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MU Peeves Thread
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speaking out against abusive players is difficult
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@Artemis and if nothing happens you feel even worse. Been there a few times. But we have to do it.
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I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.
But.
Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?
she/they
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@Tez Because VPNs are disposable connections and the icky individual can just swap to another VPN server or use their normal IP to reconnect and start over on a new bit, or claim their old roster bit again and start over.
I’ve been on a few games that tried to deal with that by just wide-banning entire domains and it caused multiple players who weren’t icky at all to suddenly be unable to connect.
I’m all for online privacy, but too much online privacy can protect people with bad intentions. It’s a tenuous balance at best dealing with icky folks while still being respectful of good players’ privacy.
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@Tez Ick people ruin things for everyone
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@Snackness said in MU Peeves Thread:
Constant unremitting sex jokes just make me so tired.
Okay, WHO SQUEALED?
j/k I don’t really think anyone said anything specifically on my behalf but someone said something because IT STOPPED!
Thank you, gentle hero.
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@Snackness i mean, you could be squealing whenever you want, iykwim.
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@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’m not saying that everyone that uses a VPN is bad or has malicious intent. I used a VPN for a while because it helped me with my MMO connection, and broadly I support the right of all people to protect their privacy online, because god knows that no one else will.
But.
Why is it that when I get the ick, like 50% of the time they are connecting via VPN?
Probably because MUs don’t collect the browsing infomation you might want to keep private. They don’t collect your credit card number or your social insurance number or your medical records or data about your pr0n-viewing habits.
I have only encountered two reasons for a person to use a VPN to connect to a MU. 1: They have it on for other reasons. 2: They have an ‘illegal’ alt.
Certainly stalking on and across MUs is a thing. But unless it’s an unlikely situation where somebody like Faraday is stalking you, the only stalker a VPN is likely to protect you from is a wiz-level staffer, who probably only has that power on one game. Nobody else is seeing your IP info. “Don’t play MUs where the game-runners are stalking you,” is a pretty obvious rule for protecting yourself, and a VPN isn’t enough in that situation anyway.
Using VPNs to do the stalking, however, can be effective.
I had somebody make a dozen alts to attempt to play with somebody who didn’t want to play with them. This poor player was having a weekly experience of finding out that NewPC was, in fact, AnnoyingPlayer. PoorPlayer would then ask AnnoyingPlayer to leave them alone. Not complying with such a request was a bannable offence. AnnoyingPlayer would abandon NewPC and make a new alt, EvenNewerPC, and pounce on PoorPlayer.
I made registering alts mandatory, and regularly looked for matching IPs. People using VPNs would regularly forget to turn them on, so yeah, I could see that a PC was logged on from Davenport, Iowa, and then again from Anchorage, Alaska, less than two hours later, and knew that the set of alts associated with those two IPs were probably all the same person. So, I’d ask them to register their alts and they’d either do it, quit the game on their own, or get banned for being bad at lying to me. Easy-peasey.
I felt hesistant about this because of the idea that ‘alt privacy’ is and should be a thing, but it didn’t take me long to feel confident it was a good choice. SO much, so very much, fuckery simply disappeared when the players themselves could spot stalkery shit, and conflict-of-interest shit, and cheaty shit. The game was empowered to police itself. And it allowed players more freedom – I could allow people to have alts in potential-conflict-of-interest situations and trust that they wouldn’t cheat in that way. Because if they did, it’d be obvious to everyone.
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I know I connect to places through a VPN from time to time, but only really when I’m out of the house and checking in from public Wi-Fi or doing something else that requires a VPN. Using a VPN just to connect to a MU seems needlessly expensive.
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We had a player who was using VPN to break our alt rules.
I’ve encountered players elseMU who have used VPNs to shield their identity when connecting to a game to violate non-contacts.
I’ve also had players that use a VPN because having it active is the best way to preserve their connection. Or because they are connecting from a work computer (I always recommend against that for any number of reasons, but what people want to do is their own thing).
I have a number of IT friends who run OpenVPN on their router at home. One is a crazy paranoid nutjob, another uses multiple devices to watch things in a buccaneer style.
VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.
We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.
The short answer, like with anything else - running a game is hard.
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I miss some of my characters like mad and get hit with random wants to play them.
Today I saw a clip from a show called Banshee that had the PERFECT look for Isi. I wish her story hadn’t been cut short in such a gross way.
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I miss RPing. I’ve filled my hours with other things, but I miss logging on and writing stories with people. I also miss the daily chatting with people I use to chat with about random stuff.
However, the idea of making a new character makes me feel like I don’t have the mental energy. Then I’m not sure how well my RP will be after the ‘break’ I’ve been on.
Anyways, in conclusion – if we’ve RPed at all, you’ve been on my mind and you rock - so thank you for writing stories with me.
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@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:
I miss RPing. I’ve filled my hours with other things, but I miss logging on and writing stories with people. I also miss the daily chatting with people I use to chat with about random stuff.
However, the idea of making a new character makes me feel like I don’t have the mental energy. Then I’m not sure how well my RP will be after the ‘break’ I’ve been on.
Anyways, in conclusion – if we’ve RPed at all, you’ve been on my mind and you rock - so thank you for writing stories with me.
I don’t post here very often, if ever, I’m mainly content to just lurk and read and keep up to date.
But this hit me like a brick.
I’ve got no game to play on right now and haven’t for over a year. Part of it is because I’m picky, another part is trust issues, and a third is a general lack of time. But every so often, at least twice a week, I think back and I miss logging on to a grid, seeing the familiar faces, and getting stuck into a bit of chaos.
I’m despondent that the last game that I invested a lot of time in went up in a sea of toxic flames, and I’m saddened by the lack of anything equivalent out there that’s similar in systems and size. I miss the people I don’t talk to anymore, and I miss playing in a codebase I understand.
I would love to find a game out there that fits my specific niche, but at this point I’d have to loosen my stifling standards and try something new.
I think I’ve been sitting on this for a long while, and I needed to let it out.
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Wrong-funning. Still around after all this time.
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Not a peeve I guess.
My hands are killing me from my earlier years breaking them in MMA overseas. I have a hard and slow time typing. Does anyone pose through speech to text? If so, what device? And it is it too much of a pain?
I guess my peeve is at me for taking too long to type too large poses. Although thank goodness for ASYNC.
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@Buttercup I know we have a couple of sight impaired folks on Keys who use various devices. Unfortunately, I don’t know which devices.
But if you want to pop by and talk to them, look for Rhia and Araminta (character names, not player names).
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@Buttercup if you’re comfortable RPing with a phone, the built-in speech to text is pretty reliable there!
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I just picked up and iPad Pro on a recommendation of the speech to text performance and will give it a shot.
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@Alveraxus said in MU Peeves Thread:
VPNs make it easier to hide who you are, but personalities and bad behaviors tend to sneak out eventually anyway, and are a better way to keep tabs than IP addresses anyway. Especially since there are plenty of other ways to switch IPs.
Certainly there’s no reason to be suspicious about somebody who connects from several different IPs – it’s probably home, work, the library, the coffee-shop. I never looked at the geographical locations unless I was fact-checking a story. No reason to be suspicious of people using VPNs, either. I figure you’re streaming Anishinaabemowin-language television the way one does.
There’s not much reason to be suspicious about two people connecting from the same IP, they’re house-mates or they use the same library or whatever. I’d ask and make a note.
It’s a good thing to keep an eye on, not hard proof of anything. And should be tempered with a good dose of “could I give a shit?” in a lot of cases – OMFG the horror if it turns out my suspicion is correct and Abelard and Bridget are really the same person and not neighbors. If they’re not making trouble, cheating hard, or squashing people’s fun, could I give a shit? Hell, odds are pretty good that Abelard just didn’t want to tell Camille that they really like her but sometimes don’t wanna chat and made the Bridget set of alts to avoid the conversation. I don’t even want to push an admission of this pretty-normal-but-embarassing situation.
We also had a situation where a crackdown on someone violating alt-rules ended up catching someone else who was NOT doing that when we were doing a look at logs and IPs, and (rightfully so) despite how careful we were in approaching them for discussion, they got upset and ended up leaving the game. A lesson learned for us in terms of how to handle.
I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.
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@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:
I’d ask what was rightfully so about it, but I think we all know. People here have posted that it’s not gamerunners’ responsibility to deal with players’ past MU-related traumas. True enough. Howeever, the fact that it’s well known to be difficult to ask someone a question like this, and that ragequit is a usual result, makes it clear that there’s a “missing stair” right there.
I think we didn’t handle it as tactfully as we could have. The player was freaked out that we knew their IP address, and it kind of escalated from there. I personally could have handled communicate a bit better, I think.
Lessons learned from first time adminning and all.
