Policies

[Kanye Qwest]

@Arkandel Too busy trying to ban you from LIFE to worry about a game.

But really, this is one of those topics that people are just going to spew out opinions on, and it's highly unlikely they will lead to any change in anyone's way of doing things.

I think a lot of games/staff bodies are constrained by things like not wanting to seem too strict, not liking conflict, not wanting to police this or that, or the other, etc. Having a set of policies is great and we can get a committee together to design shining, pristine examples of what a good policy file should look like, but at the end of the day, the policy that works is the one necessary to the game environment you want, that your staff is comfortable enforcing.

[Arkandel]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Policies:

But really, this is one of those topics that people are just going to spew out opinions on, and it's highly unlikely they will lead to any change in anyone's way of doing things.

Unlike all the other things we discuss on MSB where we change our minds to well phrased arguments all the time?

... And this, folks, is how you get banned from LIFE.

[Sunny]

@Arkandel said in Policies:

How do we feel about policies which punish players for their past behavior from different games?

As in, a new game opens and @Arkandel is already banned. Come on, you've all considered it.

In answer to the specific question, I have no qualms keeping the door closed where some people are concerned, and plan to communicate such very clearly. There are people that are not welcome for a variety of reasons. They will not ever be welcome. I have no interest in having them on my game any more than I would having them over to my house. That's not as much about their behavior on past games directly as it is that I feel it's my right not to have to deal with people on my game that I have had significant problems with in the past. Why would I subject myself to that bullshit? It's my space. Nobody is owed the opportunity to participate. Nobody is owed any part of my time.

[surreality]

@Arkandel Not as easy as it sounds, since most of the unwelcome sort are likely to use VPNs. Rex/Sovereign, for instance, apparently boasted about an intent to do so.

There are a handful of people I consider so fundamentally toxic to a game environment, I would pre-block them if able.

If not able, and they are discovered, it'd be 'first minor strike and gone'.

[Arkandel]

@surreality Yeah, I don't mean about whether it's technically feasible in the context of this thread. Let's assume that's a given.

So if you could ban a player completely based solely on behavior they displayed in other games, would you even if they haven't done anything wrong on this one?

[surreality]

@Arkandel Fuck yes. I have a list.

[GangOfDolls]

@Arkandel

I find this sort of thing sticky but sometimes necessary.

I'll be honest that in the scenario that if I were to run my game (this is staggeringly levels of unlikely) there are people exclusively by reputation that I would politely turn away. This list is maybe 2 people long and entirely likely obvious as to who they may be. While they may be as people not entirely garbage, their penchant for burning down games is entirely more than I would want to take on.

It gets a little more murky when people ban and pre-ban each other based on petty differences of opinion and pedestrian dick moves, because you don't necessarily want to open the door to normalizing bringing a chemical weapon to a slap fight.

But then I guess, in that case it becomes a 'vote with your feet' proposition for the other people playing. Pre-banning players for petty cause is a red flag about how the game administration will likely go and go forward, good luck and god speed to you if you want to keep playing there.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Arkandel No. There are people playing Arx that I didn't get along with at all in other games. Heck, there are people I DESPISED at other times/in other games playing Arx.

The exception would be if someone had been excessively creepy in other games, like stalking or harassing players or being generally gross and scary.

[surreality]

@Kanye-Qwest said in Policies:

@Arkandel No. There are people playing Arx that I didn't get along with at all in other games. Heck, there are people I DESPISED at other times/in other games playing Arx.

The exception would be if someone had been excessively creepy in other games, like stalking or harassing players or being generally gross and scary.

That's pretty much the criteria I use to select them, too. It has nothing to do with liking the person or not, and everything to do with the kind of damage they do -- creeping, harassment, cheating, etc. as repeated patterns over multiple games, enough to observe that they see nothing wrong with these behaviors that would prevent them from engaging in them on any site I ever eventually run.

[Arkandel]

@Kanye-Qwest Yeah, I don't mean players you don't like, that's different since sometimes we just don't get along with someone but they don't necessarily need to do something explicitly horrible.

Let's say players who've done things on other games repeatedly which would have gotten them banned on this one. Keep or ban?

[Arkandel]

Double post! I blame it on being a late Friday afternoon, but something just occurred to me. So, you said this GoD:

@GangOfDolls said in Policies:

I'll be honest that in the scenario that if I were to run my game (this is staggeringly levels of unlikely) there are people exclusively by reputation that I would politely turn away. This list is maybe 2 people long and entirely likely obvious as to who they may be. While they may be as people not entirely garbage, their penchant for burning down games is entirely more than I would want to take on.

But you also said this:

@GangOfDolls said in Policies:

I prefer very clear policies, even at the risk of going overboard on the overly specific because it sets clear, non-subjective expectations. Example:

'Don't be a dick on +channels' v. 'Disruptive behavior and hate or harassing speech/subjects will not be welcome on channels.'

So what's the policy you'd institute on burning down games? I suspect the people you're referring to might have well managed to get that reputation without ever breaking a single explicit policy, or if they did it wasn't on par with the damage caused through general dickish behavior.

In this case "don't be a dick" seems to be a preferable guideline... unless you count reserving your authority as a (theoretical) game-runner to ban people who burn games down without needing to break a specific rule to do so, in which case you might as well have had that policy in the first place!

(Yes Gany, I know that authority is a given)

[Kanye Qwest]

@Arkandel
Still no. I'm not talking about people I despise because of the way they eat cereal, these are all people who left very bad tastes in my mouth due to my interaction with them in games. Some of them have cheated, some have behaved horribly towards their fellow players OOC, some are just asshats.

But, as long as they aren't cheaters, horrible jerks, or asshats in Arx? Great, fine.

My purpose staffing this game is not to sort people into naughty/nice based on my interactions with them outside the game, or punish them in some way for past behavior. It's to make sure the game is a decently civil, decently relaxed place to be where one can be confident that harrassers, cheaters, creeps and asshats will not be allowed to CONTINUE those behaviors in Arx, if they demonstrate them.

This whole second chance thing, honestly, comes down to the fact that I think lots of rp games have policies about OOC behavior that just aren't conducive to maintaining the atmosphere they want. People get shitty when placed in shitty situations. Taking, for example, Firan: Firan was not a horrible, completely terrible game full of non stop chicanery the way people make it out to be. It was not the devil. It wasn't even as traumatic an experience as the time I got a big box from Target that held a single pack of gum I never ordered.

But Firan's policies encouraged rule-skirting, players policing and witch hunting other players, and the suffocation and stifling of plot access, and those things made for some pretty unpleasant experiences for individual players.

[GangOfDolls]

@Arkandel

Oh yep, I see what you mean.

I don't see them as unrelated but they do need discernment. My intention behind 'don't be a dick' vs. more explicit do/don't is that 'don't be a dick' is a more subjective proposition. There are some people who genuinely don't see some behavior as inflammatory or are so literal in their method of operating on games that unless it isn't explicitly stated that you can't do 'a thing', they reason that its a tacit allowance to do 'a thing'.

I generally concept burning down a game as the sort of thing that happens with intention, after some point. It's rare in my experience that someone trips headlong into polarizing a community possessing no intention to cause any sort of damage. I can't be certain that it hasn't happened ever but I wouldn't classify that as a majority happening. And burning down a game is often a multi-factor destructive swath that involves some combination of making oneself so utterly socially toxic and administratively unwanted and rule breaking that there's almost no way this can't be on purpose. And I qualify being stunningly self-sabotaging as a willful act and therefore 'on purpose'.

But I mean people who reach that level of game detonation are so variable in their actions per local game conditions but so steadfast in their reliability to do so that lays the groundwork to getting to that point but much like Justice Stewart's threshold test for obscenity: most rational people know it when they see it.

[Roz]

I have two feelings on this:

1. There are players that I've had on games I've staffed that I 100% would not want on a future game of mine. Would I tell them they can't play on it? I don't know. I have one person specifically in mind, and if you'd asked me that a year after our last interaction, I probably would have said yes. It's been a couple years now, though, and the memories are a little less exact. But this player would fall into a category of "Players who are way more work than they're worth." Players who regularly have way more forum threads or +jobs or however you keep track of stuff staff-side than a bunch of other players combined. So, it's tough. I'd consider it. I do think it's within a gamerunner's right to say, "You know what, you caused countless headaches for me the last game of mine you were on, and you contributed next to nothing in return. I just don't want you on my game."

2. When @Tez and @saosmash and I first made Transformers: Lost & Found, we were pretty new to the TF MU* game. We discovered that there is a LONG HISTORY in the TF MU* community and there are lots of players who really don't like each other. We made it a spoken policy that our game was to be considered a Fresh Start. That is: we weren't going to entertain "warnings" from players about other players on the game. Everyone was expected to be civil. No one would be forced to play together, and we'd certainly listen if someone needed to tell us that they really didn't want to RP with a particular other player (so that we didn't pair them up in some fashion in a plot or something), but if a player hated another because of bad blood they were expected to just keep their distance. That said, we took complaints seriously for any behavior that happened after people joined our game, and we kept a really close eye on the game atmosphere and keeping things friendly.

The big difference between these two things are, of course, personal experience versus secondhand reports.

[Ganymede]

@Arkandel said in Policies:

How do we feel about policies which punish players for their past behavior from different games?

Absolutely. This is fine and tolerable.

I have a high level of tolerance for bullshit; ask anyone. But if I make the decision that we don't get along or I cannot work with you, it is a given that I will keep you off of any of my games, once I find you.

If I don't find you, chances are that you have changed yourself sufficiently. I will still kick you off if I find you.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with people that I have not been able to deal with before. I know more people I'd rather play with and work with, and devote my time to. Or, in the words of a local mediator I like, "I ain't got time hanging out with people I don't like; I've raised three kids."

[Thenomain]

Note: I think having a specific TS policy is silly. If you can't explain your TS policy in a simple "how to treat each other as human beings" file, then you're doing it wrong.

Hell, if you need to tell people how to treat each other like human beings then I do think you need a better way to get across what you mean by "adult" and "human being". Probably with a 2x4 to the back of someone's head.

[Arkandel]

Alright, then for something more controversial we'll definitely never agree on but hey.

How do we feel about games which ban some hideous acts but not others? Some of the former with reasonable causes ('rape RP because it's a drain on staff's time when drama comes of it', 'underage TS because we don't want legal trouble') but I've seen it go further ('miscarriage RP because it might offend someone'). I've even been on one game where a staff member tried to stop a PrP because it started with a drive-by shooting and one player had lost someone to it iRL.

At the same we allow other still terrible and quite illegal acts. Murder, for starters, by the numbers; people are shot, stabbed or clawed to death left and right on MU*. Gruesome acts are routine - I can't even count the things I've seen mentioned nonchalantly at times, from sucking the marrow out of people's bones to skinned still-living people hanging from ceilings... but those are fine.

Where should the line be drawn in policy?

[Bobotron]

@Arkandel

That line should be drawn scene-by-scene and by the participants. We, as staff, cannot account for every single instance of something that will offend/trigger/otherwise make people go batshit insane. Especially with the number of people who use these hobbies as a way to work out their own issues. My only thing about policies there is make sure your policy gives outs, suggests FTB, and flatly says 'IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE WITH SOMETHING YOU ARE NOT OBLIGED TO PLAY IT OUT. And if people are trying to force you to do it via OOC methods, tell staff, because that shit is harassment. Otherwise, do what you will, to the comfort level of the people involved in the scene'.

[Lotherio]

@Bobotron said in Policies:

@Arkandel

That line should be drawn scene-by-scene and by the participants. We, as staff, cannot account for every single instance of something that will offend/trigger/otherwise make people go batshit insane. Especially with the number of people who use these hobbies as a way to work out their own issues. My only thing about policies there is make sure your policy gives outs, suggests FTB, and flatly says 'IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE WITH SOMETHING YOU ARE NOT OBLIGED TO PLAY IT OUT. And if people are trying to force you to do it via OOC methods, tell staff, because that shit is harassment. Otherwise, do what you will, to the comfort level of the people involved in the scene'.

This here, I tend to go with its consent based, by playing here one consents to what may happen, but it does not have to be played out. FTB is welcome, it doesn't negate consequences, they just don't have to be played out.

As far as topics that only some are comfortable with, somewhere around harassment I define it as the first party continuing do so something after asked to stop by the second party. If second party doesn't like rape, kiddie sex, clown sex, cats and dogs, hippie hug circle rp, or whatever, and they have stated this to the first party, the first party needs to stop. Trying to get that RP from second party after they say 'no' is harassment in my book.

In the offhand that first party says they never did it, I still go with its a warning and to just avoid second party from now on (knowing the consequence of dealing with them could lead to quiet time, time outs, banning, etc.). Second party needs to log further proof of harassment to get staff to act on policy.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Bobotron Agree..to an extent! I do think certain subjects tend to be uh, hotbeds (I am so sorry) of unwanted drama. Underage things, but even above that, rape stories. I have never in roleplay seen a rape story that didn't spiral out of the bounds of the two people who agreed to do it, because that's part of the fantasy story. There's the terrible thing that happens, and then there's the revenge/justice plot as you bring people in to bring the dirty deeder to the light! *

*note that rape done as part of a sexual scene that is 2 peoples' fantasy that no one ever realizes happened? Go and do.