Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@Derp Rule of thumb I went with when I was a game admin went something like, public scene, public log, audience of at least two other people.

@Tinuviel Aye, hence the tacking on of 'it shouldn't be'. Because of course it will be, if that something private somehow explodes in public.

@Derp If whatever it is happens between consenting adults in a private room, it can't by any means be your problem. Or at least it shouldn't be.

@Pandora If staff has indeed put 'we can and will watch you' in the terms of service, not hidden under sixty pages of legalese, then I as a player will not object to be watched. I will probably find another game to play, but I -will- have consented by logging in, so to speak.

@Tinuviel I tend to be wary of 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' because most often, it is an argument presented by those whom you really do want to hide things from; insurance companies, advertising agencies, and social media selling data to whoever wants to to influence politics and elections.

As always, the issue isn't really whether someone gets off on watching someone else write about celeries and Madonnas with ze big boobies, as much as it's about risks of stalking, doxxing, and other harassment. The only filter that actually -works-, though, is the one between hands and keyboard. If a MU has a policy and instructions on what to do when players or admins break rules, that's... probably all we can do.

@Tinuviel Somebody got the reference.

@surreality said in TS - Danger zone:

"You can never unsee it" is good cautionary advice, for real.

Certainly will be, if I am to write text porn. Fetch me the celery.

@faraday A very good one, too. Clear and easy to read. Good point there at the end, clarifying once and for all, don't assume that private is private. In the end, what you put on the net is on you, not on Ares.

@JinShei We need to either abandon this idea or make it so absolutely horrible that we can hold it up as a poster to future generations on why you should never ever abuse admin privileges to spy on players.

@Tinuviel The sad thing is, I honestly wouldn't even know. That's how unimaginative I am in such matters. Which doesn't bode very well for my eventual writing of steamy scenes either, I suspect.

@JinShei At this point I am rapidly approaching "challenge accepted" and I feel the urge to point out that YOU are currently the admin who would thus be subjected to three or four hours of absolutely pitiful, embarrassing, worst-I-can-think-of mud sex.

@JinShei I am sixty-six shades of curious and I'll happily read any log, however trivial, but while I whine, I don't snoop.

@Auspice Makes perfect sense to me. Over on Ankh-Morpork, we're still a small playerbase and split between US and EU timezones. Some scenes happen at a glacial pace. It'd be utterly pointless to make them open because anyone wandering in, while welcome, would be standing there for up to 24 hours, waiting for somebody to get around to answering to 'hello guys'.

@gryphter I am new to Ares and was actually wondering about that. Asking myself why the first thought I had when I saw 'private' was, oh, so people can have sex out of sight. Says more about me than about Ares, though. I can definitely imagine uses for private scenes that are not sexual in nature, just that you don't want everyone to barge in at random.

So, no, the intended use is not the point. Staff and players alike need to respect that sometimes, people want to do something -- sexual, emotionally intense, or for that matter, just slow posing through the web interface from work -- that's not open to the public. And that's okay.

@Derp ... You know, that might make me find somebody with a similar childish sense of humour and try to create the worst, most awful TS scene ever, just to send to you for the Ramsay treatment.

@Ghost I'd feel pretty safe with that set of rules, and a set of instructions on where to complain if they got broken, indeed.

@Derp It's certainly important to separate the two. One is the discussion of how we can make the game safer in terms of data and storage, the other is about how to encourage players and admins to not be assholes. They're both very important discussions, but they are not interchangeable at all.

@Ghost Ain't anything that will protect from admins abusing the commands they have available to snoop on players. Only cure for that is indeed, as someone said, leaving a table where the game isn't fair.

@Auspice I am ridiculously easily found on Google. I mean, this is my name. The one in blue right there. I am a writer, I need people to be able to find me, I use my name everywhere. For me, the privacy filter is between hands and keyboard, putting nothing on the net that I don't want to see in Google later.

There's never a promise of true privacy in someone else's sandbox, and obviously, staff can and likely will, poke at things uninvited -- particularly if you give them some sort of rules violation to go from. You should never enter anything into the command line that ultimately, you don't want anyone else seeing.

That said... I think I said it before, in the other thread, but here goes again. The hill I'm willing to die on is respect between players and admins. The fact that you can monitor someone's conversation doesn't give you the right to do so.

But I'm not going to contest the argument that some people will, anyway.