Posts made by Derp

@surreality

I actually fairly frequently stand up for players, and examine the motivations of the actor. But it's been my experience that the scales balance about evenly on 'unreasonableness'.

But if it'll help, here is a snippet of policy files (unfinalized) from a project that I am currently working on:

Consent

$GAMENAME is mostly a non-consent game in nature, meaning that a player cannot refuse to allow things to happen to their character, simply because they are uncomfortable with it. Some limitations on this exist:

Any player may request a FTB (fade to black) at any time. This does not mean that the event did not happen, only that it is not RP’ed.

PC death or any other effect lasting longer than the duration of a single scene requires the involvement of a judge or staffer. (Remember that a single scene may be flexible in its duration to some degree.)

However, all play on $GAMENAME is expected to consider the rights of other players, the storylines of all characters, and the overall storyline in its conception and execution. Play that sacrifices or ignores any of the three above items in favor of the personal aggrandizement of any player is not acceptable on $GAMENAME. All players are reminded that any concerns or issues with OOC communication are to be directed to staff for resolution if they cannot be readily resolved with the player(s).

Staff reserves the right to intervene in scenes or RP in-game if an NPC or world-based response to PC actions is deemed necessary and appropriate. ICA=ICC, and more powerful figures exist than any one character on the grid, no matter how high level. Nobody in the world depicted on $GAMENAME is immune from the consequences of their actions, and $GAMENAME relies on this fact to maintain story balance.

@surreality said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

Stop acting like people who say 'no' are the only people worth side-eye or suspicion. It is so far from being a balanced or reasonable perspective, it's ridiculous.

First of all, that's not what the hell I said. I said, specifically,

1. that the bad things that this system is designed to combat already exist in most games, either through coded systems or explicit policy files, and

2. that the overbroad nature of this system leaves it open to abuses.

I didn't say that other people can't be dumbassess, and I explicitly said that if someone thinks that someone is being over the top, a judge can be called for.

Please stop putting words in my mouth. I'm all for protecting players, and I think that both ends can be unreasonable, but I just don't think this implementation is the way to go about it, and we're talking about it like it doesn't exist at all already -- when it does.

@Testament said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

What worries me is that a system like this could be abused so that someone could make sure that nothing bad ever happened to their character ever.

Yeah, this is what I was saying about 'being abused' earlier. This gives players too much control over the IC based on their OOC, which is not how the kinds of games where this tends to come up are meant to be played.

Between the FTB rules and the ability to summon a judge to arbitrate what sorts of actions happen, I don't see this as necessary, and really see this being a bad idea.

@Ghost said in Armageddon MUD:

@Jeshin said in Armageddon MUD:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/619345329619206173/652699205378506752/20191206_211900.jpg

Last one I promise. No need to worry even if complaint that necro'd this thread is fake here's a real one from a phone (harder to fake) and from a long time player with a history!

PS - Sorry for bringing the MUD stuff over here but... Woof this guy.

Is it weird that the first time I read that I thought "Duh, I'd be screaming with a knife in me, too"?

If taken out of context and placed in a vacuum, I promise you that me and my staffers have made way worse comments than that. This doesn't actually prove anything, really. Most of ours are made for rimshot humor effects.

ETA: If I were the staffer investigating this, and I was provided the evidence that they claim to have seen, I would rule against the accuser too. The IP thing is pretty damning. As someone said, it's a small world, but not that small, and as mentioned, the Discord stuff is pretty easy to fake.

I would also take into account my personal history with the staffer in question, because yes, I am going to do a gut check to see if the pattern of behavior they are accused of matches anything that I have seen from them, the language that I know they're prone to using, etc.

And no, I would not suspend them from staff while the investigation is ongoing, because a) no matter what your intentions with it are, that paints them with a scarlet letter in the court of public opinion, even if you come back later and clear them of it. And b) staff is already hard to find, and harder to keep, so I'm not going to start locking the people that are working for me and helping me keep the plates in the air in a cage until I can figure out if someone is telling the truth or not.

If I determine that they are telling the truth, then the staffer will be gone. I've done it before. At least three times now. But until that point, no, I'm not going to take an action against them, because frankly, I hired them because I trust them, and as far as I'm concerned, they're innocent until proven guilty.

So, when presented with the evidence listed here, and the concerns that they brought back? I would uphold the finding. I don't think that the staff here were out of bounds on that. If other evidence gets presented, it might change my mind, but so far all we have are one comment taken out of context and a log provided from someone that had already been banned from the game, and that does not rise to the level of evidence necessary to be actionable.

@surreality said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

@JinShei That actually is a really good way to put it: it's how you wake up if you're waking up to an actual blaring alarm or the sound of someone screaming like they're being murdered. A lot of people don't get it, and I'm totally stealing that to help explain it.

The husband could sleep through the apocalypse, and fall asleep again easily after almost any interruption.

Meanwhile, me:

More like:

@TNP said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora Serious question: if someone is so reticent about making waves that they're unable to type 'Let's fade to black.' do you really think they're able to type +codered to mean the same exact thing?

This.

We've had FTB rules on games for so long I think they were around when I started playing. And this is the perennial issue -- people want things to not happen, rather than not seeing them, and that's just not the way that the games they're used on most work, or are intended to work.

Those things end up in policies, and then when staff directs people to the policy that says 'hey, you do not have to play it out, but that does not mean that it does not happen' we get reports of "bad staffers" "doing nothing" when someone's boundaries are crossed. Even though it's right there in the rules what can be done, and what it means.

I voiced an opinion on X-cards awhile back. The 'no explanation veto' is not a thing that I wish to see on games, and not a thing that I would ever personally implement, because I think that it's too prone to abuse, no matter what its justification is..

I'll enforce a FTB if need be, under the guidelines listed above, but allowing someone to veto a thing is just a step too far, I think.

@Auspice said in Hey, nerds (a shameless self-promotion thread):

I want one that says 'I'm silently correcting your grammar' so I can giggle to myself a lot

Seconded. I would absolutely buy this.

@JinShei said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@Carex said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

@Kestrel
Also, remember, once she is inside your house you can shoot her dead. Just make sure she is fully inside the residence. If you have a restraining order out on her and she breaks into your home, you have a license to kill.

Just finish the job. Shoot her at least three times at range, wait about a minute, call 911 while she bleeds out, try to sound like you're confused and in shock.

You scare me

That is not true in every state or every situation.

Best not.

@Arkandel said in Microsoft Azure...?:

Oh and for all that is holy... automate some off-site backups. Don't just create a tarball of your installation and a database dump to store on the game's host itself (although do that, too, for convenience) but make sure you're downloading regular snapshots into at least one other machine - two different machines is even better.

Also to be a purist... until you've verified you can restore everything from scratch using those backups, they don't count.

Part of the benefit of using GitHub. So long as all that is up to date, you've basically got an offsite backup of everything.

@Rinel said in Hey, nerds (a shameless self-promotion thread):

I'm going to end up fucking buying this and I already hate myself for it

(Me too. Shh.)

It looks like, in this case, the accuser isn't coming out looking so clean.

@Carex

This is a potentially very cool idea. I think that I would still recommend DigitalOcean though. I think I pay something like $5 a month, and you get credit when you start so your first month you don't actually pay anything.

As @Faraday points out in her very helpful documentation, that's less than a large coffee. I can move some funds around for straight-up ease of use.

@surreality

I mean, I'm laughing now at the concept of bee math from the soul unlocking the nature of the universe...

And then I remember that spoilery stuff in Arrival, and realize that one day I'm gonna be the old fogey going 'back in my day, we didn't have any fancy bee math'.

@mietze said in Aesca Sneak Peak:

@Arkandel I do not think that an automated cg that spits a ton of people out onto the grid quickly solves the problem and may in fact exacerbate it especially on an original themed game where there may need to be some front in quality control.

But yes, you will lose some people (possibly very loudly) if you do not adhere to their timetables. I'm not sure that I think this is a bad thing because there's always going to be some bottleneck. "OMFG approval took 4-7 days even though there were 75 applications!" Easily evolved into other time crunch angst.

I think if you do not have any chill or patience, it is better to wait to app in for a few weeks and let the staff work out the kinks. Especially if you do not plan on apping in/going for a high mucketymuck on a place where it is first come first served.

This.

But also I am seriously trying to figure out how to put a 'number of open jobs' thing in Ares for players to see, so that they know how much workload the staff actually has.

So this is like -- what -- Dark Sun with the serial numbers filed off?

Also, I'm not sure how anyone proves that they are anything over the internet, but this certainly seems like kind of a clusterfuck.

@surreality said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

I manage to avoid having to people for the vast, vast majority of the year... and yet somehow manage to end up with two art shows on the same day, one picking up right as the other ends.

At least it's just the one day, but holy crap. That's too much adulting and peopling for me in a condensed timeframe.

But your reward is not having to people again on a different day!

@Ganymede said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

@Tinuviel said in How to Approach (nor not) a Suspected Creep:

This, I believe, is where you went wrong. The person you were paging had already taken action against the harasser, so it was quite evident that they were not okay but were also quite capable of handling things themselves.

How was GreenFlashlight to know this prior to paging that player?

Because said player did it on a public channel, if I'm reading this correctly.

Yeah, this is getting a little ridiculous.

"There is always OOC" is just trying to justify branding a player based on how the character acts, and not being able to differentiate between the character and the player, which will never, ever be ok with me.

Also, I don't think that anyone is saying 'paging the person to check in' is not ok. The message more has been 'it is not your place to take up a cause on their behalf if they have expressed nothing that would lead you to draw that conclusion'.

Because yes, as other people have stated, that isn't you acting on their behalf. It's acting on yours. Because you don't like the style a character is being played in, and therefore wish to have someone approach the player of the character in an official capacity.

Feel however you want about the IC actions, but it is massively not cool to brand the player based on those.

@Caggles said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Day 6 of being on strike and the employers are just now starting to come to the table to talk. Well, that's £500 already down the drain from my paycheque. They'd better bloody listen now and do something about it.

That's the thing about a strike. Short of some kind of contractual obligation, most employers can afford to wait you out.

@faraday

And that is becoming vastly less of a concern every day. Once upon a time, there was a real worry about losing contact with an otherwise anonymous person that didn't want to share contact details because those were all mostly linked to real-life personas or niche RL sites.

Then we got instant messengers, and people started making burner e-mails, and Discord came along, and now there's AresCentral too, which makes all that even easier.

So what you can lose in the process of leaving a game has been greatly reduced, and setting up your own sandbox to tell stories in is dead simple now.