You have no idea what the kick function is about or how and when and who could use it. Don't you think we know not to put this function in a place where a griefer could use it against us?

rocketdog

<snip>Don't you think we know not to put this function in a place where a griefer could use it against us?

rocketdog SERIOUSLY?

Do you have any idea how insanely abused that is EVERYWHERE it's implemented, and how quickly Griefers abuse that system? And if you have grifers in your private Ages seriously just burn the age and get a new one, problem solved.

Now on to a general reply/rant:
I've tried my best to ignore this thread because of the fact that soooo many people are taking it sooo seriously but I think I have to respond now.

Ignoring the source of the proposed "upgrade" to the ignore code I have to question some obvious holes in the logic of the cloak of invisibility. The "Ghost Avatar" is a existing problem in Uru; I saw one so to speak just last night meaning it's not a dead issue. How this applies to "/ignore" should be obvious to everyone. You can ignore someone, a group of your twenty best friends can ignore that someone, heek your favorite Group/Guild/Sewing Circle/IRC Buddy List/Russian Gulag can all gang up and ignore this person with the ultimate "/ignore" of invisibility and your still guaranteed to have at least one person present asking over open chat about person X's odd behavior. People are very used to one person not being visually present but footsteps being heard, voice chat being heard, cones and other kickables being kicked providing proof many in this thread have said they never want to see.

The logical counter of course is that the skills of the person upgrading "/ignore" would patch over all these little tell tale leftovers making a seamless excision of the offending player. So the Question I have to ask is now that they are "gone" how do you help the people still being bothered by them if they are having problems with the KI, don't say anything expressing their distress over the KI, and you can't see player X who is being the pain in the first place? It's the whole interlocking Rube Goldberg operation their invisible, your invisible, both of you are invisible if one "/ignore" can consign someone to a single player sandbox on a server your opening a can of worms............

Just be honest a lot of the discussion has revolved around granting players Customer Service Mode from MO:UL.

Now for two little things I am pretty sure none of you have considered.

1. Custom Builds : If you go for some overly complicated ignore/ban list the easy solution is to compile a client immune to the restrictions.

2. GPL License : No matter what you do as a form of protection you have to publish the source code for it, because yes griefers will sue. After all the GPL was written by a grifer and the ultimate act of griefing the system would have to be legally taking you for everything your worth.

Simple is better.

patients always wins out eventually.

and

You all need to get over the fear of community moderation one goofball promoted to reseng can do more good then all the people that want that power or are afraid of that power when they don't have it.

Call it a Devil's Advocacy Rant.

I do I really really do understand the thoughts and concerns behind upgrading the "/ignore" feature. I've never had any issue of harassment directed at me as a boy or a girl Avie but I have a feeling that is more a matter of my play hours then anything else. I have seen countless "stream of conciseness" typists that find it absurdly pleasing to message spam over the chat channels. The ignore command really could be improved a bit I don't argue.

In my book (Harassment = Bad) even in somewhere as kid friendly as MOULa just so I am clear.

Simple solutions however are always stronger solutions, at least they always have been in my life. I suggested a while ago making "/ignore" act on the primary account instead of the disposable "sub-accounts" that are created and destroyed with each avatar. I would also happily sign my name to a petition that reactivates even a single Cyan employee checking the report log for "/harass" once a week for a half hour. (Yes even as a additional expense to cavern operating costs.)

I'll admit I haven't looked at Hokias's addition yet but I have been looking at the source code of Uru for some time now. I'm sure it does what he says but I question altering that ancient piece of software even with "minor" changes. Especially since Cyan doesn't ban players to my knowledge and new accounts are simply verified by e-mail.

I've been in other games and other worlds, but the one I love is Uru.

I would rather see time, money, and energy spent by Cyan doing the things that assure a stronger game. (Better security on the Vault, 100% rewrite on the KI, updated glue code on the Python, Updated version of Python, making the book share "yeesha hologram statue" rather then "book slammed in face", and the "to do" list goes on.....)

P.S.



A Kick function can only be a kick function, I can not imagine you or anyone else developing something with that name that doesn't behave in the common vernacular. The "Kick function" removes a player from a game level, most often this feature is paired with a ban of variable time length to prevent that person from simply returning.

Who is us?

Who do you trust?

Who decides who gets admin privileges and who doesn't?

I care very deeply about people that want such very powerful and abused commands added especially when they can only be used by "us".

Care to provide some examples of how /kick was implemented in those systems, and how it was abused? Constructive conversation is always preferable to unsubstantiated crap.

What you may view as griefing they may not see as a problem, or may even be normal interaction for those people.

I'm not sure where you got this idea.

Custom Builds/GPL License replies

Tying anything to account is pointless in a F2P game like Uru - it's painfully easy to make a new account. I would like to see more CSR support from Cyan, but I'm not sure how much good it would actually do with how easy it is to re-register.

The uru code might be old, but it's not all that awful

anybody with custom code could "kick" somebody from any age already if they wanted to.

Everybody gets priviliges to control their owned age instances

Something like this plays out several hundred times a night in every game I play that has a "kick" function except Portal2 where the grifer simple disconnects ten seconds into a puzzle because they know that kicks the other player back to lobby to.

to my knowledge no such function is currently in the works—I'd encourage you to start a different thread to talk about it. Thanks.

This has been talked about quit a bit in this thread as one of the things that should be added along with invisibility and has been added to the KI: New Feature Log by Mac_Fife ( http://guildofwriters.org/wiki/KI:_New_Feature_Log ).

Mis-attribution: I simply copied the existing article on the GoW wiki to OU's wiki as requested.

And a discussion of /kick definitely doesn't belong in this thread.

Recent events in the Cavern (which I’d really like only to be discussed in the most general and schematic terms here if necessary, ok? so that the thread doesn’t get locked down before the conversation has a chance to get started) have gotten me thinking about good responses to inappropriate behaviour again. We’ve had a number of discussions on the forums about this in the past (which are easy enough to find if one goes hunting), and some of them made suggestions for an alteration to the game client to allow for, shall we say, a more robust answer to harrassment or other forms of griefing (the /kick function). These discussions were always a bit hypothetical, since there was really no indication at the time that fan modifications to the code would ever make it onto Cyan’s version of the game; recent moves forward in open source, however, along with our currently somewhat improved funding situation, have made it seem to me, at least, that this conversation could now profitably be re-opened. And: I have a specific proposal.

I agree with the objections that people made to the /kick-function idea. In a nutshell, it had too much potential for abuse. But there is more than one way of removing someone from your gaming experience. I would like to suggest that we reconsider a less intrusive suggestion also made in earlier discussions: the possibility of modifying the /ignore-function of the KI (or of adding an additional function we might call /shun) to make the ignored avatar not merely inaudible, as is currently the case, but invisible as well.

Most griefing operates on the assumption that a certain kind of behaviour on the part of the griefer will elicit a certain desirable response from the victim (fear, anger, confusion, whatever), and it is this response that provides the griefer with his or her motivation to continue. In the Cavern, options for influencing another person’s playing experience are largely limited to KI-messages, chat, and what goes on on the screen. This last is what concerns me at the moment: it’s an immensely disturbing experience to have to watch in third person as your personal space is repeatedly violated by another avatar, or to turn around in first person to find him leering over your shoulder. The ability to ‘disappear’ someone else would render this kind of griefing immediately ineffective without compromising the griefer’s rights to be in a certain place at a certain time or to continue to interact with those players who are still willing to tolerate his or her behaviour.

So I wonder if we could talk about this. What might speak for this idea, what reservations do we have about it, what haven’t I thought of that might make me abandon it altogether in favour of something even cleverer?

One final point: Lontahv at the Guild of Writers tells me that this is an entirely possible, even minor modification to the xKI Python code. So it could be done. The question is therefore: do we want it?

(Edited for accuracy.)