Best posts made by faraday

@Ghost said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

But if someone's losing their shit because their dice are sucking or they lost an election? Sure, it's disappointing, but upkeep your reaction buffer, bruh.

That's really not what anyone here was talking about, though. Sure, people get upset to silly degrees about TV shows, sporting events, etc. That's a separate issue. The discussion was specifically around stalking/harassment/threats/etc. online. That's a whole other level of emotional pressure/stress/injury/damage/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, and the fact that it's happening with text instead of words doesn't diminish its impact. An assailant could punch you in the face, break your kneecap or stab you 10 times, but it's still an assault any way you slice it.

@Apos said in Consent in Gaming:

@Auspice tbh I was thinking of active posters on this board, and Firan, the Reach, and Fallcoast more than my current game because I've leaned so heavily away from conflict mechanics

I only know those games by reputation, which is really.... not good. So I'd venture to say that the issue is more the atmosphere/environment of specific games geared around antagonism than a widespread issue within MUSHing itself.

If you're going to allow non-consent IC rape/torture/abuse on a game, I don't think default-FTB is a viable option anyway. Those things have serious long-term consequences for the character it happens to. It's not like you can FTB one scene and then go about your normal business.

@Apos said in Consent in Gaming:

An awful lot of people want their opponents to RP out scenes uncomfortable for them. Embarrassing and humiliating ones.

We're here to tell stories and roleplay. Generally speaking that means actually playing the scenes. It's one thing to avoid a torture scene because torture makes people squicky. But somebody 'nope-ing' out of a "get yelled at by the commander" scene just because it was ICly embarrassing is cheapening the reason why the FTB option exists. I'd still honor the request, but I think it would lower my opinion of that player considerably.

@Sunny said in Consent in Gaming:

I do not understand. Why would it lower your opinion of them?

I probably spoke too broadly. I can imagine certain types of humiliating punishments being triggering to some folks - e.g. Cersei's "walk of shame" in GoT.

But setting those situations aside and looking at the more general case, it strikes me as poor sportsmanship to use the FTB clause solely to avoid scenes that make your character look bad. It suggests an unhealthy level of either character bleed (I'm gonna take IC punishments too much to heart), competitiveness (I can't let you get one over on me!) or selfishness (I'm really just here to look awesome, so no I don't want to play that.)

@Alamias said in Privacy in gaming:

I wouldn't hate it if MU's moved to a different more secure port. I don't know why it hasn't moved up with the times to use a more secure connection.

Double post because I missed this while replying to the other one...

A big reason is barrier to entry. Setting up a SSL certificate and getting the server settings right is not trivial. You have to remember that most folks running MUs are not professional server admins. I've made it as easy as I can to set up HTTPS for the Ares web portals, but it still trips people up sometimes. Also I'm not sure all MU clients even support it, so you still have to provide the insecure port as well.

@WildBaboons You're right, a Wendys was not the best example, forum software would be a better one. The privacy regulations (HIPAA, GDPR, etc.) are geared around protection of private personal information. If you're broadcasting your name, email, health information for all the world to see - you're choosing to make it public. That's not a privacy violation the site is responsible for.

@Pandora said in Privacy in gaming:

This isn't an exercise in trying to convince anyone that they need to embrace the joy that is an omnipresent staff, I'm just wondering if there is any angle I personally am not looking at, in terms of privacy, that should make me less open to the idea of staff seeing everything. Thus far, that's a no.

I'm similarly not trying to convince you that having an omnipresent staff makes the game evil, as long as players know what they're getting into. Certainly on most MUs players don't go into it thinking that staff is going to be monitoring literally everything as a matter of course. I think that's why there was such a big disconnect between you and @Derp, because Derp's talking about "private spaces" on a game (a fairly common concept in MUs) and you're talking about a game where that's a concept that doesn't exist.

But I don't think you can get away from the fact that actual harm has come from staff snooping on things that were meant to be private. From extreme examples of doxxing, stalking and spamming to the more everyday cases of drama, hurt feelings, and in-game cheating. These things have happened with reasonable frequency. That's why so many folks are touchy about it, even beyond the philosophical "privacy is a right" arguments.

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

Is voring with your feet enough to risk not participating in the hobby to stand your ground on your ethics? I was able to answer that question, for myself, of course.

As was I, which is exactly my point. We're all adults here. We choose what we're willing to tolerate. No one else bears that responsibility for us.

That's why, to the original scenario posted, I say deal with it ICly. Play the concerned patron all, "Is this guy bugging you?" and let it play out. Dragging it OOC without any indication that there's a problem strikes me like someone wandering onto the set of Mad Men and being concerned that Don Draper is an a-hole. Unless you see Jon Hamm being creepy between takes, it's just fiction.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Gap between RP fantasy and RP reality:

Personally I like to torture my characters. They are flawed people, making mistakes, drawing the wrong conclusions, and going the wrong places.

@Kestrel said in Gap between RP fantasy and RP reality:

Tying into that other thread, people who are here for the story are out there, you just need to find them.

+1. For me it doesn't matter if "most" of the other RPers on a game are only interested in being do-no-wrong player-avatar heroes, as long as there are enough story-focused players for me to have fun. And they are out there. If they weren't, I'd have given up on MUSHing ages ago.

My games these days are pretty permissive. Not quite the yes-first utopia described in the opening, but what I've found through the years is that trying to list a billion rules to govern behavior just doesn't work. The good players feel constricted, and the bad players ignore and/or don't read the rules and have to be dealt with anyway.

That said, I think it's important to set limits on several key points. Others have outlined several already in terms of consent / FTB. Alts is another good example. The utopian view is "let people play what they want and it'll sort itself out". I thought that way myself until I saw how the departure of a once-active player with 4+ alts gutted my small game because so many characters had key relationships with theirs.

Chargen apps is another. I played on / ran a couple games where chars were allowed to hit the grid provisionally and were audited after the fact. Man what a disaster that was. Never again. I keep my chargen/app process VERY lightweight and ultra fast, but I've found that it's an essential gate for filtering out people who can't even clear the smallest thematic bar.

@Arkandel I think your goals have too much methodology built in, and that's what people are objecting to.

It seems to me that your 8 goals can be distilled down to:

• Increase player agency - allow them to have a lasting impact and steer the game.
• Reduce bottlenecks and obstacles between players and scenes.
• Enable operation with a small staff.

Everything else you've outlined - "yes first", "audit don't approve" - these are methods. Means to and end, not the end themselves.

I fully support the three goals list above. In fact, I've used them on my own games. (I suppose folks can argue how successful they've been but I like to think it worked out okay.)

By clearly separating what you want to accomplish from how you want to accomplish it, I think it will allow you to be more open-minded about some of the other ideas on the thread.

Some other random thoughts:

• "Audit don't approve" is a big turn-off for me. All games have an unspoken rule that totally crazy things will be retconned, but saying it like this makes it sound like "we have limits but we're not going to tell you what they are until after you exceed them." That's going to make me very leery of running plots for fear of retcon.
• Speeding up chargen approvals is good, but I just can't get behind the idea of removing them entirely. As @ghost mentioned, I've structured FS3 to try and make approvals fast and easy. There's a tiny wait - often just a matter of minutes if I happen to be online, but that's a price I'm more than willing to pay to protect the existing players from crazy people hitting the grid and disrupting things. (And yes, you can filter out crazies in chargen. Not all, but some.)
• Having "yes first" as a staff mantra to encourage staff to be open-minded and allow players to steer the game is not so bad. Advertising a game a "yes first" opens yourself up to all kinds of bizarro player expectations and entitlement issues, as others have already said.

I'm not saying my ways are perfect. Every system has pros and cons. I'm just saying that clarifying your actual goals may allow you to consider alternative methods.

@Ghost said:

At what point is entertaining others required to become entertained yourself, because if we don't work hard and/or try to keep a game populated, we have to hit this RESET button on our fun and start someplace else.

I think that's the same thing I was trying to say with it being in your own best interests to involve as many people as possible. But I don't see that as a "contract" or "obligation" so much as a mutually-beneficial compromise.

But at the end of the day, if RPing with those people is such drudgery that it just isn't fun, then it's probably better to hit that RESET button than to go on torturing yourself playing with people you don't enjoy playing with.

Edit to add: Also it's not always black and white. There's a big difference between "OMG I hate playing with this person" and "Well, they're not one of my bestest buds but they're okay, and it'll be better for the game if I step out of my clique for a night and play with them..."

@Arkandel said in How to Change MUing:

How much of such game-provided content would constitute a positive step into changing MUing as the thread's title puts it?

I think Firan proved that there's a market for such a thing. For me personally though it holds negative interest. If I want farming and mobs and random mission generation, I'll go play a MMO. I play MUs for the collaborative storytelling. Code, in general, hinders storytelling more than it helps.

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

“You can’t please everyone” is not a replacement for discussing merits and foibles of a policy, especially not if that policy is “this is my preference”. It’s redundant; if you don’t care to have a policy outside your personal preference, then there’s nothing to discuss.

Uh... okay? I mean, I don't disagree with your underlying point, but...

I'm not sure how "This is my preference" got taken as "That's the policy on my games". And I'm really not sure how "You can't please everyone" got taken as "I'm unwilling to even discuss policies outside my preferences."

Tangentially, here's a little anecdote that may be interesting: BSGU requires you to set a desc in chargen but hardly anybody uses the 'look' command. It does not require you to set a shortdesc, but 93% of characters have set one voluntarily.

So I think, empirically it can be asserted that in this particular group/setting, shortdescs are valued more than "real" descs.

@arkandel I think splitting the thread would have been a great compromise. It was civil and constructive for the first page or so, so that part of the thread is OK. Then it veered off into a debate about private channels that really should have been a thread of its own (but I think everyone - myself included - was just too lazy to create one). It's only when the defenders started stirring the pot that everyone got all riled up and turned the thread into a dumpster fire. Those posts could've just been split off into the existing hog pit UH thread or a new one.

I have no interest in silencing legitimate constructive criticism of any game.
I just don't want to sift through pages of "F You" "No You!" posts. There's a reason I'm not in the Pit Crew.

@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

There was no reason for the entire thread to be moved. IDK why this is difficult for you and Ganymede to understand.

Nobody said there was! My first post on this thread agreed with you that splitting the thread was the right thing to do. Ganymede admitted it was because they didn't know the right command to split it more surgically and Arkandel said they didn't have time to do it tonight. Why are you being so hostile about waiting to have a thread divided?

@sunny said in Regarding administration on MSB:

Like, it was OK for dude to lie and call us all pathetic, it was the 'hey this was literally in the log we can all see you are lying' is the over the line into the personal? What?

Obviously the mods will make their own decision about where the line is between constructive and hog pit lies.

FWIW, for me it lies with personal attacks. It doesn't matter if the other person responds. Constructive is: "I disagree with you because <reasons>." Unconstructive is: "I disagree with you and you're an idiot if you can't see why your idea is dumb".

@arkandel said in Regarding administration on MSB:

This is your forum too, so if speak up if a thread is going the wrong way; please and by all means don't just wait until one of the three of us is around to wag a finger when people are shitting all over a non-Hog Pit thread. Don't hesitate to call someone on it if they are unnecessarily vicious even in the Hog Pit - it's not some magical no-man's land, we are still all people behind the computers. We shouldn't be just ripping into each other just because 'the rules' allow it.

I appreciate what you and @Ganymede and @Auspice are trying to do here because I want a forum where people can civilly discuss MU* stuff.

But here's the thing... us individually calling people out is pointless. We saw that for ages before you took over. There's a large number - possibly even a majority - of posters who think that the entire site should be a hog pit. Even just calling for moderation invites people to pounce on you.

You can try to shove that stuff down below a wall, but it'll always be there - simmering beneath the surface and spilling over into the rest of the site.

Imagine a workplace where employees could be as horrible as they wanted to each other (barring outright threats or racial slurs), but only in the break room. Seriously, what are the odds that the negativity would stay only in the break room? Zero. You've created a mindset that negativity is welcomed in that workplace. You've got habits being formed... Joe and Mary become so used to trading barbs with each other that they forget it's only allowed in the break room. You've got negative impressions being formed ... Joe said something horrible about Harvey in the break room so even when they're working they're constantly sniping/snarking at each other. And you're going to have a not-insignificant number of people who go: "We're already all flaming each other - why does it matter if we keep it just in the break room? This is dumb."

Trying to contain it is fighting an uphill battle - possibly even a losing battle. And it will require a degree of moderation that I don't think either the mods or most of the posters here are comfortable with.

@tempest said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I really wish people would stop waving this "bring down games" thing around.
It's wrong.
It's a lie.
It's being blatantly disingenuous and looking to be dramatic.

It's not being disingenuous when it's quoting what other people have repeatedly touted as a reason for MSB's existence. Now whether or not MSB or WORA ever actually had that power is open for debate.

@ixokai said in Regarding administration on MSB:

That doesn't mean no one has a negative experience. But I deny this pervading negative aura that lays heavy over the hobby.

That's fine. I'm not on a crusade to convince you otherwise. But I'm entitled to my opinion based on my experiences as much as you are. There's a reason I only run co-op, niche, borderline-sandbox games.

ETA: I don't participate in MMO communities either because they are even more negative. The fact that something worse exists somewhere is irrelevant IMHO.