Community Moderator Guidelines

The vision for our community is to be a place that anyone can feel welcome, safe and comfortable to interact with other members of the community to support ArmageddonMUD and shared interests.

Moderators will seek to be examples to the community in creating this environment and be fair in enforcing the rules.

Players are expected to behave politely in the Discord or GDB. The standard of conduct is if you were in any other real-life public gaming space, and moderators will proactively use timeouts or bans if this does not appear to be the case.

Specific Moderation Guidelines:
When moderating, mods will:
* Use the moderation tools whenever possible
* Communicate what caused the moderation to the moderated (via reason field)
Discord:
* Make a record of the moderation action within #moderator-chat
* In the 'reason' field of the moderation command be clear about the wrong doing
* In general moderation action will be a 24-hour mute, 30 day ban, or permanent ban depending on severity or repeated rule breaking.

General Discussion Board:
*Make a record of the moderation action within #moderator-chat
.* Moderators may use the "WARNING" feature, reach out to the community member in question and:
* In the ban reason field, be clear about the wrong doing.
Removal from the Community:
* If the account in question is specifically made to cause harm to the community, the account will be banned.

General Feedback to the Moderator Team:
Please submit via modmail so there is a record of it, or reach out to the lead moderator.

Joining the Moderator Team:
Please use the request tool to indicate your willingness.
Complaints about the Moderator Team:
Moderator decisions are final. If you want to engage constructively or if there has been a genuine misunderstanding, use modmail. Arguing and begging will be ignored.
If you want to complain to staff about moderators, utilize the Request tool and use the Player Complaint option.

Anti-Harassment Policy


Shorter version
The Moderator Team of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all ArmageddonMUD's community spaces, including the General Discussion Board (https://gdb.armageddon.org/) and the Discord Server, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Moderator Team.

Some ArmageddonMUD's community spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.


Longer version
The Moderator Team of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all ArmageddonMUD's community spaces, including the General Discussion Board (https://gdb.armageddon.org/) and the Discord Server, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Moderator Team.

Some ArmageddonMUD's community spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. 
Note: Interactions are defined by comments, emojis and other media ways to interact with each other.

Harassment includes:

* Offensive interactions related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
* Unwelcome interactions regarding a person's lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
* Deliberate misgendering or use of 'dead' or rejected names.
* Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they're not appropriate.
* Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like "*hug*" or "*backrub*") without consent or after a request to stop.
* Threats of violence.
* Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
* Deliberate intimidation.
* Stalking or following.
* Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
* Sustained disruption of discussion.
* Unwelcome sexual attention.
* Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
* Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
* Deliberate "outing" of any aspect of a person's identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
* Publication of non-harassing private communication.

The Moderator Team of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. The Moderator Team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

* 'Reverse' -isms, including 'reverse racism,' 'reverse sexism,' and 'cisphobia'
* Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
* Communicating in a 'tone' you don't find congenial
* Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting
If you are being harassed by a member of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the Moderator Team by using the 'Report to Moderation / Report to Admin' button, either on the forums or in private messages. If this is happening in the Discord server, send a Direct Message to @modmail and it will create a ticket for us to track.  If you are unable to use either, create a ticket using the Request Tool under 'General Discussion Board - Complaint or Appeal'.
If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server, but if you are being harassed by a member of ArmageddonMUD outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by ArmageddonMUD members, especially the Moderator Team and Staff Members, seriously. The Moderator team reserves the right to exclude people from ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server based on their past behavior, including behavior outside ArmageddonMUD's Community spaces and behavior towards people who are not in ArmageddonMUD.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse.

Consequences
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Moderator Team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all ArmageddonMUD's community spaces and recommending expulsion from the game by staff.

Introduction

When joining the ArmageddonMUD General Discussion Board, you agree to follow the registration agreement that appears when creating a new GDB account, posted at the bottom for reference.  Our Player Moderation team, with the assistance of Game Staff make the final decision on the judgment of posts.


General Rules


R1. Show respect and kindness above all in your discourse. Some examples of moderatable content:
 

• Being highly sarcastic and 'snarky' in your comments
• Personal attacks. We respect a healthy debate can occur, but debate the idea, not the person supplying it.
• Effectively airing a player complaint in public (eg the guild leader last year did 'X' and should have been banned)
• Bluntly crapping upon segments of the player base, eg 'all mages I've seen are lame powergamers'. Please use tact.
• Seeking to dismantle and demolish another player's opinion. Respect that other players may wish to lodge their view but not enter an intense debate. Remember you could always ask them if they're looking to be responded to.
• Engaging in a protracted an intense debate on Discord with one other party (even when they are willing). Respect that many others may not wish this to dominate the conversation and consider taking this to DMs or a GDB thread.
• Bashing former members of the community

R2. There will be zero tolerance for discrimination or harassment.  This includes: offensive actions and comments directed at someone's gender, sexual orientation, appearance, race, religion, language, etc., unwanted attention, deliberate 'outing' of identity, misgendering, threats, or publishing private conversation.

R3. Keep the conversation on topic and in the proper channels.

R4. Keep your personal information private, and do not request the personal information of others in public channels or DMs. Please do not harass, abuse, or send other unwelcome communications to other members (e.g., romantic advances, explicit content).

R5. No NSFW content allowed.

R6. Do not bash other MUDs, communities or other users.

R7. No advertising.

R9. Use modmail to interact with moderators or report rule violating content.  Do not PM individuals to disagree with their moderation decisions.

R10. You must be 18 or older to participate in the Arm community.




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Random rolls would be way OOC for a developed character, IMO.

Alternate suggestion: Be able to trade one stat point for another per every six RL months if if you have played for 10 days played to reflect what your character has been doing over the past three IG years.

Been lifting weights and training every day and getting drunk all night -1 wisdom +1 str or agil.

Former labor slave who is now a desert wanderer? -1 str +1 end

Retired soldier who has shifted to being a Templar's advisor? -1 end +1 wis

There is a reason most people train once a day. We don't really know our timers and spamming skills tends to be looked upon unfavorably. Unless you are rather twinky, this won't have much impact on the majority skills even if you are playing for hours at a time.

Weapon skills alone are a different beast, this may have an impact on weapon skill gains themselves. This means you might reach plateau a bit quicker which then turns into an opportunity game once again.

So while the change may help with plateauing weapon skills, it does not quite address the feelings of fustrating grind the players have expressed over the years.

The change does also make wisdom more of  dump stat. The game seemingly going from 4 viable stats to 3 does have on impact on overall experience even if it seems minor at first.

Not quite the feedback staff probably wants to hear but its still feedback none the less. After all, the sentiment for this change didn't just pop out randomly for no reason at all. There is a clear intent to this change which may have some unintended outcomes.

The only ones I don't think I agree with are bandage and poison. Both of these skills really feel like "knowledge" skills rather than something relying on alacrity, so wisdom feels more fitting to me.

After a couple of weeks I did check in with staff and told them something to the effect of: "I've had this spell at mon for a few weeks, and have failed it plenty, but the spell I thought would branch off of it, hasn't branched. Is something broken, or am I doing something wrong?"

The answer was - I was doing something wrong. It branched off a different spell. A couple of RL days later I got that spell I wanted from branching the correct one, which wasn't even at mon yet.

It's a LOT improved from the days before we were given the spell combos. I remember being SO insanely frustrated, writing down all the combos I could think of, after branching a new spell - only to learn that this spell required a different element completely, that wasn't the purview of my character's element. A rukkian trying "wek un drov blah blah" just was - not intuitive at all and there was no help available.

Quote from: Krath on April 22, 2024, 12:42:22 PMI tend to agree with Kavrick...I think Pierce and Swords should be agility secondary, and Axes and Bludgeoning Strength. It would align it with the secondary skills that are specific for each weapon type:

Swords -> Riposte -> Agility as a Secondary Stat for Both
Pierce -> Backstab -> Agility as a Secondary Stat for Both
Bludgeon -> Sap -> Strength as a Secondary Stat for Both
Axe -> Hack -> Strength as a Secondary Stat for Both

Non-Weapon Skill Changes I would make:

Bandage -> Agility as a Secondary Stat
Poison -> Agility as a Secondary Stat
Guarding -> Agility as a Secondary Stat
Threaten -> Agility as a Secondary Stat
Sling Use -> Strength as a Secondary Stat
Kick -> Strength as a Secondary Stat

Watch -> Just Wisdom
Search -> Just Wisdom
Direction Sense -> Just Wisdom
Ride -> Just Wisdom

I like and agree with all these.

Quote from: roughneck on April 23, 2024, 08:59:32 AMFolks who say this would not help the grind, what in the world?

If the stat you would naturally prioritize then helps you gain skills faster, you are grinding less. Couple that with higher starting skills for mundane classes and subclasses, and we are on fast-track baby.

Yeah- I read Halaster's post. This change shortens skill gain timers, not the instance of how you gain a skill. You're only gaining the benefit from that if you're really playing or doing skill training lot in a short time period IRL, consecutively. So yeah - it'll probably help those characters at the very beginning, when they're super excited, and play for an entire Saturday. Maybe it helps you get 3-4 forage or armorcrafting skill ups that Saturday as opposed to 2. But for those logging in more intermittently, anytime past the timer expiring and your next log in isn't effected and so a longer timer is kinda meaningless. So it helps in the specific instance you are hardcore doing things to build skills, in a near/consecutive play session, yes, it would decrease the time that you're required to do that.  And trying to gain a ton of skills in a single play session would qualify to me as grinding.

If I'm trying to get skills on a character I'll typically do once an IRL day than leave it for the next IRL day, or do morning / evening. The grind in this case won't be affected, as it depends more on % to skill up and ability to get a fail in whatever skill than skill timers.

As Roon mentioned, for many skills, it's really an opportunity thing. The more palatable reduction to the grind is to maybe make the difficulty of getting to journeyman in skills, or whatever, less, by potentially making them notch more.

(Numbers made up)
If you currently require 60 fails to get to advanced, for instance, and your skill timer in the new system is 3 instead of 4 hours, you could do that in 1 week (7.5 days), assuming you logged in at every time you qualified to bump and went to train. Say you played a lot like it was your job, half the day - 12 hours. You could get to advanced in 15 days (~2 weeks). It takes the 4 hour timer character 10 days of solid play, and 20 days - playing half the day. Sure, the grind is reduced minimally in the total start->finish time, but not the time required to be invested, as each character needs to find 60 skill instances.  If you logged in once a day, it would take both characters 60 days. The time required meet the more infrequently you play.

If you doubled the skill notch gain from 0-30, and kept the timers the same, it would take 7.5 days of solid play, and 15 days of playing 12 hours a day -  same as reducing the timers, in this specific incidence. Yet you would only have to be doing things/foraging rocks/sparring/breaking sticks/grinding/whatever to skill up 45 times, as opposed to 60 times. If you were a daily player, it would take you 45 days as opposed to 60, saving you two whole weeks. You would have to break 15 less picks, or find 15 less scrab shells. And you would reach the halfway point faster - meaning your character could get into plots and survive getting scrabbed MUCH faster.

-That-, to me, is reducing grind, because it reduces the hoops you have to jump through, not meaning you can just jump through said hoops at a faster rate.

It's clear what option I think would make more sense.

Just because a change doesn't fix all scenarios doesn't mean a change shouldn't happen.  You guys are right, this doesn't do much for some groups of people, but it does for other groups.  It's still OK to make the change.

[/quote]

I don't think anyone expects all scenarios to be fixed. But the concern I have is with a change that maximizes downside for something uncontrollable (rolling poorly) and maximizes upside for meta choices (min-maxing character priority or race choice) is potentially a less egalitarian way of achieving the goal of grind reduction.