Thread Renamed at Player Request

[BattleJenkins]

I will say that, despite tensions clearly being high right now, people are doing an amazing job staying civil, so kudos to everyone on that! Any other MUD community would have exploded into mass name calling by now.

[Pixie]

Personal thoughts here:

Sending yourself 50 gold is benefiting your alt. Buying things from your own shops is benefiting your alt (Learned this one the hard way, no matter how obvious it should have been...). Dropping a damascus sword you bought on the ground and going to pick it up on another character is benefiting your alt. Chiming in on an open Inquisition case against your alt and saying "HE'S NOT A MAGE!" is benefiting your alt. Supporting yourself with IP is benefiting your alt.

Protesting a character being killed that your alt is or was friends with isn't really benefiting your alt, because you don't actually gain anything for it that you couldn't have by just being on your alt. If you were there to protest the individual's death because of the alt's feelings there's nothing stopping you from just... signing out and logging into the alt to come and protest the death. This is kind of what I mean by needing to put at least a modicum of confidence into players to keep their alts' motivations separate. Believing X's motivations -had- to be related to Y's motivations because the outcome might have been pleasing to Y is way, way too paranoid for my tastes. It also leaves mad room open for gray areas and interpretation.

[BattleJenkins]

A quick something - can we please change the name of this thread to something less inflammatory?

[Tremere]

I just wanted to say that in general I agree with what is being said here. I do think that use of logs/screenshots for disputes is going to be a valuable resource and if not required, it should be taken in mind more when there are logs to back up what is going on. This game is larger than a fair number of games I've played on before, smaller than some. But even still it is quite small and it is almost impossible to not have some form of cross pollinating of character interactions. I think that if it doesn't derive strict financial/code benefits or if it isn't socially benefiting and there is only one character involved in a plot thread it should be fine to have interactions. Like if someone's alt is heavily involved in a case, but have a character that could oversee it, they recuse themselves, assign someone else the case.

[Silrie]

Personal thoughts here:

Sending yourself 50 gold is benefiting your alt. Buying things from your own shops is benefiting your alt (Learned this one the hard way, no matter how obvious it should have been...). Dropping a damascus sword you bought on the ground and going to pick it up on another character is benefiting your alt. Chiming in on an open Inquisition case against your alt and saying "HE'S NOT A MAGE!" is benefiting your alt. Supporting yourself with IP is benefiting your alt.

Protesting a character being killed that your alt is or was friends with isn't really benefiting your alt, because you don't actually gain anything for it that you couldn't have by just being on your alt. If you were there to protest the individual's death because of the alt's feelings there's nothing stopping you from just... signing out and logging into the alt to come and protest the death. This is kind of what I mean by needing to put at least a modicum of confidence into players to keep their alts' motivations separate. Believing X's motivations -had- to be related to Y's motivations because the outcome might have been pleasing to Y is way, way too paranoid for my tastes. It also leaves mad room open for gray areas and interpretation.

This.

[Silrie]

I'm going to tiptoe in with my own opinions on this topic. I'll start by saying I've been nailed for crossplaying a few times, which brings me to my own examples as to how I myself understand crossover.

Crossover is when one of your alts directly benefits from something another alt does. That is how I understand it. As Pixie pointed out, (in my own interpretation), in some circumstances, what "benefits" an alt from an outside perspective might be something that wasn't ever taken into consideration from the ooc perspective of the player. So in adition to being a massive gray area, you may find yourself being nailed for something that never even crossed your mind as being crossplaying at all.

On a more sensitive note, there are people in the world who need gray area things like this explained to them in simple terms. When you have comprehension issues, and I mean real, honest to god learning and comprehension issues, things that may seem black and white to others tend to run together into a confusing jumble. I think that should also be taken into consideration when laying down the rules for what, exactly, benefiting your alts means, especially when your character has zero IC clout to make any actual changes.

In that vain, if another player knows your alt and feels you are crossing over, I believe that, as players, we should be willing to reach out to each other as players first and be all, "Hey, look, I think you might be running into crossover territory and here's why." If players went to players before running to staff to complain, I think you'd find that most of the aledged crossover complaints were completely unintentional, and had they been brought to the player's attention, the rp would have been nulled, apologies offered and, now knowing where they were going wrong, players would have withdrawn their alts from any further contact that would see them getting into trouble.

Now, if a player cusses you out and keeps going on, then I can absolutely see a complaint to staff. But as it stands, I'm starting to feel as if I can't trust any of my fellow players to come to me if they feel I'm doing something wrong, which in turn makes me feel like I can't trust any of the players at all. That is just how my mind works, and it's not enjoyable to feel like you're surrounded by people who only want to see you in trouble. I can speak from experience that I do not understand gray areas as well as might others, and if you'd only speak with me to help me understand, I'd be willing to listen.

So, communication, people. I think that might help. It's never fun to be confronted with a wrong you didn't even know you'd committed until you were already in trouble for it.

[Voxumo]

Firstly, I want to just say I am disgusted with the current state of affairs on TI, though not on the staff side but the players side. Mind you, I haven't been playing for over 6 weeks now, and I just logged back in on thursday, so I don't have a horse running in this case that brought this whole thing up. Right now, this how I see it. The friends of Character A, because the majority of the people who have their panties in a twist, both in this forum post and on the general board post in game are people who character A consistently rps with. Aka friends are upset that their friend is being reprimanded. That's understandable, but how they are handling it... well it's not. Of course this is just my opinion, but I do full-heartedly support the decision that was made. Staff are to be held to a higher degree of responsibility than others. They should know the rules well enough to avoid anything that might be construed as breaking said rules.

It's also worth noting that I am not someone who frequently is on the best side with staff on this game. Infact I'm usually the one who is first to question decisions by staff and somewhat annoyingly vocalize my displeasure with their choices or how they are doing things. So I'm not a suck up and I'm not defending staff because I see them being able to do no wrong. I'm simply defending this particular case because it's being blown out of proportions by friends and allies of the accused.

Also Kinaed doesn't just make decisions willy-nilly. I recently had a policy matter brought up against me, where a player was saying I was harassing and being nasty to them across alts, and that due to the amount it was occurring that it was based in ooc targeting. However instead of immediately jumping the gun I was allowed to defend myself and kinaed was able to use system information to discover I had only rped with said person for a total of 17 hours in the last two years, thus making the likelihood of me harassing their alts unlikely.
The point of this is that Kinaed doesn't base her decisions on word alone, but does do some investigating as is expected of policy cases. You ask for logs to be required for policy cases, she had logs provided by the accused themself, why the hypocrisy?
Speaking of logs, for those who argue that logs should be required for every case that is brought up... well that's a ridiculous expectation. Even in real world law not everything can be recorded and often eyewitness testimonies is purely what gets a case started, but then cases are investigated. Take my example above. The person did not provide logs for their claims, but a case was still started based on their claims, and a investigation was done to determine whether the claims were true or false. A log was never a part of this, and yet the case was able to be handled fairly.

Protesting a character being killed that your alt is or was friends with isn't really benefiting your alt, because you don't actually gain anything for it that you couldn't have by just being on your alt. If you were there to protest the individual's death because of the alt's feelings there's nothing stopping you from just... signing out and logging into the alt to come and protest the death. This is kind of what I mean by needing to put at least a modicum of confidence into players to keep their alts' motivations separate. Believing X's motivations -had- to be related to Y's motivations because the outcome might have been pleasing to Y is way, way too paranoid for my tastes. It also leaves mad room open for gray areas and interpretation.

I'd like to just clarify that protesting against a character's death who your alts are friends with is benefitting your character. By said character dying, your alts lose out on the connections they made with said character, they lose out on future rp with said character, and any plots or future plots that were planned involving said character is now lost. Your alts does benefit from another alt protesting the death of a character. Secondly there is a reason we have different alts, because differents alts often fill different roles in the game. Alt A may be a nobody who is friends with said victim, but Alt B could be a very influential character in the game. Alt B's protesting against said characters death would have more impact, more power, more influence than Alt A's protesting, even if both used the exact same protest/reasoning.

Also reading Silrie's reply, it feels like people think that with crossover cases it's one strike your out... This isn't the case. I've had several cases of crossover brought against me, and most of the time I'm able to just talk it through with staff and it is able to resolved without need for punishment because it turns out to be an honest mistake. The one that has happened most frequently with me is having multiple alts on at the same time, and forgetting to change windows and accidently writing a response to a rumor I meant to post on a different character. This has happened to me more times than I care to admit, and it falls under crossover.

Personal suggestion: Have confidence in the players to keep their character identities emotionally and motivationally (not a word) separate from one another.

They do generally have confidence in this, but when a case is brought up, feelings have no place in said case, just evidence. Like it or not humans are flawed, and we allow our feelings to get the best of us. This is why most cases in the real world, throw feelings out the window and rely on evidence, or at least that's how it's suppose to work. Most people can get a crowd who will vouch for their integrity, that doesn't mean said person is innocent, just that they are able to fool a bunch of people.



Let's just have a little faith in Staff's ability to handle policy cases, as they've been doing it since the start of the game, so they must obviously know what the flying fish they are doing.

[Silrie]

Protesting a character being killed that your alt is or was friends with isn't really benefiting your alt, because you don't actually gain anything for it that you couldn't have by just being on your alt. If you were there to protest the individual's death because of the alt's feelings there's nothing stopping you from just... signing out and logging into the alt to come and protest the death. This is kind of what I mean by needing to put at least a modicum of confidence into players to keep their alts' motivations separate. Believing X's motivations -had- to be related to Y's motivations because the outcome might have been pleasing to Y is way, way too paranoid for my tastes. It also leaves mad room open for gray areas and interpretation.

I'd like to just clarify that protesting against a character's death who your alts are friends with is benefitting your character. By said character dying, your alts lose out on the connections they made with said character, they lose out on future rp with said character, and any plots or future plots that were planned involving said character is now lost. Your alts does benefit from another alt protesting the death of a character. Secondly there is a reason we have different alts, because differents alts often fill different roles in the game. Alt A may be a nobody who is friends with said victim, but Alt B could be a very influential character in the game. Alt B's protesting against said characters death would have more impact, more power, more influence than Alt A's protesting, even if both used the exact same protest/reasoning.

Still don't agree with this, especially when rp xp is used as a determining factor for how close your character is to another character. I do understand that staff can only work with what they have, but it also strikes me as woefully inaccurate to say, character A has this much xp earned with character B, so they must be very close and therefore, character c's motivations must be in line with what character a wants, when in reality, they're nowhere near bffs in the way it's being shown. In your case, Vox, I see how this could be useful, determining that you did not, in fact, do what you'd been accused of because there was no time to do it in, but in gray area cases, you can, in my mind at least, determine nothing based on familiarity alone. You could have tons of rp with someone you hate. Does that mean you are close to them? I'm not sure I'd go there myself. So I still feel this is a serious gray area myself, though I do thank you for laying your own opinions out so flatly.

Also reading Silrie's reply, it feels like people think that with crossover cases it's one strike your out... This isn't the case. I've had several cases of crossover brought against me, and most of the time I'm able to just talk it through with staff and it is able to resolved without need for punishment because it turns out to be an honest mistake. The one that has happened most frequently with me is having multiple alts on at the same time, and forgetting to change windows and accidently writing a response to a rumor I meant to post on a different character. This has happened to me more times than I care to admit, and it falls under crossover.

Oh, that's not how I meant it at all. I mentioned up there I'd had several cases where I ran afoul of crossover. I merely was trying to get across that if only people had communicated with me, I may have realized the crossover territory I was stepping into, especially with my last infraction. Staff must view evidence as they receive it, yes, but I still believe that in some circumstances, the gray areas must be even more clearly defined, because I myself find them very confusing and I'm probably not the only one. And in some cases, Vox, talking just does not solve much when they have decided against offering the benefit of the doubt.

Now, I do not post these messages to vilify staff. I still think they're the best staff I've found on any game, and they've dealt with me respectfully most of the time, even when we're both at the ends of our tethers. I add to it by posting here, but I do not enjoy seeing such strife either on this game. I think we're all just trying to understand, be it the issues of crossover or the ways in which policy is enforced. I don't believe any of us, myself included, forget that staff are human behind their immortal personas, but as humans ourselves, I think, as just mentioned, that despite it all, we just wish, pure and simply, to understand, be it what to do, what to avoid, how to interpret things, even how we should feel about the upheaval that's recently found us all. For some, it's easy, for others, all the confusion is overwhelming, confusing, and begging for some sort of answer. The fact that answers and conclusions will be different for everyone cause emotions to run high, but I do not feel that any of us are trying to place staff in the proverbial electric chair so that we might all take a turn to roll on two.

[Dice]

Thanks for implying this is all about my friends agreeing with me rather than genuine differences in philosophy, Vox - but I do RP frequently with probably well more than half the game, including the most active people around, so there are pretty good odds the people speaking up in any discussion will be people I RP with.

Since the case is out there, I'll add that beyond/after what was in Kinaed's policy note, I sent her a much longer series of emails detailing additional evidence - and there is in fact an absolute ABUNDANCE of evidence that Ariel was acting for his own motives rather than Eamon's, and hence not committing crossover, down to a discussion I was literally having with Kinaed at the time of the event. (And you as much as anyone know that Ariel is -relentless- in pursuit of people whom he deems as "corrupt" in their use of authority.)

So I was pretty well clear on the charge of acting specifically to benefit my alt without IC reason. But the point on which I was ultimately deemed guilty was the line in help multiplayer about keeping alts out of the same RP thread. I would have never assumed that just having RP with a person on both alts counts as the same RP thread, when only one alt was involved with a specific situation/scenario/plotline (i.e., Smith's arrest/execution). I literally did not think for a second that what I was doing counted as breaking that rule, or I wouldn't have done it.

And whatever you think of the specifics of my case, what this incident demonstrates is that the policies on crossover and multiplaying are so unclear that people are interpreting them vastly differently. This thread echoes that concern. I think people are generally a lot more frightened/worried by the precedent this sets than necessarily defending me just because they like me, and I think they're worried for good reason.

If involvement in 'the same RP thread' is counted as involvement in 'the same character', is there literally anybody in game with more than one character who isn't committing a multiplaying violation by having involvement with the same character across their alts? I would argue there's probably not, and countless cases of multiplaying (under this policy interpretation) are happening every day as people's characters help characters their alts also like - but these things are happening for perfectly valid and IC reasons, and punishing them hurts the game.

Or when they oppose characters their alts also oppose - you'd be in violation under the same circumstances for disliking the same person across multiple alts, even if said dislike could be ICly substantiated for both PCs, and even if only one character had acted on it recently. And again, I think enforcing that as against policy hurts the game.

Hell, every time somebody is applying for a background connection with a character their alt knows is a multiplaying violation waiting to happen, because it involves getting a second character involved with the same person... and those are the vast majority of BG connection requests we see.

To me, the one silver lining of this incident is that it's exposed that these policies desperately need clarification. How can we specify policy to ensure we're catching people who are legitimately using their alts to benefit themselves, but not catch people who are just RPing normally in a small game where it's essentially impossible to avoid tripping over your own feet?

[Kinaed]

Delicately, my viewpoint about the crux of this case and why decisions were made is described in full, by myself, on the Policy Release: Takta's Dismissal (WARNING: OOC DISCLOSURE) post.

Improving our game's policies is open for discussion, which is why this thread was initially allowed to continue. However, the policy case that kicked this off is a moot (albeit sore) point - it happened almost six days ago.

Just a reminder - please focus on discussion regarding constructive improvements. Inciteful or argumentative threads that devolve in people accusing each other of poor behavior contain no game value and provide intrinsic harm, so keeping away from that tone was a stipulation I put on leaving this thread open at the outset.