Identifying Major Issues

[A. Meowley]

@HelloProject: Wait, whaaaat? I'm going to hope you mean your PC, and not like, you know, your literal murder as a human.

[SparklesTheClown]

@A.-Meowley Yeah my PC, haha.

[A. Meowley]

@HelloProject hahaha, okay good! To my knowledge I've never interacted with them, but I've heard whispers that lead me to believe they're malicious & problematic as a player. Glad this doesn't include like RL threats!

[ThatGuyThere]

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

@ThatGuyThere I like to think of it more like showing up in a new town at a gaming store (or a con) looking to play.

That is fair enough, but while I have played with strangers at a con, I do so because there is little risk (a bad time) and the potential for reward. I certainly wouldn't give the other folks at the table my phone number. And while I would show up to a con to play, I wouldn't say I trusted the folks running the thing either.

[faraday]

@ThatGuyThere how is that different from a MU though? I don't see the phone number analogy relating to a MU.

[SparklesTheClown]

My current personal preference in MUing is to try to get a feel for staff before I even app a character, and look for red flags. Since I started doing that, I've had a significantly better time as far as not wasting my time in a place where everyone suddenly pulls off their masks and reveals a deep layer of shittiness.

I do this specifically because I used to have a lot of trouble trusting staff, and used to do the opposite (avoid them). It was a bit counterproductive. But it helps that I no longer play games where staff consider themselves lords on high above their entire playerbase, who make themselves unavailable.

[Seraphim73]

@A.-Meowley said in Identifying Major Issues:

@HelloProject: Wait, whaaaat? I'm going to hope you mean your PC, and not like, you know, your literal murder as a human.

I love (it's horrible, but it still amuses me) that this seems like a reasonable thing for VASpider to have done. Like, pretty much everyone else in MU*ing, you would assume they meant to kill someone's PC, but VASpider has been built up so far (and generally with good reason) that the question has to be asked.

[surreality]

@Lithium The security issue is pretty easily handled. It isn't hard to lock down certain critical namespaces to prevent tampering. Sheets are definitely one of those things -- but even so, wiki provides a public, easily accessible record of who changed what and when. Tampering to cheat is going to be glaringly obvious to the whole internet (players and staff and everyone on this forum) because of the internal record-keeping automatically kept by the wiki in each page's changelog. That alone is going to be a huge deterrent, and it's something we don't have now.

I'm not interested in running a WoD game, nor am I. Or PvP games, on the whole. (I planned to try it on a WoD game until I got too fed up with WoD, however.)

That gets to the core of one issue, however, at least, that does rely on the trust issue: player to player, and player to staff.

We've seen the attitude grow that when staff is the only group with access to this info, staff cannot be trusted to play on the game at all, let alone privately -- and we saw that attitude spread intensely. It is simply assumed that since staff has this information, they are going to use it to cheat.

You want trust, you have to extend it, too. Collaborative environments are hamstrung without that (and also without smacking people upside the head when they do something crappy, no matter who they are). People use the wiki information currently more often to

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

@ThatGuyThere how is that different from a MU though? I don't see the phone number analogy relating to a MU.

I am Thenomain. You are Faraday. These are who we are, our identifiers. While we might not be afraid of someone getting ahold of us, we are sometimes concerned about defending ourselves. We expose ourselves by linking our RP to our online identities.

Not quite the phone number analogy, but it's my take away.

[faraday]

@Thenomain To each their own, I guess.

[Thenomain]

@faraday said in Identifying Major Issues:

@Thenomain To each their own, I guess.

I don't know what this means. I mean, I know what it means, as a truism. I was explaining how the phone number analogy can be stretched to mean "anyone and everyone knowing who we are and where we play in this hobby".

[faraday]

@Thenomain The context of my phone number question was in regards to @ThatGuyThere giving reasons not to trust people on a new game. By "to each their own" I meant that if the concern over people knowing who you are is reason enough to approach each game with deflector shields at maximum... okay? I mean that's a personal choice, I can't really fault anyone for it. But I confess that degree of defense baffles me more than a little.

[ThatGuyThere]

@faraday
The phone number comment was more a moment of snark directed at games that require an e-mail addy.
And I fully agree that MU*s are a lot like showing up at a con to play, just not sure how that means I should trust folks on games since i wouldn't at a con either.

My whole point on the trust thing as I stated the first post was that it is not an automatic thing that requires time and interaction to build into, good policies are a start but only a start.

[faraday]

@ThatGuyThere said in Identifying Major Issues:

And I fully agree that MU*s are a lot like showing up at a con to play, just not sure how that means I should trust folks on games since i wouldn't at a con either.

It's quite possible we're talking about different levels of trust here. I'm just talking about giving the players and GM the benefit of the doubt. I go into a con game expecting to have fun. I trust everyone to follow the rules and to not be jerks unless they give me reason not to. If the GM says: "You're allowed to do X to drive the story" I take them at their word.

Now yes, sometimes it doesn't work out. Players can be jerks, GMs can suck. It's hard not to be gunshy when you've been burned. I get that. But if you approach every new game expecting to be burned again, not trusting staff to not screw you over... how are you ever going to have fun?

[surreality]

@ThatGuyThere I have generally planned to require email if I ever open something -- as in, email to request a first login.

But really, that's required anyway for how I'm doing stuff; wiki use is also necessary, and wiki, while it can be set up to not require an email to be handed off to someone directly for account creation with some hacks or a complete lack of security, needs it.

Really, we hand out our emails on most games that create wiki logins this way, and generally to more than the 1-2 people who may have access to a game's gmail account to +jobs, which are often set up in such a way that any staffer might be able to read the email that's been shared in the +request.

Instead of thinking of things from the perspective of 'how games that require you to email for game access', which are few (and have the glaring problem of Elsa attached to them), think of it from the perspective of how many times people already do share this information in a much more broad way in +request on a game without anything remotely resembling an incident arising from it.

[SparklesTheClown]

I've been on probably dozens of games that require email, due to it being a general norm in some areas of the hobby. I've never really seen anything bad come out of it. Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

[Derp]

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

So much this.

[surreality]

@Derp @HelloProject That.

Plus, having it means you can do some cool things -- like allow people to OPT-IN to get a notification if one of their characters is going to freeze soon, or to send a new password over to the player at the end of a temp-ban, send a new password if they forgot theirs and need to verify they are who they say they are somehow, etc. (@newpassword is the easiest way to do this when it becomes necessary, and it requires somewhere to send that.)

I didn't plan to have guest logins enabled at all times. Mostly, they wouldn't have been, but there would have been a posted schedule for 'open house' periods for guest availability on the wiki. So email becomes a little more necessary. (I hadn't decided if it'd be something like a certain week per month, weekends only, one month per season, or what. But it was a thing.)

[Thenomain]

@Derp said in Identifying Major Issues:

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

So much this.

It is annoying as fuck, tho, and no not everyone knows how to do this let alone cares to learn how. We've talked about the barrier to entry, and we've talked about trust, and the required email is solidly in both camps. If we're going to talk about trust, then there's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address. It may not be a big deal to some, but let's be blunt and also call a telnet-based game "not a big deal". And yet if you say that in this crowd, it's a good way to spark a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

There's absolutely zero reason, at all, even a little, for a game to need your email address.

[ThatGuyThere]

@HelloProject said in Identifying Major Issues:

I've been on probably dozens of games that require email, due to it being a general norm in some areas of the hobby. I've never really seen anything bad come out of it. Also who doesn't have like 10 burner emails? It's not that heavy.

I can get a burner phone to give the number to people too but that doesn't mean I think handing out a phone number should be a requirement for 90 percent of things.
And yeah I have a e-mail I give games, it is a throwaway not connected to any real information of mine that I never check and delete all in once every three months or so. Giving it to a game serves no purpose I do so to get to the playing part but it benefits any game not at all, since it is the least effective way to get info to me. And benefits me not at all because any info sent there will not be seen by me. It is the electronic equivalent of saying have a nice day as someone leaves a store.