Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning

Thenomain

I edited what I said because at second reading it wasn't what I meant. I didn't mean to shit on the game, and I certainly didn't think that I did. I absolutely question "give us your email because it doesn't matter" and what I see as the poor logic in saying it's "not a big deal". Put up with it? Sure. Attacking someone's reasoning for saying it's not a big deal? No. And I'm not even talking to you here.

You know, no matter how many times I try to bury the hatchet with you, Kanye, you appear to want to take everything I say in its worst context. Go you, I suppose, and I know you're going to read this and just come up with reasons why you're right, but I left the Hog Pit for a reason. I'm tired of this. I'm done with it. Shitting on someone you think shit on you then blaming them for editing themselves to look better is going to be all on you. Your game is okay, you have decent ideas as staff, but you are not such a good person that I'm going to take two posts in a row shit-talking me.

Please stop trolling me. I'm tired of it, and I've stopped trolling you back. Take the high road please. Thanks.

Arkandel

I never understood the privacy issue regarding e-mail addresses. They're zero dimes a dozen.

I have a game-specific e-mail account which contains no personal info (even the birthday is fake) that I only use for stuff like that - confirmation mails, password reminders, etc. Otherwise it sits in a folder of my real e-mail account and doesn't get glanced at.

What's the privacy downside?

Kanye Qwest

@Thenomain You didn't shit on the game, you said that anyone who thought there was a valid reason for email requirement to play refuses to see/use logic.

You're confused about what's going on here. I wasn't trolling, I was legitimately offended by what you said. For the first time! So grats on that. I was calling you out for calling two of the best people I know incapable of logic. You have edited it since then, and I'm guessing that's not what you meant to get across, so that's fine. It's all good.

Apos

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Tehom said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@WTFE said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Meg said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

They have an easy application

They want an email for application. That's an instant "nope!" here. On two grounds:

I don't know them from a hole in the ground. I'm not going to hand them my email.

If(f) they think this somehow "secures" things they're too stupid to staff.

I don't know (or care) if #2 is true or not. #1 is sufficient grounds for turning and walking away.

I am honestly confused how anyone could ever imagine that an email would be anything more than a convenience for automating the application process so that a GM doesn't have to be on hand.

Because there have been several times in the past where people have taken those email addresses and abused the trust of the people who've asked for them. We here, esp. us dinos like WTFE and myself, have been over this and we can't come up with a considerately valid reason why having the email in the first place has more benefits than risks.

I'd be happy to waive it if someone is unwilling to provide an email, though I'd wonder why they wouldn't just google 'temp email' and save both of us time.

There is something that saves everyone even more time: Not needing s system to validate over email to being with. This is how Mushes (et al.) work.

As a coder, I would then be able to get other things done. If the email address is used for "is a person" except then you're ignoring fake email addresses, then it's helping nobody. It's a hoop that nobody cares about. So why have it?

I don't suspect the answer is much more than habit. It seems like a very Mudlike requirement, though I honestly don't know why.

Because the alternate implementations are worse, more cumbersome, and unnecessary when the few people that have issues with it we could just manually make exceptions for? I can understand people that have been doing this for eons having a ton of baggage with weird stuff that's happened, but like I don't see the point in designing unbelievably arduous workarounds when I can just say, 'yeah sure I can do that for you manually' instead and skip an email by hand. If you're designing a system where staff and a player applying for a roster character don't need to be on at the same time, you can just automate mailing out a confirmation email saying you're good to go... or you can make a giant account based system where anyone even guesting to the game has a brand new account, track characters to each account, design auto pruning so there's not a horribly unmanageable scroll of dead accounts, probably protect the accounts with false deletes, make sure an internal mail system accommodates them, and so on. Or you can use an email. If you wanna say it's more logical to do the Giant Catastrophe Option for the 2 dudes in the world that are scared that I'll track them down through their fake throw away email, okay man, whatever you say.

Thenomain

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Thenomain You didn't shit on the game, you said that anyone who thought there was a valid reason for email requirement to play refuses to see/use logic.

You're confused about what's going on here. I wasn't trolling, I was legitimately offended by what you said. For the first time!

It looks exactly like most things you've said shitting on me, so while I'm bitter about that (quite a lot, incidentally), I do genuinely apologize for offending you in that way. I do speak in hyperbole, but I honestly never want to lump an entire group into being stupid.

That is absolutely no reason to call someone a shit-lord outside of the Hog Pit. There's a reason that it's there, and I don't have to be administration here to call you out on it. That was a fucked-up thing that you did.

I was calling you out for calling two of the best people I know incapable of logic.

Maybe if you said so; I mean, we all make mistakes. And calling me a swan? Yeah, sometimes you pull your pants down just to pee on everything you find offensive yourself. I dunno, but I think I'm far more willing to accept the mistakes of others than you are.

You have edited it since then, and I'm guessing that's not what you meant to get across, so that's fine. It's all good.

You must have rage-blinders on because I specifically said that's not what I meant. I don't think it's all good, but I'm the one you blindly attacked, twice, over a misunderstanding. I'll be calm in about ten minutes, myself.

NOTE: With this version of the boards, I can no longer scroll down to "quote" another post, so I'm going to be apologizing to @Apos here in a minute.

@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Because the alternate implementations are worse, more cumbersome, and unnecessary when the few people that have issues with it we could just manually make exceptions for?

Fair, but your cohort was making snide comments about these people. I took some minor offense to that. I am going to assume from Kanye's blind rage that "snide" was not his intention and leave it at that.

More difficult? Well, like I said, Mush-likes can create characters from the login screen. I had no idea that this was difficult for Evennia. It honestly shocks me. To me, having something that reads emails and creates a character that way sounds far more technically complex. This shocks me enough that I'm going to look into it, because using email to trigger an automated system that I at least feel could be built-in sounds, well, silly. Implementation differences, I suppose? But still, a bit of the head-scratcher.

Thanks for the clarification, tho. And yeah, sorry if I offended.

Sunny

@Thenomain

From what I have seen, I think it's related to the fact that they use a roster, and that you request a roster character as a guest, rather than creating a character from the login screen just to be given a mailbox and another character. Don't know! That's just what I suspect based on what I have seen.

Thenomain

@Sunny

That would make sense. I'm not going to make a technical comment about it. I know of one simple workaround for that using Evennia, but I also know what it's like for someone to come in, look at your code, and say, "Why didn't you do this differently from the start?" Sometimes the answer is, "Because I didn't, and if you keep on going about it I'm going to take this code and shove it somewhere that you'd regret."

Make fun of neckbeards if you'd like, but they are some of the most chill people on the planet. Not all of us coders are Big Bang Theory tropes. (n.b., I am not a neckbeard. I'm a skinny neurotic beta nerd, thank you.)

Sunny

@Thenomain

There might be easy workarounds, but 'apply for character off roster as guest, get e-mail with password sent to you so you don't have to wait on the game' really isn't a bad system. It seems reasonable enough to me.

Apos

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

More difficult? Well, like I said, Mush-likes can create characters from the login screen. I had no idea that this was difficult for Evennia. It honestly shocks me. To me, having something that reads emails and creates a character that way sounds far more technically complex. This shocks me enough that I'm going to look into it, because using email to trigger an automated system that I at least feel could be built-in sounds, well, silly. Implementation differences, I suppose? But still, a bit of the head-scratcher.

I'd say it's like 30% technical and 70% trying to future proof from an administration angle to avoid problems with scale. For example, in evennia you probably notice that every bit has both a player object and character object associated with it, rather than a single object, and this is designed to allow easy puppeting for games that have that. That sounds like it would be ideal for a roster game, but it has problems there, in that you want the transference to be permanent and eradicate any previous links, so that becomes a big headache where you really want to transfer accounts- and that means you'd need some form of master account, then a player object, then a character object, meaning that it's easiest to largely ignore the player/character objection distinction and make them 1:1 anyways and not try to do roster stuff as a form of puppeting. So then we go back to some form of master accounts even past player objects, and man, having an email (or a dummy string field) for that is way easier than a lot of other options. And that brings us to the administrative future side I mentioned.

And that's pretty much exactly what @Sunny is thinking of there- if we created just throw away accounts, that means an automated method of pruning them, because otherwise you get this ongoing gigantic list of dead accounts just from anyone stopping by to browse rather than guest accounts, with all the name validation pita therein. These aren't insurmountable, but I do think it's a lot more work than email.

Thenomain

@Apos

Eh, you could enable the player account and allow people to add and drop characters from there, which doesn't sound difficult to me; you already know if a roster character is used by if it's associated with a player account or has an "in use" flag or something like that.

I take account administration for granted as part of my bread and butter for game coding, something that I've already solved with a straightforward system. Again, a matter of implementation more than anything else.

Do remember, you and @Sunny both, that I started down this road with a comment that requesting email as a way to track people was silly and demanding it to make things easier was illogical. This is not what you're doing, so by that same logic my entry into this is moot.

I'm willing to talk more about it, because I find design decisions to be fascinating. I do! And it leaves my head working on a way to make things easier still, especially for the (trust me, more than two) people who just want to log in and get going, while keeping the design goal of "keep it clean", which is laudable.

edit, brief thought: Have you considered a note that the email is outgoing only and is never stored or saved? The number of people I know who don't know about things like 10 Minute Mail is pretty surprising, but I think we still have a long way to go to educate the general public on good online security.

Sunny

@Thenomain

Yeah, my commentary was more to point out that they didn't seem to be using it as a people-tracker and providing what I thought it was generally used for in that 'you're right, it's not good for that, but this is what it's good for' blah blah.

Goyim

I swear Arx has more OOC politics than IC ones.

Pyrephox

@Goyim said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I swear Arx has more OOC politics than IC ones.

Is there any political MU* of which that is not true? Which is not to say that it might not be a problem (OOC politics are often problems), but that's been true of every MU* I've ever been on. People take things done IC as proof of OOC dislike, or misunderstand things and don't bother to try and communicate about them, or oppose a faction or a character because they don't like the players involved. Or, worse (and what tends to make things very unfun for me) is taking a character's failure or lack of...expected rewards (be it positions, prestige, inclusions)...as a personal referendum on the player. When, at their heart, political games are built on IC exclusions, preferential treatments, and bargains that involve some compromises and losses. That's what politics is.

ThatGuyThere

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Thenomain You didn't shit on the game, you said that anyone who thought there was a valid reason for email requirement to play refuses to see/use logic.

So what is the logic behind an e-mail requirement? I mean I am like @Arkandel and have a game e-mail that has nothing close to my RL info attached to it so I will play on games with that requirement, but I have yet to see a sound reason to require an e-mail.
It can't be to prove identity because it is super easy to have multiple e-mails with different identities as both Ark and I show.

ThatGuyThere

@Goyim said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I swear Arx has more OOC politics than IC ones.

Never been on Arx but that statement describes at least 95 percent of all game ever.

Three-Eyed Crow

Wouldn't you need an email to use the wiki anyway?

I get to some degree the 'meh' about the need to provide an email, but you need to provide one to edit your wiki page most other places, so I don't find it as unusual as all that.

Apos

@ThatGuyThere said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Thenomain You didn't shit on the game, you said that anyone who thought there was a valid reason for email requirement to play refuses to see/use logic.

So what is the logic behind an e-mail requirement? I mean I am like @Arkandel and have a game e-mail that has nothing close to my RL info attached to it so I will play on games with that requirement, but I have yet to see a sound reason to require an e-mail.
It can't be to prove identity because it is super easy to have multiple e-mails with different identities as both Ark and I show.

The short answer from what I said above is it's to automate letting people wanting a roster character get one easier. Since they log on a guest and don't have a character bit, it's just a simple way of telling them, 'you have character A, here's the password' so we wouldn't have to be on the same time, and we don't have to make throw away character bits just for that purpose. If they don't have an email or don't want to give one, it's fine, we can do it by hand, it's just faster and easier.

@Three-Eyed-Crow The webpage isn't a wiki as such, there's no real distinction between a character ingame and the webpage, and they use the same login credentials automatically since it's the same DB calls. All the character information there is just populated automatically from attributes on character objects and so on.

Cupcake

My character recently stirred the political pot, and I've been enjoying the results, both good and bad that she's managed to drive in consequence. She got contacted by Max about this, only to find out that he may have some similar political leanings and well, here's me getting excited about how this can work out in RP and...

alt text

Arkandel

@Cupcake Roll the dice! What can possibly go wrong?

Tehom

@Thenomain said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Sunny

That would make sense. I'm not going to make a technical comment about it. I know of one simple workaround for that using Evennia, but I also know what it's like for someone to come in, look at your code, and say, "Why didn't you do this differently from the start?" Sometimes the answer is, "Because I didn't, and if you keep on going about it I'm going to take this code and shove it somewhere that you'd regret."

Make fun of neckbeards if you'd like, but they are some of the most chill people on the planet. Not all of us coders are Big Bang Theory tropes. (n.b., I am not a neckbeard. I'm a skinny neurotic beta nerd, thank you.)

I could easily see alternate implementations that don't use email at all, but create a throw-away player account that restricts their permissions (and that of the associated character they create) during character creation and while waiting for approval, then grants it to them post-approval. It might be cleaner overall, honestly, but I don't feel redoing the entire process at this point would be a good use of my time.

Evennia doesn't have any use of email built-in, but django does, which is what the user/player account model for Evennia is built upon, so extending it to send emails out is fairly trivial (it's something I should probably revisit at some point to use twisted's email package rather than django's for better error handling, but whatever). Additionally, most django packages you can add have some expectation of email being used (like a helpdesk package that I grabbed and turned into our +request/@job system), and while I wasn't using those features, I could imagine a time where we might wish to. For example, by default the helpdesk would have sent out emails to anyone with a response of some boilerplate for any ticket that was answered, and I had to rework that since I thought it would startle people.

That said, email was never really meant to be a hard requirement, because I could foresee people who would be uncomfortable giving it out, it just seemed to make the whole process a lot smoother. Given the ease of getting temporary email addresses that exist specifically for the purpose of people registering for things, or being able to get a new dedicated email address that's a throw-away/spam-absorbing thing, I didn't think it'd be a show-stopper for anyone, but as I said, I would be willing to manually go through the approval process for someone who was uncomfortable using those things.