Out of Character and you... the grey of grey areas.

[wizturbo]

Good time to pivot the discussion to the whole "justice" part of this.

Personally, I am definitely against any kind of zero tolerance approach with this kind of thing.  Extremely bad cases may warrant serious actions like forced storage or banning, the rest should be addressed through less severe actions.

You won't create a culture of good judgement and discretion around in-game secrets by swinging the hammer of justice around too freely, because ultimately staff don't really have many consequences they can dish out for this kind of thing.  This isn't like a company where you sign an NDA and face a lawsuit, the worst thing the staff can do is ban a player or publicly shame them.  Also, any harsh punishment doesn't just punish the person in question, it damages the entire community.  Force store someone, all the players that interact with that character just lost something.  Ban someone, we just lost an engaged player.  People who've been punished severely rarely admit to their wrongdoings, and in fact tend to reach out to others to bitch and complain and that just causes more damage to the community at large.

I'm a big fan of karma for this reason.  You want to earn karma, and keep your karma?  Then don't spill the beans OOC.  You create an incentive for the people who really want to "win" Armageddon to do so by acquiring karma, which means they have to follow the rules.  Of course, that means karma has to unlock things that are actually powerful, and that people really actually want to play, and with powerful magickers gone and all I'm not sure if that carrot is as tasty as it used to be..  But that's a whole separate topic.

[Patuk]

Jesus. You threw out an entire plot because you thought two players may have been colluding?

Animate some NPC clan A assassins to kill the offenders. Post on clan A's forum board about NPC's having snooped on the people doing the 'gick hiring and confirming it was clans B and C. Do something, rather than throw up your hands and go home. If this is your one big example of how OOC collusion ruins completely everything, I'm going to view said collusion as being much more harmless than I thought.

[Lizzie]

n/t - responded to the wrong thread!

[Taven]

Regarding risk, House A wouldn't be risking everything either, just the small contingent represented by PCs who had a personal stake in the conflict.  House A 's PCs certainly could have assumed who did it, they could have looked at the members of that particular opposing crew, and judged that their own crew was capable of wiping it out. None of these Houses would have actually destroyed each other, as you can't attack the virtual crews of a House. But if you kill enough of the PC population, it stand to reason that the Virtual portions of the House would react - ideally by negotiating an end to the conflict once one House had established local dominance. Or by spawning a shit ton of NPCs and killing you in return. Either way it's better than doing nothing.

[...]

Edit: Also, the retaliatory war would not be based on OOC information.

There were IC confrontations between the clans. There was IC motive. There was an IC act. It didn't take a genius to connect the IC dots. All of that would be enough justification for a group of characters to decide to go fuck up another group of characters. Maybe it would be the wrong assumption, but just because someone talked OOC would not have invalidated the IC reasoning.

Hey guys?

I think it's important something be said. Staff shut down the piece of the plot that involved giant cave beasts, and perhaps punished the players involved with sharing OOC info.

The virtual world was accounted for with House A, B and C's actions. There were NPCs involved and a virtual repercussions as a result of House A's IC actions. The fact that cave beasts were gone sooner didn't suddenly remove A's ability to react.

The real fact is that B and C were found out ICly. House A worked hard to ICly gain proof of that, rather then just suspicions. The level of response that House A had was dictated by the players. Now, yes, there was some restrictions by the NPC seniors of the House. That did limit the scope of what could be done, eventually. Prior to that House A had a month or more to decide what they wanted to do and how.

The issue is that if B and C aren't playing on a fair field and are demonstrated to be chatting OOCly about the specific plot, then that throws things out of whack. But even with that, the overall plot continued.

[Nergal]

Nergal and/or staff, could you please elaborate on the OOC in the example story?

OOC may have been used to coordinate the killing. It's not completely clear. But OOC was definitely used to spread word of the killing after the fact.
OOC was definitely used to form and coordinate the terms of the alliance between the two allied Houses (fun fact: OOC friends almost never betray each other in-game, despite the insistence by players that it can still happen organically), spread ongoing plans for review, and coordinate complaints to staff via the request tool.

The minutiae of those actions aren't worth discussing, and I am not going to say exactly how we caught it, but I will say that if you react to something ICly that never actually happened IG, and it's something that could have only been discussed OOC, that raises a red flag there.

Jesus. You threw out an entire plot because you thought knew two players may have been were colluding?

FTFY. And yes. Once staff discover players are colluding, we do what we can to shut it down and reverse the damage. Simply removing the source of the rot is pointless once it has already spread. That being said, we did remove the source of the rot eventually and let the plot continue for a time, but by the time everything had happened, we found players had backed out of the plot on their own anyway.

---

Have another story:

The characters:
Amos, the roguish ranger
Lord Templar Malik, the templar

Amos was a pretty standard character. He went through Byn training and started to branch out on his own. He ended up on our radar when he ignored the virtual world (the crowd) by shooting arrows into the Gaj from the roasting pits to assassinate someone that was threatening his mate, and then running upstairs into his apartment to hide and wait out the criminal timer. Allanak was alerted to this criminal and the AoD began to hunt them, except for Lord Templar Malik, who had no IC relationship with Amos at this time.

Amos eventually got out of Allanak with his mate, and occasionally returned to Allanak to give his excess coin to Lord Templar Malik, out of the belief that it was good to keep a templar in his pocket. The templar accepted the coin without reacting to Amos's wanted status. Amos committed more crimes in Allanak, and even served as Malik's bodyguard from time to time.

Eventually, we discovered with the help of a third player that the players of Amos and Malik were OOC friends, and Malik was ignoring Amos's transgressions before he was even bribed because of the OOC friendship. After Amos decided to kill someone else in public, we decided to have the world react, because the PC templar was not reacting. An NPC templar swept in and worked on taking Amos to jail for punishment. Malik, who was logged out, immediately logged in to attempt to diffuse the situation by contacting the NPC templar. Amos decided to flee, and the planned prison punishment of exile from Allanak turned into execution in the Arena.

[Patuk]

Jesus. You threw out an entire plot because you thought knew two players may have been were colluding?

FTFY. And yes. Once staff discover players are colluding, we do what we can to shut it down and reverse the damage. Simply removing the source of the rot is pointless once it has already spread. That being said, we did remove the source of the rot eventually and let the plot continue for a time, but by the time everything had happened, we found players had backed out of the plot on their own anyway.

Right.

[a french mans shirt]

Stuff

Ouch. You know, even if you were willing to risk a ban in order to 'help' your ooc friend through some metagaming junk, these people forgot that a death in Arm is basically meaningless (don't even need the 'basically' in there.) A year from now, you will have bad account notes and nothing to show for the fact that you did this to save your friend. Just remember that if you're ever considering doing that.

[Iiyola]

Have another story:

The characters:
Amos, the roguish ranger
Lord Templar Malik, the templar

Amos was a pretty standard character. He went through Byn training and started to branch out on his own. He ended up on our radar when he ignored the virtual world (the crowd) by shooting arrows into the Gaj from the roasting pits to assassinate someone that was threatening his mate, and then running upstairs into his apartment to hide and wait out the criminal timer. Allanak was alerted to this criminal and the AoD began to hunt them, except for Lord Templar Malik, who had no IC relationship with Amos at this time.

Amos eventually got out of Allanak with his mate, and occasionally returned to Allanak to give his excess coin to Lord Templar Malik, out of the belief that it was good to keep a templar in his pocket. The templar accepted the coin without reacting to Amos's wanted status. Amos committed more crimes in Allanak, and even served as Malik's bodyguard from time to time.

Eventually, we discovered with the help of a third player that the players of Amos and Malik were OOC friends, and Malik was ignoring Amos's transgressions before he was even bribed because of the OOC friendship. After Amos decided to kill someone else in public, we decided to have the world react, because the PC templar was not reacting. An NPC templar swept in and worked on taking Amos to jail for punishment. Malik, who was logged out, immediately logged in to attempt to diffuse the situation by contacting the NPC templar. Amos decided to flee, and the planned prison punishment of exile from Allanak turned into execution in the Arena.

2 players were clearly communicating about it and player Malik basically protected player Amos, and only Amos got punished? Or did Malik get a punishment as well? Cause two were clearly at fault here.

[Nergal]

Both players were punished. My stories are focusing on the actual abuse, not the aftermath.

[Ath]

So emotions are starting to run a bit high, with that, I'm very close to closing this thread now.  I appreciate that some are understanding of what is going on, while others don't seem to get the point of it.  The Producers & Admins have the unflattering job of having to deal with these situations, it's not fun.  I wish none of us had to deal with it, but it is our job to make sure the game is fair to all in whatever way we can.

One thing I can take from this is that it seems that people would rather us come to them prior to talk about a situation before it devolved in a punishment.  They also would like us to be more willing to hear the other side, which is fine, but I will state that there are times where we have foolproof evidence, and we try to give the other party a chance to talk about it, but they still lie... those cases are going to get the hammer.  Prior and repeat offenders (which is noted on their accounts) are less likely to be shown leniency also, just due to the fact there is little evidence of them changing their ways.  Now if you come forward right off to us, I let you know that it is much more likely for us to be lenient.  Honestly, I've seen case where a player has gone... "Yep, I was doing this... sorry." before we even asked them about it.

At the same point you the players have more a job in this than we do.  OOC Cliques, groups, that gather up and talk about the recent ongoings in the game that will just help each other, these can be avoided.  I don't care if people get together to talk about the game in a way that isn't abuse, the TeamSpeak server has been a great place for me to go chat about it.  Even though BadSkeelz is a pain in the ass   - You all can also let us know if you have any complaints on any of this, or if someone is blatantly breaking the rules.

Anyhow... I'm only leaving this thread open for a bit longer.  Nergal has been kindly trying to give examples of what he's seen and how it affected the outcome of a plots he had a hand in with.

[Dar]

Yeah. if a character who wasnt logged in, logs in and immediately contacts an absolutely random Templar NPC, then it'd be an obvious and blatant ooc collusion.

Sad thing is that if the Templar character logged in immediately as it happened, I would've been ok with this. As long as he used IG means to find out about this. The Caught archer would way him and so on.   Did the Templar log in because the player of caught archer asked him to OOC? Yes. But realistically, he could've been logged in at the time anyway, so the story line is actually completely unchanged. It's no different (in my mind) then announcing a 'recommended' playing time.

But if the templar basically logs in, and insta contacts an NPC templar, whose name/sdesc he doesnt even know in any way. That's bad play. Idiotic even. Every single cheater of an OOC clique out there right now is thinking, "I'd never be so blatant. My OOC colluding is going to be unnoticed. Zalanthas shall be mine!"

I begin to suspect that OOC collusion may possibly be the 'worst' offense, or the one that began the slide, but in both situations there were other instances that the staff rightfully found dejecting. For GMH scenario, it's the desire for house B and C to solve a problem by PKilling entire PC population. Which is a lame, ignore-thy-virtual-world, uncreative, game damaging attitude to solving problems.  With Archer/Templar Scenario, it's the fact that the Archer kept shooting arrows into busy taverns, ignored virtual world completely, and used AI inadequacy in the "I" department to get away with it. All this, compounded with the blatant ooc communication sapped any kind of desire on staff part to be in any way accommodating.  I get all that and support that.

But this is a conversation about OOC collusion. And all of this, except the insta knowledge of the Templar, could've happened without it.  I once ran a rogue drovian rinthi elf who tried to burglarize the Templar Mansions, got caught by a Red Robe, tried to pickpocket him on our way to jails, was placed into PC blue emplar's hands, escaped him and the jails, got perma wanted for it. And a rl week later, that same PC templar removed the perma-wanted, and was giving me rare magick items and enchanting me with 30-40 rl hours worth of magickal sight spells. None of that was OOC collusion. All of it was IC. But if someone was already predispositioned to see OOC collusion in my actions, they could've easily suspected that it was.

I'm not arguing that OOC collusion is good. It's not. I'm just saying that in most cases, it's outside of your control. And a lot of that irrefutable proof comes from logs provided by another player. For these logs to happen, that other player must have been part of that OOC conversation and you should ask yourself whether that player himself is not an even worse OOC cheater? Worrying about this, letting it affect your judgement, your interest in the game, can be very detrimental to your own enjoyment and the state of the game itself.

At the same time being able to converse about IG events after some whatever period of time can be very beneficial to the game. It allows for the "WOW" factor, the "I'd love to be in a similar scene one day", "Shit. I think I'm gonna skip on homework and go play now, that itch to login is unbearable!" factor. And while ruining IRL lives, it can be very beneficial to the game itself.

[mansa]

...
So I'll ask then, what sort of events could be talked about you think? I personally don't take the rules as banning any ooc, should we write them in more detail, give situations?

1.  Desire to share experiences

2.  Desire to figure things out

3.  Desire to achieve things
3a.  Massive benefit to cooperating to achieve things
3b.  Cooperation is logistically simpler OOC than IC.

4.  Very little in the way of secure IC comms
4a.  Obvious massive benefit to secure comms
4b.  OOC secure comms are logistically far simpler than IC methods

5.  Difficulty of enforcement

6.  Ease of OOC communication
6a.  Sometimes massive benefits to OOC coordination

Doubt it will ever change.  It seems to have gotten somewhat better, but maybe I'm just not in with the cool kids anymore (not that I ever was).  Human behavior is what it is.  You can lament it all you want, but it's not going to change significantly.

...
We want players to talk OOC, because we want this game and the community to be more than just in-game characters.  Something would be lost if I was just "Player131391" instead of "Wizturbo". 

At the same time, we do not want players to talk OOCly about things that can ruin fun plots. 

That requires every player, every time they talk to someone, to have good judgement about what they should or should not say.  It requires people when they're emotionally charged, excited, drunk, horny, or stoned out of their mind to make good decisions.  That's going to be very tough to manage.  I would consider myself to be 'very good' at keeping secrets through OOC channels, but even I probably let something minor slip in the 15+ years I've played this game.

Utter elimination of this problem is going to be practically impossible, and I have no silver bullet solution to offer.  In fact, the only thing I can think of are more complications:

1.  Valeria's post about having any cases of this handled by people who are not emotionally involved in the situation (a third party) is spot on, but I'm not sure it can realistically happen that way.  No staff members are unrelated third parties, they're a team.  If someone pissed off one of my team member's at work, I would almost certainly take their side.  That's what team members do.  I'm sure some staff members are better than others at being objective, but I doubt those staff members want their new job to be judge on OOC abuse cases.  And I don't see staff recruiting a "High Inquisitor" to handle these cases removed from all other staff business.  With that said, having someone who is not the primary 'victim' of the situation handle the OOC communications with the abuser is a VERY good idea.

2.  By the very nature of the problem, having solid evidence of abuse is going to be very difficult to acquire unless someone has contacts with the NSA.   And, because evidence is going to be so rare, the times staff do get solid evidence they're going to naturally be inclined to swing the ban hammer with righteous justice.  Partly fueled by the dozen cases they didn't have enough evidence to act upon, even though they're pretty sure there was some wrongdoing going on.  This might be true even if the person in question didn't do anything too awful.  It's like the guy who gets pulled over and has just enough weed on him to put him over some state limit that makes his punishment significantly worse than if he had just a few pinches less on him.

3.  Trying to apply black and white rules to grey situations is problematic.  Sharing your thoughts on the new monsters in the salt flats via AIM is OOC abuse, but relatively harmless.  Sharing who is a mindbender, or some major plot secret is not harmless.  Problem is, you might catch someone for the former but not the later.

...
My general feeling is I trust the staff to make the best calls they can on how to handle these situations on a case by case basis.  There's no world where this can be regulated in a precise, clear and fair way unless we 'legalize' the sharing of IC information and I think that would basically ruin Armageddon for me and many other players.

I like these posts.  Dar had an example of how a character assassinated someone, and their OOC friends immediately found out and played differently in game.  I've many examples of this myself.


As an elder player, the best times I've had was when I never knew the players that I played with; but an even greater moment was the reveal and talking about these shared experiences I've had with the players themselves after the fact.  I want to be able to share my storytelling experiences.

[The Warshaper]

Maybe why most muds have Enforcer admins where their job is to just catch cheaters all day ery' day.   It's such a timesink/energy destroying/faith in humanity losing job for storytellers to run plots and deal with enforcement. Maybe take a look into Staffing enforcers, plural.

[BadSkeelz]

Nergal, I understand that history repeats in Armageddon (often getting more farcical as it does) but are you pulling and modifying all your examples from within the last year? Because I'm pretty sure I can pencil in the names of the actual PCs in your Templar example.  I don't know how the story actually ended, but we seem to be burning bridges here.

I'm glad they were caught, and wish players simply knew better than to behave like that. Especially the archery and apartment nonsense. The OOC colluding here was the clumsiest kind. No one can claim a witch hunt when that's punished.

Taven, regarding the house conflict, the question for me then is how pressured were the players of house A to respond a certain way, and how much of the drive behind that pressure was because Staff didn't think they any longer had the incharacter justification. That's probably a discussion for another thread, where the concern of realistic virtual world reactions get in the way of player action. Kind of the opposite of Nergal's example, where the original sin was not enough respect for the virtual world.

[LauraMars]

As an elder player, the best times I've had was when I never knew the players that I played with; but an even greater moment was the reveal and talking about these shared experiences I've had with the players themselves after the fact.  I want to be able to share my storytelling experiences.

[wizturbo]

Using OOC channels to send a message like "something going on, could you login?"  Is not at all abusive in my eyes.  No one can be online 24/7.  So the suddenly logged in Malik doesn't raise red flags with me.  What they do after the login is perhaps another matter though and there's obviously more to the story.

[a french mans shirt]

Enforcers would be awesome. High-karma folks that have repeatedly demonstrated they don't abuse the game even when faced with character or asset annihilation. Their only concern in staff mode is watching the powerful (relative to other pcs) for signs of abuse.

[BadSkeelz]

My interpretation is that OOC collusion or friendship is what led to Malik giving excessive and poorly justified coverage to Amos. Malik abruptly logging in to try and save them was just the event that proved something shady was going on.

Enforcers would be awesome. High-karma folks that have repeatedly demonstrated they don't abuse the game even when faced with character or asset annihilation. Their only concern in staff mode is watching the powerful (relative to other pcs) for signs of abuse.

High karma are some of the worst abusers. They've been around the longest and have the most relationships to draw on.

I volunteer for Shithunter General.

[wizturbo]

A staff role whose sole job is to hunt down other players?   Sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster.

[BadSkeelz]

A staff role whose sole job is to hunt down other players?   Sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster.

Heheh, probably.

I actually like what staff did to put an end to the Malik/Amos relationship. Staff spawned a new game piece that could have been survived if players played responsibly. Players kept to their bad habits and we all got an arena show out of it.

It proves that however much you talk out of game, there's always something to oppose you in game.

[Armaddict]

Using OOC channels to send a message like "something going on, could you login?"  Is not at all abusive in my eyes.  No one can be online 24/7.  So the suddenly logged in Malik doesn't raise red flags with me.  What they do after the login is perhaps another matter though and there's obviously more to the story.

Yeah, that's...kinda how I feel about it.

As far as the rest of that story there's a lot of circumstantials regarding timing and whatnot.  Sorry, not sorry, don't have problems with arrows into taverns (it's gone on for a long time, and in a game where people leave reality while asleep and where the majority of time is spent in public places or inaccessible places, sometimes 'opportunity' is less based on following the story because the story isn't exactly working in tandem with what we have access to).  Even in the HRPT, there were NPC's throwing weapons into taverns.  This falls under a number of other categories, where if things were real in how the code and game interact, then this would be a rule.  But the game doesn't behave in a real way due to it being a game; people are far more invulnerable within the city than they actually would be.  No one eats strange food.  You don't have the opportunity to poison bar food.  People aren't asleep in their beds.  Soldiers are omnipresent.  Etc etc. If this is a super serious no no nowadays, then influence the code for it to make it impossible for everyone equally, because as it stands, it doesn't get jumped on in any scenario other than this.  No one complains about VNPC's not being taken into account in open streets, or hardscrabbles, or apartment hallways, or rooftops where there are tents set up for squatters.  No one says VNPC's make this task impossible in any other scenario.  Likewise, no one complains about masters of any other skill doing masterful things, aside from perhaps theft, where they usually also receive a defense.  Thus, when it comes to this particular complaint of ignoring it, I actually think it falls closer to people thinking of taverns as 'safe zones', and feeling disappointed when that belief leads to a lack of safety on their part.  Otherwise, we're going to start having VNPC's being a lot less Virtual in a lot of areas, or an acknowledgement of a double standard being applied.  In the mean time, stop thinking of taverns as safe zones for crying out loud, that used to be common sense, particularly when you know you've just made enemies, or know that you've got longstanding enemies.  They aren't safety spots.  People can and will reach you, via whatever means the game allows (the same way the game keeps you safe in a multitude of ways you normally would not be).

The hiding upstairs afterwards was normal.  But in the old days, that might have led to having a templar and a couple giants come knocking on your door after talking to the clerk, depending on who was murdered.

The rest of it, though, if true, with the friend giving shielding and so on...

After Amos decided to kill someone else in public, we decided to have the world react, because the PC templar was not reacting. An NPC templar swept in and worked on taking Amos to jail for punishment. Malik, who was logged out, immediately logged in to attempt to diffuse the situation by contacting the NPC templar. Amos decided to flee, and the planned prison punishment of exile from Allanak turned into execution in the Arena.

This is much more in line with how things are well dealt with, in my view.  I like this reaction.  Put Malik in a position where he's attempting to sway another templar.  While this shouldn't be impossible, this is an immediate IC interaction based on templar ethics, with staff correcting what they think is strong collusion but at the least, not behaving in the game world the way they want.  This feels very appropriate to me.

Edit:  There's nothing wrong with templar/noble/upper crust protections in the game.  I don't care if they're friends with each other.  But the staff running a templar to handle it essentially forces that position that obviously hadn't been enforced for Amos in awhile.  "Don't put me in fucked up situations where I end up owing powerful competition favors to keep you alive.  Or someday, I won't."

[The Warshaper]

I understand the apprehension Wiz. Most enforcers still have checks and balances in any sort of staffing structure. Present your evidence to Lead Admins and wait for a ruling. In the case of possible harm done to plots the storyteller would be notified by Lead Admin after an enforcer submitted something. In the case of triggers or wonky possible code abuse leading to gain in power the matter could be soley handled by an Enforcers judgement. Someone using a gathering script? Enforcers give them a direct message saying to respond in X amount of time to make sure they are at the keys. They fail a check inform them of the policy and make a note on their account.

It's not to bash players around like a HG clubbing baby scrabs, it's just to make sure folks understand the rules and are held accountable. Storytellers could get help from an Enforcer to watch for critical information getting leaked by characters who have been trusted with it. They can focus on their plot Enforcer can watch for any ooc motivations. Things run smoothly.

A hard job? Yes. Ultimately major punishment would still be decided by Lead Admins though. I understand to many cooks in the kitchen causes chaos but honestly everytime a staffer running a plot has to stop and investigate well... it's pulling their limited volunteered time from a project.

[Refugee]

A staff role whose sole job is to hunt down other players?   Sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster.

I agree with this 100%.

[wizturbo]

I understand the apprehension Wiz.

A hard job? Yes. Ultimately major punishment would still be decided by Lead Admins though. I understand to many cooks in the kitchen causes chaos but honestly everytime a staffer running a plot has to stop and investigate well... it's pulling their limited volunteered time from a project.

It's a bit past apprehension, I adamantly loathe the idea of having some inquisitor role on staff.

It is a hard job, and it makes you wonder who would sign up to do it for free.  It would take someone who enjoys doing that kind of thing, which is the absolute worst person for the job. 

[Delirium]

We don't need enforcers- just send in a player complaint if you have good cause to think something shady might be going on.