Firefly - Still Flyin'
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@TiredEwok said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
@Browncoat said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
@faraday said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
You just have to weigh whether the "last resort" kind of situation you're describing is worth establishing a policy that's going to chase good people away.
Thank you for your thoughtful response, @faraday and the thought occured to me as well that we'd also invade the other player's privacy in this case.
To be entirely honest here, I personally hadn't expected that this bit of policy would stir so much feeling, because it's been pretty much a given on every mush I've been on that staff might lurk "dark" in scenes. I've only ever RP'ed wth that thought in my mind and would only ever talk about staff in pages or through channels away from the mush. So when we wrote the policy, it just seemed... a normal staff thing to do (and say). But if people think that the line would make people uncomfortable and even chase good players away, I wouldn't mind removing it from the policy.
I think the policy is best left as being something left unspoken. At this point in the hobby, which has been around forever, I think pretty much everyone knows that it is a possibility that one's RP/OOC interactions/etc might be monitored by staff under certain situations. Stating that outright makes people who have had bad experiences, heard bad stories, or whatnot, anxious and less inclined to play on a game, as been evidenced in this thread.
There's a lot of things that people think "pretty much everyone knows," but I think that's kind of bad to assume. I've seen plenty of newcomers to the hobby continually over my time in it. There are always people entering the hobby and tripping over all of our community assumptions that we take for granted.
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Good point.
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Gotta say though, it's nice seeing another stab at Firefly outside of the convoluted code mess (and unethical WTFness) that was Serenity Mush.
I think what you're seeing here is some residual worry about snooping because some of the Serenity Mush old guard (not just Mal/Inara) were known to snoop and would (up to the point of banning players) abuse players for choosing against their wishes via RP.
I think a lot of people loved their stories and characters from that game, but didnt exactly love the game itself. That make sense?
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I mostly don't see what this accomplishes as a practice that using the SUSPECT flag doesn't do better for a player you've had the kind of complaints about to make it seem necessary, since you can't monitor pages or mails or stuff that occurs when you're offline by sitting DARK in a room. I guess I'd rather have it stated upfront if it's going to happen, though.
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Thanks for all the useful thoughts.
I've now gone ahead and removed that line from the policy as I don't want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.
However, I've done this now without first checking back with Otrere, so it may return perhaps in some sort of altered form.
He is also the main coder (I've done all the descs and a big chunk of the wiki in the meantime) and my guess is that he hasn't been aware of the SUSPECT flag. This is our first rodeo with FS3.
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Staff being able to spy on players is common, players being aware of it may be less common, and staffers without any coding experience being aware that they could potentially have this capability may also be less common.
There are often good reasons to spy on players, and this often considered a breach of privacy.
Privacy is a debatable commodity on a MU* when you can take your private OOC conversations to Discord, much the same way tabletop RPers can take their private OOC conversations into another room that the GM is not responsible for.
2020 is a very different time than 1997, and people
appreciatedemand transparency, often to the extent that it is detrimental to a game's setting, theme, and ambiance if staff allows their vision to be trampled over for the sake of said transparency. (Most do.)I'd advise that you put the policy back in place, else this thread WILL come back to bite you in the ass at some point, and the accusation WILL be that you obfuscated your spying. Not worth it.
Policy + Clarification, and an outline of what complaint procedures are, including whether or not people are issued warnings that they're being observed, how long the observation period will be for, and so on. If someone is worthy of being spied on 24/7 forever, just ban them. You're making too much work for yourself, especially for a manual labor-intensive code-lite game.
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@Browncoat said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
hasn't been aware of the SUSPECT flag. This is our first rodeo with FS3.
Just to clarify... SUSPECT is a flag built into PennMUSH. It has nothing to do with FS3, which is just a skills system that runs on Penn and AresMUSH. Most servers have some sort of toolset for abuse management, and itās an unfortunate necessity that staff be intimately familiar with those tools. I think thereās a thread around here about that somewhere, detailing the tools available on the various servers.
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@Browncoat said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
He is also the main coder (I've done all the descs and a big chunk of the wiki in the meantime) and my guess is that he hasn't been aware of the SUSPECT flag. This is our first rodeo with FS3.
I believe you said in the advertisement its FS3 on Penn. I'd recommend connecting with the PennMu* folks if you haven't already (web: mush.pennmush.org - the social MUSH via client, same address via port 4201). They can help, such as easier to connect with @grapenut who helped with the web-based JS client that can be a useful tool (and I've had it run just fun on wikidot).
They're also good for discussions about policy too. I can say as related to SUSPECT (a mushcode thing that PennMUSH has as well), they'd say if it wasn't in policy, it shouldn't be used on players.
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If spying is the game plan for dealing with 'some kinds of complaints', then say that. Don't intend to do it and then not say so just because some person said 'oh everyone assumes...' - you are going to have way more issues hiding it than stating it up front.
It wasn't the spying that killed it for me (don't mind my rp.being watched in most circumstances), but the lack of specificity. I don't understand anything about this game beyond it is a tool staff put on the table, and apparently now still plans to use, but is in the closet so people don't even know it's there?
Yes, it is possible to spy, and you can't tell, and technical limitations, but my expectation is that staff will follow the rules that they set for themselves, whatever they are, until I have reason to think otherwise. Thus, when a staffer says in policy 'I will not watch TS', I assume that they aren't. If that is not policy, then I have no assurances that it will not happen when there are no presented boundaries for the spying.
Thus, I appreciate being informed that it is being used indiscriminately, so I can not play. Taking that notification out, ESPECIALLY when you still intend to use the tool, is less comfortable for me. Am I a good litmus test? Absolutely not. But this is the general issue I am seeing with it.
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@Roz said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
There's a lot of things that people think "pretty much everyone knows," but I think that's kind of bad to assume.
For example, I am horrified to learn of this, because if spying on PCs is as rampant and expected as people make it sound in this thread, then every complaint I've ever lodged has been documented by some creeper on staff and they just refused to do anything about it. Now I can't stop wondering how many of the requests that I produce logs supporting my case were made by people who already knew what had happened but were looking for excuses to protect their creepy friends by creating hurdles for me until I tripped over one of them, thus providing a pretext to drop the case.
This probably has nothing to do with the game being discussed but is upsetting enough I had to say something.
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@GreenFlashlight Eh, I think this is very much a case where people's experiences vary. I've been in the hobby for some two decades and I've never run into it on a game I've been on. People just definitely remember the instances where they run into it.
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To my knowledge, my RP has never been spied on in a situation where I wasn't aware of it (ie on games where there were public rooms or commands that allowed watchable rp for various reasons). I'm certainly aware it's possible through various means, though. Mostly I feel like watching my rp would be a really boring and unproductive use of a staffer's time.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow your rp isn't boring!
unproductive tho.
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Okay, how is this for a rewritten policy - would this put players' minds at ease?
(we reserve the right to) check on repeated complaints about a particular player by monitoring said player's RP by being invisibly present in the room for as short as possible. Before this happens we will send a written warning to that player that we've received complaints about him/her and he/she may be subject to monitoring. However, we will NOT watch any kind of scene that could be considered infringing on another player's privacy unless that player has been asked for permission, and we will NEVER watch any kind of intimate scene (TS) between players.
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Frankly Suspect and all that is mild compared to some of the hardcoded tools out there. Rhost is a perfect example of what can be done. They have a spoof function that allows you to monitor in real time all the input and output sent to/from the MUSH for a specific connection(IE Player).
While I understand that @Auspice likes the idea of having privacy, the real truth is that once you log into a MUSH/Ares/Evennia/MUX/etc, you probably are waiving it. While some servers like Ares doesn't really have any 'spy' tools built into it. It's flexible enough that one can be added with a little code knowledge. So I always assume, when I log into any MUSH, that I am being watched every which way but loose. It's better for my sanity that way.
Pay no attention to me. I'm old, jaded and generally unfriendly. I am prone to fits of stupidity, but I am still unique, just like everyone else. ~~ Current President of the Anti-Faraday fan club.
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@Seamus
Technical capability does not mean it is being done. It is reasonable to expect the staff of any game to follow their listed policies regardless of the possibility the platform contains for violations. 'Because it is possible' is hardly a reason to implement inappropriate policy.
ETA: I am in IT. I can technically access the email of anyone in the office here and read it. Wanna guess how it would go if I did? If I had a coder on my staff team that abused the technical ability to spy on players, I would fire them and apologize to my players. Likewise, if a staff team says 'I will not watch your private rp', then I expect- reasonably- that they don't, and would further expect that if someone were caught, they would be removed from staff. If they were not removed, then the game staff does not follow their stated policy, and I will not play there.
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@Rowan said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
At least they're not using 'observer objects' like Firan, which would be on you 24/7 logging everything both IC and OOC.
I always counted it as a matter of pride when I struck my tent and an observer popped out. My TS was clearly a topic of great interest.
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@Seamus said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
While some servers like Ares doesn't really have any 'spy' tools built into it. It's flexible enough that one can be added with a little code knowledge.
You don't even need that.
As I was telling someone earlier, a person can just add a Staffer to their private scene and let the Staffer see the behavior.My issue with policies like 'We might watch your RP after complaints' is that, as @faraday mentioned, it would also mean monitoring people that aren't under suspicion and it comes with that confirmation bias. (Maybe they just see 'good' scenes. Or maybe they can only observe a limited amount.)
Something like a SUSPECT flag or Rhost's function as you mentioned allows them to collect everything just on that player. It means other people aren't caught in the crossfire.
The first time I ever encountered spying was 'innocent.' On a game I played many years ago, before posted logs were a thing, we found out one day that the HS had been observing, while dark, almost all of our RP (as a small group). It weirded us out. A lot. She insisted it was because she loved our plots and RP and it was fun, but I always wondered (and still do) why she didn't just ask to watch.
What if one of us (we were close friends off-game too) had a major RL issue come up (say, death in the family as an example) and talked about it with our friends via OOC? Then suddenly some third party is hearing about this personal stuff.
And I know, the answer from a lot of people is gonna be 'don't talk about personal stuff on game' but I don't think that's a good response.
We know Discord can technically access logs, but we're not going around telling people not to use it.
Google can technically read your emails, but we don't tell people not to send their resumes because 'oh no someone might know where you live.'What we do is have a reasonable expectation to privacy. Yes, we all know Staff CAN do these things, but we also go in with a reasonable expectation that private scenes are private. That page conversations are private. etc.
They can be logged and reported (just like people can in other programs like, say, reporting someone on Twitter for harassing DMs), but I should be able to login and feel comfortable that no one's gonna creep on what I'm doing 'just because.'
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Auspice said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
She insisted it was because she loved our plots and RP and it was fun, but I always wondered (and still do) why she didn't just ask to watch.
I feel like this specific instance and the general concern are symptoms of a single problem: that the staff/player hierarchy creates a divide between the two groups. As a staffer, you are removed from the general player experience because you have information players don't (the intentions behind the rules), and players have information staffers don't (the effects those rules have on the play experience regardless of intention) that they're mostly afraid to share for expectation of reprisal.
Fixing that might be beyond the scope of this thread, though.
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@Auspice said in Firefly - Still Flyin':
They can be logged and reported (just like people can in other programs like, say, reporting someone on Twitter for harassing DMs), but I should be able to login and feel comfortable that no one's gonna creep on what I'm doing 'just because.'
And what makes you think this is not already happening on the games you play on?
I have said it before: everything rests on a staff memberās reputation. No policy is sacrosanct; no expectation will never be broken. All you can do is trust your staff or not trust them.
Thatās really all it comes down to.
And if that is so? Thereās no need for a policy.
And before anyone thinks I will spy on them whimsically, I aināt got time for that shit.
