Goblin Squad Member
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If someone is found by the PFO judges to be to paraphrase Ryan Dancey, an a%^&*le, what if their xp inflow was postponed a week or two weeks or a month for repeat offenders etc.?
They paid for it so you can't take it away, but a lot of the undesired behavior seems to be motivated by a sense of feeling powerful and having your only means of making a character more powerful taken away for some length of time seems a psychological jolt that will be felt more than a disapproving post and very unfun to me. Behave badly, unfun happens.
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Goblin Squad Member
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No Good Deed goes unpunished...
That said, are you suggesting this punishment be the result of any act of a~@%#*&ry, or the result of crossing a particular threshold of Reputation, or even somehow proportional to Reputation?
My first thought is that it might be a really bad idea to take away something the customer has paid for, given that Goblinworks is selling XP gain over time.
My second thought is that it shouldn't be needed. There will already be consequences - both mechanically in-game and socially among the players - for having a Low Reputation.
My third thought is that there's probably something nice I should say about the idea, but I'm up way past my bedtime because the meds I'm on won't let me sleep...
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Goblin Squad Member
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Not taken away because they did pay for it (I said that before too) just postponed. I mean for when someone gets reported as being a total egg and the GMs agree. Other games drop a 3-day ban hammer or something which is just celebrated during those 3 days as a badge of tear extraction honor; I have serious doubts temporary bans do anything to adjust towards desired behavior. But if you're playing the game with the niggling thought in the back of your head all the time that everyone else is getting ahead of you, every minute all week, man for me that would suck.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Proxima,
Ryan has said on more than one occasion (Nihimon help me here) that truly egregious behavior will mean banning, and they won't be shy about it.
But it terms of shaping the sociocultural terrain so that a$$hattery isn't the norm? That needs to be an organic result of good game design, enacted by the player community. Ryan has pointed out that not-so-good game design offers perverse social incentives (e.g. UO), and that they plan to avoid that by design.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My third thought is that there's probably something nice I should say about the idea, but I'm up way past my bedtime because the meds I'm on won't let me sleep...
- Chicken soup from a chicken and throw in vegetables and herbs. Then to garnish chopped, fine raw garlic, a little chilli, pepper, basil and grated cheese on top. That is tasty and seems to fortify the immune system.
- If a throat or head problem, then hot milk with turmeric (haldi) or hot water plus squeezed lemon juice from a lemon or two and add a dollop honey.
I always try nature's cure if possible... Hmm maybe that could give me an idea for Druid healing poultices.
=
@Proxima Sin: I think that tag is really to say if a player is eg ganking copiously or the system detects such then as above Good game design causes a chore for them to progress and other repercussions. It can't tell if a player is really an xyz or if they are very interested in pvp and making a big nuisance of themselves and the game is pushing them towards making a reassessment about how and when they pvp more diligently going forwards.
The social repercussions of groups I think is a potentially very powerful tool in this respect, that Ryan recently mentioned. I also think what they're doing with new or low level players is good with Influence for CC's.
Could there be a way for the lowest ranked members in CC's to be aided by higher levels in some form (perhaps access to skill-training facilities) so that form of helping the weakest in a group is modelled/encouraged?
Overall leaving the tools for the players to play how they want is really good. But I think the exception has to be with regard to what Mbando says:
Ryan has pointed out that not-so-good game design offers perverse social incentives (e.g. UO), and that they plan to avoid that by design.
Truly bad behaviour hopefully will be High Visibility and therefore sent to the GM directly and immediately.
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Goblin Squad Member
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...truly egregious behavior will mean banning, and they won't be shy about it.
First, there's no hard & fast definition of "griefing" that will satisfy everyone. For some, any limit to their activities is too restrictive, and to others, any non-consensual interaction is too permissive. Where you fall on that continuum is really a matter of personal choice, not definition.
I can tell you that in Pathfinder Online you will be involved in non-consensual interaction with other players on a regular basis.
That is not to say that unlimited poor behavior will be tolerated. There are three ways that behavior can be limited:
1: Game Mechanics - the game itself can establish limits on what can and cannot be done. It can also establish punishments for doing things that are considered poor behavior even if it does not outright restrict them.
2: Community Management - the humans who watch over the game can act to force certain kinds of behavior to cease when they are petitioned for help. Those same humans can escalate the matter to the point where a repeat or particularly egregious offender's accounts are closed.(*)
3: Social Engineering - the humans who play within the game can act to enforce certain norms of behavior by providing and withholding access to shared community resources in response to character behavior.
It is not our intention to create an "anything goes" world where players are subjected to endless scams, ganks, and immersion breaking behavior.
It is our intention to apply some of the real world lessons learned in our major cities by focusing on "broken windows" - that is, stopping minor transgressions of our social behavior policies before they escalate out of hand. It is my opinion that doing so will reduce antisocial behavior substantially. People who want to be anonymous jerks will not get much pleasure out of being quickly and unceremoniously silenced, booted, or banned. Without the ability to encite "rage & tears", those folks will have no good reason to haunt Pathfinder Online.
All three kinds of tools will be used to help enforce our social behavior policies. But the meta-rule will be: "If you're acting like a jerk, we'll feel free to give you a time-out lasting from minutes to forever without appeal and without warning."
I'm especially concerned with ensuring that new players are able to learn how to play the game, gain some mastery of basic gameplay features, have some fun, and have a great experience without having to worry about someone intentionally ruining it for them by scamming them, killing them, taunting them, or otherwise disrupting their attention which should be focused on dealing with the sensory overload of going into a new virtual world.
I'm secondarily concerned with ensuring that people who choose a low risk / low reward course of play are able to do so without regular interruption by those seeking to gain enjoyment from interfering with them as they go about their business.
What I want is for people to clearly know that the more risk they accept, the higher the rewards they may be able to achieve, and to be able to assess the risk of the area they are in and the actions they are taking with reasonable ease. Nobody should be surprised to discover they're in a PvP free-for-all subject to being attacked by hordes of well-prepared opponents. On the other hand, it should be clear to those same players that if they really want to find those super-rare resources, or track down that really tough monster, or explore beyond a border claimed and patrolled by hostile forces, that they're accepting the risk that entails.
Players should be able to operate in an area of risk/reward that makes them feel most comfortable.
Players should also be free from metagame harassment of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political or religious affiliation, favorite college football team, or participation in other MMOs. Taking someone's off-line world into our on-line world will be totally unacceptable and we'll have a very low tolerance for those who break those rules.
(*) Be aware that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. It's impossible to ban a PERSON from Pathfinder Online because its very easy for one human to impersonate many different players - and people can and will do so for all sorts of reasons. The best we can do is try to connect accounts together when we believe they're controlled by individuals who have been excluded from the game, but that is never a perfect solution. The same gay-bashing, neo-nazi thug who insulted your mother and your pet (and then got banned) could be playing the character you're conducting extensive trade with or even following as leader of your party or Settlement. There's just no way to be sure and there are individuals who take a pathological glee in living those kinds of fragmented disparate lives.
I quoted more than was really needed because, in my opinion, it's one of Ryan's best posts.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan has said on more than one occasion (Nihimon help me here) that truly egregious behavior will mean banning, and they won't be shy about it.
A player who consistently generates names that are reviewed and found to be a problem will simply be banned - it will be cheaper to fire the customer than to try and fix the customer.
If that's their opinion when it comes to Naming Conventions, I think it's pretty clear they're going to be just as quick for more serious stuff.
This also seems relevant:
Let's focus on the best-case scenario:
People who actually do want to rile others up just for the lulz are kept to a minimum, and the community views that behavior as so aberrant that it self-policies to a large degree the kids trying to be cynical/tough/ironic/sarcastic/hip/cool who just don't know any better, and acts like the body's immune system when it's someone who is actually interested in pouring gasoline on the place and burning it down just to watch it burn - identifying them quickly, bringing attention to them swiftly, and being happy to be well rid of them when they're forcibly removed from the premises.
The quality of community thus engendered attracts a great audience of folks who have been looking for that kind of community attached to a fantasy sandbox, and have been turned off by the toxic, degenerate, schoolyard bullies that seem to populate all the others. That's a positive feedback loop as the healthy nature of our community becomes a feature of the product, used by evangelists to recruit their friends.
Societies tend follow the ground rules laid down at their inceptions. They build momentum. Barring major disaster or a significant change to the environment, societal patterns tend to reinforce themselves. If you have good patterns from the start, you tend to get a good development long term. If you have unhealthy patterns at the start, you fight the tide forever trying to fix the problem.
Just look at the difference here, on the Paizo forums, which have been well groomed from the start to engender a healthy society, and compare them to what you find on other RPG discussion forums. This isn't rocket science. The days when all this had to be figured out by black-boxing the community or operating on conventional wisdom and guesswork are long over. There's tried and true practices for managing great on line communities, and we're just going to use them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@AvenaOats, I appreciate the concern and the suggestions. I have really bad arthritis in my knees. Most of the time, I get by on just a couple of Aleve, but I have some harder stuff when it gets worse. My wife's been dragging me to the gym lately (I definitely need it) so between that and my Aikido classes I'm pushing my body harder than I have in quite some time. I tend to prefer natural cures myself. I'm especially wary of prescription pain meds, and refuse to take them for more than a day or two without taking at least a couple of weeks off.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ah joints are a pain. Good to ration meds: They work better that way anyway. My bro has painkillers for his spine which sucks, atm. But I tell him if he can keep his attention on other things it helps reduce the pain as well as using necessary pain-killers which obviously mess with other things eg sleep etc.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nihimon - Depending on your Aikido dojo and sensei, this may bad form, but siting in seiza can be *very* hard on the knees, and you may want to check without your sensei to see if it would be acceptable to sit in lotus instead.
It's not traditional, but your health should come first.
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Goblin Squad Member
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... siting in seiza can be *very* hard on the knees...
Again, I really appreciate the concern and advice.
We don't sit in Seiza at all. We're mostly an older bunch - there is the occasional youngster, but I'm actually one of the younger regulars and I'm 42.
Didn't mean to hijack the thread to talk about my health issues, though... that's something old people do :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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It's ok, I only have a couple of years left before I hit the 40 mark myself. I almost didn't post about the seiza thing, but some Dojos are incredibly strict about that kind of thing.
Anyway, you're kind of a fixture around here, so we want you to be well in your advancing years. :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nihimon - Depending on your Aikido dojo and sensei, this may bad form, but siting in seiza can be *very* hard on the knees, and you may want to check without your sensei to see if it would be acceptable to sit in lotus instead.
My sensei recommended I sit in a Lazyboy recliner with a drink holder in the arm. Works great and my knees never felt better! ZZzzzzzzz
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nihimon - Depending on your Aikido dojo and sensei, this may bad form, but siting in seiza can be *very* hard on the knees, and you may want to check without your sensei to see if it would be acceptable to sit in lotus instead.My sensei recommended I sit in a Lazyboy recliner with a drink holder in the arm. Works great and my knees never felt better! ZZzzzzzzz
hehe... I got a cuddle recliner earlier this year. Nice to have the space for my woman to cuddle next to me while I watch TV or play a game. :P
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think a great punishment would be "The curse of Pharasma".
1. You can not utilize threads for a week.
2. Your attributes, traits, movements, etc are halved.
3. You can not utilize monuments to dispel negative effects.
4. You can only use natural healing or remedies. You can only be healed or cured by a Cleric who worships a deity in direct opposition of Pharasma.
5. You are marked as accursed, for all to see.
6. If you are killed you will respawn in a far off land and with no means of returning to the River Kingdoms until the curse is lifted.
Ryan Dancey had written somewhere that the worst condition to suffer in an MMO is boredom. I believe this curse's effects will achieve that goal in punishing the PC.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea of "The curse of Pharasma".
It allows players to realize they have something valuable (like oxygen) that they could lose.
I'm not sure when the most appropriate moments for "losing the mark of Pharasma" aka "curse" would be?
Eg absolute zero rep (-7,500) + some other measures of gameplay or reaction from other players?
I like the idea that PFO simply has such a feature that could occur to some players. EVE generally creates a lot of buzz when you hear a ship was blown up for 850$. It's good drama to make use of some players skirting the extremes and suddenly falling off a cliff.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If we (the player characters) are specially blessed by deities, it makes the deity seem more "real" if they can also revoke (even for a short period) that blessing for poor behavior. I like it.
I would definitely put threads, monument use, and access to any bindpoints other than your original into the penalty pot. As for mortal enforced punishments, access to banks in NPC towns or even access to NPC towns could certainly be a result of poor reputation.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Reputation should only come into account of when a player is banned (which that Curse is. It is a week long ban by another name) if reputation is somehow tied into how favoured one is by Pharasma, and even then I would consider it a mistake.
Remember that reputation has no bearing on how much someone deserves a ban, unless the developers outright say that people should not be engaging in unsanctioned PvP. A character who kills an unsanctioned target once per week, but otherwise acts as a kindly individual could still have a low reputation. The only thing that reputation measures is the ratio of sanctioned:unsanctioned combat (or other activities that alter reputation) a player is involved in.
If reputation was renamed to Favour of Pharasma, then having a curse levied onto a player for unsanctioned PvP would make sense. You are killing other characters who have been blessed with her favour, and she doesn't appreciate that, so there goes the benefits of her favour to you for a little while. Sanctioned PvP becomes PvP that is Sanctioned by Pharasma, which actually makes sense from an RP PoV. It makes the entire thing more acceptably arbitrary (Pharasma, as a god, is arbitrary after all).
However bans should be withheld for actual griefers. And unsanctioned PvP isn't griefing. You can grief while you are performing unsanctioned PvP, but you can also grief while you are standing in the middle of town twiddling your thumbs.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'd say that going lower than the absolute zero Rep + "Other factors" leads to "loss of mark of Pharasma" then perhaps you lose some skill-training on your next 3 deaths irrespective of how or when or why.
It would be like the system of:
1) Foul
2) 2nd Foul: Verbal Warning (Green Card)
3) 3rd Foul: Temporary Sanction (to the player & team) (Yellow Card)
4) 4th-repetitive Foul/Major Foul: Permanent Sanction (Red Card)
I think "losing the mark of Pharasma" would be 3). Banning would be 4), to break up the stages. And if it's 3 deaths then it's 3 deaths for eg it's not time dependent but result dependent.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The result would be that no one would ever get recruited to an organization without an incredibly indepth interview process. The game developers have said that they want to encourage people leaving the newbie zones. Sanctioning organizations for the actions of their members does the exact opposite of that. One of the best methods for tempering the actions of a abusive players is to place them into an active crowd of better behaving players. Punishing groups for their members would prevent that from every happening. No organization would recruit the members with any risk of being sanctioned, which means they are never in the company of better players.
Punishing players should be targeted, it should be entirely in the purview of well trained customer support staff, and it should preferably be transparent. You cannot automate banning systems. There are far too many ways that griefers can then take control of the system and bend it to their means.
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Goblin Squad Member
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With such a system banning might even become an automated consequence, graduating in seriousness until the status of permadeath was achieved.
I was a chat mod and GM elsewhere. In an attempt to control the worst abuse in chat, we would to double the length of 'mutes', each time a player decided he needed to be a jerk in global. They generally got one warning unless it was really bad, or unless he became a serial be-a-jerk-until-warned-for lulz.
The problem was that we had to rely on memory and word-of-mouth in our own channel.
Regardless of what the punishments are, GW should support their moderators with tools to show a character's punishment history. Preferably from a click on a character name.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Temporary Sanction (to the player & team)Imagine the possibilities for meaningful human interaction if, for example, The Seventh Veil were somehow penalised for me playing my character as the type of a@#$%^e we're concerned about.
In say, the Viking era, life was hard. Imprisonment was generally not an option, because feeding some criminal while he didn't work made no sense. Maiming someone and making him unable to work made no sense. So early punishments might fall along these lines:
1. Death (game equivalent: banning)
2. Exile (game equivalent: banning. Or maybe a switch to sudden death mode.)
3. Weregild. Your family or clan pays precious gold to prevent your death. (game equivalent: your company is given the choice: they can pay Influence to prevent you being banned. If you are a company leader, your nation is given the choice to pay DI to save you. Are you worth it? Will you just do that thing again?)
edit to add: The great majority of jerk behavior will never be caught by GW. By making the company/nation part of the process, you give them reason to police their own. ("Hey, buddy, the rest of us can control our mouths in global. You need to do the same.") And when the company chooses *not* to spend Influence to save some jerk, they are implicitly learning that they might have saved him, if they had spoken up and he had listened earlier. They learn that they just need to kick out the next jerk that doesn't get under control.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The result would be that no one would ever get recruited to an organization without an incredibly indepth interview process. The game developers have said that they want to encourage people leaving the newbie zones. Sanctioning organizations for the actions of their members does the exact opposite of that. One of the best methods for tempering the actions of a abusive players is to place them into an active crowd of better behaving players. Punishing groups for their members would prevent that from every happening. No organization would recruit the members with any risk of being sanctioned, which means they are never in the company of better players.
Punishing players should be targeted, it should be entirely in the purview of well trained customer support staff, and it should preferably be transparent. You cannot automate banning systems. There are far too many ways that griefers can then take control of the system and bend it to their means.
Yes Morbis, you beat me to the punch.
By punishing the group, based on the actions of one or a few, you will also create a whole new means of griefing. You would hurt the law abiding, good samaritan. Meanwhile the groups of griefers would face no additional penalty at all.
I can see it now.... Two new characters enter the starter town. They claim to be new to the game and big fans of Pathfinder TT. They claim to be Husband and Wife in real life (this is truly effective sucker bait in an MMO).
Once they are in your group, they will play nice for some time. It might even be a few days. Then, Bam!!! They go on a terrible noob kill spree, tea bagging and frapping every kill they tally up, and with your company / settlement logo floating over their heads!!!
They then go skipping off into the sunset, wearing Green Hats, and delete themselves! And you are left holding a bag, that smells stinks of crap.
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Goblin Squad Member
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They then go skipping off into the sunset, wearing Green Hats, and delete themselves! And you are left holding a bag, that smells stinks of crap.
Public Disclaimer: We at Green Hat Inc. are in no way associated with the individuals in the afore mentioned post, nor do we condone such behaviors as noob killing, tea bagging, frapping or especially skipping...while wearing green hats.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Everything we've seen so far leads me to believe the Settlement or Company will be offered an option to either kick the a#$~@+$s, or accept the Reputation loss. I really don't think the devs are so stupid that they'd leave such an obvious loophole in place...
It has nothing to do with their intellect, and likely more to do with, "can these loopholes be accounted for and dealt with"?
There may be thousands of things they would like to do, and only a few dozen they can do. The difference is where the players come in, to guard, police and avenge for themselves.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea of involving the company and settlement in policing their members when it comes to bad behavior, but I really don't think paying influence to avoid a ban is a good thing. That seems like a system that would be rife with potential for griefing; you can consistently be a jerk to a group of people as long as you pay this price. Bans should not be 'bought off', especially when the purchase price is in a renewable resource.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Temporary Sanction (to the player & team)Imagine the possibilities for meaningful human interaction if, for example, The Seventh Veil were somehow penalised for me playing my character as the type of a@#$%^e we're concerned about.
Yeah, I'm not thinking any given action or any given player. As Urman mentions more of a way for a group to have an accounting ledger for their members actions and of course be able to see when there is a spike in rep loss or so on and deal with it (as Nihimon more or less points out).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I like the idea of involving the company and settlement in policing their members when it comes to bad behavior, but I really don't think paying influence to avoid a ban is a good thing. That seems like a system that would be rife with potential for griefing; you can consistently be a jerk to a group of people as long as you pay this price. Bans should not be 'bought off', especially when the purchase price is in a renewable resource.
It all depends on the level of the transgression. The 'ruler' got to decide if weregild was even an option - some offenses are just death sentences or exile. Weregild only affects lesser offenses, and even then it doesn't have to be cheap. It's a last warning before a ban, that yellow card.
(I'd think the age/rep of the character might enter into it as well, both in determining if Influence payout was an option and how much. Old character with clean record, mid to high rep? Month old character with very low rep? Justice doesn't have to be equal for all cases).
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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It has nothing to do with their intellect, and likely more to do with, "can these loopholes be accounted for and dealt with"?
There may be thousands of things they would like to do, and only a few dozen they can do. The difference is where the players come in, to guard, police and avenge for themselves.
Well I guess the point isn't to punish a group for MAKING a bad choice, but for KEEPING, a bad choice. I don't think GW are stupid.