address what is kind of a very niche issue.
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@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:
While I'm not saying that you can't have a preference for not giving out or just having an extra email that you use for unimportant shit, the strong resistance to simply giving an email is still one that's very strange to me. It's one that I've literally only encountered here and WORA, like, even outside of the hobby it's not a thing I've really heard before.
Yeah I don't quite get @Thenomain's concern here. You'd be hard-pressed to register for anything without an email address these days. I seriously don't understand why people get up in arms at the idea of a MU* doing it.
If they spam you? Report it as spam in your email client and block them. If they send you a LinkedIn request, ignore it. If you really don't want to have the games tied to your RL identity, use a burner email. Even my mom has a burner email, for goodness sake. And if it's a dealbreaker, then that's totally your choice, but I don't think it's cool to act like staff are insane for doing what almost every other site on the internet considers a best practice.
But @HelloProject -- I think the number of people objecting is less of a minority than you might think.
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@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:
porn email, a business email, a general personal email, etc, which is what I do
You too?!? Brofist.
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@faraday It's possible.
At the very least, I think email apps are a hell of a lot of work, so when I make my MU I plan to have a chargen anyway. I do think that an email is very useful for identity verification if people lose their password (especially if they lose it and are asking for it back on a different IP), but I'd have that be optional.
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I've seen it happen a few times that particularly spiteful staff or players used a player's email or IP to stalk them or ruin their reputation on other games. A WoD game I used to play on once had the single most inhumanly angry gamemaster I've ever met. He collected the emails and IPs of about a dozen players whose behaviors he didn't appreciate in his plotlines, and sent scalding emails to a couple of other games trying to warn them about those players.
I've also witnessed a close friend of mine get banned from Multiverse MUSH and have logs, his email and his IP sent to a couple of other places which got him prebanned from several of them with only one side of the story provided.
And my personal favorite, I made the mistake of making my email public on Brave New World. Big mistake. I got a lot of angry emails when I left from one of Elsa's friends.
While these are unusual and rare circumstances, being only three examples out of the fifty or so games I've played on, I can understand why someone would want to keep their email private. That having been said, since pretty much all MUSH admins can see your IP address, unless you use a VPN to MUSH you're not ever truly safe from stalking and someone who's determined to come after you can find a way. Your email address being visible is the least of your concerns if you're paranoid about being stalked across games.
Making a throw-away email takes thirty seconds with gmail, anyway, so if your email being visible to anyone at all is that concerning to you simply make a new email for every RP place you apply at.
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There are some good points here. In the past 10 minutes, I've also scratched at my head. Where to start? Or start at all?
One of the marquee things about the Internet was the fact that it was relatively anonymous. I picked the handle of Ganymede almost 20 years ago, and it's the only thing that has stuck. I've shifted e-mail addresses and characters more times than hair colors. And I'm not the same person I was back when I first called myself "Ganymede, the Sexless Wonder."
I no longer see a need for e-mails. It's a requirement that can be easily worked around, so it provides no real sense of security. Much like "gun-free zones," there's a strong argument that assholes don't really pay attention to what they are told not to do, and will do things because they want to. Any staff member who thinks requiring an e-mail address will be a shield against harassment is naïve.
I side with @WTFE regarding the reticence of staff to provide on-grid support for PrPs. I side with @Thenomain that the bureaucracy that comes with these, in the name of "fairness," is generally discouraging. I side with @Derp in that, in many cases, the bureaucracy is not an actual barrier to entry. In the end, though, I see the issue as, simply: why don't I get to do what those people are doing?
Why can't you blow up part of the Grid? Because Sally Sits-In-OOC didn't think of it first. Why is there a cry for fairness? Because Mopey Murphy wants what Alice Active has worked with staff to get. Why does it seem to be a barrier to entry? Because Larry Lazypants can't be bothered to put together a two paragraph summary. And whatever is permissible or fair or paralyzing changes from game to game, player to player.
It goes to planning. Planning, planning, planning. With that comes understanding the system and its objective. Too often, systems are shoe-horned into settings with themes that are incompatible. And the rationale of "the players want this!" rings in me with the same strength as "the client wants this!" or "this sounds like a good idea because my kids want it."
We've identified the issue. Planning means devising a method to address the issues in a manner that each person working on a project can agree with. Those methods will differ from person to person, but there is a certain amount of strength in that diversity.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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Now, not to sound dinosaur-ish, but I feel like these days effort is often not treated as the meritocracy I remembered MUing being when I first started (which, again, was only back in like 2005). This isn't to say that people who aren't running wild intricate plots can't get to do cool things, I in fact like using people who don't run plots as featured people in plots that I do, because it plays to their strengths and allows them to go out there and have fun.
But often, and something Ganymede said made me think of this, I feel like lately you don't really get back what you put into a MU, which was one of the appeals of them and what really defined my current style of doing things. Like, seeing people get to do insane shit, who are significantly less proactive than me and other people, and I'm just like, twiddling my thumbs wanting to do something super basic that I can't do.
Though I wouldn't say it's necessarily the norm, it is something that I'm encountering enough to be discouraged by it. I hear great things about that new hero game though, if only I could think of someone to app.
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@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:
Like, seeing people get to do insane shit, who are significantly less proactive than me and other people, and I'm just like, twiddling my thumbs wanting to do something super basic that I can't do.
I'm going to hook right here to make a succinct point.
The issue, in my mind, isn't the bolded part; it's the bolded-and-italicized part. This is because, more often than not, the policies are geared to prevent the bolded situation and not to enable the bolded-and-italicized situation.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
