Posts made by faraday

@Tinuviel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

@faraday On the flip side to that, if we the general player base know about the complaint (and if it's complaint worthy, gossip has already started about the behaviour) and then see staff do... nothing about it. Why would we complain if it happens to us?

Well firstly, how would you know that staff did nothing about it? You wouldn't know if, as @Three-Eyed-Crow said, every complaint gets put into a file. You wouldn't know whether staff talked to the player in question or not. You wouldn't know if staff had talked to Susie or not. You wouldn't know if staff had started watching what the player says more critically. All you know is whether the person had been banned or publicly flogged or something.

As @Seraphim73 mentioned, there's a big scale between "nothing" and "banned". If folks are going to assume that anything short of "banned" is no action at all and refrain from complaining because of that? I can't help them, and that's on them, not me.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

All I expect staff to do is to keep the complaint saved somewhere, remember it happened, and look at the player complained about in a different light if other stuff comes in. And very, very often, it will.

Absolutely. But confronting the accused based on flimsy evidence that may or may not be hearsay and is not by itself sufficient for disciplinary action? That does not strike me as a great idea. It seems more likely to cause drama back on Susie (after all, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where the complaint came from) than to stop the behavior in question. YMMV obviously. (not directed at you specifically)

@Tinuviel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

"Hey dude, apparently you're being a dick. Stop being a dick." It's not difficult.

Uh huh. And when they say, "What, me? I'm not being a dick. What are you even talking about?" Then what?

@Ganymede said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

And I think that staff need to adopt the position as investigators as much as being mindful of their role as judges.

Agree 100%, but if people aren't willing to be candid with complaints or submit logs to corroborate their accusations, your ability to investigate is severely hampered. Staff needs to do its part, but players need to meet them halfway.

@Auspice said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

If the main person he'd been targeting had felt safe enough to come forward... it'd have helped.

That's exactly the problem I'm talking about though. If all I'm getting is vague reports of "Bob is harassing Susie and Janey" and Susie won't tell me anything's wrong and Janey isn't even on the game any more, I'm not going to take action. I'm just not. It doesn't matter if the accused is my BFF or someone who's been on the game five minutes. It also probably would have helped if more folks had come to me directly with their concerns instead of just badmouthing me in the hog pit.

Folks can believe what they want about favoritism. My conscience is clear.

ETA: It might be worth noting that in this case, Susie was also a near and dear MU friend. If I were going to show favoritism based on friendship, it would have been to her. But that's not how I roll.

I agree with the folks above that if you need to resort to page-blocking someone, there's a problem and I would prefer to know about it as staff.

However, I also agree with @TiredEwok that I think a fair number of issues can be solved just by players. There are genuine abusers and creepsters in the hobby, to be sure, but there are also quite a few needy folks who just get carried away, blending IC/OOC to an unhealthy degree and not even realizing it until somebody holds up a hand and checks them.

We're all adults here, and can take responsibility for enforcing our own boundaries. It's when you do that and someone still bothers you that I, as staff, want to be notified.

Kind of tangential to the discussion but I thought it might be useful to highlight some of the tools I've added to AresMUSH to help players report abuse.

I want to stress that this is not global logging of all pages (for the aforementioned privacy reasons), but highly targeted and limited logging that can be activated when someone is harassed to provide a verified log directly to staff via job.

Channel Reporting

If someone is behaving badly on channel, you can bring it to the game admin's attention - along with an automatic, verified log of the channel recall buffer.

channel/report <channel>=<explanation>

Page Reporting

If someone is harassing you via pages, you can enable page monitoring. This will keep track of the last couple dozen pages to and from that person. The other person will not be notified that you are logging pages.

Once you have the pages logged, you can bring the matter to the game admin's attention using the page report feature. The pages from the log will automatically be included as an official, verifiable log. You can report someone more than once if the problem happens again.

page/monitor - Shows who you're monitoring.
page/monitor <name>=<on or off> - Starts or stops monitoring pages from someone.
page/log <name> - Review your page log with someone. This is what will be included if you report them.
page/report <name>=<explanation> - Creates a report, including your page log with that person as evidence.

Mail Reporting

You can report an offensive mail to the game admin.

mail/report <#>=<explanation> - Reports an offensive mail message.

I realize these tools are not perfect (page reporting in particular requires the harasser to continue to harass you after you've activated the log) and do not cover every possible circumstance. I still think it's a heck of a lot better than what we have today relying on unverifiable plain text logs.

@Ganymede said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

There is always an element of discretion -- most complaints aren't so dire -- but I think that any complainant who wants some level of confidentiality or non-action would make that request before informing me of a dumpster fire.

I understand your point, and like you said - it kind of depends on the situation. Some things you can act on without compromising the confidential source. What I usually get is something like:

"Harvey is harassing Julie but she doesn't want to cause waves and would get mad at me if she knew I said anything so let's just keep this between us." There's a few things going on here. One - I have no details to support this accusation. Two - This is coming second-hand and could all just be a misunderstanding. Three - Julie is a grown-up and if she's having issues she should talk to me directly (which is what I would encourage the white-knight friend to tell her). I will keep an eye on what Harvey says on channels and keep this info in mind if future complaints are leveled against him, but it's not going to be enough by itself for me to take direct action.

@Ganymede said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

Consider staff -- good staff -- to be like mandated reporters, people. If you ring the bell, they will act.

I think that's a fair policy to have on your game. In absence of such a policy though, I would feel it a breach of trust if someone came to me in confidence and I violated that. It also makes it harder to actually get the person to cooperate in giving you details/logs/etc. if they feel they can't trust you.

@Kestrel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

I'd like to hear from staffers here. Someone you don't know joins your game and says 'your BFF here is making me extremely uncomfortable and wilfully ignoring the fact I've told him he's exacerbating my mental health issues, along my polite requests to terminate our communications'. Whom do you believe?

As @Roz said, belief usually isn't the issue here. If you say someone is making you uncomfortable, I'm going to believe you because they're your feelings.

When it comes to taking action though, it gets a little more complicated. My main question to the accuser is: "What do you want me to do about it?"

• "I want them to stop paging me." Done. "Hey, you're making Susie uncomfortable; back off." It really doesn't matter if they did anything "wrong"; everyone is entitled to their personal space.

• "I want them to stop saying things on channel that make me uncomfortable." Well, that depends on whether I think that what they're saying violates game conduct policies. Something blatantly bigoted or mean? Absolutely. But there's a lot of gray areas. I have to use my judgment and you might not be happy with it.

• "I want them banned." I'll be honest - I have a high bar for what it takes to ban someone. I'm never going to do it based on one person's "he said/she said". What I look for here is more a pattern of behavior that persists even after I tell the person to knock it off. I suppose it's possible for somebody to do something so egregious they get banned on a first offense without a warning, but I've just never encountered it.

• "Please don't do anything; I just wanted you to know." OMG this one drives me nuts. Why tell me if you're just going to tie my hands? Now you've put me in a position where either I let a potential creeper continue creeping, or I violate your confidence by taking action against your wishes. IT SUCKS. Please stop doing this, people.

But like Roz said - I have no problem putting on my staff hat with friends. Since I mostly play on games with people I've known for ages, it's kind of my default position. Those who know me know that I'll tell my friends when they step over the line. I even had to ban one once because they wouldn't stop doing what I told them to stop doing. It sucked, but it was necessary.

What also sucked in that situation, though, was people who were all: "You're just protecting Joe because they're your friend." Uh, no. There was no protection. It just took awhile between the first complaint and Joe getting banned because mostly what I got was Vaguebook comments like: "I know someone who left the game because he bothered them too much" or "He was banned from another game" or third-party "He's bugging Susie." complaints that I felt were too flimsy to act on. Once I got specific, actionable reports, I acted. I can understand how some folks might take the "Where there's smoke there's fire" approach and act on less solid evidence; that's just not my style (whether I know the accused or not).

@Tinuviel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

Have neither of you ever used a job system before? It's an anonymous job, not a shout into the void.

I've written three different job systems and none of them have included any kind of "anonymous" job because (as Sunny also pointed out), you can't keep it anonymous from the wizards. I guess you're talking about a game where there are non-wiz staff handling complaints and players aren't worried about the wizards somehow accessing the "anonymous" data, but I've never seen such a setup in decades of MUSHing.

Even if the job itself were anonymous, I have no clue how you'd keep all the details anonymous. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure things out once you start including specific conversations.

@Tinuviel From whom? If the reports are anonymous, who are you going to ask?

@Tinuviel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

It would still be up to staff to investigate the accusations.

How, though?

I can say from experience that it's hard enough establishing the veracity of non-anonymous complaints. I can't even imagine how you would respond to "Bob is being creepy" in a constructive fashion without logs or details.

The biggest issue, as @Wretched alluded to, is that most folks don't keep logs of this stuff. I've tried to combat this in Ares by creating tools to help players report things. It's really no different than keeping and submitting a log, except that it comes from within the game itself so there's no potential for "He faked it!" accusations. (It doesn't log everything; it's selective and enacted by the person being harassed.)

I like documenting NPCs. We had a minimal NPC roster on BSGU and at least one of the NPCs got so popular that somebody made them up as a roster PC and they got played and it was awesome.

I tried a more in-depth one on BSP years before with a system that had notes and backstory and everything but honestly it barely got used. I think the more ornamentation there is on a system - the more 'work' it is - the less people are inclined to use it.

@skew ctrl-p and ctrl-n are SimpleMU commands for scrolling through your command history (previous and next).