A Little Sermon

[Sanvean]

This post reflects the official view of the staff.

Some recent events have made me feel as though perhaps it would be good to have a refresher course in what OOC means, what sorts of OOC is and isn't acceptable, and what the penalties for unacceptable abuse of OOC are.

What is OOC? It stands for Out of Character. The OOC command within the game is intended to let people know that what is being said is not the character speaking, but the player behind it.

In many ways, staff feelings regarding OOC communications have relaxed over the years. It used to be that most of the OOC communication took place on ISCA (a bbs). In those days, it was sedulously investigated and punished and any OOC comunication was viewed as suspect. Nowadays we have a number of staff sanctioned venues of OOC communication: the IRC channel, PMs on this board - even many of the helpers list IM contact information. In my opinion, the player base is trusted a lot further to know what is and isn't appropriate than it was, say, ten years ago.

Acceptable OOC includes things that are not game-related, such as talking about movies, interests, making jokes, etc. Acceptable game-related OOC includes things like coordinating playing times, or arranging to play related characters. Unacceptable OOC consists mainly of exchanging information that your character has not learned in-game, and the main reason that it is unacceptable is because it is cheating. It gives you an unfair advantage over players who are not exchanging OOC information and are forced to rely on getting information within the game.  It is also unacceptable because it spoils the game experience for other people, by depriving them of the chance to learn things within the game.

You should not be telling other players anything about your character and his or her actions, stats, equipment, location. etc. that they have not found out in-game.

Here are some examples of what I consider unacceptable OOC exchanges that I have observed over the years:

- A clan who put up a webpage that included the skill trees and all the spell words.
- A clan who communicated via IM while playng, and used it to tell each other what to do and where to go while hunting, rather than relying on the way.
- Someone telling people via IM about the character they had just pkilled.
- Someone pasting the log of what they were doing, line by line, to the IRC channel.
- Someone relaying the location where they had just died, in order to let someone else go loot the corpse.
- An assassination planned in emails, so the victim had no chance to find out about it.
- People gossiping on the IRC channel about who plays which character.

OOC is very hard to police - in fact, we can't. All we can do, really, is try to let players know what is and isn't acceptable so they can police themselves, and to come down hard on cases where it's obvious. If I find a clear cut case of it, then I'm going to treat it along the same lines as the other big no-no: multi-playing. Which is to say, I may ban you for a month for the first occurence, and it may be a permaban the second time.

It's also exceedingly tiresome to have to sort these occurrences out - to have to wade through a week's worth of logs or the complaints someone else has sent in. I'd rather not have to waste my time on it, because it's thankless. There is no joy in banning people, regardless of what you may think. No one is happy to be banned, and often there's a lot of harsh language, which is understandable, because they're upset. It's tiresome and saddening to have people lie outright to you about their actions, even when directly caught in the act.

Please be careful with your OOC communciations. Don't give other people information that should be learned in-game, particularly when they may not want it.

Thanks.

[ArmageddonMUD]

Over the years members of our community have formed strong bonds outside of the game and made close friends. That's something to be celebrated. It is important to remember that there are rules about the separation of IC (in-character) and OOC (out-of-character) behavior. While it is tempting to discuss game happenings and to play with our friends, the line between innocent sharing of stories and outright cheating is sometimes very thin. It is not appropriate to share game secrets. It is also not appropriate to form power blocs with our friends. Please take care not to cross the line. The easiest way to do this is not to discuss what's going on in-game with anyone using out-of-game means.

Finally, while it is fun to play with your friends, it is important not to form insular cliques. This would give you an unfair advantage. It also robs you of the opportunities to roleplay with people you will not be exposed to by sequestering yourself in a small group.