@Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered)

[saosmash]

@sockmonkey Oh man, ninja presents action. What a good idea.

[Ominous]

@roz Just want to note that Darren voted against it. Redrain wanted nothing to do with the elves that wasn't head on spike related.

[saosmash]

@ominous The point is that "everyone blame Dawn for this thing the High Lords collectively voted for" is a false narrative that continues to persist.

[Roz]

@ominous Yeah I'm aware. Well, I'm aware that Darren tried to abstain because he decided that the months everyone had had to look into matters was inadequate but the vote had already been put off for way too long so people had to vote and so he had to pick a side and thus picked not doing it. The only person who really emphatically voted against it was Edain.

[surreality]

@sockmonkey said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers:

If you ever consider bringing it back, perhaps instead of having a direct effect -- all these condemns = immediate social loss -- there can just be a threshold that needs to be attained. If someone reaches X amount of condemns, it gets put on staff radar. And then they can make the call whether or not it's worth a prestige adjustment.

I'd suggest something in addition to that: Someone using the command X number of times ends up taking a hit, too. Ex: if all John Doe does is talk shit about everyone around him, after a while, people are going to start taking a less positive view of John Doe as well, even if people generally share the same negative view of whoever he's talking about.

[Bananerz]

Tracking and Obfuscating: I think being able to spend AP, silver, resources is a great sink in making it more difficult for anonymous messengers to be traced and the longer it goes the harder it gets to track as evidence gets cold and evaporates with age. And for folks who really want to know? You can investigate it by spending AP, silver, resources and whatnot with an @investigation!

As for abuse: If folks can't handle being an adult on a game lots of folks play on, then maybe they should move to a different game that's more suitable. You can report them immediately and staff will nip it in the bud rather than letting it get out of hand. Help keep the garden weed free.

[Darinelle]

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

Tracking and Obfuscating: I think being able to spend AP, silver, resources is a great sink in making it more difficult for anonymous messengers to be traced and the longer it goes the harder it gets to track as evidence gets cold and evaporates with age. And for folks who really want to know? You can investigate it by spending AP, silver, resources and whatnot with an @investigation!

As for abuse: If folks can't handle being an adult on a game lots of folks play on, then maybe they should move to a different game that's more suitable. You can report them immediately and staff will nip it in the bud rather than letting it get out of hand. Help keep the garden weed free.

I mean, other than that not being an @investigation, but instead being an @action.

[Sunny]

@bananerz

Are you intentionally ignoring the problems that were mentioned regarding this type of thing?

It's not about people not being thick-skinned or unable to be an adult on the receiving end of this, but individual cases aren't particularly something reportable, either. You can't discipline 40 different people for sending a 'you suck' message. There's nothing to 'nip in the bud' because it's just people not thinking on a wide scale, and they think its Perfectly Reasonable to get in on spitting in somebody's face. Their character would! It doesn't matter that 40 other people did it, too. And that's. Not. Fun.

[saosmash]

When people can't use toys without behaving like snotty children on a playground, it's perfectly reasonable for toys to be taken away. Honestly, I'm glad condemns aren't there. I've had impulses that could have led to unfun things for someone else if I had that ready, anonymous way to be mean to someone who irritated me. It helps me be a better person that I can't do that. I consider myself a pretty empathetic person and there've been moments I could've used that anonymity to be a shithead to someone. If that's me, I'm pretty sure it's most people.

I mean, not that Aureth is particularly shy about telling people when he thinks they suck. But at least when he does that, he's open to being responded to and if he's gonna be nasty the person in question can fight back. You can't fight back against 40 people all being like "you suck" anonymously in the privacy of their own rooms where no one can react to their shit.

[Bananerz]

@sunny No, let's focus on the topic.

You've got physical combat that clearly can and has been used to PK with the overriding understanding that this isn't a PVP game and that all deaths are reviewed. You've got clear social combat happening that is less controlled than the physical combat but still, it's there and being used I think really successfully for those who want to focus on a completely optional goal.

If the reason you can't have anonymous messengers is because a small minority will wreck it for everyone when such tools can be conducive to RP and story generation without needing to constantly do @actions and making more work for GMs, perhaps before you can send an anonymous message it comes up with a red warning:

This is not for OOC harassment and any IC actions you take can be reacted by others. Please use responsibly and respectfully. Enter the command again to send.

I'd rather think folks are mature and adult to handle a tool, and if not, get them out of the game. If a player thinks they can't handle such a tool, then don't use it. But shaming everyone because of fringe cases seems off-base. If though folks are being jerks even after the warning, get rid of them.

[Kanye Qwest]

i'd be ok with anonymous messengers if you could use retainers or the criminal/social system to try and figure out who sent it. Using them to be a dick to people should carry the risk of being found out and taken to task publicly for being a coward, as that would not reflect well on you in Arx's culture.

edit: sorry @bananerz if this makes you take back your upvote, but the problem was that it wasn't fringe. It wasn't one or two people using condemn to be super horrible, it was a LOT of people - way more than we'd ever want to ban or even talk to - using it in a way that was fine IC, on the surface, but added up to a really unfun time for the target.

No one in the heat of the moment thinks "i'm sure several other characters to whom this issue is way more relevant are already giving X person shit for it". They think instead "OH! My character wouldn't like that!" Which may be true, and is fine, but when 40 randos a week are like 'fuck you and the horse you rode in on' it becomes a problem in aggregate.

[Roz]

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

I'd rather think folks are mature and adult to handle a tool, and if not, get them out of the game. If a player thinks they can't handle such a tool, then don't use it. But shaming everyone because of fringe cases seems off-base. If though folks are being jerks even after the warning, get rid of them.

You're talking as if we haven't already basically gone through this whole point. I'd like to think folks are mature and adult too, but they already proved that they weren't. It's not "shaming everyone" to say "this used to exist on the game but it was abused so they took it away."

And you're not listening to @Sunny in terms of the fact that it doesn't actually require all these people to be active assholes; it just requires a number of people to be thoughtless for it to become a serious weight of unfun on others who are receiving high volumes.

[saosmash]

@bananerz Describing it as "fringe cases" when it was prevalent as a problem issue across a significant portion of the playerbase is disingenuous at best. This is a thing that literally happened, on this game, to a player, on this game. It was not the only instance of it happening, only the most flagrant instance of it happening. No one who was doing it was thinking that they were participating in harassment OOC. They were thinking, "Oh my character totally agrees with this, of course I will participate."

And yet! It still became a massive issue that continues to distort the factual representation of what happened on this game over an OOC year afterwards.

[Bananerz]

@kanye-qwest said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

i'd be ok with anonymous messengers if you could use retainers or the criminal/social system to try and figure out who sent it. Using them to be a dick to people should carry the risk of being found out and taken to task publicly for being a coward, as that would not reflect well on you in Arx's culture.

I'd be very happy if someone is being a dick that it pretty much lowers the difficulty in finding them for the other person. I still think if someone OOCly is being a dick and wrecking a character, get them the hell off the game. But good idea!

[Sunny]

@bananerz

I am focusing on the topic. Your suggestion doesn't work for the same reason that the condemns didn't work. This information is relevant and important. You're not considering a major angle of importance, and this is a problem.

Like, the problem isn't maliciousness, it's thoughtlessness. The exact same thoughtlessness you're displaying by claiming that staff would just need to punish the problems, without bothering to consider that it's not the outliers or the extremes that are the issue. Your reaction to criticism on this topic is the EXACT same problem that existed with condemn: thoughtlessness as to how this might impact the people RECEIVING the messages.

[Darinelle]

@bananerz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (:

I'd be very happy if someone is being a dick that it pretty much lowers the difficulty in finding them for the other person. I still think if someone OOCly is being a dick and wrecking a character, get them the hell off the game. But good idea!

I still don't think you understand. We have 400 active characters. On a given evening, we have 200+ unique accounts logged in.

Now, suppose you do something that even HALF the game doesn't like. Take it down further, even a QUARTER of them.

Now suppose they all take a moment to either condemn (if we still had it) or send you an anonymous messenger.

Now you have to what - spend your AP to find out who those 100 anonymous messengers were sent by, and have 100 scenes of "why do you hate my character" or also "you have no goddamn idea what I'm actually doing what the actual fuck"? Or alternately, just be shit on anonymously by 100 people for making a decision that isn't the most popular thing and doesn't make everyone universally happy.

Keep in mind that we (GMs) deliberately make it so that choices have to be made, and especially as a leader it's unlikely that you're going to have a lot of "please-everyone" choices to make about major events.

As @Sunny says, it's not the fringe cases we care much about - we can just boot and ban people if it's a one-time thing. But having 100 conversations with 100 people about "hey, maybe think that yes your character wouldn't like someone but also how fun is it for a character in a positive to make hard choices to also have 100 anonymous people telling them they suck day after day after day" is exhausting. And yes, we can make a news post but no one ever thinks it applies TO THEM. Because of course, they totally have a super important REASON. IC IS IC.

Yes, IC is IC. But leader positions already are hard. Let's not also make it filled with a shitton of negativity you realistically have no way to respond to in any meaningful way.

Sidenote: If you want to send an anonymous message? Put in an action for it. Then the person can get it anonymously, we know what's going on, there's a track of it, and if someone investigates who sent it, we can adjudicate whether you were stealthy enough for it to really be anonymous. It's a valid use of an @action.

If it's not that important to you? Then maybe it's not really that necessary.

[Bananerz]

@Sunny @Darinelle Got it!

[Thenomain]

The next time someone throws “ICA=ICC” my way, I’m going to link them to this thread. We play games for OOC reasons, and make limitations for OOC reasons. We try to be IC as much as we can, because that’s what we do, but at the end of the day we are players and nothing is going to stop that from being true. Short of a full scale psychotic break.

Looking at you, person in the mirror.

[Ominous]

I miss Dawn. That was some of the best RP I had on any game I have ever played.

On a more relevant note, I think that praises and, if disses they were to be brought back, may need (would need in the case of disses) diminishing returns for multiples in short amounts of time. The public can only be wowed or disgusted so much in a short amount of time before it becomes old news. After the Nth woman came forward about Bill Cosby/Harvey Weinstein/insert your least favorite scumbag here, were we that much more shocked or outraged?

[Kanye Qwest]

@ominous said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

were we that much more shocked or outraged?

Shocked, no. Outraged, yes.