Open Letter to the Playerbase

[ArmageddonMUD]

Hello,

Last night (the night of 2/20/16) information stolen at an earlier date was published to a forum set up for discussion of Armageddon MUD outside of the GDB. This information contained pages from the staff wiki that detailed information on prominent PCs from the past, plot details, world details, chat logs from staff recruitment and personal information of staff both past and present which included home addresses and personal telephone numbers.

The information posted was the culmination of years of staff contributing to a shared resource but had become deprecated as more and more staff activity was moved to other places. The information was however, still a staff resource set up by staff for staff in order to run the game.

This information was behind two passwords and cannot be considered by anyone acting in good faith to be public information, nor information that the players of Armageddon MUD really need access to.

This collection of pages has been since removed - but not before it was downloaded and spread. The damage is done and the wiki is out there along with the information it contained.

Armageddon MUD is run by people with lives outside of the game. It is a shared hobby that we invite other people to participate in. The majority of the work done on the MUD is to increase the enjoyment of the game for people who play it. Needless of what you think about this contribution, or about the staff members who work on Armageddon, the access of private materials by exploiting weaknesses in security is not acceptable in any public arena. None of us on staff would ever condone or support anyone who accessed and spread data kept by any other player or MUD - whatever disagreements we may have with them.

In escalating this antagonism against the MUD we have been made aware that we are not targets of mere dissatisfaction, nor is criticism leveled against us beyond the GDB part of some wider goal of changing the way Armageddon MUD is run. It has shown us that we are simply targets of people who would breach our privacy, take our efforts and work to remove all good will between ourselves and the player base.

Armageddon is just a game and none of us are interested in being such targets. Nothing about Armageddon MUD is worth exposure of personal information, nor having to consider if everything we do will just be snatched away to satisfy somebody else's crusade.

We are considering our options and will be discussing this as a team over the next week to decide what this means for our work on the MUD.

Thanks for your patience.

[ArmageddonMUD]

Thank you all for your patience.  We realize that the playerbase is waiting for a follow up to this original letter and apologize for the delay in getting back to you.

As previously stated the publishing of information that was contained on our staff website was not received well by our staffing team. We needed some time to consider this and to our players we would like to offer an apology - the last few days have seen staff take a step back from much of the day to day work of the MUD and this has meant that we haven't given our time and energy to supporting the MUD as it deserves.

The staffing team, as a whole, is ready to move forward and continue on with the work, stories and changes for this mud.

What this incident has forced us to do is take the time to consider our various repositories, the information that is contained in them and what we want or need to do with that information in the future.

We will be moving on with a number of initiatives including:

- Moving and/or deleting information that is no longer relevant or does not need to be retained in order to run the MUD.
- Changing how we track and record access to staff documents.
- Assessing our community forum, its purpose, how it is accessed and use of the forums.
- Assessing the rules and guidelines for our forums and the MUD itself.

We want to assure everyone that we have no intention of closing down the MUD. We have a number of projects that were underway and plans for some larger scale changes later in the year.

In the next month staff will be working on:

- Recruiting builders
      Expect to see an announcement soon as we finalize the tools and process for taking on more player builders.
- Working on guilds
      We will be rolling out our changes to main guilds in phases. We expect the first of these within the next couple of weeks. As we change the guilds we will be updating helpfiles. All guild helpfiles will eventually list skill selections as the subguild files now do.
- Holding a player staff meeting
      We had previously been discussing other ways to make staff available for discussion with players. We will be looking also to hold a real time conversation with players. We have not at this time decided if that will be via voice chat or if we will go old school and hold it within the game.

Again, thank you to our players for your patience, please join us as we get on with the real purpose of the MUD - roleplay, fun and entertainment.