Thread Renamed at Player Request

[chronodbu]

This has been an ongoing point of contention for quite a while now on the game and quite frankly it feels like it's reaching a boiling point considering recent circumstances and staff's inability to handle it properly, but instead choosing to punish those involved who have time and again poured countless hours into the game to both better and provide something meaningful to its atmosphere.

People complain. People will complain because they don't get their way. A very specific portion of our playerbase has constantly and uninhibitively been doing so whenever they have failed to either get their way or had any kind of pushback on their attempts to do what they want.

Yes I'm talking about the current set of events. Yes I don't give a flying fig how it's painted to make the target of said situation look like the bad guy. The truth of the matter is - the Reeves almost didn't get what they wanted, or at least they got pushback on it. What they did was totally unjustified and lacking any sound lawful background on the game and multiple players tried to push back against it.

The fact that Ariel tried to do so as well doesn't mean jack in the grand scheme of things because to put it simply - The game is too bloody small to never interact with the same people twice. The Execution was a known thing. The Reeves were incredibly shady about it, and they got pushback as they should have rightfully had RPly.

Running to the staff every time everything doesn't go according to plan cannot nor should it be the answer to these situations. Hell, we saw a policy change recently specifically to reward players for letting bad guys go right after another situation where folks Didn't Get Their Way(tm). All this is going to continue to do is run off good players who try to actually get involved with anything.

Edit to add clarification -

I misread the initial post by Kinaed on the issue and apologize to the Reeves for assuming that they may have been the party who raised the problem in the first place. Whether they were or not does not matter so much as the assumption on my part.

[Kinaed]

I am cautiously going to leave this post standing. I don't want to inhibit speech, and I think some of the matters under discussion are worthwhile to discuss. That said, I'm trying to calm the situation down, not incite it. So, people, if you reply to this post, please keep it respectful and focused on what we can do to improve the game and people's experiences rather than attacking one another or getting unnecessarily nasty.

Please do not label particular players or parties toxic. That's subjective and extremely hard to define - someone could point at this post and use it as an excuse to label its author toxic. If we have problems, labeling people and pointing fingers isn't the solution.

If it goes too far in the direction of bile and whatnot, staff will have to intervene (ie, lock/remove/etc, the thread).

[Pixie]

The game is too bloody small to never interact with the same people twice.

This.

[Kinaed]

How do you propose the rules ought to change?
Should we just remove multiplay entirely and allow people only one character?
If the problem is "a core group of trouble makers", how are they identified (beyond the court of public opinion - I think that's hugely problematic) and held accountable?

[Romewhoa]

Should we just remove multiplay entirely and allow people only one character?

Please this.

[Dice]

I am going to cautiously wade into the waters of this conversation and propose a solution to the multiplaying issue. It is absolutely true, in my mind, that' it's impossible to keep distance from people you know on your alts on a game of TI's size.

So I think an accusation of multiplaying should require:
* Active involvement of both alts at the same time in a specific RP thread (specific RP thread, not character)

And an accusation of crossover should require:
* One alt doing something to directly benefit another alt - always not okay
* One alt doing something to indirectly benefit another alt - UNLESS there is clearly substantiated reason the action is IC in the case involved. This should ideally be established via cnote/Request board beforehand.

[Kinaed]

The problem is that Policy don't often get that level of detail to be able to discern the truth, and when players say "My alt didn't actually care about that" - that's quite hard to prove and is extremely subjective. If we go to that level of details, we'd need logs - not all players record logs. And proving or disproving interaction with a thread may be relatively easy on a macro level, but it's next to impossible when it's not a big, in-your-face case like a public execution.

I sort of feel like this is a policy that has a great deal of importance in an IC/OOCly separated world, but it is damn hard to detect, diagnose, manage, or enforce. At the stage I'm listening to people say 'My character's motivation was actually X instead of Y', I'm completely unable to pick that apart - motivations are an internal process to a player.

It's because of that that the policy is written as it is - it's something higher up, but it's more detectable/enforceable.

[BattleJenkins]

I believe that having completely fair PVP is mutually exclusive with both staff alts and multiplay both, but I also feel that sacrificing things just for the sake of fair PVP, which is not necessarily what everyone is here for, would be heavily to the detriment of the game. It's a very complicated problem and unfortunately I can't think of a proper solution. I think we, as a community, need to decide what's most important to us.

I think confusion or disagreement on whether we're playing for the thrill and engagement of high-stakes conflict or whether we're trying to make the best or more interesting story regardless of how it shakes out for our characters is a source of a lot of our problems. I definitely want to see the spontaneity of the game preserved and I do think that PVP interactions with high stakes and uncertain outcomes are a core part of the game, but I personally think that an RP-focused game like this one is not ideal platform for fair PVP competition.

TI:L is striking an extremely delicate balance - we need to either find some way of acknowledging these different aspects of the game as irreconcilable and trying to manage some way of letting them coexist while recognizing them as potentially exclusive, or we need to collapse this waveform one way or the other and decide exactly what kind of game TI:L is before something like this happens again.

[chronodbu]

Accusations should always be supported by logs. Not logging is not an excuse nor has it ever been an acceptable one on any game I have ever played or in any internet environment that involved some form of oversight.

[Dice]

Yes, I would say if you can't produce evidence that your PC is acting ICly, then you're out of luck - burden of proof in this case would be on the defender.