Posts made by surreality

I think the sporting competition thing is not the best analogy for a MU*. I do agree that it does have 'rules of the road' re: good sportsmanship, however, in the same way a MU* does.

Some of the shittiest behavior I've seen on games I'd attribute to a lack of good sportsmanship, and what I ultimately consider 'bad faith'.

You can almost guarantee that any time someone is called on crappy behavior (barring 'the staffer calling them on it is Elsa-grade nuts') and their comeback is, "But there's no rule against that!" they're acting in bad faith; they're adhering to the letter of the law to avoid getting in trouble, but they're absolutely trying to be as crappy as possible to others while avoiding any repercussions for themselves.

@sparks said in Make it fun for Me!:

Saying you should put other people's fun before your own is a little unfair to players in general.

I think this is true to a point, though the exceptions tend to be corner cases, or instances of players who can't have fun while following the basic playground rules like 'the playground is for everyone' and 'sharing the toys is required', etc.

I'm primarily thinking here of the problem child players who can never be intimidated/charmed/lied to/tricked/come in second place/etc., derive fun from one-upping others on the player level, or aren't having any fun unless they're the star and predominant focus at all times. In these cases, yes, players with these traits are potentially going to have to place the fun of others above their own on a fairly regular basis in order to have a healthy collaborative existence on the game.

I don't see this as a fault with the theory; it's a fault in people that needs to be addressed in order to sustain a positive game environment.

Unlike @SG's experience mentioned earlier in the thread, I haven't seen as many instances of staffers or staff buddies benefitting from this, though I don't doubt it happens plenty. My personal experience has been more the opposite: when staffing, or playing with someone on staff I'm friendly with, I expect my fun is going to probably come in at last priority more often than I would expect it to otherwise.

She is so lucky she's cute. I call this one 'Disaster Waiting to Happen'.

@taika Not so far as I know.

(There's no updates wiki-side because my computer exploded, and I couldn't work on it until, well, this coming week, since the replacement finally arrived and is finally plugged in with a working keyboard.)

Re: names.

I have always hated my last name. I have always longed for my paternal grandmother's last name. (Let's face it, 'Deanna DePaulis' sounds like a goddamned movie star. I would have been all over that.) But no. I have Deanna M---- F---------- instead, because it sounds (marginally) better with the middle name in there.

I yearned to marry off my last name. I married someone I met as B**** Price. Woot! Score! ...but then he found out whilst doing paperwork that his mother had never officially changed his last name back to hers when she divorced. So half his paperwork was (technically illegally) under Price, and the rest under G-------, his father's last name. So to consolidate his records, he had to hyphenate that shit.

I did entertain the notion of triple hyphenating that shit just to torture the credit card companies, because I dare them to fit Deanna M---- F---------- G------- Price on an imprint, but no, there was no win, I just kept the old one to avoid paperwork. (When asked why I didn't change it, thankfully 'bureaucrazy and paperwork sucks' more than satisfied his family on that point; most of them have been married, divorced, remarried/etc. multiple times and they instantly understood.)

I think a lot of what @icanbeyourmuse describes (and has described in the past) is, honestly? It's very familiar personally, and it's not just narcissistic horsepuckey when I say that's the kind of approach that makes for a really great player:

• Find the things you will both have fun doing together
• Mutually don't mind if people do things not involving them that are specifically about the unshared areas of fun
• Mutually come along and play along without forcibly changing the focus sometimes on things for each other's benefit to create more opportunities for others
• (somewhat related to the above) Share the spotlight; mutually be willing to be 'the backup person', taking turns supporting each other (which is actually also fun for me at least)

I think of this as 'the three big Cs': Cooperation, Coordination, and Compromise. (With their magic powers) Combined, they <insert Voltron theme music> become the big Collaboration.

This is worth linking here, too, as it's relevant to this discussion as well. In this case, using an ip-fetch image setup on a forum to potentially identify posters and link them with game accounts.

<sarcasm>...because that can't and won't go horribly wrong in a hundred ways, no, never.</sarcasm>

(Thanks to @RnMissionRun for linking that in the Armageddon thread.)

@Apos Yeah, got that, but I'm not arguing tech whatsoever, or tossing out any tech citations, so I'm not sure why it's directed at me is all. I have never claimed tech expertise and am the first to say I don't have any.

If people are providing information or services, they should only be doing so in the manner in which they are comfortable doing so. If that means not playing somewhere that requires an email, it applies; if that means not allowing connections of some kind, it applies. That basic principle doesn't seem complicated to me at all.

@Nemesis @Apos Not sure why you directed any of that at me, since (neither of) you addressed anything whatsoever that I said.

Nor did I cite youtube (or anything else) for literally anything in this thread, or likely ever on this forum as anything but a link to something funny -- or in a PM, of a craft process, to a fellow crafting geek.

I personally think expecting professional grade anything in this hobby as a default is foolish, no matter who or what someone claims to be.

You see what's on offer, and you take it or leave it. If it isn't up to your personal standards, leave it. Making suggestions is one thing, making demands is another entirely. Someone making demands is behaving inappropriately, especially if it entails the person you're demanding something of investing a significant amount of time or money in order to meet your demands for the sake of meeting your demands.

A great many things in this hobby are miles from my standards (or preferences) in a variety of ways -- so I either suck it up and deal if I go there, knowing this, or I don't engage with that thing. I do not demand it change to suit me, no matter what my reasons are, and I definitely do not demand that a game runner spend money on me

This may be a dumb question, but if I wanted to import my settings over to a new computer because this overpriced logitech keyboard is not playing well with others as promised, uh, is there some shortcut method I could use to do that?

(Even just the name of the folder buried deep in the somewhere-nested I'd need to copy across would be helpful.)

ANNNNNND the same question is a handful of posts up. Ignore me, please, I'm more a brainfried idiot than usual tonight.

@tyche I have a feeling even the wikipedia ones do this. I know I once logged in to find a warning splashed all over my screen about restricted edits due to my IP -- despite the fact that I've never submitted anything to the actual wikipedia in my life. Someone with the IP I currently had apparently had, though -- four or so years earlier. So, yep. I know it can at least be set up to do that, even if it isn't default.

@faraday Ghost isn't the one displaying the entitled attitude at all.

That was in one of Nemesis' posts: "All you need to do is get this $120 router in order to allow this!" (which would allow them to play through the style of connection they are using, which the game owner did not want to do for reasons).

That crosses the entitlement line for me: "I want to use your freely offered thing, but I can't the way it is, so you go spend money so you can let me!"

It's pretty awful, really.

@aria Ours comes and goes a hell of a lot. It's not often for a long stretch at a time, but it drops us on the regular enough to be a giant pain in the ass.

While I think the original question might more be related to 'what level of info provided would y'all be comfortable with providing since we keep getting repeat trolls creating accounts constantly up in here', this is worth looking at.

@ghost said in What's your identity worth to you?:

• Are IP addresses stored, and if so how long?

Not sure. I don't actually think it necessarily expires from the MUX on its own. If it does, it may be 'after X number of IP slots have been used by that person' more than a factor of removal over time. As in, it stores ten, once you get the 11th, the first drops off, whether that's in two hours or twenty years. (I genuinely don't know, but there seem to be a few things in MUX that work this way.)

Similarly unsure regarding the wiki. (Since most games have both, it's worth looking at what the standard mediawiki install does with the same info.)

• Does stored IP information get scrubbed?

Probably not, unless it's by one of the methods above. Every so often, Shang purges theirs by some metric or another, since they use theirs for alt-tracking/ensuring people remain within alt limits. I think it's every year or two, but I believe it's manual/a script they run, not an automated background process.

• For games that require registration with an email address, does that email get scrubbed when the PC bit is destroyed?

There are a lot of moving parts to this one -- mostly because so many games don't destroy bits any more, they freeze them so the player can return later if they wish, without data loss re: sheet/etc.

Personally, I wouldn't.

Players who leave voluntarily should be permitted to return, and this is a simple way of verifying that Returning Bob and Original Bob are the same person. (Not Person Stalking Original Bob finds out Bob had an alt there and wants to thaw Bob's character to see who approaches Bob to chat, and about what. Having had someone spoof one of my characters in such a fashion before on a game that did destroy bits... yeah, this can and does happen.)

Players who have been removed should stay gone. Again, while there's a lot of workarounds for this, keeping forbidden IPs and 'Banned User Email List' is a very simple check on this. Most people will just use a VPN or new email, but a surprising number don't.

@ghost I didn't need any of this info to make that call. "You need to go spend $120 so I can play at your virtual house," was more than enough for me to re-re-re-re-re-click the little eyeball on Nemesis. There's pretty much no amount of technical expertise (real or imagined) that would make me want someone with such a major sense of entitlement on any game I'd run. Who would?

Really, $120 is a year of hosting on digitalocean right now for plenty of space for a MUX w/wiki. If someone is concerned about their own security and is going to spend money related to a game, I would think they'd be more likely to spend it on something like that.

@ghost said in What's your identity worth to you?:

So if someone told me "Hey, update your home network so that this guy you don't know can connect via IPv6 to your home server to play an online game" I'd:

Me: "I'm offering something free under the terms I'm comfortable doing so, and no more." (The end.)

Privately in my head: "Wow, the entitlement is really off the charts when someone's telling me to spend $120* just so they can join, too. Maybe I shouldn't bother doing this at all."

^ Because seriously, this attitude is not much different than, "If you want me to play in your tabletop game, you have to buy me all the books."

• Because maybe it's nothing to you, but $120 isn't something I have just laying around for my own fun, let alone to use on something for someone else's fun.