All Star Wars Scenes Must be in Cantinas (with Spoilers)
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@Soresu Yeah, Age of Alliances went away for a while, and a conversation on there earlier today reminded my why. Random policies by whim of the headstaff, as well as random changes with little reasoning.
Example: there is a policy about having your armor in your @desc. Which is sometime sensible (if your desc and poses have not reflected the presence of power armor, no, you don't get it for the scene). Sometimes it isn't (since armor is factored into attacks automatically, you must choose a specific type of existing armor. Having it customized to something you might actually ICly wear is a hassle). This policy, however, does not carry over to, say... PVP. If someone knocks you out in a fight, they can loot everything off of you. Even if it was not in the desc.
There was also talk about ships, because... Star Wars. Cujo made mention (probably in jest) that it would be super keen if ships were just one @dug room, with a bulk description of what was what, with the justification that RP doesn't happen in a turret gunwell. This is well and good, except because of that loot thing I mentioned earlier, sometimes you want to put your equipment somewhere people can't get to. Like a locked room on a ship. I also casually pointed out that the Millenium Falcon has 19 rooms. A number of them just hallways.
It's just the casual insistance of how, on the one hand, he wants a hyper-realistic game, with datapads you send IC emails to people, to holographic radios so you could talk to someone on the other side of the galaxy, to fluxuating economies on planets for traders, to a coded Krayt dragon that wanders around the dune sea (existing in a grid with each room taking up 15 km^2) that you can fight.... while on the other hand, 'just handwave shit because, while I could @dig a separate bunk for each crew member that asks, It adds needless bloat to the database'? Bothers me.
It's this kind of thing thatis why AoA faded out to three people logging on to churn the trade lanes until it died before, and the only reason it's alive right now is because of the adrenaline injection that was The Force Awakens.
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Cujo was interesting. I remember when they gave the reigns to someone who had Coruscant invaded and thousands of Dark Jedi streaming out. It happened, like over night. The new guy got mad when he found rp that wasn't really reflective of it. There wasn't much to go on and it just .. happened. The place is coded so well and has just the right mix of Mechanics and rp that it was fun back in the day. But I agree, ultimately it was the policies that killed it off. While it doesn't sound like they are off to a good start necessarily, maybe it'll change this time around.
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Another issue at the moment (though it's being fixed, as we now have a coder) is that you can't run combat of a non-PVP variety. The code requires a target to +attack, and there are presently no NPC dummies standing around to be accommodating.
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I was just approved over at generations and aside from there being no request system, so we have to either wait for staff or send a direct mail with no way to track our jobs, the staff seems very amicable. I'm interested to see what kind of rp I'll find. I think I've made a pretty interesting character.
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Is Generations of Darkness the one that had staff spying on player pages/whispers?
MSB free since 24/3/2018
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@Faceless said:
Is Generations of Darkness the one that had staff spying on player pages/whispers?
No idea. It's the one with all of the SAGA edition code.
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@Faceless said:
Is Generations of Darkness the one that had staff spying on player pages/whispers?
There were rumours of that last year before I left. I don't know the situation now, though.
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Generations of Darkness is the most populous Star Wars MUSH at present. Lots of people, like 30-40 unique connections at one time with 50-60 character bits connected.
I think the staff 'spying' was Kitty (a wizard) using one of the built-in spy commands to listen to a problematic player who was later banned. But then I remember one of the head staffers (Vaapad or Ataru) actually got into the WORA thread where it was being discussed and said the command was being restricted or taken out.
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@Fizzle11 said:
Generations of Darkness is the most populous Star Wars MUSH at present. Lots of people, like 30-40 unique connections at one time with 50-60 character bits connected.
I think the staff 'spying' was Kitty (a wizard) using one of the built-in spy commands to listen to a problematic player who was later banned. But then I remember one of the head staffers (Vaapad or Ataru) actually got into the WORA thread where it was being discussed and said the command was being restricted or taken out.
Indeed, this is what occured and was discussed on Wora. The command, while making people extremely uncomfortable, was intended to be used for cheating and such. I am currently an admin there. It's a hopping place for the moment.
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I think it would be fair if the players asked to see the code, to know how staff can use it.
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I don't know much about Rhost, but doesn't both Penn and Tiny come with built-in suspect flags which automatically log all the actions of the suspect?
What is obvious to you may not be obvious to me and vice versa.
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Rhost also has SUSPECT. I doubt it's used much though since it also has that lovely undocumented @snoop command.
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Yes, the Suspect flag exists and logs everything, but this statement has two facts encoded in it. First, log files cannot by default be read in-game. It can be set otherwise, but this is the kind of code that is reasonable for players to know. The second is knowing how Suspect flag works, and it's either defaulted to Wizard- or God-Only.
Out of the box, everyone can know who has access, the ability and limitations of Suspect.
What it does not do is allow you to log specific commands. For this, you would use @hook, which also requires server access, but can allow this kind of logging and revealing of the log to everybody. This is how I guess they're doing it. "Anything" is broad enough that players who are interested in knowing their implied rights are reasonable. That is, this is a reasonable thing for staff to be asked, and they should reveal the code outright in that case.
edit: I forgot about @Snoop. https://github.com/RhostMUSH/trunk/blob/82b353e19b33227b360efaa01a3b32ba3a5d80dd/Server/src/netcommon.c#L569 -- it looks roughly like a different kind of Suspect flag.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@Thenomain I don't know what the implementation of snoop is on MU* but on CircleMUD it actually gave you access to everything someone saw on their end, including pages, channels etc. Talk about massive violations of privacy.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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This would be an updated Suspect flag, which only logged what they type.
The thing about violations of privacy is that you have to expect privacy to begin with. My objection to many implementations of games is the assumption that if you don't explicitly state it, you have none whatsoever. I believe this to be ethically wrong, if technologically neutral, which is why I don't like technocratic administrative methods.
However, without a statement of privacy you should assume the worst and demand an official statement. Don't let staff hide practice behind obscurity or ambiguity. If they continue to do so, assume they are purposefully unethical.
On-topic, I like cantinas and especially Star Wars again, thanks to the recent movie.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
Because in today's modern day of age we all have some kind of expectation of privacy, amirite?
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We do. This is why we still get upset about it.
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@Thenomain said:
However, without a statement of privacy you should assume the worst and demand an official statement. Don't let staff hide practice behind obscurity or ambiguity. If they continue to do so, assume they are purposefully unethical.
I quite agree. My worst case of privacy violations though (mentioned earlier in this thread) wasn't necessarily due to staff policy.
We - staff members active at the time - had no idea about the command even existing, so whether it was simply put in place by a well-meaning but unthinking coder (not at all an impossibility) not realizing the consequences of a game-wide snoop, a rogue coder actually trying to pry into everyone's affair or even former Head Staff having put it into place so it was inherited down the line as one function among tens of thousands badly written lines of code... we never knew.
What I'm trying to say is, even with a statement of privacy and assuming the best intentions by head staff, all it really takes in the end is one coder no one catches at it. So having no expectation of privacy, ever, seems like a sounder policy.
- 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 said:
What I'm trying to say is, even with a statement of privacy and assuming the best intentions by head staff, all it really takes in the end is one coder no one catches at it.
This really explains all code and all coders. There was, a year or two back, an exploited code hole in ...
bash, was it? That the people in charge of the code think was inserted purposefully, but it happened so long ago that they couldn't determine it. -
To return to topic: FFG dice code: great system, or greatest system? [/Actors Studio Will Ferrell]
