Posts made by Derp

So, we've covered the roles of staff some, but now we're starting to get into who makes for a good staffer and who wouldn't. So, here's what I look for when hiring staff:

• Passion - Unlike others, I prefer people who are excited about the theme and the game. Yet, this hasn't been the case for awhile now, and I haven't seen many games that actively look for this kind of thing and recruit passionate people. The first time I ever saw this was in the hiring process for Haunted Memories, who preferred their staff to be lukewarm for reasons I will never fathom. If you wanted the job, you weren't the right fit. That boggled me more than I can tell you. I don't want someone who's phoning it in. I want someone who is actively engaged, and wanting to do more.

• Competence - Slightly less important than passion, I want someone who knows the system. Code and commands I can teach. Someone who has actually read the damn materials for the system? Invaluable. I'm willing to hand-hold a bit, but really, I expect you to either know what you're talking about, or at least know where to find it when you inevitably need to go look it up, and not make more work for me by chasing down rules errors.

• Assertiveness - I also need someone who can interact with players. I don't necessarily need them to be nice. But I need someone who isn't afraid of diving into a conversation, or breaking up a fight, or trying to steer the ship of OOC, or making a decision on a job, or a roll. Whatever. Someone who at the very least carry some water when I'm not there. If you're so conflict averse that you just watch everything drift on by like turds in the pool while you wring your hands, or refuse to say anything, you probably aren't going to be much use to me. This goes both ways, though. I want someone who can call me on my mistakes, or tell me when they think I'm wrong. I might not agree, but I'll definitely have the conversation with an open mind, and respect you for being willing to speak up.

• Miscellaneous - There are other things I look for too, but those are so far down the list that they're almost bonuses rather than criteria.

@DareDaemon said in Punishments in MU*:

In the hands of a good staffer it is, but we all know that some staffers are shits who cannot be trusted where the goal of punishment frequently isn't correction, it's coercion.

But here, 'correction' implies that there is a universally accepted way of doing things. There isn't. All of what we do is 'coercion', in the sense that we are trying to create a specific set of actions and discourage actions that we don't want to see.

What counts as 'abuse', too, is largely subject to an individual game's policy. What is written into the contract for some may be completely out of bounds for another.

Edit because it attributed to the wrong darn person. Sorry, @Lemon-Fox !

@Arkandel

Which is a form of behavioral control, yes. But it only exists for every individual game, not "the community." No matter how many people or games hate an individual player for whatever reason, there are a handful that simply won't, or will defend that person, either for good or ill.

My larger point was that there are very few things that one can classify as a "community standard" in a community where we can't even agree on terms for things, much less universal blacklists and behavioral policies.

@Ghost said in Punishments in MU*:

players banned from the community itself.

Woaaahhhh there cowboy. I usually agree with most things, but this one I think is a bridge too far.

Getting removed from one, or even a handful of games, does not necessarily mean anything for the community at large. I've seen players that I consider perfectly acceptable banned from multiple games at the same time because they pissed off one gamerunner who was friends with other gamerunners. (Those are a very small subset of this community, and despite defenses to the contrary, notoriously clique-y.)

You're never going to find anyone banned "from the community" because nobody in "the community" has that kind of control over anything. I guarantee you that even the most notorious villains like Spider and BigBad and whoever are playing somewhere happily.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

Crossing that line is a good way to get me to run away screaming, at least, because an admin who doesn't recognise that boundary probably fails at other boundaries too.

I think it also depends on the type of game, too. What if the PC wants to, say, seduce one of the King's advisors to get information? Should we disallow that because it's an NPC? Would it not depend on the game, and the themes therein?

I think that it's murky, at best, and highly subjective, but I think that the intent here sometimes matters more than any sort of objective measure.

@L-B-Heuschkel

In this case, I used Mac for a specific reason:

Mac has a relationship with Harry Dresden, and will sometimes help him out if he has some information, but has to be careful about how he does so because he has Accorded Neutral Territory...

BUT he also has his own agenda, and often politics in the background, showing up with new information and actions that he's taken, which on a MU often translates to 'has to interact with PCs to get that done'. He's a mover in the world.

@Ganymede said in Privacy in gaming:

There will always be bias. But there can be safeguards against it, and those safeguards include clear rules which will make bias easy to detect.

While I mostly agree with you...

...a part of me also thinks "come on, law-bot. You're a lawyer. You know that no amount of rules are going to stop people from people-ing, and trying to write in super complex codes is exactly how you get "TITLE 36 1/2 of the OHIO CRIMINAL CODE, ARTICLE 37, CHAPTER 118, SECTION 1302, PARAGRAPH 4(A)"(1)...

Writing 'clear rules' just means that someone is going to try and find all the edge and corner cases. I'm less a fan of 'clearly defined rules' and more a fan of 'let people know up front that you are not gonna play that game with them.'

(1) I have no idea how Ohio's laws are laid out. Does it follow TACS? I dunno. It's an example, don't overanalyze it...

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Difference between an NPC and a Staff PC?:

An NPC is a plot driver. No one owns him but the story. He is a literary device that staff uses as a sock puppet to propel the story onwards. He is not the antagonist, we don't get inside his head, we don't get to know him intimately (in either meaning of the word).
When we do -- he stops being an NPC. He may become a staff PC, someone who interacts part as a character, part as a plot driver -- a favoured barkeep, gossip, or other person whose function is to info dump on the real characters, through his interactions.

See, this is kind of where I disagree. Just because an NPC is a presence with a personality and characters can get to know them well doesn't automatically make them a staff PC. Think of...

Well, you mentioned 'favored barkeep'. Think of Mac, from the Dresden Files. Would we consider him a staff PC, or an NPC? I would absolutely consider him an NPC. He has a relationship with some of the characters, but his main purpose is to be background.

@Ganymede said in Privacy in gaming:

@Derp said in Privacy in gaming:

Even if you get an AI to run a MU, we teach AI stupid amounts of bias all the time, because they learn from us, and the stuff we want them to focus on.

Mind your tongue, meatbag. I've learned nothing from you.

edits Ganymede's lines of code

Teach YOU, you walking tin can...

Sure, there's always going to be some of that. No MU is ever going to be bias-free. It's run by humans. Even if you get an AI to run a MU, we teach AI stupid amounts of bias all the time, because they learn from us, and the stuff we want them to focus on. There have been numerous studies about how bias actually gets magnified when you take the human element out of decision-making, like when used to grade essay answers.

I can see both sides of it. On the one hand, the 'friends of staff' argument can have some merit. On the other, those same 'friends of staff' are likely the ones that were considered in the creation of the game, gave their feedback on the theme, and helped shape the world -- so they're also probably the experts on the theme of the game itself, and the ones in the best position to try and help move things forward. There really isn't a way around that. Staff is always going to have a handful of people that they lean on, either because of expertise or quality, to move things along. A little mini sub-staff. Every game has it, and if a gamerunner tells you they don't, then they either don't realize that they're doing it, or they're lying.

But that's also why compartmentalized information sometimes has to be overlooked, even if you want to act on it. If I see a page where someone is bitching about me, or about a decision I made, I likely might be a touch annoyed, but I'm not going to make that actionable, unless there is some other reason to do so (control of misinformation, maybe -- I dunno, I can think of reasons, but if it's just spleen venting then fuck 'em.)

So there is something to be said for privacy via compartmentalization, but there's also something to be said for 'sometimes you just got to give someone the OOC lowdown on what you want and set them loose upon the world'. Every player gets this, in one way or another. That's the entire reason that you have theme and policy files.

@krmbm

They are, thankfully, going the way of the dinosaur as players who consider volunteering as staff quickly catch on to the fact that that is a thankless scenario with little to no reward and nope out of that quickly.

@Ganymede said in Privacy in gaming:

For that reason, I don't mind staff playing PCs or otherwise lingering around on channels. The reminder of a staff presence can temper people to cool it most of the time. It's harder, of course, when the bad behavior comes via page, but -- I think I've said this before -- it is difficult to find problems when no one's reporting them.

Upvoting for this part, but also:

Gods bless @faraday for making a command that can flag pages and dump an entire history to a staffer.

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

enabling a certain kind of player to disrupt the game play of other players without actual evidence or cause.

This is one of my big peeves in the MU community too. These players absolutely exist here, and are getting even more ability to behave poorly due to the social climate.

This is one reason why I'm kind of glad that Ares makes it so easy to flag pretty much anything. There is now no reason to not provide actual evidence of wrongdoing.

@Macha said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

I would like an urban supernatural that's not WOD necessarily. Toss Supernatural, some of the vampire/werewolf shows, some of the magic shows.. and blend.

Isn't that Gray Harbor and/or Spirit Lake?

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

@Derp Someone claims to be a catgirl in an emote, staff notices in the scroll-by of emotes, drops her an @mail that there's no catgirls so please cease & desist. Simple. I'm not proposing something far-fetched, plenty of games have staff watching the IC RP without any issues.

Yes, and nobody is suggesting that it can't happen if they bring it onto public spaces on the grid.

What we're saying is that we have no control over private spaces. Spaces where staff cannot see things, either scenes set to private or RP that happens in a Discord sandbox. Staff cannot see everything, even if they can see every bit of code that comes onto a server (which would be a nightmare to wade through anyway), because not everything even happens on the game itself.

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

@L-B-Heuschkel Where's the complication in not approving catgirl apps in a Victorian setting? Like, if there are no hybrids in your setting, why approve one?

I think that both LB and I are talking more in terms of 'character wants to pretend they are some kind of catgirl after approval' and not 'approved as catgirl'. What staff approves and what players play are wildly different things, in many circumstances.

In terms of privacy, if you mean people RPing being a catgirl in private RP, that seems to be more of an argument for staff oversight than against it.

You keep saying this, and I don't think that you're getting what we're putting down, so let me just ask you -- how? How does staff police this? What tools would they use in order to do this? How do you see this functioning?

Ok, fair. Just seems that we're moving away from 'privacy in gaming' and more into 'how can staff enforce the game theme'.

In terms of controlling what people do in their private spaces, there is blessedly little that I can do for that in an age where everyone can have a private space that only they control. Nor do I want to continually play whack-a-mole with people hell bent on doing so. Again, I am limited in my abilities, and that actually makes my life easier in a lot of ways, so I'm not disputing that too much.

The only thing I can control is what the game considers official. If people are spreading misinformation to newbies, I can try and stop that. I can correct it when I see it. I can make robust theme files. But at the end of the day, we all know that everyone's gonna have their own headcanon anyway. The limits of my power are, ultimately, to try and correct misinformation and if necessary move egregious offenders off of the public game space, and back into their own little private areas where they can live out their fantasy of alternate timelines or whatever on their own.

But I can't stop them from thinking that. I can't change their mind if they disagree with the Official Staff Interpretation (TM) of what the theme files are. I can control a limited set of actions and try to counter theme-drift by providing accurate information, but I don't have any illusions of control over that, nor should any other staffer. People are gonna people. All you can do is try to herd the cats, and remove the bad apples.

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

To be fair, it's not actually a thread of conversation I'd like to continue outside of the aspect of whether or not privacy in terms of staff being able to see/monitor RP is a 'right' worth more than the benefits of such visibility.

You and I are not the only ones engaged in this conversation, however, and I think it deserves a different thread.

This seems like a discussion that could be spun off into another thing, rather than cluttering up here. @Arkandel! Do your thing and thready-splitty por favor!

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

Actually, they're not. Not unless you've decided to let them.

I'm sorry, what now? How am I going to 'not let them' fire up their own little Discord sandbox and go at it? My powers to police other people's actions are limited by code and various laws of nature and the United States.