Posts made by Ghost

Moar posting.

Ask yourselves these questions:

1. Since I'm using telnet, my password is being transmitted in clear text (telnet vulnerability). Does my MU char password match or resemble the pwd for my provided email address or any other sensitive logins I use on other sites?

2. Is the database where my email/ip information is recorded in logs encrypted? Likely not.

3. Who runs the MU? Who are they really? How do they store or remove IP/contact information? Who has access to this information? What is the vetting process to mitigate new staff using this information against me? Do I get a say or have any way in proving if a staffer does use this information against me? Are the identities of these individuals (staffers/wiz)tracked, or is it semi-anonymous? How long is this information stored? When a game is scrubbed and the DB moved to another game, is this data scrubbed? When someone steals the DB from the game owner and makes a game of their own using the DB, what happens to my IP/email information?

4. Is it possible that any of these people who lurk, stalk, or behave negatively haven't made notes about who is who, or has any of my personally identifying information that I've given these strangers been stored?

I don't mean to be a broken record, but I'm going to venture to say that the majority of people in this hobby are not technically savvy and rely on 3rd party products to protect themselves from intrusion on mostly Windows OS software. I'll also venture to say that a large number of players are more knowledgeable on MU commands than MU technology, otherwise we wouldn't have so many help threads like "What to do if your MU is attacked", because many game runners rely on outside sources for code/tech knowledge (and aren't technically savvy enough to protect this data day in, day out).

I'm just saying "Let's be real..." here. Every one of you gives every game you log into the #1 piece of important information every time you log in: where you are. You give every game a point-to-point traceable path back to your location and device.

Double post.

I'm not on any games, don't staff anywhere, but before I write this want to make it clear that I'm writing this to drive home my point.

Say I were staff.

I could:

• reverse lookup your IP to gather geographical data
• use your IP information gathered at every login to port sniff your computer(s)
• web search your email address to research who you are. If it's not a throwaway email, this might lead me to your social media where I can learn your name or family members names
• I could then search those names for more Intel.
• if its a throwaway email, I could find other sites where youve used said login/alias to research places where you may have slipped and given details.
• through IP use, if I'm able to break through your security, I may be able to find a port capable of allowing me to insert man in the middle attacks or monitor keystrokes.

After all of these are put together, I suppose I could be an obsessed stalker, or an identity thief, or that guy who is really into rape Role play, but I'd have what I needed to fuck some shit up.

There are reasons why this information is protected on a corporate server level, and I assure you, RanfomMUofDarkness isn't applying Infosec level guidelines and background checks on the people getting access to that information.

And this is just an example for information that you weren't aware that you were giving.

There is a very real reason why telnet is blocked by most infosec orgs and SSL is required.

In MU, privacy has a few core problems:

1. There are really no (or few) two-way agreememts as to what game staff can or cannot use your contact information for. A good example of this is Mal from SerenityMush mass mailing everyone his LinkedIn information. Aside from annoyance and leaving the game, there is no guarantee staff won't use your IP or contact info for their own purposes.

2. From an IT perspective, telnet is insecure and any personal information stored on a telnet game could also be vulnerable to a number of attacks. MUs are far less secure than Equifax, and do not have established rules for patching, etc.

3. As we have seen recently, being subjectively kind of like that one guy from Louisiana and also being from Louisiana, will not protect a musher from having someone else's identity knowledge being used against them on an inaccurate witch hunt. Justified or not. (Though, I think the term justified is morally ambiguous in this case)

4. Stranger Danger. I've seen some seriously dark behavior, controlling behavior, abuse, etc in this hobby. Again, I will remind people that while these people share a common hobby, they are strangers. There's plenty of stalking and obsessive behavior on these games, and the assumption that you havent provided enough information to have your private life infiltrated is an assumption. Staffers could perform IP lookup to gather location data, view stored email address information, and either through web sleuthing on Google or social phishing could definitely find ways to violate your privacy.

Keep in mind that this isn't an anonymous online gaming community where you play Call of Duty and are protected by a screen name and 10 minutes of matchmaking. Many people in this hobby simulate very intimate and personal scenarios with people who are strangers, could be misrepresenting who they are over long term, or over time could develop obsessive/controlling/attachment behaviors that can make you regret having shared any information.

It is unwise to assume (with the number of strange and extreme personalities in this hobby) that just because you give a fake email address that you cannot be found.

#2 should be your greatest concern. Technically, Zero/Elsa/OPP/Spider, any of your usual suspects anathema crowd, have at times had more than enough information to breach your privacy or perform attacks on you.

Pseudopod
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@faceless said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

@ghost said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

I can't say that if the change were in my hands that I wouldn't have gone with a new locale myself.

Beaver City, Nebraska by Night.

I've been there.

When you're 15 that city sounds like exactly where you want to go, but no no no no NoOoOoO it doesn't live up to its name.

Not to be a dissenting voice here, but TBH I think the upper NE United States and the general New England setting as a whole is pretty played the fuck out.

I can't say that if the change were in my hands that I wouldn't have gone with a new locale myself.

Technically:

1. No one ever bothered RPing daytime scenes when playing vampire. The default setting for all scenes was night. That Miami has longer days means very little unless there was timecode detailing day vs night that vampires were expected to adhere to.

2. Werewolves aren't as tied to forests as they used to be (in WtA), but swamps apply.

If anyone in FC (who played Vamp) ever RPed indoors/outdoors based on coded time, please let me know, but I imagine like all WoD MUs, the concept of time is more a plot device than anything.

@lithium Watch me while I WEAAAAB

Sword Art Online had 3 arcs:

1. Sword Art Online: 10,000 minds trapped within the VRMMORPG where if you die in game you die in real life. SWO was very D&D.

2. Alfheim Online. Ellllves.

3. Gun Gale Online. Featured in season 3 of the anime.

Fatal Bullet steps out of swords and sorcery and gets into post apocalyptic gun badasssery. I'm loving this game so far.

I am thoroughly enjoying Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet.

A little bit Dot.Hack, a faux-mmo atmosphere, and a shitload of anime.

...my love for JCVD runs deep. DEEP.

...deeeeeeeeep

I would also like to throw this out (before I stop responding for a while to let other people get their thoughts in):

If we're going to define, or discuss "BAD" behavior by players, and if it's defined by very specific things such as sexual harassment, stalking, doxxing, etc, then I think we should take a moment to acknowledge the amount of hell some people have gone through on these boards for things like:

• Bad character descriptions
• Poorly written roleplay
• Unpopular character concepts

I think, in the grand scheme of things, it's ultimately fair to say that the same people who may be discussing the various fucked up things that people do, or (if my senses are accurate) slowly put together a word of mouth system to bar players ranging from "disliked" to "possibly serial killers" from games, then we should take a moment to observe the way some people have been treated by the people who would be making those distinctions.

We can all agree that a doxxer, stalker, or sexual harasser is bad, and no one likes to be made fun of, but if we're going to discuss negative behavior and the poor ways that people treat each other on games, we should probably ask ourselves if by dragging people's characters, wikis, and descriptions through the mud, are the people doing this not being bad themselves?

But define BAD?

I'm sure we can all agree that the following falls under BAD

• Sexual Harassment
• Doxxing
• Unwanted OOC tracking/stalking
• Abusing the game's code for personal benefit
• Quid-pro-quo harassment
• Giving personal information out on people's RL
• Other OOC abuses including slander? Pestering? Unwanted advances after being told to stop?

But even if there's a pattern of behavior, shouldn't the pattern of behavior be related to things that fall squarely under bad? There's a lot of gray area He-Said-She-Said that I've seen many people on this board suffer, myself included, that took a personal disagreement into the realm of personal attack based on disagreements about:

• Being inconvenienced
• A disagreement on what someone meant or intended
• A misunderstanding on what someone was trying to do/not do
• Lack of OOC communication on an IC situation

I think getting our collective heads together around what is actual BAD behavior versus a personality conflict could lead to a lot of good, including (and here's my personal stake in this conversation) protecting any of us from having a bad week turn into having to leave the hobby because of some kind of OOC/Hog Pit bandwagon?

We should define what is actually BAD, so that players will know some sort of suggested code of conduct. This would keep, for example, someone with a somewhat okay reputation suddenly deciding that @surreality needed to suffer because they were upset about a game situation (that was a misunderstanding) and use their reputation to "fuck her up" a bit on MSB.

The court of public opinion, the mob, is a strong factor in the social environment of these games. We SHOULD actively put together a habit of logging negative situations and reporting them.

Likewise, defining BAD and logging would also allow someone with a shitty reputation, be it their fault or not, to prove that people are being "BAD" towards them without these forums going "whatever, you were a shithead on XYZ game and I believe this person because we had fun on another game".

So that's my take on this.

One of the major problems in this hobby is that without the existence of logs, bad behavior is a matter entirely of hearsay that makes it hard to truly understand what's really going on. Over my tenure in the hobby I've seen some really openly bad behavior (Stalking, threats, doxxing, abuse to name a few), but more times than not I'm approached with rumors of these behaviors without evidence.

I'm going to say up front my answer, and then explain why.

My answer? YOU CAN'T, NOT WITHOUT LOGS

This is a text-based hobby, where there isn't any explanation as to why logs can't be presented. This extends even to Discord or any other outside-of-game chats. Sure, they can be falsified and edited, but in theory the person being accused could also present their own logs as evidence of edit. But the one thing that remains true is that you can't deny the existence of logs as a good focal point on determining whether or not bad behavior has happened at all.

Now for the part that some people might not agree with me on, but I feel very, very strongly about this.

• I've been on games where jilted players have used threats of badmouthing the game to fuck them over as a means to get back at the game for upsetting them (where do you think they intend to do this?)
• I've been party to some fairly excessive claims, without logs, that I later found out the other side of the story was a completely different take.
• We just had a thread show up on the Hog Pit where one player caused a stampede on another game on a theory that a player was OPP.

Like it or not, this isn't an environment where things happened exactly as a person claimed that they did because they say it's true. There are people who leverage their reputation over logs, and there are people who know that character assassination on a private, page-level campaign without the existence of logs can do absolute damage to a player or game that they aren't happy with...and it happens. We all know it happens, and it happens more than I think we pay attention to.

So my advice on this thread going forward is to understand that over the history of this hobby there have been some absolute people who deserved the title of "problem players", but there have also been some rather unfortunate victims of aggressive behavior from players who have somehow managed to avoid getting onto that list of problem players (due to cliques, popularity, ownership of games, etc).

How do I personally deal with problem players? I used to get annoyed or upset about it, but nowadays? I don't.

For me, it's simple. If someone does something rude to me on this text-based media, I can log it and forward it to staff. There's no reason to wrestle and there's no reason to lose my cool. I'll forward it to staff as a complaint, sever OOC communication with the player, and if I find myself on a game where staff isn't handling complaints about logged abusive player behavior? I leave the game. Ultimately, if this results in me having zero games to play? I do something else with my time, because at that point I'll have more fun away from MU than with it.

But we should be very, very, very careful to not create an environment where cult of personality results in logless courts of public opinion, and I feel that there should be more awareness and action taken against people who use the sideways means to attack other players.

So, there are problem players (Stalking, Doxxing, Abuse, etc) and there are players who use logless whisper campaigns of such to attack other players who have upset them. There's a difference.

@lithium By that I meant that a lot of existing FCs have been put through the ringer over years of defining what their powers can and cannot do, including weaknesses and personal kryptonite factors that have been written into existing canon.

OCs, even in my own tabletop games, tend to be very creative to put together powersets that can sneak up on you to be way more powerful than a GM had originally intended to allow. So, when it comes to powers, FCs are a known factor.

Are there overpowered FCs? Yes. With decades of explanations as to how their powers can be combated. In a hobby, though, where there are plenty of people who never like to lose and work to be extra creative to create something super unique and rare, you run the risk of approving Can Control Muscles and suddenly have a character that feels entitled to stopping the hearts of every person for a mile radius because "muscle control" was approved.

That's what I meant.

@tnp Then the answer seems pretty clear. If the game doesn't allow OCs as a means to focus on the characters in the comics, and you feel that the characters from that comic book production company doesn't properly include the social demographics of your choice, then I would suggest reaching out to DC requesting more representation.

Then, whichever characters may come out of that that meet your demographic preferences, they will be appable FCs.