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Witcher MUSH Design
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@bear_necessities I like having some crunch behind the scenes so that’s the direction I am driving towards. I am putting a lot of work in to minimizing how much is exposed to the player while they are doing whatever it is they are doing.
I do keep flip-flopping on the logging aspect. Regardless of what I say on that front people are going to make their own conclusions. My original plan was something more like logging interactions. So rather than logging contents, it would be like the following.
[12:37] Blah paged Istus.
[12:38] Istus paged Blah.
[4:36] Istus posed with Foo, Bar.Maybe the softer touch is a better path?
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@Istus I guess my question is, what purpose does that serve? I mean not to beat this horse but I don’t see the point.
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@bear_necessities Removing problems faster.
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@Istus Right but like, how does logging interactions get you to the point where you can get rid of problems faster? All you’re seeing is ‘someone paged so-and-so’ which gives you no context. So what would be the point of that?
This probably isn’t the right thread for this but unless you truly intend on reading all the logs every single day you’re not going to catch the bad players, and who has time to read all the logs every single day? And if you are just going to use the logs to “prove” accusations - that means that people would have to make those accusations, which honestly most people tend not to do. And then you’re potentially making really big judgment calls that just … I don’t know. As a former gamerunner, the idea that I’d have to police my own game to catch the creep just would make me never run a game again lol
Anyway if it’s important to your game philosophy go for it! It just doesn’t work for me as a player.
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@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@bear_necessities I like having some crunch behind the scenes so that’s the direction I am driving towards. I am putting a lot of work in to minimizing how much is exposed to the player while they are doing whatever it is they are doing.
Keep in mind that, psychologically, this will have unintended consequences. In a very real way, obscured mechanics will encourage a certain fraction of your playerbase to overinvest, frantically hitting whatever buttons they can, as hard as they can, to map out the way to maximize rewards. They’ll stress out about it, and they’ll also stress out everyone else around them with trying to develop optimal strategies and “beat” the system.
This happens with transparent systems too, of course, but in my experience, it gets a lot worse with obscured systems. So you may want to think about how to counter that anxiety in some way.
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@Pyrephox With the added consequence of, at least potentially, making a One True Way to go about things, mechanically, to the exclusion of those who don’t optimise as strongly.
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@bear_necessities Off the top of my head, having a list of potentially problematic keywords that get flagged up is easy enough. As you say, I do not have the desire nor the time to sit there and comb through logs on a regular enough basis to be absolutely proactive.
Patterns of behavior do eventually bubble up to the surface but I would prefer to minimize the potential damage that is left in its wake without having to make gut responses.
@Pyrephox The system would be transparent. I just meant that the interface that the player uses to interact with it is simple. For example, you do not need to know that skill X is opposed by Y except in a scenario where player B has this talent that modifies Y.
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@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@bear_necessities I like having some crunch behind the scenes so that’s the direction I am driving towards. I am putting a lot of work in to minimizing how much is exposed to the player while they are doing whatever it is they are doing.
I do keep flip-flopping on the logging aspect. Regardless of what I say on that front people are going to make their own conclusions. My original plan was something more like logging interactions. So rather than logging contents, it would be like the following.
[12:37] Blah paged Istus.
[12:38] Istus paged Blah.
[4:36] Istus posed with Foo, Bar.Maybe the softer touch is a better path?
I don’t think that would net you any useful information. When there are issues between players, I don’t think people tend to take the tactic of “I’ve never even spoken to that person!” That idea actually seems to me like you’d be trading players’ sense of privacy for nothing actually useful.
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@Roz It only allows me to line up timestamps if someone decides to provide logs or at least prove, without a doubt, that there was an interaction in the time frame that someone specifies.
To be honest, I did not expect my stance to be so controversial. I will have to poke around on other games and see if they publish their policies on logging player/staff interactions.
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Yeah, it sounds like the same gist of my master log idea. You only check it when you doubt the veracity of player-submitted logs.
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@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@Roz It only allows me to line up timestamps if someone decides to provide logs or at least prove, without a doubt, that there was an interaction in the time frame that someone specifies.
Yeah, to me, the fact that there was an interaction at all rarely seems to be the thing people hear about or experience in regards to player complaints. The real meat of this stuff is in the content of what was said. It just feels to me like a log of timestamped evidence of interaction happening is next to useless, or it would put you in the position of just – your brain trying to extrapolate meaning from it.
@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
To be honest, I did not expect my stance to be so controversial.
You’ll find a lot of recent discussion about this sort of thing here! Which may help to see some opinions written out in more detail about how folks feel about privacy. With that said, this board is only a small section of the hobby, at the end of the day. I think most people will respect this sort of thing as long as it’s displayed loudly on the tin so they can opt out if they have an issue.
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@Istus yeah idk this all sounds very thought policy to me, because what is a problematic word? How are you going to define that, are you going to tell players what words get flagged, etc.? Also it’s a very strong encouragement for creepers to just do their creeping via Discord or other mediums to avoid detection from the logging system.
As for the time stamps… idk any person who independently pulls time stamps into their logs but also why couldn’t I alter the log but keep the time stamps and yeah. This is a problem that doesn’t have a defined answer other than to be responsive to player complaints and do a gut check.
ETA I should probably admit that I have a huge distrust for most people after being burned too many times so I always think of the worst possible scenario and how someone could manipulate the system
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@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@bear_necessities Off the top of my head, having a list of potentially problematic keywords that get flagged up is easy enough.
I unfortunately really don’t think this is gonna catch anything useful. There’s no real list of keywords that will magically catch this sort of harassment.
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@Roz Thank you for the link! I will dig through it.
@bear_necessities I would not share what words I consider worthy of investigation. Ultimately, I can not control what happens outside of my spaces but I can try to keep what I do own as clean as I can reasonably manage. As you have mentioned, it all boils down to trust and there is nothing I can do to establish that at the outset. These games are dictatorships at the end of the day but I feel that faith can be built through consistency and transparency over time.
I appreciate all of the responses, dissenting or otherwise. Everything is valuable.
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@Istus The worst creeper that I ever reported was over a page that said, essentially, “I bet I can change her mind.”
as previously stated, good day.
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@Istus Just to toss in - with MUSHers using Discord so much - logging everything on the MU* still won’t catch all your problem fish.
Sooooooo much shady shit begins with “what’s your discord handle?”
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@farfalla said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@Istus The worst creeper that I ever reported was over a page that said, essentially, “I bet I can change her mind.”
I swear to god I hate it here sometimes.
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@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@bear_necessities I would not share what words I consider worthy of investigation. Ultimately, I can not control what happens outside of my spaces but I can try to keep what I do own as clean as I can reasonably manage. As you have mentioned, it all boils down to trust and there is nothing I can do to establish that at the outset. These games are dictatorships at the end of the day but I feel that faith can be built through consistency and transparency over time.
I’m half-stealing someone else’s thought here that was brewing in my mind, but. What your responses have made me worry about is the sense that you think you can kind of – code fixes to player disputes, and you just can’t. And you may be building yourself a false sense of security by adding these tools that aren’t at all going to catch the sort of harassment that goes on. Like, if you build tools that don’t solve a problem, but you feel like they’re solving some of the problem, then I think you’re actually less likely to actually catch and fix things.
@Istus said in Witcher MUSH Design:
@farfalla @KarmaBum Every system has cases where it will fail. There is always going to be a situation where I will have to make a gut check. I do not think that this means I should completely abandon my desire to minimize possible footholds and catch whoever I can proactively.
I think that “gut check” is not an accurate descriptor of a lot of staff investigation and discipline that goes on. It’s there, certainly, but I think what more happens is “investigation and using personal judgment,” and no matter what, this will be the bulk of your work in staffing player conflict.
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@Istus I think your logging everything will have your players trusting you as staff less. Players already have trouble trusting staff on game. It’s part of why predators can get so far (the majority is because they know how to control the story). Some staff has shown to be pretty abusive with their power to a lot of players over the years.
