Posts made by surreality

@Ghost That's pretty much it, with a lot of folks. It's, I think, why the fact that she had zero qualms behaving that way with real property and a real home is ultimately so telling.

That, and... really, her tumblr thing pretty much proves the 'not changed one bit' already, but that whole 'time to change' was also 'time to make amends', and zero effort was expended on that front.

I can see why someone might not see the need to do that in regard to virtual property. That she feels the same way about physical property is pretty horrifying.

And if the standard scale of importance differential between RL/VR is applied, the kind of gross things she thinks are perfectly fine to do to people on a game becomes quickly apparent. Even direct parity would be awful, but we're really not that lucky.

@HelloProject I am stupid keen on people being able to add 'I had a neat idea!' project areas to the grid. Doesn't have to be their business or something they maintain. Just 'I had a neat idea for a business I'd like to build where my character just hangs out sometimes' or 'it would be neat if there was a secret cave in <place>!' if they want to do it.

I think it would be very cool if people did build things like the business example to list on the wiki for people to 'claim' and so on; 'keep and run it', 'donate to game-owned grid', 'make claimable' as options, essentially. Would be neat. I know I've had, and known plenty of people who have had, highly cool ideas for businesses or areas of a grid that would be unique and interesting, but they don't feel like jumping through the hoops to make a character to run it (especially if they'd just want to be a customer there, or have a place they don't own but where they hang out, etc.) or meeting whatever the IC financial standards are for the build, etc.

Temp rooms get used for this kind of thing a lot, which is handy, sure, but sometimes the locations described would be quite useful or cool, and I'd love to see as permanent additions to the grid. Provided your core of grid rooms is sane, I really see very little harm in this. I 'grew up on' sprawling, immense grids, and always found them interesting. So long as sensible navigation is possible, people adding a park or a cave or a strange hidden garden or a secluded beach or whatever is something I think should be encouraged.

@Ataru Pretty sure she's lurking to read obsessively. While it's true this one thing may have changed, she revels in the attention threads like this give her and pursues them extensively to feed her victim complex.

She has yet to understand that simply relating the basic facts about her actual behavior is not persecution.

This is part of the problem, of course, but there are people who will always believe their seeming buddy over strangers on the internet -- that's completely normal, after all -- so she'll spin all this into 'those mean creepy stalkers'.

There's plenty I know that I have not, will and would never repeat. Some of it is second-hand (with evidence) stuff from friends, which is their story to ultimately tell and not mine, and some of it is stuff I saw go down RL, but no matter how much it would give people 'ammo' to mock or belittle her, I would never, ever share, since ultimately that is not the point of threads like this, and that would be vastly uncool. (No, really, do not PM me to ask, either; I know folks will/would and I'm serious about that.)

...back to the trust gap: it's obviously there.

Email is clearly one of the factors, and there's not much consensus on how to resolve it, apparently.

'Ability to alter the grid' is another, for which there are solutions, if people want to implement them. (I'm keen on allowing the desc adjustment thing as needed on a 'default to trust first, if it's horribly abused by someone, deal with that abuser specifically' basis; YMMV.)

Alts and alt transparency is another 'there is just not going to be a broad agreement on this one' subject, so maybe let's not poke that hornet's nest just yet.

Other than these things, what other issues -- from staff side or player side -- do you feel contribute to the trust gap? Any ideas of how you would try to handle them?

@ThatGuyThere Couldn't agree more with this. It's that 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me' thing, too, to some extent.

Patterns really are the most relevant thing, though. Pattern recognition is a survival skill for a reason, and when somebody whines on about the past being in the past while demonstrating the same patterns again, it's foolhardy to dismiss it as mere matrixing.

@HelloProject The setting I'd be tinkering with, if I un-retire enough to do more than tinker in the most generalized sense, isn't modern day, so most of the mass communications mechanisms just aren't in place. There could arguably be something, like, 'the whale song channel' or something, or 'psychic network', but that's about it.

There is a text message and phone code out there for MUX; while it wouldn't be super helpful with Evennia, it's definitely something to consider.

Jesus, people. Share with the class, if there are examples.

That the examples exist is not going to make the place that banned the cause of those examples look bad, after all.

@HelloProject I'm looking at a setup for mediawiki that would let people do something on wiki directly, basically adding comments directly to a log as they go.

I get what you're saying, and realistically I'm fairly sure almost nobody would ever use it, but it might be something that could be potentially useful for odd corner cases, or for folks who can for whatever reason get to a web page from work but not telnet, etc. A lot of folks do RP in gdocs and such, and it would be similar -- just, it would all be public, which is a thing people would have to keep in mind, like... I don't care if they're TSing or anything, but they would have to be aware that, hey, anybody and everybody can read that as it happens, and you may have some popcorn-munching audience members, if you care about that.

@HelloProject I think there's a 'chat' thing you can set up on wiki. It's just a generic special page and is for anyone logged in to the wiki to use, not something with a chat per-page at all, but that's one thing people could potentially use as an OOC communication thing that's officialish and would be open to everyone participating in the game to use if they wished.

I looked at it, wondering if would be a useful 'per page' sort of thing that people could use for RP on wiki directly, but it wasn't, sadly, that.

@Ghost WoD's overly-broad skill problem is one of the big reasons I started writing something up myself.

It may work for tabletop, where the social/downtime/offscreen stuff isn't as frequently played out, but since that's the bulk of the interaction on a MUX, it really exacerbates the overly-broad skill problem. It tends to come up more often, since it's what people typically spend the bulk of their game time doing.

@ThatGuyThere It's more a case of avoiding the collateral damage, as @Derp mentions.

The real 'no immediate slinkback/return under a new name and keep ranting' is that it's closed create at the login screen.

That means there's an interval of time for the person to not be present in the environment, no matter how short, and even a few minutes to reflect on something can often make a rather enormous difference in someone's behavior.

You're still going to have your share of dedicated douchebags, but it's a pretty useful deterrent for the casual angrypants douchebag.

@Thenomain Here's the thing, though: certain design decisions mean that providing an email is not opt-in. Namely, it's needed for the wiki and to provide the initial MUX login password (and any resend if the person ends up with a temp ban and gets change-passworded until the ban expires; this is relevant, will mention how/why below). That part isn't, and really can't be, opt-in, so the 'provide an email' thing isn't something I can call 'opt-in' completely. There's bonus 'we hope this is helpful and if people want it they can sign up for it and we'll happily do that extra work for you in an attempt to be helpful' stuff, yeah, that absolutely is opt-in. Just, the over all 'we need an email' isn't.

Re: the temp-ban things mentioned above:

My judgement call on this is to work with @newpassword, rather than an IP ban. IP bans are not as reliable in the days of VPN, and like I mentioned before, can adversely impact innocent third party roomies or spouses, etc. in ways I, personally, consider quite unfair, and would not feel comfortable with.

I have seen good effects come from the use of temp-bans, or 'enforced vacations' if one's feeling euphemistic (I'm usually not feeling euphemistic). A more accurate definition of this, to me, is 'cooldowns' if I had to pick an effective euphemism.

There are long-term temp bans that should be called precisely that for actual abuse, or infractions. Permanent ones if it's bad or repetitive, obviously, or intentional abuse that can be clearly proved in some way.

But! ...even the nicest, most reasonable, most fair-minded people can have the occasional meltdown and asplode. And sometimes they will not stop asploding until someone steps in and contains it. You can come up with some kind of elaborate coded prison cell or something to lock someone up in to sit on the game and fume in silence, but I'm not that code savvy, and I actually think that's less effective than temporarily removing them from the environment entirely, because the environment is, at that time, clearly not the one they should be in, usually for their own sake and that of the others on the game. Cutting someone off to go back to the real world for a while is much more effective; leaving someone to sit connected and non-communicative and stewing tends to only make them hyperfocus on the anger/frustration/etc. Basically, confinement and a sense of helplessness in a restricted online space is not the best way to accomplish a reality check, and most of the time, this is what someone actually needs.

@newpassword and @boot does this the most cleanly, IMHO.

It's possible, I guess, to create some kind of login, similar to a guest, that can potentially only communicate with staff or something, to handle these kinds of 'pop back in to get the return password', or otherwise handle things like this, but that seems like a lot more work than just sending somebody an email with their new password when the cooldown time or temp ban has expired. There are options for this with the cron that are also worth looking at. Still, emailing the new password is the easiest, lowest code-overhead method.

@Ghost I'm not seeing how that's not exactly the same problem with supernatural applications of the same mechanic, unless 'supernaturally gifted singer' = 'expert photojournalist'. It's a problem with a really badly constructed skillset, or with the mechanic, but it is not a problem unique to the PT merit in any way.

@Paris Burner emails are definitely a good idea. Not a single person has suggested otherwise, or that some core or otherwise personally identifying email should ever be used.

I don't think staff should be the ones setting up someone's burner email for them (as was suggested elsewhere). That's more risky, is technically problematic, and is just going too far to coddle paranoia, IMHO, in ways that actually make it less secure rather than more.

What I'm saying is this: the way most MUXes are set up, that +job is visible to the entire staffcorps. Almost universally, those jobs go to a bucket every single member of staff can read.

This means that info is being made available to, typically, a lot more than two headstaffers only. I'm suggesting that people stop sending their email addresses over +jobs for precisely that reason.

Instead, email headstaff for a login. The email you choose to email from is the info that is used to set up the initial OOC player login on the MUX, (and the initial wiki login in one shot if they want); they get an email in return from staff with their @pcreate info, and one from the wiki (which will show up as being from the same headstaff account as the sender if things are configured to send that way, which is helpful).

There is no other way to get an initial login on the MUX with closed login screen create disabled: you have to contact someone to ask and they need a means of sending you your initial connection info and password. Any and all subsequent logins can be requested without ever having to disclose this information again in a +job from that initial login that goes directly to headstaff. The email address initially used can be re-used as needed by headstaff because it's stored on their initial OOC login on an attribute only visible from the God bit, #1, and not even to other wizards on the game. As in, unless you have access to #1, there is no way you can access this data to use it.

If you are trusting shifty people with access to the God bit on your MUX, you have much bigger problems than email privacy.

Anybody who wants to give VASpider a chance to reform is welcome to do it -- on their game. Their time, their money, their investment, their time spent building trust amongst their playerbase, their risk. It's just a risk that has the potential to fuck over all those other players who trusted them, in addition to losing all the time and money invested in their project if she hasn't really reformed.

I'm not willing to count on someone who just pulls a persecution act and behaves abominably as a matter of course, and does not see any fault in their actions beyond the most fickle lip service to the notion, having seen the light.

I wouldn't take that risk on her, not only because I don't feel like wasting my time to build something I find cool only to have it scragged by a crazy person, but because the risk wouldn't be exclusively mine, and would also be shared by all the other players who chose to trust in the project to participate. The latter is a considerably bigger issue but the former alone would be more than enough for me to nope the shit out of knowingly allowing her on anything I ever run, if I ever decide to pick stuff up again.

I will also be incredibly pissed if staff on FH get screwed over because they trusted her, because they put a lot of time and effort into this place from what I've heard.

I simply do not believe in allowing a repeat offender to keep shitting all over that kind of effort, and claiming they just can't help themselves because they have <laundry list of medical symptoms that mean they're an explosive diarrhea factory at all times>.

@Ghost No more than anything else that grants again/rote. Supernaturally gifted singer isn't automatically the world's best photojournalist, but what you're suggesting as a revision makes it so.

@Misadventure Part of the issue is that most of them require your webmail to generate. Which is frankly no big deal in that you can just link that to the core game webmail addy, but it also means you as staff are now responsible for the RL maintenance of that webmail account in full. If they ever lose the password to that email/need to access it again, the resets/etc. are sent to the staff email, which potentially opens up full access to that account to staff -- which I'm reasonably sure people would enjoy considerably less.

@Misadventure WoD has some major issues with skills. Some are vague, some seem to double up more than a little, and some are insanely broad. (Crafts is absolutely the prime example of this.) Something like a 'on rolls related to their profession' is definitely a reasonable requirement, but it doesn't fix the core problem of the pretty dang broken skillset the game is using on the whole and how inconsistent the usefulness of certain skills is.

That said, I haven't seen people frequently trying to use things outside their profession, since the profession is typically what they want to focus on in play if that's what they took, and have definitely not seen a significant instance of 'they just want to take the merit for overly broad things so they can abuse it', let alone a majority.

@Paris Players should never be getting someone's email unless the email's owner does one of the following:

• directly gives it to them
• shares it publicly
• grants permission for staff to share it with another individual on a case by case (individual by individual) basis by the player's direct request.

That I'm pretty sure everyone making these arguments has sent in a wiki login request that can be seen by a huge group of staffers, vs. 2 with access to a game's email account, makes this all ring weird to me.

@Ghost That's a problem with the overly broad skills in WoD, not a problem with PT.

Is what you're describing it any less ridiculous without PT? Nah, because their pool for Crafts is the same for all of those things with or without PT. Which is already oceans of dumb.