@Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered)

[ThatGuyThere]

@bananerz
I think you are misunderstanding something and that is how the IC effects the OOC, lets say you have Count Basie a fine PC nobleman and he goofs up, it happens and the player handles it well and is fine with consequences, so all of a sudden the consequences are getting dozens of messages every time they log on telling him he sucks, while it may be IC for every person that sends one to send it, and could even be completely motivated only by IC so no real infraction being committed for staff to deal with since no OOC wrong doing is occurring, but it still becomes incredibly not fun for the player of Count Basie.
It does not matter how mature a player is being continuously hammered at that you suck will likely be detrimental to your enjoyment of the game. And anyone who sees what happened to the poor old Count will now be less likely to want to risk IC mistakes since they can see the result will not be an obstacle to get past in a story but an OOC gauntlet to try and survive.

[Bananerz]

@ThatGuyThere Thanks! Got it, they made it clear just a few posts ahead of you but thanks for taking the moment to comment too, I appreciate it.

Irritated that folks aren't treating fellow players how they'd like to be treated. Imagine sitting at a table and every single time we sit, jerkface does something just to treat the other person across from them like garbage. I'd probably slap their face. Not really, I'd probably just leave the entire game and not come back because I'm very flakey.

[ThatGuyThere]

@bananerz
Sorry I didn't mean to pile on, I reply as I read so at times I join in before I realize the matter has passed.

[Bananerz]

@thatguythere Ha! It's okay to double-check!

[Tehom]

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

@ThatGuyThere Thanks! Got it, they made it clear just a few posts ahead of you but thanks for taking the moment to comment too, I appreciate it.

Irritated that folks aren't treating fellow players how they'd like to be treated. Imagine sitting at a table and every single time we sit, jerkface does something just to treat the other person across from them like garbage. I'd probably slap their face. Not really, I'd probably just leave the entire game and not come back because I'm very flakey.

I think some social cues that'd exist in a tabletop game aren't present here. Like a dogpile isn't all that obvious unless you're on the receiving end of it. Even if people are vaguely aware that other people are complaining at a person, they don't register it that much.

If we put back in condemns in some form, it'd probably have very tight throttling to prevent the sort of egregious dogpiling that just seems to happen in any text/faceless medium.

[Thenomain]

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

Like a dogpile isn't all that obvious unless you're on the receiving end of it.

A dogpile is super easy to spot if you're not the one piling on. If you are one of the people piling on, taking a step back and paying attention to those around you will also cue you in. I cannot really imagine that 40 people individually decided that Dawn needed reamed. I have no idea how I would break it down, but in my experience it happens in groups that agree with one another and do it to support their colleagues, because they agree or at least have only part of the story.

By the time you have the whole story, congratulations! You're part of the problem!

How many people are willing, at that point, to stop? Let alone to apologize, knowing that even if they are sincere they are inviting retribution. (Especially if that retribution might come from staff.)

Nope, it's far more human at that point to double down and stick to your beliefs, out of fear or out of stubbornness. If you can convince people that you're not wrong, then if you get punished the punisher is acting unethical.

(edit: I've found it likely at this point that both sides believe the other is being unethical, furthering deadlock. yay.)

--

At this point in my staffing career, I would have no problem mailing one-fifth of my game's active population and telling them it's not cool and to cut it the fuck out. I also would remove the code, knowing that even if they did, someone else wouldn't.

This is too bad, because PvP between trusting people is pretty goddamn fun.

--

For the pedantic: I don't know the tools that people can use instead, or whatever, but I do know that if there's a way that something can be done, then there's a thousand ways to end up with the same result. This part isn't up to me, but I can already see the shape of how it might work.

Because making systems is fun.

And I'm insane.

[Roz]

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

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

ike a dogpile isn't all that obvious unless you're on the receiving end of it.

A dogpile is super easy to spot if you're not the one piling on. If you are one of the people piling on, taking a step back and paying attention to those around you will also cue you in.

It actually was easy to miss with something like the condemn code, because you weren't seeing the effects except for that once a week at cron when suddenly you'll see someone at the top of the chart with something crazy like 40 condemns. It's easy to watch dogpiles in process when they're public and visible. And even that requires people to be reading those bbposts, and we know how many players don't do that at all.

[Bananerz]

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

This is too bad, because PvP between trusting people is pretty goddamn fun.

It is!

[Thenomain]

@roz

I said:

I cannot really imagine that 40 people individually decided that Dawn needed reamed.

If you can tell me this is exactly what happened, then so be it. With a sample size this large with the same opinion, it's hard to believe that there wasn't collusion, subconscious or otherwise. I'm not calling for a conspiracy, and certainly not across the entire set, but 40 people? Yeah, not buying it was a statistical fluke.

edit: Let me put it this way: If one-fifth of the game's active population all individually decided that Dawn needed condemned, then maybe it wasn't a dog-piling. Maybe it was a real, if visceral, opinion of the game's population.

Staff decided that it wasn't, that one-fifth of the game's population was hatin'. That's...a huge chunk of the game's population, on any size game, to decide are abusive. Without comment to them about their actions.

Can you take a hater and make them play nice? I don't know. I wasn't given that choice. One-fifth of the game's population was. Call it good or call it bad, I'll call it a thing that adds into the overall staff culture. It is what it is.

My personal application of Occam's Razor in what I know of this situation (i.e., what's been posted here) make the 'small conspiracies' make a hell of a lot more sense.

(i'm done, i swear)

[scar]

@saosmash

[Doozer]

@scar I was STRUGGLING with trying to read that.

TY!

[brent]

I think another contributing factor was that condemns were on the X per week system, which leads to the mindset (similar to other systems) that if you don't use X condemns per week you're "wasting" them, so use it or lose it right?

That said, even if you "fixed" this mechanic by, say, instituting some sort of system where you could say, condemn somebody at the cost of 3 praises (and not have a condemn be 3 times as effective, just make it have the opportunity cost of cutting into your ability to praise people) I tend to think these kinds of systems are in the end more trouble than they're worth for the reasons already mentioned.

[Roz]

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

@roz

I said:

I cannot really imagine that 40 people individually decided that Dawn needed reamed.

If you can tell me this is exactly what happened, then so be it. With a sample size this large with the same opinion, it's hard to believe that there wasn't collusion, subconscious or otherwise. I'm not calling for a conspiracy, and certainly not across the entire set, but 40 people? Yeah, not buying it was a statistical fluke.

I mean, you're right in that I imagine there were also scenes of people expressing dislike, and I know there was plenty of OOC bitching. But does it require a bunch of collusion for 40 players to thoughtlessly sort of shoot off a 'condemn Dawn=She really sucks'? It was really easy to do without thinking about it, and I'd say that the lack of thinking or consideration required is what encouraged the volume in certain situations.

edit: Let me put it this way: If one-fifth of the game's active population all individually decided that Dawn needed condemned, then maybe it wasn't a dog-piling. Maybe it was a real, if visceral, opinion of the game's population.

Staff decided that it wasn't, that one-fifth of the game's population was hatin'. That's...a huge chunk of the game's population, on any size game, to decide are abusive. Without comment to them about their actions.

Can you take a hater and make them play nice? I don't know. I wasn't given that choice. One-fifth of the game's population was. Call it good or call it bad, I'll call it a thing that adds into the overall staff culture. It is what it is.

You're missing the actual point that's already been explicated in this thread. It's not that people didn't think it was a real opinion of the PCs being played. It wasn't that people were using condemns abusively on an individual level, hence why multiple posters have already talked about why it wasn't really a situation where staff could start taking people aside. It was that the system encouraged a thoughtless brand of negativity that offered no IC risk and yet could end up piling a huge lack of fun onto certain PCs. It wasn't that 1/5th of the game was necessarily being abusive by way of condemns. It was that the system encouraged a method of play that easily could become actively unfun for anyone in a leadership position who ended up having to make any sort of difficult position.

If you have forty people lining up to complain to one leadership PC, for those forty people it's one part of their play, for that leadership PC it's the entirety of their time. It's the same logic. And the condemn piles would also be hugely uneven based on certain factors -- COUGH GENDER COUGH -- that only added to the overall un-fun-ness of it.

[Bananerz]

Be limited to one praise and one condemn a week. I had to be so damn choosy with Driskell, he had like 1 a week. Social combat represents an investment of resources and time, if you had only one to give you probably would be more choosier. The actual fluctuation and power behind it would of course be determined by stats and things that I don't know.

Just as folks pile on with condemns, there is pile on with praises too. I see that happening.

[faraday]

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

It was that the system encouraged a thoughtless brand of negativity...

I think that's it in a nutshell right there. If you build a tool that enables (encourages?) thoughtless negativity, then the result of players being thoughtlessly negative should hardly be surprising.

I'm not sure why anonymous messengers would fall into that same category though. There's a very real difference between a gossip-y/gripe-y condemn system and and a direct message system. Would a significant number of characters really be sending hate mail to the leader ICly via anonymous messenger? Because if not, then using the message system in that manner would be OOC abuse. It seems like that could be easily smacked down by staff (assuming the sends were tagged - for staff eyes only - with the sender's name).

[scar]

@faraday Would a significant number of characters really be sending hate mail to the leader ICly via anonymous messenger?

I honestly believe that the players on Arx absolutely would.

[Roz]

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

I'm not sure why anonymous messengers would fall into that same category though. There's a very real difference between a gossip-y/gripe-y condemn system and and a direct message system. Would a significant number of characters really be sending hate mail to the leader ICly via anonymous messenger? Because if not, then using the message system in that manner would be OOC abuse. It seems like that could be easily smacked down by staff (assuming the sends were tagged - for staff eyes only - with the sender's name).

The benefit to headache quotient there is so wildly off, though. What great value would there be in having to spend the time policing it? Keep in mind the size of the playerbase. It's just so wildly not worth it for the trouble it would cause.

[faraday]

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

The benefit to headache quotient there is so wildly off, though. What great value would there be in having to spend the time policing it? Keep in mind the size of the playerbase. It's just so wildly not worth it for the trouble it would cause.

Sad but probably true.

[Bananerz]

@scar Grr. I just want to send gifts, hidden praises, threats, dead birds. To use it as a tool to create RP, not to shove some player off the game. This is why my idea sucks because it'd just in the end be a tool to be abused.

[Doozer]

@bananerz Pay someone to send it. "I was told to deliver this to you. They didn't say who."

Hope that the person can keep a secret.