Continued from elsewhere:
No need to really mince words about it at this point.
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As for the larger matter of "trolls"; I think that's a dangerous line of thought. I haven't seen much in the way of evidence that isn't either circumstantial or easily dismissable, 'specially considering there seems to be an attitude of attributing it all to one person/group of persons.
The underlying cause of which, I think, is that people care way, way too much. Frankly, this is only a game to me and will never be anything more. With that in mind I'm fine when a game dies or I walk away or whatever because I only ever put as much effort into a character as I am willing to lose (which, really, is hardly a loss in the traditional sense because characters can be repurposed with virtually no effort).
Most people seem to get so invested in the character that they have a hard time handling it when things don't pan out. It lends to one looking for some malicious entity to attribute their woes too, to make it easier to accept the idea that it can be stopped or that it won't happen again.
But the reality is that it WILL happen again, and it will always happen again. And that's not to say that things are isolated only to trolls; sometimes one doesn't even get into a game, or a GM has a legit reason to step away, or the game just plain old sucks. Warning against/hunting for trolls seems to be the wrong way about it I think.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cautionary tales and prevention but I think we're bordering on dangerous territory (unless someone has a reasonably appropriate means by which Paizo could actually monitor and prevent this). I'd much rather see people make an effort to be more direct with what they want out of a game and what they're willing to offer to keep it alive. Not to say that you are advocating otherwise, mdt, but ideas have a tendency to take a life of their own once said.
Just my two cents, anyways. Not like I haven't been wrong about things in the past, nor should I expect everyone to approach the situation with my own mindset in favor of their own.
The idea isn't to do anything ourselves, it's to make sure people alert Paizo if they think they have been trolled.
As to how they could confirm it, it's actually not hard. Unless we're dealing with a black hat hacker who get's his jollies doing this, any troll is likely to be just a normal person who enjoys trolling, and that means they likely have 1 way of connecting, possibly 2, which means the trolling will trace back to an IP address or two. That will confirm it for Paizo if all these threads are linked back, to say, Verizon IPs in Hell MN. They'd then just flag any new sign ups from Verizon IPs in Hell MN and see if they start up recruit threads.
And even if Paizo does nothing about it, if the community is aware it's going on, then that takes a lot of steam out of the sails of the troll.
If you really think there's not a troll, I'll dig up some links. Two different GMs, 6 months apart, using the exact and very precise and unusual character creation guidelines, in multiple recruitments, that all started a game and then never posted in them or posted one opening and that was it
Yes, but what qualifies as a "troll recruitment"? What guidelines are the Paizo staff actually supposed to follow that are actually realistic and fair? Best case is you ban a handful of potentials, maybe even enough to make a difference for a while. Worst case is that you've created a platform by which people can accuse one another to resolve personal vendetta's. Remember, the thing about trolls is that they look exactly like normal posters, so if you want to make strict guidelines to block trolls you'll inevitably put normal posters at risk.
How does the community being aware possibly deter a troll? The worse thing you can do in this case is engage them and show that they're getting results. If anything people are offering more fuel for the potential fire. I agree with GM Aest for what it's worth, but I'd add on to their own statement that bringing it up in this manner invites the risk of a witch hunt (a possibility that has already been broached once thanks, unintended or otherwise, to GM_Panic).
If you want to post links, that's fine. I'm not totally against the possibility of the troll, but I have a hard time of believing it is to the extent that some have claimed and also that it lies at the root at the problem. Also, if I could be presumptuous for a moment and guess that you would cite the Gossamar World and The Fallen Sons and Daughters of Heaven recruitments, let me point out that both of them had the full endorsement of Monkeygod who has something like 14,000 posts.
So what would you suggest? Just ignoring it and letting it continue? I'll dig them up when I have a chance. But, simply ignoring an issue doesn't solve the issue. Turning a blind eye to it doesn't either. Again, I'm not trying to start any witch hunts. I'm simply pointing out that multiple people in multiple places have had the same experiences. Statistically, that many threads doing the same thing over and over is outside statistical probability for random chance.
I know Monkeygod, I've had him in a game. I do not even know the two threads you mentioned off the top of my head.
What I really expect to happen is, if there is trolling, and Paizo tracks down someone, they'll find that the troll has a real profile on the boards that they keep far away from the trolling. And that they'll just drop that person a PM or e-mail and ask them to cut it out. I expect that will work, and that will be the end of it.
The two threads, if memory serves, each had their own handful of claims of trolling on the part of the GM. I had assumed that was what you were referring to since they were both fairly large in their own right. Apparently I am wrong, apologies.
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Hey guys, its your friendly DM Tee Rollin here, recruiting for the brand new Hell's Vengeance AP. I know it's totally not released yet, but thanks to super secret connections I've acquired an advance copy of the entire adventure, which I'm absolutely going to run to the end.
Character creation will be done using gestalt gestalt gestalt rules, which basically means you gestalt two gestalt characters together and then gestalt two of those characters together, for a total of eight classes.
Anyways get ready for the number one top game of the year and start working on your characters because I'll accept nothing less than full aliases with backgrounds of no less than 750 words. I'd also like you to supplement your backgrounds with oil paintings of your characters at various points of their lives.
Tee Rollin out.
We see Tee Rollin--we hatin'....
More substantively, this has been going on for at least five years; I got burned more than a few times, in RotRL, Splinters of Faith, Serpent's Skull, and like that.
There should be a request pin button for threads. Thanks for the PSA, mdt
Troll recruitment threads?
Wha? Why would...?
Are there really people out there who seriously have nothing better to do?
The kind of things some people on the internet have nothing better to do than are really baffling at times.
Yeah I ran into a GM and a "friend" that did this. I won't name names, but it was a hugely disappointing experience. Unfortunately, I don't have a huge amount of confidence that paizo has the time to actually put a stop to it (this isn't a reflection of the staff, merely an observation that many of them are fairly busy with everything else on their plate) but hey, maybe I'll be proved incorrect.
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On the fatalistic side, I did manage to produce some good character ideas in the recruitments, including some I can toss into the games I'm running. XD So they weren't total washes, at least.
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On the fatalistic side, I did manage to produce some good character ideas in the recruitment, including some I can toss into the games I'm running. XD So they weren't total washes, at least.
That's how I think of it--time spent putting together a character isn't entirely lost, and you might get to use the character for real sometime. I recycled a character after the RotRL game he was made for folded (the GM disappeared before we got to see a goblin), and he's almost through Book 5 of Shattered Star now.
Is it trolling if they are gauging interest though?
Sometimes players need to take accountability as well. I have had a few games that I spent time recruiting for and going over characters only to have the people chosen disappear.
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It's trolling if they have no apparent interest in actually running the game. From where we are, disappearing because of RL issues and disappearing because you were trolling are indistinguishable; in either case, it's the lack of word that's the rude part. (Granted, as you point out the reverse is true, but there are far more players than GMs on the boards, so it's much easier to find a substitute player than GM after a disappearance.)
Yeah, I've got to admit, this has hurt once or twice. I've actually backed off from some cool looking games unless it's with a character I can crank out in, or, five or six hours, or am likely to re-use at least the general concept later.
Yep, not really talking about 'interest checks', those are always 'meh, maybe' things going into them.
And what JonGarrett's feeling is the worst side effect, people passing on recruitments due to this.
Thank you for bringing attention to this. These days it feels that recruitment threads aren't as plentiful as they were before, so it is extra painful when you stumble upon a recruitment thread after not finding any new ones for a while, only to later find out that it was all nothing but someone trolling.
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I think considering a recruitment that fails to get off the ground a troll is jumping the gun a bit. I personally posted an interest check thread for a game I've been working on for a long time, but reality hit when school started again and I found out taking six classes wasn't going to be easy. I feel bad about drumming up people's interests, but I certainly wasn't intending to troll anyone, and as I graduate this year I'd like to come back to the idea in the future. I feel that some of these recruitment threads are people not realizing how much work GMing a PbP can be, just sorting through the applications is probably daunting for a lot of new PbP GMs. I don't deny that troll threads probably exist but... I'd like to think better of people than that.
I hope that if you are unable to continue a campaign you would make a "Sorry, I have RL trouble/must spend more time studying/too much workload/other reasons to quit" post.
I can accept losing a game to that.Losing a game because the GM disappear is another matter. Sure, RL happens and can cut you off from the game without warning, but it shouldn't be a common occurrence.
I hope that if you are unable to continue a campaign you would make a "Sorry, I have RL trouble/must spend more time studying/too much workload/other reasons to quit" post.
This. I think most of us accept that games dying early on is part of the nature of the beast that is PbP, but it really annoys me when GMs or other players just disappear without a trace. Believe it not, it worries me because I don't know if RL just picked up (job, family, etc.) or if something horrific happened to you.
Re: caring too much - I dislike the implication that the people who get upset by these sorts of things are just taking the game too seriously. While I never consider the time spent to make a character wasted, it can be frustrating to devote your time to one of these recruitments that never takes off when you could've directed it to another one that does. And to be honest, it does make me more wary about applying to future recruitments unless I'm familiar with the GM or they've been around the forums for awhile - which sucks because I'm all in favor of supporting new GMs.
Re: caring too much - I dislike the implication that the people who get upset by these sorts of things are just taking the game too seriously. While I never consider the time spent to make a character wasted, it can be frustrating to devote your time to one of these recruitments that never takes off when you could've directed it to another one that does. And to be honest, it does make me more wary about applying to future recruitments unless I'm familiar with the GM or they've been around the forums for awhile - which sucks because I'm all in favor of supporting new GMs.
What I'm having trouble understanding, then, is what exactly is at stake. From where I sit I see two things: one's time, and one's emotional attachment to a character. If it is the case that one's time cannot be wasted (or that said time is negligible even if lost), then the only thing at significant risk is the latter. Assuming this to be true, I question why one would choose to become so invested in a character - especially for recruitments that are still in progress (real or otherwise). As someone stated above, the number of players often outweighs GMs and thus chances are never great that one will get into to this or that specific game. I'd also put forward that there is no reason one should limit themselves to only one recruitment at a time, unless that person is only setting aside enough time to devote to those specific recruitments and their potential games.
One could make the case, I suppose, for losing trust in new GMs or becoming jaded with the process in general. To that I would counter that it is simply unfair to hold a bias against new or inexperienced GMs and that at least some amount of trust is owed to those people for putting themselves forward in that manner.
I maintain my own standards that I use to judge potential/active games and on more than one occasion I have left a thread that failed to meet those expectations (Echoing Diego Rossi above, there is nothing wrong if one joins a game/recruitment and later politely walks away). However, I hold it to be my decision for leaving, not because the GM or any other failed to provide what I was looking for at the time.
Of course I'm not advocating the creation of troll games but I feel it necessary to reiterate that one can only be trolled if they put themselves in a position to be trolled, or at least it is difficult to troll someone who is suitably apathetic.
I try to make characters I can re-use later. XD So even if the game itself doesn't pan out, I have an increasingly large stock of detailed character designs I can introduce as NPCs or remake for a game at another point.
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Re: caring too much - I dislike the implication that the people who get upset by these sorts of things are just taking the game too seriously. While I never consider the time spent to make a character wasted, it can be frustrating to devote your time to one of these recruitments that never takes off when you could've directed it to another one that does. And to be honest, it does make me more wary about applying to future recruitments unless I'm familiar with the GM or they've been around the forums for awhile - which sucks because I'm all in favor of supporting new GMs.
What I'm having trouble understanding, then, is what exactly is at stake. From where I sit I see two things: one's time, and one's emotional attachment to a character. If it is the case that one's time cannot be wasted (or that said time is negligible even if lost), then the only thing at significant risk is the latter. Assuming this to be true, I question why one would choose to become so invested in a character - especially for recruitments that are still in progress (real or otherwise). As someone stated above, the number of players often outweighs GMs and thus chances are never great that one will get into to this or that specific game. I'd also put forward that there is no reason one should limit themselves to only one recruitment at a time, unless that person is only setting aside enough time to devote to those specific recruitments and their potential games.
One could make the case, I suppose, for losing trust in new GMs or becoming jaded with the process in general. To that I would counter that it is simply unfair to hold a bias against new or inexperienced GMs and that at least some amount of trust is owed to those people for putting themselves forward in that manner.
I maintain my own standards that I use to judge potential/active games and on more than one occasion I have left a thread that failed to meet those expectations (Echoing Diego Rossi above, there is nothing wrong if one joins...
The other option is people getting fed up with PbP as a medium and reducing the available players and GMs on these forums. If we lose players who might someday become GMs, we lose something from the community. If a new player gets burned by a troll, they may turn around and say that all PbP games are likely like that. Then Paizo's forum starts to gain that reputation and that causes us to lose future members.
Personally I've taken to making characters with reusable names. And not making an alias until accepted. I used to feel that making an alias for recuitement showed a certain professionalism about the process, but it just isn't worth it anymore.
The other option is people getting fed up with PbP as a medium and reducing the available players and GMs on these forums. If we lose players who might someday become GMs, we lose something from the community. If a new player gets burned by a troll, they may turn around and say that all PbP games are likely like that. Then Paizo's forum starts to gain that reputation and that causes us to lose future members.
Certainly this is something worth considering. However, I am of the opinion that troll games are an insignificant contributor to this, at least in comparison to legit games that simply fail (of which there are many). Given current circumstances I'm not sure that potential trolls are as prevalent or effective as has been claimed, and I think that choosing to seriously pursue those people is to risk damaging the community far more than any troll has done.
Personally I've taken to making characters with reusable names. And not making an alias until accepted. I used to feel that making an alias for recuitement showed a certain professionalism about the process, but it just isn't worth it anymore.
I've seen many people take this route, though I don't personally as I have a tendency to make many small edits and corrections between submission and when the recruitment closes and it strikes me as tedious to repost a statblock with every change.
As an aside: I would like to see Paizo implement the system used to track characters in a campaign for use in tracking an accounts individual aliases. For those of you who may not be familiar: a GM can edit their campaign and mark certain characters as "active" or "inactive" which would be a boon for alias management over the current system.
As far as the aliases thing goes, there's at least one person on the forums who has an alias titled "Characters Yet to Be". It's got like 200 posts, and it just gets resubmitted in lieu of making new ones each time.
I try to make characters I can re-use later. XD So even if the game itself doesn't pan out, I have an increasingly large stock of detailed character designs I can introduce as NPCs or remake for a game at another point.
Would you like to guess how many characters from Broken Towers are like this?
More than any of us would like to admit?
...well, more than you would likely be comfortable knowing.
The other option is people getting fed up with PbP as a medium and reducing the available players and GMs on these forums. If we lose players who might someday become GMs, we lose something from the community. If a new player gets burned by a troll, they may turn around and say that all PbP games are likely like that. Then Paizo's forum starts to gain that reputation and that causes us to lose future members.Certainly this is something worth considering. However, I am of the opinion that troll games are an insignificant contributor to this, at least in comparison to legit games that simply fail (of which there are many). Given current circumstances I'm not sure that potential trolls are as prevalent or effective as has been claimed, and I think that choosing to seriously pursue those people is to risk damaging the community far more than any troll has done.
One other thing I don't think you've considered. These troll recruitments are taking up people's submissions as well. Most people (from my experience) limit how many games they apply to when they have enough time to play. If they are limiting themselves to 1 or 2 games, they are then actually limiting themselves to 1 or 0 games (if one or both end up being a troll).
I'd like to mention that I've started at least three games on this forum which I abandoned...without telling people why. I find that living in China, I occasionally lose all internet access to this website, or have other technical issues (no internet at work, broken PC, etc.) On the other hand I haven't run anything in over a year, so I'm not a part of this.
Don't forget the most important "warning sign".
If after a week of recruiting the GM has disappeared and his "friend" chimes in that the GM "has internet troubles" you may as well drop the thread because I have yet to see one recover from these mysterious "internet troubles" that apparently last until the end of time because the GM never pops back up.
Of course by then it's too late, but ah well.
I did send an e-mail detailing some stuff right after I posted the thread linked in the OP, so hopefully that brought this whole thing to the community staff's attention. I haven't seen any proper recruitments with the same warning signs since then. A few interest checks were unceremoniously dropped, but dropping an interest check isn't such a big deal.
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As indicated above, we've received some emails about this behavior cropping up on the site. Now, we don't officially have a guideline in place for this sort of thing for Play-by-Post (and thus have to handle these cases individually as a best judgement item), and it's possible that if it becomes a bigger trend, we might need to.
What action do you think should be taken on Paizo's end for these threads? What would the guideline for starting campaigns look like to you (how should it look)? Should we restrict interest checks to the new "General Discussion" area for PbP, rather than utilizing full campaign features? Should this be a new area?
Gamer Talk might be a good place for interest checks, rather than in the campaign section.
Perhaps a way to flag trusted GMs somehow. If a trusted GM starts a recruitment post it can have some mark stating this.
The trusted flag could be obtained after running 3 or more short adventures, or one long campaign for more than a year.
Perhaps by requesting feedback to the players once a Campaign is set as inactive. The players can then say if the campaign was properly concluded and somehow rate the experience.
It can help out creating a reputation for the GMs so they have a motivation to make a better work and overall improve the community reputation.
Just an idea
Perhaps a way to flag trusted GMs somehow. If a trusted GM starts a recruitment post it can have some mark stating this.
The trusted flag could be obtained after running 3 or more short adventures, or one long campaign for more than a year.
A potential player can already check this easily by looking at the GM's Campaigns tab in his or her profile. An experienced GM will have games that you can check and see how long they've been running. An untrustworthy GM will have multiple games that run a page or two before they disappear. A new GM who has been a reliable player in other campaigns is more likely to be a reliable GM since he or she is already used to checking the site regularly.
The problem is distinguishing new GMs with good intentions from ones who are going to flake out. I honestly don't know of any way to do this, save giving them a chance and possibly getting burned.
Okay, so I know that I will probably catch some flak for posting what I am about to post, as it ties into this subject of troll versus non-troll. I'm not just going to debate it philosophically and offer personal experience though, I'm going to offer some input on how to, potentially at least, make things better, both for GMs and PCs.
First, I will start off with a confession, one that I find a bit shameful on my part, but one that I have recently admitted to my players: I have multiple profiles. Now, why does this guy have multiple profiles, you must ask? Well, let me elaborate in a long wall of posting, so that you can get the perspective of one person who has multiple profiles.
I joined Paizo years ago... 2013, if I recall. I was pretty much the starry-eyed college student who didn't have a care in the world. I was studying psychology in college, running my Pathfinder campaigns here and such, all fairly normal stuff, I suppose (If psychology and neuroscience are typical things, anyway,). My profile was The Silver Prince, one that I accumulated a massive amount of posts on, two or three thousand I believe, but the last half to third of posting on that profile was very spotty and I abruptly stopped posting several times in my campaigns.
I always had the intention to resume the campaigns and see them through to the end, but things kept getting in the way. It was simple things that would delay me for a day at first, like college work. Then I started having physiological and psychological problems, which I would find out about a year later were due to low blood sugar. That affected my memory, made me lethargic and disinterested in almost anything, and several other things. All of that I dealt with as it came, but then the hammer fell when my girlfriend of the time, a lovely young woman with a mind as beautiful as she was, tried to commit suicide. I tried to talk her down and, when I couldn't and she hung up the phone on me, I contacted her family to get them to forcibly stop her from killing herself. They stopped her and got her help, but after she got out of the psychiatric hospital, she despised me, telling me that I had no right to speak to her after I was the reason she was still here. I tried to mend things, but we went our separate ways eventually. That was the point where I stopped caring about anything and ceased posting completely, not even warning the people in my old campaigns, nor the new campaigns that I took on as distractions from all the problems that kept cropping up.
I eventually logged back on and had a number of hateful, spiteful messages directed at me and posted in my campaigns. Disheartened, I quit for a while. Eventually though, I joined under another profile, before my own sense of emotional turmoil forced me to shut it down, leaving another dead profile.
Fast forward to my current profile. I had finally fixed most of my problems, got back around to posting, got a few friends to join Paizo (One of which joined under one of my emails, due to him not having his own email, the other of which used her own,) and one to even rejoin after she had quit. Things were looking up. Then I had an accident and was forced on a hiatus, one that took me a long while to recover from fully. It had caused a temporary bout of psychosis as well but, as people who have ever had any sort of brain damage from a car crash or some such thing can tell you, it puts you out of commission, keeping you from effectively doing a lot of things. I was out of the game for a while, building my life back up, trying to get financially stable after thousands of dollars in medical bills and such.
I eventually returned to this profile, not wishing to run from my past posting any longer, but still wanting to hide my past profiles out of fear of some sort of stigma. It's hard to find games or make friends in the community if people hate you, whether it is your fault or not. Due to players talking about dropping due to bad past experience with new-ish GMs dropping and such, since I had to take a hiatus before truly starting my Kingmaker thread, I felt like I had to either quit and make a new profile, something that would have been the easy route, or fess up to my past and overcome my fear of stigma on these messageboards so that I could finally run my campaigns without fear of someone recognizing the similarities between me and my old profiles.
I finally chose to do the latter, to overcome my own sense of shame and guilt and fight past the fear of scorn from people who I once considered my friends. To me, it was no longer worth running from my past posting history, no longer worth trying to hide if I am only deceiving people that, I hope, will be good friends of mine (One of which is an old friend from a past game,).
And so, you have my story. Take from that story any lessons that you want. I wanted to share it so that people might understand that not all people who have another profile, then abandon it are trolls. There may be some who are, and they are huge disappointments to the online TTRPG community, but they do not comprise every person who has owned or will own multiple profiles.
Now, how to fix it, you might ask? How to make it better so that it can be easier to separate trolls from people who have, figuratively, ran from their past profiles out of shame or guilt?
Well, here are a few things that could, as a whole, make the experience better and at least keep people from serial-profiling like I did.
EDIT: Option 3 is the more realistic, and most likely to work, out of all my propositions, the first two of which are sort candyland thinking.
The first, and least likely, is for every single person to be civil to a person who might disappear for a few days or weeks at a time due to real life problems. I have never dropped someone due to real-life problems, nor made them feel bad about it (I DID kick somebody from a campaign for being disruptive and going into 'PvP mode', but that's a different story,). If GMs who have had problems did not come back to PMs such as "You're scum!", "Hey, nice way to let us know you were gone, (Insert expletive of choice,)!", or stuff like that, the GM might not feel the need to drop all of his/her remaining campaigns and bolt. I know that this is not a good way for a GM to handle the situation, by cutting all play-by-posts off and creating a new profile, but the burden of guilt is not always on one side. Sometimes both parties involved are at least partially at fault for a situation turning out like it does. This way, honest GMs who have hit hard times will return to their profile and not bolt the moment someone even hints that their style seems familiar.
The second idea is to build a cool app for cellphones and computers, one that people can join at their leisure, that sends post notifications directly to each players email and the GMs cellphone. The app could also have a system where they could send out blanket alerts across all of their campaigns, letting people know the situation swiftly and surely. This way, it is more personal and GMs who have been away for a while can respond quickly to things like people threatening to drop (And let's face it, coming back from an ordeal that could force you to stop posting and finding that most of your campaign has quit is enough to make someone WANT to drop their profile!). I am aware that this system is somewhat flawed as-is, but if Paizo could make it where once a person uses a particular name/number/DOB is placed in the system, it is locked in place and they cannot create a new one. This way, it would be easier to trust GMs who make those, as they cannot drop that and, with the system's convenience, most GMs would not say no to it, making it easier to spot trolls. Again, nowhere NEAR a perfect solution, but one that may help.
The third idea, as odd as it sounds, is to legitimize the 'creating a new profile' thing, allowing people to, once every 365 days, 'reroll' their account, starting fresh if there is a massive amount of stigma attached to it or they just want to start fresh. In addition, Paizo should 'name/phone#/DOB-lock' a profile, so that only one JohnDoe/1-777-7777/1-1-2011 could possibly have an account, no matter their actual email that they put in. This way, the GMs can hide from past posts if they feel that they must, but PCs get the comfort of knowing that a person cannot troll and make a billion identical profiles in their name to troll people with. A bit of give-and-take, as it were.
EDIT: Actually, option 3 might also make it easier for you to get rid of those spammers using foreign languages! I might have just solved TWO problems with that idea! :)
Now if anyone, Paizonian poster or employee alike, wishes to know more about my perspective or whatever, just send a private message to Divinitus. Do NOT send hate mail, please, as it was hard enough admitting this in the first place.
Thanks for listening to my confession and thanks in advance for hopefully not slinging hate-filled rants my way.
If any of the modulators are reading this, is there a way to merge The Silver Prince and Divinitus into just Divinitus? Also, is there a way to delete the profile that was pretty much nil on posts? I can give you the exact profile email and such. Now that I've manned up to my mistakes and faced my shame, I want to do this legitimately and make myself 'official' regarding profile clarity, I guess is what I'm trying to ask. If you would, Chris Lambertz or whoever, please send me a message. If you can't (As I can't message you for some reason,), just send me an email and post for me to check it, if you please. I rarely check my emails, whether they be my main one or the ones that I use to safely sign up for things that I know would spam my main email (Looking at YOU, Facebook notifications!).
I'm not sure the dob/phone/birthdate would really work, as people can fake those (I do when I want an anonymous login to a web site, although I only have one profile on Paizo). Unless we're talking about requiring a text message to phone thing, but that's expensive to do.
What I would suggest for Paizo to do is simply let people submit 'potential troll' messages as they currently are, and then store the IP addresses of the potentials. If the same IP hits multiple times on the trolls, and on a non-troll account about the same time, that's a reasonable link, and Paizo can send that account a PM politely alerting them that their account was associated with a potential troll.
I suspect that simply getting an alert will make most trolls hesitate to continue.
If things get bad enough, Paizo could restrict PBP campaign creation to accounts with a combination of post count/length. While that's not a perfect solution, it would make it difficult to troll, as I suspect most trolls don't have the will to create and play a profile for 3 months for example, and join games to get post count up, in order to troll and toss the profile away.
As to Divinitus, I have no hard feelings, and am playing in his game now. I have relatives with depression issues, and can certainly give people another chance. I think you'll find that people will accept 'I am not in the right place in my life to continue' almost all the time. I've had 3 games so far end because the GM said something like that, and I have not had one hard feeling over it. Most players are mature enough to accept your needs, RL always trumps game life. Just give them the benefit of the doubt, and things will usually end up better.
I tend to just stay away from recruitments by GMs that don't have at least 2000 posts.
I also tend to remove myself from any consideration in games as soon as I get a feeling during recruitment that the game might not work out.
Chris, the only thing I can think of that would curtail troll recruitment a would be to put a low "minimum number of posts" in order to create a new thread in the PbP sub-forums.
Even a post count as low as 50 would stop a lot of these issues. The bad side to that would be that new GMs might be discouraged. Of course, it might also encourage people who genuinely want to run a game to join a game for a while first.
Most trolls probably aren't going to want to crank out 50 posts in other areas of the boards just to start a troll recruitment.
Another possibility would be for a feature similar to Favorites or Reviews or Flags wherein other posters could review PbP GMs or players.
Being able to flag a GM as "abandoned game during recruitment" or "ran a successful game for one year" would give some means of community review to these issues.
Or something like that. I can see this sort of thing creating some issues, but it could also be a neat way of tracking the things we're discussing.
Perhaps the easiest way of doing this, and maybe the least complex, would be to have a simple "date of first post" and "date of most recent post" notes added to each game in a poster's PbP tab. Then other people could review a posters PbP record very easily.
Lessee now - yup, there was that gestalt Wrath of the Righteous campaign back in May that had a recruitment thread many pages long, And the GM was running another recruitment at the same time with an even longer recruitment thread.
Then nothing.
Then a "friend" popped in with a story about a car accident with "details" and "stuff" and relayed promises to return.
Then.
It.
Died.
Without warning. Or further communication.
I think a really simple thing for prospective players to do is do some backup checks - check their posting rates, history, style, responses etc and then, if that all seems largely on the level, or more importantly within a style you appreciate, grill the GM on their dedication, thoughts on desired posting rates, homebrew/houserules or lack thereof. Pretty much as you would in a face to face situation.
Thanks to mdt for bringing this up, and to all those posters who have given their opinions, brought their stories and offered solutions and advice.
And hi DH. :)
P.S. One last thing. Don't disappear. Just don't. We all know life happens, and if it does, be honest and let your players/GM know. More than anyhting it makes running or ending things much less an inquiry into whereabouts and much more about debriefing and getitng closure. My very first PbP experience ended when the GM literally disappeared without a trace. To this day, I am left wondering if the person behind the alias The Lost Gamer is alive.
As more and more PbP experiences ended with disappearing GM's - seriously it has happened more often than...well - just look at my profile - almost every alias with more than 10 posts has been in a game, and almost every one of those PbP's died, and I'd say a good 90% of those was without warning - I guess I became a little jaded, and stopped worrying about the real life nature of whatever led to the game dying.
Even real life, face to face games end abruptly at times - the nature of our fulfillment then becomes the interactions (both between the players and their characters and their world) while the game IS active. Do honor to those moments and have the grace to end them with humility and honesty. You'll find people much more appreciative, adn you won't lose sleep over it. Guaranteed.
^ Everything OSW said. While I don't doubt that GMs who poof for a bit might come back to some hostile messages (internet anonymity and all) from some of their players if they come back, I daresay that the large majority of players simply want some sort of closure if a game needs to be halted or ended due to RL reasons. You don't even have to share the nature of what's going on, just be honest and let people know so they're not worrying that you've died, which I worry about anytime a GM or a fellow player disappears without warning.
And although I've never GMed here, I did have a two week spell over a year ago where I up and more or less quit posting in the games I was playing in for nearly two weeks without notice. In retrospect I suspect it was a mild depressive episode due to some personal things happening at the time, but I had several PMs from both my GMs and fellow players checking up on me. No one was hostile, they just wanted to know if I was okay. Even with all the well-wishes, I couldn't even answer PMs or bring myself to post in Discussion threads due to how I was feeling. Eventually, things righted themselves and I continued in my games with no hard feelings - I would've been replaced of course if I'd needed to drop or hadn't shown back up, but I genuinely think people were just happy to know that I was still alive. So I do sorta get it from the other perspective too. Just be honest and let people know you're still out there but maybe can't continue to GM/play, even if it takes awhile for you to be/feel able to do so.
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If you, as a GM, decided that you don't want to run your gestalt game after two weeks then do the classy thing and actually TELL your players that.
It is frustrating as hell to spend hours making a character only to watch the game sit there while the GM is off making characters for other games and posting on other threads. If you need some time then tell your players. If you have no enthusiasm for the game then tell your players. If you would rather poke your own eyes out than work on the game then TELL. YOUR. PLAYERS!!
I am a human being and I understand that life happens. But don't leave me hanging. Tell me what's going on. Give me a chance to submit the character to other games. I can and will understand any and all reasons that you don't want to continue but if you ignore your players while you're still actively posting on the paizo forums then you're being rude as heck.
Just popping in real quick, since it's been a couple days:
Some of the technical suggestions are interesting, but not totally compatible with the fact that we're also an online retailer (we're very unlikely to do anything like reroll accounts over). I'm also wary about opening the options to limit posts (if it's an option for play-by-post, it opens up the argument about posts in other subforums). I do think that our team could definitely make Play-by-Post more transparent (IE: providing clearer instructions for use, stickies with specific suggestions/guidelines).
Divinitus: I will be emailing you regarding your account as soon as I get a moment.
Thank you Chris, it is much appreciated!
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If you, as a GM, decided that you don't want to run your gestalt game after two weeks then do the classy thing and actually TELL your players that.
It is frustrating as hell to spend hours making a character only to watch the game sit there while the GM is off making characters for other games and posting on other threads. If you need some time then tell your players. If you have no enthusiasm for the game then tell your players. If you would rather poke your own eyes out than work on the game then TELL. YOUR. PLAYERS!!
I am a human being and I understand that life happens. But don't leave me hanging. Tell me what's going on. Give me a chance to submit the character to other games. I can and will understand any and all reasons that you don't want to continue but if you ignore your players while you're still actively posting on the paizo forums then you're being rude as heck.
It burn, neh?
We are in the same boat, very irritating.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As far as I'm concerned there are two and only two valid excuses for disappearing without giving your players or GM notification. You are dead or incapacitated.
If you don't like the game...bow out gracefully
RL issues "Sorry guys have to leave, RL problems"
Going on vacation "hi, going on vacay for 2 weeks. I'll check in as soon as I'm back"
All of these things take less than 5 minutes. You're computers broken. Log in on your cell phone.
No excuses. Just common courtesy (decency)!
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This actually happens? Man why would people do that, that infuriates me.
This!
What can recruiting trolls possibly get out of it? Is it just some twisted, deviant, sadistic joy at watching others' joy be squashed?
I've just gained the sickened condition.
I've only ever played in one PbP (Hi Terquem!)so I'm not really in a position to comment, but that said I really like the earlier suggestion of giving PbP GMs their own forum title and such. Maybe something like "Active GM" "Solid GM" "Trusted GM" ect. as they get more games either completed or post counts above a certain number. That way the trolls are starved and GMs have a badge of honor to work for.
Just saw this thread. I mentioned this to someone a few weeks back regarding the same issue, it seems I was not the only person here on the boards who noticed this over the past several months!
I picked up 2 PbP games from vanished DM's this year so it seems that some of these stories have happy endings :-)
I've picked up a game once - it ended with the players controlling a giant robot in order to fight a dragon. XD
So... not the worst result?
Was that a Voltron Sci Fi RPG? :-) [I know, I am dating myself with that reference...]