Posts made by surreality

@Coin In some systems, those things are linked. CoD being a prime example. There's only one prince status slot, for instance. They're corner case issues, but they are out there.

@Rinel That must be hell. I would be a catastrophe of anxiety in your shoes. Fingers crossed the boss realizes this added stress to the situation.

@Thenomain (I was able to keep it short and simple and not full of 'want to tear my hair out screaming because I know you're smarter than this'.)

Yes, if you don't follow the rules, you can't play on the game. As faraday says, however, this doesn't mean this is punishment.

I'm not sure where you're going with this either. Faraday hits part of it, but even if someone hates the place they're kicked from or what-have-you and it's no greater loss to them than never having been there in the first place, is there a need for something punitive that exists beyond the game's scope? Because barring extremes that should probably involve law enforcement -- RL stalking, RL harassment, sharing child porn pics, death threats, etc. -- I don't think this is necessarily a good direction to go.

@Thenomain I don't really know a tactful way to explain this at this point.

Yes, obviously, if you never earn something in the first place, or lose that something once you have earned it, you don't have that thing.

This is only a problem if it is something you are inherently entitled to have in the first place.

Access to a game and its resources is not something you're entitled to have in the first place.

You have to earn driving privileges in the US, you have obligations related to maintaining those privileges, and you can lose them as well. Does this make the situation more clear?

@Thenomain Notice I explicitly said it was not a right: it's a privilege.

It is something extra that one is not entitled to have by default.

One earns and loses privileges.

@Thenomain said in Punishments in MU*:

But when the outcome of doing something wrong (cyber-stalking) is the same as not following a barrier to entry (write a background of at least 3000 characters), what kind of difference is there?

A notable one, when you keep in mind that playing on any given game is not an inherent right.

I look at the initial setup stuff -- I loathe 95% of it and always have, so I don't love this truth -- as 'what you need to do to earn the privilege to be there in the first place'.

'Doing something wrong' is a way to lose that privilege.

@Pandora Actually, a quick edit...

@Pandora said in Staff’s Job?:

The job of staff as a whole in any text-based game is to maintain all of the back-end tasks that players do not have access to.

^ That about nails it. (It does in complete form as well, but the more concise version sums it up nicely.)

@Pandora There are a lot of reasons 'isn't willing to work with staff' could end up eventually in a ban.

Examples:

• someone told 'no' about a thing they then go on to do anyway, and defend doing despite being told no
• someone insisting theme or policy be changed to suit their preferences rather than following the existing community guidelines that work for everyone else
• someone unwilling to follow whatever steps are outlined to do a thing (send in a note before running a plot, ask if you're going to create a new character in a private faction, etc. -- whatever they are)

These tend to result in 'this game is not what you're looking for, it isn't going to become that for you, and your refusal to accept this is causing issues for staff/other players; you are not a good fit here, leave'.

Plenty of people leave of their own volition at that point; some say 'no'. Either way, the result is essentially the same, and really should be backed up by code. Just because someone walks out the door voluntarily doesn't mean they won't sneak back around with a new name and pull the same garbage behaviors all over again; there are people who make this their standard operating procedure.

@Ganymede I'm not talking so much about it applying to punishments on a game, though it's relevant there as well, to be sure.

It is definitely a reason to take the 'run people out of the community on a rail' approach with extreme care and with hard facts rather than this kind of speculation.

You're a rarer person than you think re: people call this out more often than they don't, and that speculation is often pointed out. We would be in a much better place collectively if that was the norm.

@Ganymede I'd call it a notably dangerous one for this hobby. Fill a group with imaginative people with anxiety, avoidance issues, varying degrees of social awkwardness, etc. (HI!) and you're going to get some doozies.

The big difference here is that if the Penelope or Harland from that example simply said to the other, "Squeeb rapes dogs and stabs the elderly with rusty pirate ship anchors!" the listener is most likely going to realize what complete and utter insanity that is.

The build-up, taking the form of a paranoid validation cycle, has both of them believing this to be fact.

That's not a trivial difference, even if it is a subset.

@Ganymede ...maybe scale back on the enthusiasm just a smidge from that. Just a smidge.

@Ganymede Enthusiastically, I would guess.

I'm going to second Jeshin. There are too many smear campaigns alone to make that plausible, even if it was possible.

When it comes to that sort of garbage behavior, people are very slow to realize that it's the person spewing steady, endless viciousness over a period of years about someone that's the problem as much if not more than whoever they're smearing. Most of what is coming out of their mouths is probably bullshit born of commiseration spirals with the people they're bashing as a group.

For anyone not familiar with this: go read the perspective section of ye olde guide to common sense.

If you don't think you've seen or participated that, you'd be wrong. Yes, I mean every one of us. It is super easy to fall into that trap and very hard to get out of it, since the people involved have become entrenched.

For people too lazy to click the link:

Another issue to be on guard for when considering perspective is the commiseration spiral. A commiseration spiral occurs when two or more people who have been mildly put-out by a certain person's actions realize they share the same feelings, and rather than speaking to the offending person to try to resolve their differences, they instead proceed to complain to each other and reinforce their negative reactions until their opinion of that person is radically altered and exaggerated.

Por ejemplo:

Harland is playing Captain Humongous, Penelope is playing Rocket Tits, and Squeeb is playing Farnokk The Thrusting. Squeeb has been plotting an epic Farnokk The Thrusting saga for quite some time, and Squeeb is very excited about playing it through, as there are parts for both Captain Humongous and Rocket Tits. So excited, in fact, that he commits a hasty error of omission, and continues Farnokk's Mighty Thrusting attack on the Sinister Space Trolls without realizing that Rocket Tits has called for his help with fighting Captain Humongous.

Penelope is struck with the impression that Squeeb is ignoring her, and says as much to Harland, tentatively. The exchange may go something like this.

Penelope: "Hey, I think Squeeb didn't even read my pose."
Harland: "Maybe not. Huh. Maybe he just skimmed it."
Penelope: "Or maybe he doesn't really like me."
Harland: "Or maybe he doesn't like ME."
Penelope: "You know, I bet he's pissed about that time Captain Humongous kissed Rocket Tits outside of the laundromat."
Harland: "Nobody understands our love."
Penelope: "I can't BELIEVE he'd be this petty about something like that! It was our choice to make with the characters, and who is he to throw it in our faces, like he's some RP god who doesn't even read poses?
Harland: "I'm so sick of this kind of bullshit! It's hurting the game, it is, and it's driving players away!"
Penelope: "I bet Johnny Chundernuts quit because of that crap, too!"
Harland: "Son of a bitch! He probably sits around at home, masturbating to poultry porn and trying to increase his power on the game! You can't even talk to him anymore!"
Penelope: "I know! It's got to STOP, I'm TIRED of this kind of treatment!"
Squeeb: "Hey, Harland, it's your turn."
Penelope & Harland: "YOU RAPE DOGS AND STAB THE ELDERLY WITH RUSTY PIRATE SHIP ANCHORS!"
Squeeb: "... wh-what?"

And so on.

A simple mistake that could have been rectified by a gentle prod turns into a massive conspiracy theory about power plays and personal invectives. The commiseration spiral is a slippery slope indeed.

@L-B-Heuschkel Irony: even if all staffers did have that superpower, people would accuse staffers of spying via code/etc.

...and it would be so much worse.

"You're reading my mind! I know it!"

"...I was asleep, what?"

"You're reading my mind! You can't prove you weren't!"

"...I am going back to sleep now."

@faraday said in Privacy in gaming:

If they don't complain, then they're not entitled to a status update about the complaint, IMHO.

^ This, x1000.

If staff does not know you're experiencing a problem, the means at their disposal to notify you that your problem is being addressed decreases dramatically.

I believe someone mentioned -- I don't know if it was here or back in the last days of WORA -- that there's one of the 'all media' games that does something like this, with a mention of every person and infraction and what it was and all the rest. It sounded like a nightmare to me, but apparently it's something that's done out there, and some folks had some reasonable arguments for why they supported it. (I am still not on that page, but there were reasonable arguments for it.)

I think this is where we see the 'we've had a recent issue with <problem> and have had to speak with some players related to this, please try to not <things that would recreate issue>' sorts of posts crop up. It is also not a flawless approach, but if you know you've reported <issue>, and the issue post goes up, it shouldn't be difficult to do the mental math there.

So cute. So much cute. So well-behaved. So lovey.

...but why did you have to be the cat equivalent of a morning person, flouflette?

The rescue sent a picture of her with her kittens she raised before she was readied for adoption. They were all found in a window well in a town about 45 minutes from here. They are a fleet of four nearly-identical white floufkittens.

Me: "We're probably lucky that wasn't our window. We'd have five new cats instead of one."
My mother, who usually glowers with alarm when such words come out of my mouth: "I keep saying no more cats, but, yep. We would."
<both nod somberly>
My mother: "...so do you think they've been adopted yet?"
<both get shifty-eyes>

(Pretty sure they have, but that reaction made me giggle.)

@insomniac7809 While I agree with this, in most cases -- barring the really egregious ones -- they're first steps worth trying.

Most people on games do not intend to be assholes, and are assholes without intending to do so. Cluing them in about behavior they likely don't realize is problematic can stop this unintentional assholery, which is conveniently the most common form.

It's the dedicated assholes -- those that don't care that they're creating issues with their asshole behavior -- that just need to be shown the damn door with no regrets.

It isn't often too difficult to tell one group from the other. We tend to pretend it is harder than it actually is. The "I had no idea" excuse? Your decent folk will generally feel bad and want to make right, even if they had no idea their behavior constituted being an asshole. Your dedicated asshole will continue to feign innocence/obfuscate/misdirect/shift blame or argue or try to throw themselves a (usually wildly over the top) pity party, but they won't feel a shred of remorse or regret and they will care even less than that about making right. It is really, really not difficult to distinguish between the two types, and we need to stop pretending otherwise sooner or later.

There is a wide range of options other than banning, and mietze covers them nicely.

I'd like to see them used more often, really.

It seems like bans or nothing tends to be all there is in practice lately, which unfortunately seems to lead to encourage the spread of a lot of 'unofficial' action taken in the form of harassment and whisper campaigns.

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