@Tez
This may have been introduced during the last update/upgrade? Looks like it might be a quick fix. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/15860/solved-eacces-errors-after-rebuilds

@Ashkuri
I think there’s sort of two different things here, at least from the previous topic/your title and the question you’re asking, one being 3-Month Players (3M) and one being The Bubble a new game experiences that they contribute to.

I don’t think there is a right answer to The Bubble. I think it is in large part inevitable if awareness is high and especially if the game is good, and every way of trying to manage it administratively has some flavor of contraindication. You can waitlist, but then you burn enthusiasm when people can’t get in or don’t get in with their friends. You can roster-only, but then you burn enthusiasm when people feel blocked from the concept they wanted to invent (even if it is 90% the same as the roster). You can just plow through it, but then you burn enthusiasm when there’s not enough content coming from staff for everyone to engage in. All of these burn staff enthusiasm too, from knowing about the burnt player enthusiasm.

I saw some assertions made that there simply needs to be enough for players to RP about on their own, and I don’t agree that this solves everything. Nobody is coming to your game solely to come up with their own content in your incredibly original and unique setting; there has to be enough content coming from staff or you will burn enthusiasm, period.

I also don’t agree that all players want to stick on a game but the game fails them, and I don’t agree that you can make the game so shiny that these people will stick when they would have otherwise gone off to the new shiny thing. Some people are 3Ms and that’s just the way they are. You can make the greatest, most inclusive, most content-having, most relationship-building game anyone has ever seen, and they will still wander off to check the next up and coming game. The grass is always greener. People (and that is what players are) love novelty. People love the idea that something different will fill the ‘want’ inside them, and that something different is always the next thing that I don’t have yet. Nothing is more important than tracking that incoming package, and nothing matters less than the thing that came in last month’s package.

Some of this is down to bad player expectations, that a volunteer staff providing a free service will supply a bespoke, on-demand, endlessly entertaining funbox filled with interesting (and new!) entities for them to meet and build fulfilling relationships with. It’s always going to be a ‘pick your poison’ scenario for how you handle those expectations and the inevitable failure to meet them, especially during a bubble.

How do you tell a 3M from a forever player? Wait three months. You don’t have the benefit of knowing which flowers will set fruit and which won’t. You have to treat them all well, or none of them will. I’m always devastated when a tomato gets end rot or splits before what I felt was its time, but there’s only so much I can do, so I try to enjoy the harvest I get and not shed (too many) tears over the harvest I don’t. Do your best, get some help if you need it, and let it ride. There’s always next summer.

And hey! Where is it written that 3Ms are bad, actually? If you can whirlwind through in 3 months and make me remember you enough to miss you when you’re gone, my hat is off to you. I love you. I hate you. I think of you often. I hope you’re doing well.

We should talk about 8Ms too, but this post is long enough already.

@Lemon-Fox
It’s nice you’re having a good time. None of the people in this thread left because it was impossible to have a good time, or there was too much gatekeeping, or it was hard to get started as a newbie, or there wasn’t enough content, or the mechanics weren’t ideal, or the DB was bloated.

We left because players who had behaved in unconscionable ways were promoted rather than disciplined. These same players remain on staff. You may not care what kind of people they were to other people or at another time, but there are certain activities that, change of heart or not, I’m simply not ever willing to be around those who have done them or who tolerate them. It’s hard to say which is worse, but at AoA you don’t have to decide; you get both.

Of course we discussed these concerns with Cujo. I spoke with Cujo a few times a week for over five years. Zephyr spoke with him every day. We tried appealing to a sense of decency over this particular decision and were rebuffed. That’s why we left. We wanted to see some justice. We wanted protection from an abuser. We didn’t get it, so we had to leave.

There is a lot of unrelated salt in this thread, that is true, but this post was not put up out of a sense of revenge but sadness and concern. I am still sad, three years gone, about the outcome of those conversations, and I am still concerned for players who, like me at the time, did not know that the environment was unsafe. Please watch carefully for yours and your friends’ safety; staff won’t be.

@Faraday
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent on both client and the portal, but to me, the channel mute situation is something I typically handle client-side with a trigger that simply does not trigger an activity alert. This is a “best of both worlds” scenario to me, because I’m not checking the window and finding “oh, it’s just Bigmouth Joe for the 18th time”, but I can follow the conversation if someone I care about is engaging.

If people genuinely never want to see a word Bigmouth Joe ever says for the rest of time, I guess that’s fair, but the annoyance to me has always been “oh ACTIVITY- …and it’s Bigmouth Joe.” I can skim over that when I find it, it’s the checking that makes me insane.

@Jax
These are the mechanics the sex pest in chief pitched a few years ago, so.

@Meg
I played Tarion Tavers and Kylo Ren on this game, among a few others. I am the Trashcan previously mentioned in this thread as momentarily having been put on staff. I am one of the people who protested Hadrix being made staff in the same elevation as I and a few others were, which was done without asking us if we actually wanted to be on staff. I stepped down from the staff bit I didn’t ask for, and was banned from all of my bits while I was away on vacation. I’m not sure on the exact timing of when I was banned vs when I resigned but they were all in there together.

I’m not sure what else you’re asking other than if I also condemn Cujo’s behavior and of course I do. That’s why I quit the game.

Here’s me resigning:

If that doesn’t answer your question, please let me know.

I played on this game for a long time; in fact, I am the aforementioned jerky second-Kylo, after Banshee. It seemed odd to me that somebody would keep coming back to drag this game over and over again while also clearly having a long history with the game, citing events and posting logs so old that even I was not there for them. I joined this game over 8 years ago and left almost 2 years ago when this first post went up, and almost 2 years later you are still coming here to read people for filth.

I went back over your posting history to try to get a clearer picture of what sort of deep salt might be driving these posts, @Anony-Mouse, and what I’ve read here makes it fairly obvious to me that you are probably one of the few players that was ever actually banned from AoA for sex pest behavior. The character was Sion, a bit that repeatedly, over the course of actual years, posted emits about their pants abruptly coming loose and falling down, exposing their undergarments to the other characters in the room. This was so pervasive that Cujo, a headwiz so clearly uninterested in policing bad behavior, finally was moved to ban the player.

I doubt it is a coincidence that you’ve taken aim at me in these posts, given that I booted Sion’s alt from the First Order faction because of their unremitting OOC negativity. There are a litany of accurate critiques to make about AoA, and many of them are laid out in this thread, but you are not the voice to make them.

The receipts are long. I’ve hidden them in a spoiler tag.

Spoiler

TL:DR, the very specific stories and knowledge cited by @Anony-Mouse support the conclusion that they are Rhona/Nova/Sion, one of the few sex pests ever to actually be banned from AoA.

If true, it is really rich to come on this thread with righteous fury given your history.

@Narrator
Of course using AI tools is expedient. At this point, everyone involved in the conversation recognizes two things: AI tools are expedient to use and they stand to make the people creating and using them a lot of money. No one is arguing these points.

I’m glad you’re being transparent about your business practices, but the complaint in this thread is about people who are not being transparent. To use your Whole Foods analogy, you may not care where your eggs come from and that’s fine. Keep buying your 5 dozen egg trays. However, if someone thinks they’re buying the pasture-raised free range eggs and when they open the carton, they are, in fact, the same eggs from the factory farm, that just ain’t right.

@Pyrephox
I have seen other games use a ‘social contract’ (credit given to this blog post for the details) and I think having policies presented this way is much more productive than just saying “this is the way it is IC”.

The social contract approach tells me if a theme’s elements I find potentially problematic are there to be engaged with in a compelling way, to examine a particular theme, or if I’m expected to swallow it straight-up because that behavior is just part of the world that staff wants to live in. Given that there are a list of potentially problematic human behaviors that used to be (and in some communities still are) normalized, this is an important distinction for players to have.

Without this context, I don’t know what “engaging with the setting in good faith” looks like, and I don’t know whether to be squicked IC or OOC.

@Tributary
The Ares escape is a \. help formatting has all the dirty deets.

@imstillhere
1A. The game has to be selling what I want to sell. This is a dealbreaker type of thing. I’m not interested in trying to shove RP into a game that doesn’t belong there. Once I’ve decided that me and this game are fixing to push the same content, I go about creating my Lil Dude. Lil Dude should be the RP equivalent of industrial Velcro; any sort of content or relationship dynamic can stick to them. I want to be the opposite of pigeon-holed. I want to say yes to anyone and everyone on as many things as possible (RP is basically improv, and I want my best yes-and foot forward).

1B. Once I’m actually on the game, it’s all about MEETING PEOPLE. This is IC and OOC; even if I know someone OOC, I don’t know them IC yet, and I need to. I jump on RP requests. I try to get into open scenes. I set up open scenes. If there’s a board about connections, I ask for them. I start paging people asking for RP. I ask on channels. I offer up hooks to anyone who asks for one. It doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t matter who they are, it doesn’t matter if I know them or like them yet, YES. Yes to everything. I’ll sort out what I want to say more yes to later, at the start I’m just looking for volume. I have no shame, I ambush anyone I can. People like being asked for RP.

2. What I’m looking for to stay engaged is basically “does 1B produce results?” If I’m putting that down and genuinely not getting much back (or what I’m getting is weird/unfun) then that’s a red flag that maybe this isn’t the game for me. In my experience if you go full court press on a game, though, you’ll get engaged. What usually detracts from that for me is just my own ability to engage/maintain the full court press, but the good thing is it literally never stops working if the game is still alive enough to respond to it. You can do it whenever you have the bandwidth.

@Sage Hitting people in the head with hammers is wrong, as I’ve been saying. Those of you with hammer access, do not yield to temptation.

@Pavel
Ignoring any of the issues with how LLMs currently function for the sake of avoiding that aspect of the discussion:

I wouldn’t care much if it’s used for brainstorming and purely gathering prompts and ideas. I wouldn’t like but wouldn’t really care about their use in things like descs (no one reads them). Lore is similar, because I often expect that to be a group effort anyway, and it’s functional more than evocative. I would prefer to know.

Moving up the scale, anything where it’s being copy-pasted or heavily influencing the text of IC content that is meant to be engaged with either directly (e.g. poses in a scene) or emotionally (e.g. vignettes), I think disclosure becomes required and I would be genuinely upset to discover it absent some sort of disclosure.

@Sage
Bring me another hammer that people are smacking others in the head with and I’ll go off about that too.

@Sage
Bing is using GPT-4 and I can see in your snippet that you’re using GPT-3.5.

Going back to my original post: “plagiarism” got dragged in here because in “the common vernacular” it’s used as a thing society mostly agrees is unethical. In the common vernacular, it has two parts: theft of words/ideas, and claim of those words/ideas as own’s own.

People can (demonstrably) argue until they are blue in the face about whether the first part is happening.

It is not arguable that if you copy/paste from ChatGPT or some other LLM, and do not disclose that you have done so, you’re doing part #2, not because ChatGPT wrote it but because you didn’t. I’m not going to name and shame because that’s not what this post is about, but that is already happening in our community.

In a community fundamentally based on reading and writing with other people, it should be an easy ask for transparency if that is not what’s occurring. People deserve to know when they’re reading the output of an LLM and not their well-written friend Lem.

@Tributary said in AI Megathread:

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

Ironically, this is because of, as you put it, ‘information transfer and learning’. Without the context it is too likely that the average person will read the sentence and assume it to mean that ChatGPT is functioning like my theoretical program, copying large blocks of text and merely swapping around some words a bit without acknowledgement given to the original writer, as opposed to them understanding that what you are saying is that it does not provide references to where its information has come from.

Are you suggesting that ChatGPT does not just regurgitate paragraphs it finds on the internet? Because it certainly does. Ask @Faraday about how it just vomits up stuff from her website when asked about Ares.

Ares site on the left, GPT via Bing on the right.

@Sage
People are out here hitting people in the head with the hammer, so at the moment I am trying to establish common ground that we can all agree on, like “hitting people in the head with the hammer is bad”.

I recognize the debate on whether the hammer itself is bad or not is more nuanced. I think we can all agree slugging people in the head with the hammer is probably wrong, regardless of whether the hammer is made of fair trade rubber or blood diamonds.

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

I’m just going to point out that plagiarism is “to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own” (according to Mirriam-Webster).

If you do not disclose to other players that you are using AI in your “workflow”, whether or not you’re plagiarizing the people whose content was used to build the LLM, you ARE plagiarizing the LLM because you are “passing off the words of another as one’s own”.

Transparency is required.

Edited to clarify: where your “workflow” includes copy-pasting from the output of an LLM.

I made an account just to come rant on this topic and then posted in the wrong thread so now I’m here.

I think everyone broadly agrees that plagiarism is morally wrong. Plagiarism has two aspects: 1) the theft of someone else’s work and 2) the misattribution of that work to someone who did not produce it. Both aspects are wrong individually. Why is it that with AI, people are willing to hedge around the second one just because the first one has been rendered fuzzy and unclear?

Transparency is required. If I copy-pasted the world of Popular Franchise X and did a Find-Replace for recognizable words and changed those to something else, and claimed that I had created an Original Theme, everyone would get that this was Wrong. If I did the same thing but said “yes this is shamelessly ripped from Franchise X”, there might be opinions on whether it’s lazy and not worth engaging with, but transparency would have rendered this down from Clearly Unethical all the way to Sort of Low Effort, Isn’t It?.

There is no money to be made in Mushing; we are all doing this for the pure pleasure of reading other people’s writing and having our writing be read. What we receive is entertainment and validation, and the balance of those two vs. how annoying we are OOC makes up our entire reputation in this community. I don’t buy that you can explain away the unethical nature of undue validation being rendered with “but you were entertained and isn’t that enough?” No. You’ve robbed me of a whole half of this experience. At least be honest about it and let me decide if half is enough.