Emotional separation from fictional content
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@Arkandel It's almost exactly the same kind of system (including some things that other people have suggested, like imposed delays and other penalties) and it was removed, presumably for a reason.
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@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
A question we need to look at though is... are such things getting reported or do those who could, or should, simply take their losses and stop logging on instead?
If anything, I think that false positives related to subjective, emotional responses are muddying the water when it comes to actual complaint-worthy behavior. These false positives make it harder to identify unethical behavior due to the number of accusations related to intent.
In the end, I think it all still circles back to the psychology of emotional attachment. Stalkers, creeps, cheaters, and predators tend to leave an audit trail of logs that can be forwarded to staff, but a lot of the major drama comes from emotional attachment and accusations of alleged intent.
Fuck, god knows myself as well as half of us would be fucked on an anonymous +complain system based solely on the crazy shit we've been accused of intending.
Edit: will note, I'm still a fan of my idea of a toggle command that silently forwards incoming pages to and from from a target, one-way only, to staff channel. Like a silent alert.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@kitteh The difference being intent. My proposal is only meant to use it for one reason - borderline inappropriate behavior. Not conflicting opinions, bad typing, terrible English or bad grammar, generally not-liking-them, them not supporting your views on a different issue recently or just for the hell of it - all of which have arguably been reasons for people to downvote each other here.
But also - and the reason my comment was admittedly kind of flippant - not everyone has to agree with a system in order to use it. I kinda liked downvotes, it was useful (to me) to see which direction the consensus on a matter was moving towards, but I'm okay with not having them either. It just... doesn't mean anything either way.
And also also! All this stuff's effectiveness is really hard (probably impossible) to gauge; does it work? Is this better or worse? Would we have avoided <thing> if we had done <other thing>? There are no control groups here, no studies, small numbers of players in the pool, lots of baggage between us... we're all stumbling in the dark hoping shit we try doesn't go horribly wrong. But the way I see it we've learned some lessons over the years, some things have been improved because on average we're handling stuff better than we used to.
Maybe.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel The thing you see with downvotes you see just about everywhere is that people use them willy-nilly and some people use them capriciously. Serial downvoting is a thing. Does that mean downvotes are evil? No of course not. It just means you need to be judicious in what you use them for.
I think your proposal isn't too different from a forum where there's a "flag/report" button to bring something to the moderator's attention. Low fuss low muss. I just don't think it works well with transient content that the moderator can't refer back to, or that it will really help if people don't have faith in the moderators to actually do something about it.
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A normal complaint system is high effort (ie reasons, logs, evidence) requires almost wholly manual processing, and expects to get immediate investigation/results. A social downvote system, is low effort (you just hit a button, maybe with a short description), mostly mechanical, and promises no immediate action but rather the eventuality of bad actors accumulating enough that they can be considered guilty by consensus.
They both have advantages, but the disadvantage of the second is that you don't get to really control what it's used for. You may not mean it to be for conflicting opinions or general not-liking, but what guarantees its not used that way? (assuming it is in fact a low-effort mostly mechanical system)
Again, it sounds like you're just trying to encode basic social behavior (ostracism) which should happen anyway if people are visible bad actors. Gamifying it only serves to make it easier to cheat and abuse for the people who want to do that (ie, a clique going around spreading nasty rumors is somewhat obvious, a clique coordinating mass downvotes is not).
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@Coin said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
We have been arguing about where "the line" is all thread. Hell, all forum. Hell, since the first WORA.
The line shifts when society shifts; the line has been shifting ever further towards something less permisive of destructive and abusive attitudes, and we need to shift with it.
Except that the average person does not see things from a societal perspective; many see things at a personal perspective. This is not me trying to be pedantic but wanting to point out that most people don't have the ability or don't have the time to seek out where society is. No, they defend their views and either bend as society changes, or stand still and try to carve out a pocket of their own social beliefs.
So telling people where the line is can infuriate and argument rather than quell one.
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@Ghost said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Edit: will note, I'm still a fan of my idea of a toggle command that silently forwards incoming pages to and from from a target, one-way only, to staff channel. Like a silent alert.
Now for Coder Theno!
The SUSPECT flag does something close to this, adding every single thing typed by a person to the hardcode log file, where it can be poured over. I know what you're talking about and you want something more specific, but there's something there.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@kitteh said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
(ie, a clique going around spreading nasty rumors is somewhat obvious, a clique coordinating mass downvotes is not).
This actually happened here, believe it or not. One of the reasons they're gone, I believe.
Oh fucking well.
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@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
Staff... get distracted. They have a ton of shit to do, from +jobs to running plot. It's easy - it's been proven easy, historically - to overlook things happening right under their noses. That shapes the perception of their role over time, which combined with the fact certain vulnerable players don't want to bring attention to themselves by speaking out too aggressively (what if they are judged? or told they are the problem? both have happened, by the way) they let things slide.
I want to hook on this for just a second.
Don't mistake negligently overlooking an issue with deliberately avoiding it. As I said before, most of us plug in to have fun, not deal with problems between people. That requires a certain kind of psychotic asshole: one that likely practices the art of law and bullshittery in equal amounts.
Let's take the restaurant analogy back. You are the GM, maybe even the owner. The sous-chef is getting lippy with the head chef. Some of the tables haven't been waited on. And there's some guy wearing no pants jerking himself off while purring obscenely at a table of ladies. Which problem do you address first?
The same applies to games. If there is a player-player problem or player-staff problem, you should deal with that first. Especially if it comes down to this guy is making advances to me via page, please make him stop.
“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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@Ganymede said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
And there's some guy wearing no pants jerking himself off while purring obscenely at a table of ladies. Which problem do you address first?
Apropos of absolutely nothing, yet still on point: once upon a time, I worked at a Mom & Pop video store with my father. M&P video stores are, yes, the ones with the back room.
One day, a dude high as a fucking kite comes in, and bounces his way to the back room, where he begins to jerk off to the DVD covers. My father is watching this on the video security monitor and laughing his ass off.
...until the guy comes swanning back out, arms extended at either side, to smear fluids along every spine of every DVD on the shelves in the main room on his way out.
My answer: You thought it was so fucking funny and wouldn't tell him to leave, Chuckles, YOU clean it up.
And my ass went outside for a smoke break.
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@Arkandel said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
@kitteh The difference being intent. My proposal is only meant to use it for one reason - borderline inappropriate behavior.
While I see your goal as noble and good, not everyone would use the system as intended. Not even taking into account malicious usage if you have a +complain command I guarantee you would get some use out of it but you will also get crap like Jim Bob was mean ICly, Janet didn't rp her character right, Paulie and George argued about some rule on the channel and it annoyed me etc.
I don't see the system is bad but if implemented it should definitely include a reason field if only to aid staff in separating actual issues the system is meant for from chaff. -
@surreality said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
@kitteh said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
(ie, a clique going around spreading nasty rumors is somewhat obvious, a clique coordinating mass downvotes is not).
This actually happened here, believe it or not. One of the reasons they're gone, I believe.
I missed this snippet from @kitteh while composing my other two replies.
As Headstaff on The Reach, I found it very easy to identify rumor mills. It's even easier if people are using Skype to coordinate.
What is not easy is deciding what to do about it. There is only one thing you can do on these games to punish a player, and that is reducing or removing their ability to play.
And if a group is coordinated enough that they can create pressure via rumor mill, they are also probably generating RP for the game meaning you're now thinking about doing elective surgery on your own face. (If they've entirely cliqued it up, that's another thing. That wart is easier to excise.)
I don't have an answer, and I may be agreeing with things I didn't read or consider, but I think the above is extremely important to point out. Players bring play, and that makes them harder to punish.
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@surreality I believe it!
The system works fine in really large, really anonymous settings, like some multiplayer videogames that may have many thousands of players at a time. On these, 'some dude and their five friends' is usually not enough voting weight to break the system, and they work well for slowly identifying and quarantining toxic players (generally by matching people to people with similar votescores, so the trolls just play other trolls, and polite people play other polite people).
But when you have an actual (small, relatively intimate) community, it's just taking something that community should be doing and shuffling it off to some easily to manipulate shortcut. The community should have no trouble identifying actual bad actors. And the people it can't easily identify? Are maybe not bad enough that they need to be ostracized in the first place, but fall into the realm of 'personal differences that people are going to have and staff doesn't need to resolve every one of.'
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@ThatGuyThere said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
you will also get crap like Jim Bob was mean ICly, Janet didn't rp her character right, Paulie and George argued about some rule on the channel and it annoyed me etc.
I have been on the receiving end of ooc rantings and threats because someone did not like how my character behaved, and for that reason alone I won't let such a system be implemented on my game. If people have a problem, log and file a complaint. If folks don't feel safe talking to staff, they shouldn't be playing there, imo.
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@Thenomain said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
The SUSPECT flag does something close to this, adding every single thing typed by a person to the hardcode log file, where it can be poured over.
<peeve type="pet">Pored. Pored over.</peeve>
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A generic, anonymous upvote/downvote system is not something I would advocate for a MUX.
A means of people being able to submit 'this made me uneasy' about someone to staff, perhaps with a flag of 'just noting this in case there are other issues' or 'please take action about this' of some kind that does not reveal the complainants identity to the complained-about is not, I think, a bad idea.
Something like, say:
+issue <name>=Person did a thing, and it was a little weird. Didn't make me uncomfortable but could see how it might be an issue if it's something they do all the time, and other people might care more than me. Peace out!
and
+issue/helpme <name>=Person did a thing, and I told them to stop. They didn't. Can you drop a house on them? k thx bai
Ideally, this would allow someone to store both kinds of records about <name>, but would give the complaining player the option of saying whether or not they want someone to actually step in and do something about it or not. The sample command names there are crap, but the idea is a clear enough, I would hope.
In my case, which may not be applicable or useful to others in any way, there will be alt registration/tracking objects of a kind anyway. They have other purposes that have nothing to do with punishment (they're mostly for player XP and how I want to set up XP earning/spending) but this is the best place, IMHO, to store such a thing, since it links the behavior to a player rather than to an individual character object. Linking it to an individual character object may not allow the patterns to become apparent as quickly, if staff don't have some other means of tracking alts/alts are public info on the game (and you'd still have to cross-reference even if so) so I'm not sure if something like this would be as useful to anyone else.
As described here, this is something I'm looking at if I continue with the current project stuff, anyway. (Currently on hold, pending... stuff-whatever-something.) Something to add a note that a player thinks is maybe worth noting in case there are other issues vs. 'plz take action on this NOW!' is a useful sort of switch, I think, and may encourage people who have issues that they consider too borderline for action to be taken to report their concerns (which can be helpful, since it can demonstrate a pattern more readily if one exists) even if they don't necessarily want or feel they need staff to intervene/deal with the situation on their behalf.
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@Paris said in Emotional separation from fictional content:
If people have a problem, log and file a complaint. If folks don't feel safe talking to staff, they shouldn't be playing there, imo.
+10
Log and file is necessary and if people are unwilling to report unethical behavior, then the behavior persists. If they're uncomfortable with staff to such a degree that they fear repercussion (or if the complaint is about a staff alt), then why continue to play? Throw the log here, or something. Fuck them.
No one should continue in this hobby under duress or threat of ramification. No form of entertainment is worth being stalked, abused, harassed, or threatened.
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Absolutely at both @Paris and @Ghost
We can't trust on magic code to fix things that are otherwise broken. Clearly bad behavior should be easy to report, and relatively easy to act on. One part is on the complainant, and one is on staff. If the first doesn't do their bit, then they can't expect the situation to improve. If the latter doesn't, then they've obviously abdicated their responsibilities and are either indirectly or overtly supporting the behavior.
Abandon ship!
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@kitteh Yeah I learned a long time ago to never stay or return to a game with unethical staff. Nothing is worse than the passive aggressiveness that comes with the abusive marriage feeling of needing to stay at a game, but hating the game itself. It's also not just staff that can make people feel that way. Abusive/unethical players? Vicious mean girls gossip rings and people who will listen to them?
There are dozens of other online games to play. It's not worth it.
And if you feel that all of the games eventually turn out this way? Then in any order, I highly recommend Overwatch, Masturbation, and Ash vs Evil Dead
Those three things in any order will seriously clear that aggro right up.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
I am big on the idea that complaints, and any form of voting really, be tracked per topic, and never summed. Ideally, it would be able to do 25 players have seen player X do something that could bother someone but didn't bother them, and 14 players say that they had an IC conflict that went swimmingly with player Y. I also think with some time delay, such as weekly, that number should be known to the player.
