Posts made by Arkandel

@secretfire Try Ithir. On one hand it seems to be exactly what you're looking for thematically, but using Arx code which you don't like.

As far as I'm concerned the difference between a staff and player NPC is the reason I don't staff; people act differently around staff and I don't like it.

I like running PrPs without the label (almost stigma ) of what it usually represents - some sort of official importance that makes it different from RP on the grid. What I like to run, instead, is things that resemble such RP and could in fact often have started as such, but then evolve in a pseudo-organic way into full stories.

In fact I'd be doing that in 'normal' scenes and not as an +event at all but I decided I didn't want to derail the former with my stuff by offering an opt-in instead.

When you are staff it all changes and I'm not a big fan of that.

The best staff, in my opinion, is someone who doesn't want the job but is able to to do it.

People who want to become staff for the wrong reasons - prestige, authority - are very rarely any good at it in the long run.

The best players do not necessarily make the best staff members. There is a skillset required - managerial ability, communication, decision-making, time management - that's not necessarily present in an excellent roleplayer's bag of tricks, but it's essential for administrating games.

On the other hand staff does absolutely need to understand their own game and to be respected by its potential community. They have to be well aware of how certain things work - the balance between plot and 'unscripted' play, the challenges of being new to the MU*, spotting up when RP becomes hard to find... all or all of which require experience at actually having been players first, and probably decent ones at that.

I'm splitting a different thread into this one since the issue of how punishments and discipline work in MU* warrants its own discussion.

@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:

There are certainly players who are behaving so egregiously that they need to be removed.

But I would say MOST of the incidents I've dealt with as staff are otherwise-decent players who lose their temper, say something inappropriate, make a poor decision, cross a boundary, etc.

I agree. It's easy to lose a bit of perspective while gaming in general, especially with the potential for miscommunications, the 'fog of war' in contentious IC circumstances, etc. Many people (I definitely count myself among them) screw up, get rubbed the wrong way, etc.

Another factor to be considered is how easily MUSHes allow bandwagons to form, leading to one person getting presented as the fucking devil if they don't get along with a group of popular, loud players. Then suddenly every word they type can be misinterpreted or presented in a contest they didn't intend - which influences staff. If you (General You) get a bunch of complaints by different people with comments captured out of context about the same one guy it's easy to think they're right without looking deeper into it. It happened before; it will again.

Generally speaking the number of folks who need to be banned is pretty small.

There should absolutely be more options in disciplining people. Sometimes you need to go through the entire range.

Years ago when I staffed on Tyme there was this one Asha'man player (who were basically male sorcerers) who was getting quite out of line. He'd use invisibility to stalk people, especially the ladies, threaten them OOC if they ventured anywhere outside of their cities and 'he caught them' and using "IC consequences" as a very thin layer on top of what amounted to bullying.

It was actually harmful to the game on a macro scale, not just from a creeping point of view, and I tried to step in. I tried to reason with the guy, I adjusted the power of some of their spells (I still remember the cries) to balance them a little better, I jumped on their guild channel to ask them to tone it down... nothing worked. I still remember his ultimatum at the end of all that, too, all those years later. "I'll burn down this place if I want to". He seemed to think the numbers on the sheet and the time he played there were enough.

Well, I banned him instead.

Some people simply see gaming as a pissing contest or means to a much different end than what the game itself is about. I find that those need to be removed - but they are a very small minority. Most folks just want to have fun and just happen to step out of line a bit here or there.

@Tinuviel said in Privacy in gaming:

Another conversation worth having, jumping off of this point, would be what kinds of punishments are there? Is banning all we have?

Punishments for what though? Unless I misunderstand the question, most of the offenses I have in mind would need staff to be at least complicit, and who's watching the watchmen?

Although Americans will enjoy much better sales than the rest of us, let's post some good deals on games here since Black Friday/Cyber Monday are around the corner!

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Privacy in gaming:

That is, not the logging, but the decision to use the banhammer seemingly at random

Imagine running a MUSH but instead of 20-40 players online you have hundreds of thousands. You need to hire a lot of staff to manage it, train them, monitor them... some will be good, some will suck, and being consistent in all of these different, complex situations is next to impossible.

I suspect that's why Blizzard's in-game decisions seem random. One of those hundreds of employees decided something and they have so many tickets opened daily that auditing them is a major complex operation on its own - and they're probably falling behind.

It also explains why newer games have no in-game chat. You can't be a perv when all you have to communicate with others is emoticons.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Privacy in gaming:

Blizzard enacted a zero-tolerance policy to a point where someone claiming you did the nasty could be enough to get you banned for a while, evidence be damned.

That's a corporation caving to liability issues though, not something related to privacy.

If you wanted to discuss that for WoW specifically though there really isn't any privacy at all, but players are warned in the EULA regarding this. Every conversation, personal or over a channel, is permanently logged.

I'm okay with that. I'm warned and aware, I have the choice to play the game or not, that's fair.

@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:

@Arkandel said in Privacy in gaming:

If you're having a private conversation I can't use preinstalled microphones you don't know about to record it just because you're under my roof

I'm not just talking about the legal repercussions. It's fair to argue most people would find the idea of being recorded without their knowledge in a house they're visiting to be disturbing, creepy or at least frown on the idea of such a practice.

@gryphter said in Privacy in gaming:

To my thinking, when I log onto a game, a few important things happen. First, I'm connecting to the infrastructure of a system that someone else owns. They pay money to own it; there is no reasonable expectation, therefore, that anything that happens there is 'mine'. I bring some of my stuff with me, like my PII, and I can't argue with anything said here about how we should be protecting that more effectively -- I should be able to maintain control over my stuff that I brought, or if that's impossible I should have some recourse to feel satisfied about what's being done to protect it for me.

You walk into my house that I own. I pay money to own it, yet not everything that happens there is 'mine'. If you're having a private conversation I can't use preinstalled microphones you don't know about to record it just because you're under my roof, and if you go to specific private parts of the building (like the washroom, nevermind that I still own it) I am not permitted to have installed cameras.

To give up on the analogy though it's not a matter of authority. Obviously if staff are bad actors they can do whatever they want and will only get caught if they leak that fact themselves and there's just about no recourse a player has other than leaving the game or spreading the word.

All I'm saying is that - in my opinion - secretly prying on private rooms or conversations constitutes unethical behavior. It's not because what transpires there is noteworthy, shameful, intimate, etc; it's because privacy itself is important.

@Auspice said in Privacy in gaming:

@Arkandel said in Privacy in gaming:

@Auspice said in Privacy in gaming:

Just like what I am posting, right now, is going to an unsecured site.

Would I be furious if Arkandel used it for nefarious purposes? Yes, of course I would. But I'm not waltzing in expecting the forum equivalent of Fort Knox and that is what I think people need to stop doing.

Hey now, you are posting stuff to a regularly updated platform running on a regularly updated Linux system hosted by a reputable company, and you're doing so over an encrypted https connection. While it's true MSB is no Fort Knox, we're not exactly trivial to breach either.

Conversely there's only one way for me to provide your data and that's if the police produce a warrant demanding something specific. In Canada laws are fairly sane in that regard so the chance is low. No other requests are going to be honored.

Also although I obviously can't prove it and you shouldn't take my word for it, I'd never pry into the database for your people's disgusting private conversations with each other. I don't want to have to bleach my eyeballs afterwards.

It's still unsecure in the sense that, save for a few sections, anyone can read what we're saying without having an account. Someone could use a crawler to grab an archive of the entire forum if they wanted with minimal difficulty. Would it include PMs? No.

There's still a level of insecurity.

Oh I see what you mean. I guess I don't consider posting on public forums something that needs to be protected, much in the way scenes in non-private rooms on the grid should be fine to share without asking permission.

@Auspice said in Privacy in gaming:

Just like what I am posting, right now, is going to an unsecured site.

Would I be furious if Arkandel used it for nefarious purposes? Yes, of course I would. But I'm not waltzing in expecting the forum equivalent of Fort Knox and that is what I think people need to stop doing.

Hey now, you are posting stuff to a regularly updated platform running on a regularly updated Linux system hosted by a reputable company, and you're doing so over an encrypted https connection. While it's true MSB is no Fort Knox, we're not exactly trivial to breach either.

Conversely there's only one way for me to provide your data to a third party and that's if the police produce a warrant demanding something specific. In Canada laws are fairly sane in that regard so the chance is low. No other requests are going to be honored.

Also although I obviously can't prove it and you shouldn't take my word for it, I'd never pry into the database for your people's disgusting private conversations with each other. I don't want to have to bleach my eyeballs afterwards.

@Ghost And yet this is not a good argument. Of course plaintext data are easier to intercept but the payoff potential is very small that no one intending to make a profit from it will bother.

Profit is not the only incentive for violating someone's privacy though. Consider stalking as an obvious example. Exploits within the game, be it by staff or anyone else running 'eavesdropping' objects are far more likely than intercepting site to site communications.

This came up in the TS thread (because of course it did) but it definitely deserves its own space.

How much - if at all - do you value your privacy online in the context of gaming?

The following is just a prompt where I was going to respond to Pandora. Feel free to expand and add your thoughts.

@Pandora said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

I think we've gotten so entrenched in 'PROTECTIN' MAH RIGHTS!' that people aren't really giving any thought to how (not)useful this so-called right is in the context of a GAME as opposed to real life.

I don't protect my privacy because it's useful to me. I value it because it's important.

Or to quote Snowden: Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:

That's... not acceptable. I've staffed on various online games, and that's never been acceptable anywhere I've been.

Unfortunately acceptable is a funny word when it comes to this hobby. The truth is people have historically tolerated truly abusive behavior from staff and continued to play there - and that's pretty much the definition of having accepted it.

The list of justifications for it is pretty long. Players will claim they've invested too much time to give up, their friends are still playing there, "but other than this the game can be fun", whatever it is... what it comes down is they'll complain and shake their fists at things they claim are important but then they'll go back to playing there anyway, proving that really... such things really aren't that important after all.

What's a little personal dignity when it comes to playing Lady McGuffin on a text-based game who's about to unlock a new secret if her player doesn't rock the boat too much?

Frankly this tangent is pretty theoretical. I believe in privacy is a right in MU* (and everywhere online) while others don't, and that's fine.

Even so I doubt staff in any game have ever felt entitled to do so because there's a clause buried in a help file or wiki page somewhere.

@Pandora Privacy is a right. It doesn't require justification, but taking it away does.

@Thenomain Are we raging? I need to be told how to feel about this.