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Should all Alts be Public?
#643076 - Thu Apr 02 2009 01:59 PM
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Some time this year (probably the summer), the current threads of the Dream will be frozen (we'll announce specifics weeks in advance) and a new upgraded structure will be set up. There will be no automated importing of old characters. You would need to re-create the profiles for any current Dream avatars.
My debate topic concerns whether in the new system, all alts should be public. Should fellow players know if two characters they are interacting with (or who are interacting with each other) are being run by the same player? I used to consider there to be advantages to not knowing who the player was, as it allowed for more authentic character interaction. But the downside is that the OOC curiosity factor seems to swell and overshadow the presumed benefits.
I wanted to know what other players thought about the topic. This issue is not so much a concern to those who essentially play just one avatar. I really want to hear from those who enjoy playing a variety of character types and want other characters to respond to the them appropriately.
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Don't do it. No. Not at all. There are many people on this website with hidden characters they want hidden, and it should always be that way, as it should always be respected. There is a wealth of mystery in not knowing who belongs to who that is completely beneficial to role-playing and interacting. Yes, some might want to know who has who's alts, but is it really fair to rip that right away from the pgs with hidden alts?
On a similar side of things, I absolutely love not knowing who plays who. If I knew who was played by each pg, and therefore focused on each pg, instead of the character they are trying to represent, then I could easily determine how they roleplay as a whole, how they decide things, how they set things up, etc, regardless of the character they play. Telling me who all their alts are will in effect destroy the possibility of being stuck wondering what their character will do or what scenario they might set up next. It rips away mystery and replaces it with probability is what I'm getting at.
I don't understand this whole 'everyone is expected to make a new profile' business. I thought MZDM was about preserving the past. Having to make 30 new profiles seems a bit unfair, and more unfair for characters like Squic and Britt. We also will no longer get to remember fantastic old profiles like Ubar and great characters of the past. Can't there be a way to transfer the profiles over? Or, if you want to remove all unused profiles, transfer profiles with more than 2 posts over, warning those chat-only to report that their acct is, in actuality, being used.
And so help me if you freeze my active Perform adventures indefinitely.
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Furilius Pitch said:
My debate topic concerns whether in the new system, all alts should be public. Should fellow players know if two characters they are interacting with (or who are interacting with each other) are being run by the same player?
No, no they should not. My main reasoning for this would be to counter against bias. From a social aspect, people on this site have an idea of who they like and who they dislike in both IC and OOC terms. I think there have been examples, especially in the chat, of people who would avoid others simply because they know they dislike the PG playing a character. If all alts were public, my belief is that this would just cause more clique-like behavior that personally drives me up the wall.
Also in considering the latest 'revelation' in ESCAPE by Ceera, I have to wonder how much having all alts be public would cause people to create false PG identities, just so they could either escape bias or at least pretend to have some anonymity. It's something I can see happening, depending on how the system is set up.
There will be no automated importing of old characters. You would need to re-create the profiles for any current Dream avatars.
Um... what? I'd like to know what exactly is going to keep someone from spoofing the alias of someone else, especially since they would be able to grab all the information necessary from the public profiles here. I... just can see all kinds of bad happening there.
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Master Flare said:
It all.
aka
I Agree With This Comment.
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Pretty much. No to making alts public, as I know plenty of folks who wouldn't want their alts known, and people would try to hide it anyway. I think it's better to let a PG admit that "these alts go with each other" if they choose to, and not by default...
As for the spoofing problem, yeah, definitely worried there. We don't want people pretending to be other people. There's gotta be some way around that.
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Make it optional. Anyone who really wants to hide their alts will find a way, Pitch.
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Re: Automated Profile Importing.
To be addressed fully at a later date, in a different thread, by the admin who actually would have to try desperately to code a functional way to turn a single text html field into a series of individual fields detailing specific things like height, eye color, etcetera particularly given the wide range of different ways people make profiles.
Or you can just read that and figure out why I'm not planning on doing any automated import of old profiles. Authentication and spoof checking, on the other hand, is fine with me for a brand spanking new character table and profile system.
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"Yes, may I help you?"
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Okay, sounds like you and me are on the same page there, Krin. I'd be tempted to add a "legacy profile" link option for those who don't feel like converting immediately. Since the profiles would be locked in place on this end, that means they'd work fine for a while, but then one would have to convert the profile to the new system on their own when things change.
Trying to convert who knows what format in HTML over to the new database structure would be sheer madness. That, or it'd be worthy of a major prize in computer science.
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Would it be possible to have access to the current forum for a short time after the new one comes up? it would be handy to have acess to our current profiles as we enter data into the new system.
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Master Flare said:
There will be no automated importing of old characters. You would need to re-create the profiles for any current Dream avatars.
Um... what? I'd like to know what exactly is going to keep someone from spoofing the alias of someone else, especially since they would be able to grab all the information necessary from the public profiles here. I... just can see all kinds of bad happening there.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Quick, before the current profiles get locked, post your Public Key in your profile, along with the assurance that you'll sign your new profile using your Private Key. That way, even if someone copies everything down, they can't produce the expected New Signature!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)
iEYEARECAAYFAknWJFgACgkQsMe0o8UtwkesNgCfU8SR4WxOiFMZc1m3yquRchLP
pXIAoKrlCw0rVzOt/IShvyjzf0aCo8S8
=AQhk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Alternately, if /access/ to the old profiles wasn't immediately dropped, you could allow players to make a link to their new profile from the old profile, verifying that the new profile really is the same player. If someone is spoofing you, you don't have to make a link from your old profile to their new one for you.
As for the topical question, and speaking, I also vote no. If I were a PG, I'm sure there would be some PGs for whom I had little to no respect (the rules can't make me have respect) and so I avoid interacting with them (the rules do require that I show respect). Every so often, I might muster enough patience to feign respect for a while, and haul out an alt that I'd been careful keep untouched by my honest opinion, and would want to be able to interact on that basis, rather than avoid interaction altogether.
If all my alts were publicly known to be mine, I think it would be difficult for one of Those People to keep in mind "Ok, Mr. Atheos is logged in as Fluffball-San now, and is going to pretend he has some respect for me, so I should act as if I'm interacting with someone who generally can stand my usual levels of idiocy and not immediately get all defensive and huffy." Heck, it would make it harder for me to stay in character and treat them with respect, if I knew they knew that I was behind that character.
Then again, since the end result would be avoiding interacting with some people altogether and no longer wasting the time giving them second (third, fourth, etc) chances.... I say 'wasting' because chances are nobody actually would change enough to start meriting respect, despite what people would like to believe about the possibility of personal growth... I guess I would end up being less frustrated by the depths to which humanity can sink. That would be a plus.
Bleah. You mnimo have weird problems to deal with. I'm glad I'm just me.
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No. No no no and no.
I have several alts- some of them people know, others people don't. Some of them I want hidden for a reason. I have some alts that are meant to be a mystery, and if the entire forum knew everyone I played- they would make the appropriate connections. And would kill an underlying story I have going on, which was going to be turned into an Adventure thread at some point.
All of that hard work to consciously change my posting style so people wouldn't make the connections would be wasted effort. It's a personal choice to keep them separate from my regular band, and I think that should matter somewhat. If the everyone-knows-the-PGs-behind-the-charas was implemented, I would either not bring the character back at all (thus keeping the mystery) or make a false PG identity.
But, that's just my own two cents <3
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"Yaaaay! Birdies! *feeds them happily*"
((Eee! Thank you Val! Thank you Andrea! The poem and the image are gorgeous!!))
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I must concur that I have no desire to see each player's list of "alts" publicized. Personally, I don't think I try particularly hard to hide the fact that I'm the person behind a variety of logins here. Some people may disagree on that score, but just because I don't explicitly link them together doesn't mean I'm trying to hide those links. That said, I think that my "Dynamism Challenge" might have received a different (I'll not venture a guess as to whether it would have been "better" or "worse") response were I to have used a login with which players were more familiar.
I think that if someone really needed to know if two logins were controlled by the same player, they could ask them. Considering the fact that I've never received a PM asking me if I was [login X], and I imagine most others don't either, I don't think there's a particularly large consensus as to the need to publicize this information.
Additionally, I would very much appreciate it if - when the coding switch-over occurs - we could have access to our old profiles in some shape or form. I know that I would not remember all of the things I have written down in my various profiles, nor do I any longer have them all written down in Notepad or Word files. Honestly, at the point of "swap," I think I'd like to do nothing more than copy and paste my old profiles into my new ones - albeit making the necessary changes to fields and such.
I can't claim to speak for everyone in that regard, but I'm willing to wager that more than a few others would like to do the same.
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Ditto.
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Mind, you mouthbreathers are going to be misposting all over the place with the new system, so why any of you even remotely think this is a relevant issue is beyond me.
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Ichak
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Member #4378
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Posts: 441
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I have only a couple of alts, one I've only played a few times, and one I've never used, or even completed a profile for, so I'm personally somewhat indifferent...but I have to ask, why are you deliberately stirring this hornet's nest? There are several multi-avatar players who have publicly said that, in addition to their known avatars, they have some that they want to keep secret. Exposing those would at the least upset the players, and at the most would cause those players to quit the dream.
From the description, I gather that the new forum's profiles will have a number of defined fields, rather than a single field with a template. Are you planning to require that each of those fields be filled? At the least, I hope that you allow a generous space for a "general description" field, because I can foresee some players trying to save work by copy-pasting their current profiles into it, and typing "see general description" into the remainder of the fields...
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P.S. - The bird bites.
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Ichak said:I have to ask, why are you deliberately stirring this hornet's nest?
Krin should correct me if I'm wrong on this- my guess is hope. Hope on at least a few fronts. Hope that people here are mature enough to focus on the part of roleplay that is /interactions between characters in roles/ rather than the implicit part of /interactions between the people behind those roles/. Hope that the inner workings that make the multiple-character system work can be simple and easy to make work well, rather than complex and subject to unexpected bugs hiding in the woodwork where you'd have to tear down large portions of code to fix them. Hope that there'll be a project where the thanks-to-complaints ratio is better than one-to-ten.
Hope, however, is futile, so clearly the real reason for, as you say, stirring this hornet's nest, is a combination of masochism and morbid curiosity. Oh, and there may be a side-bet somewhere to the effect of "Nobody will vote 'yes' for any reason other than to be contrary - they wouldn't really mean it or try to back it up with intelligent reasons."
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Okay. I get the message. Alts must stay private.
This is a related question for Krinele...
Can AMS be set up so that a GM can limit the # of Avatars per Player, per thread (or other Player-based limitations/filters) without relying on Admin communication or revealing who plays who? If the GM sets a thread for max 2 Avatars per Player (or 1, or to exclude all Avatars by a certain Player, etc.), can the system do it behind-the-scenes at the Player level and the Player will just get a standard reject message: "You have reached the allocated number of [#] avatars for this thread."
Granted, this isn't really a burning problem given our community size. But I'm talking about systemically to reduce reliance on Admin intervention to coordinate such things. Would that be a coding nightmare?
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Ichak said: I hope that you allow a generous space for a "general description" field
Cyborg 42 said: Hope, however, is futile
'Nough said for my actual response.
Pitch, I think we were thinking maybe five to seven hundred characters when working with the initial prototype? Heck, that wasn't even to prevent what you suggest, Ichak... I'm in it primarily to stem "unnecessary" adverbs and adjectives.
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Furilius actually took one of my "being contrary" responses in several ways with his request. FP, your response is after the horizontal rule in my post.
Cyborg 42, one of our best reasons against having hidden alts lies in Furilius' question there, and I think you probably know this one so realize I'm not actually telling you this. Just pointing out the reasons.
With any player, there will be other players who they absolutely cannot stand. If anyone says they don't, please realize that the NCD is still a fairly small representation of role-playing people, and we lack the interest of certain key groups that a great deal of people cannot stand.
But I digress. Let us focus on people that you absolutely cannot stand. Under the current system, if one of these people really wants to role-play with you, they can make a new alt and pretend to be someone else... sometimes they have enough skill to not be blatantly obvious, but generally you'll figure it out when the tendencies that routinely popped up causing you to absolutely not stand them will pop up again.
So, this person's tendencies finally pop up again in RP. You realize you cannot stand them, and start to wonder who they are. Then you whine and mope to me about how you've just ended up wasting another avatar's development with someone who just wants to get kinky.
Eventually, you start to shy away from newcomers, and only role-play with your own group of friends... voila, you end up with a very exclusive clique through the very nature of not knowing who you're dealing with.
Just advocating for the devil, one of the many jobs of an admin.
FP, it's entirely do-able - I was planning on such a feature (or at least limiting to one character per PG) already in my concepts for how RP's could work. Say, for instance, if I also get a read permission set up for individual threads so they could be run as follows:
Public thread that works like a newscast, giving the generalized results as observable by the universe at large.
Private threads are viewable to just one side, or even one character.
So, limiting to one character per role-play would prevent a PG from playing both sides of the fence and potentially metagaming by having read access to both threads.
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Krinele Fullin said:
Pitch, I think we were thinking maybe five to seven hundred characters when working with the initial prototype?
The gist was to have a one-paragraph very brief description (like the first paragraph in a Wiki entry) at the top (I don't remember the character count) which I called "Brief Profile".
Then certain required fields (so everyone know where to look for the most critical data).
The rest of the standard group of Categories (and standard fields within) would be optional but recommended. (These were my preferences for 8 Profile Categories and Fields, but nothing's finalized). Players could also add custom ones like Karol allowed with the current profile formatter.
There was also going to be an alternate free-form HTML field, which, in theory, Players could just copy the HTML code over from the current profiles. But the problem with that is the Player then has to maintains two sets of data. And it undercuts the whole point of trying to have relevant info in the same consistent place for quicker reading. It would serve better as a "creative expression profile" of the character than the core profile.
The other big thing was being able to group multiple profile tabs (each tab with a set of character attributes) under a single Character login (e.g., The Ora's, Burgle & Binder, David Atheos & Goliath).
* * * * *
I still don't get the spoofing paranoia. To my knowledge no one's ever assumed another's login maliciously. If it were to happen, it would be uncovered fairly quickly, so I wouldn't get the culprit's point, other than being a temporary hassle to Admins.
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Furilius Pitch said:
There was also going to be an alternate free-form HTML field, which, in theory, Players could just copy the HTML code over from the current profiles. But the problem with that is the Player then has to maintains two sets of data. And it undercuts the whole point of trying to have relevant info in the same consistent place for quicker reading. It would serve better as a "creative expression profile" of the character than the core profile.
Another side-note:
My current plans nix this, bossfox. While I understand the whole "creative expression profile" thing, my present belief is that the art of creating and playing the character should be seperate from the presentation of information about them.
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I always considered that HTML freeform page to be more of a sop to anticipated protests of trampling player's creativity. I'm fine with it being outside the scope of the formal profile.
They can always add a "Creative Profile" hotlink under (Category)Appearances or (Category)Pictures that links to a post on the new forum (or the old forum) with the old profile material. It's like they would do for a "Home Page" link (link to old one until new one is set-up). Under the Field Names in Appearances, Players should basically have a clear data entry mechanism to create linked text (Link Name | URL).
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Krinele Fullin said:
Cyborg 42, one of our best reasons against having hidden alts lies in Furilius' question there, and I think you probably know this one so realize I'm not actually telling you this. Just pointing out the reasons.
Actually, the "restrict posting based on PG" hadn't occurred to me...
Public thread that works like a newscast, giving the generalized results as observable by the universe at large.
Private threads are viewable to just one side, or even one character.
So, limiting to one character per role-play would prevent a PG from playing both sides of the fence and potentially metagaming by having read access to both threads.
Nor had the "restrict VIEWING based on the PG" option.
At first glance, however, they both look like very interesting features with a lot of neat potential!
In regards to the concern of newbie-paranoia-due-to-detested-kinkseekers, my gut feeling from a security perspective is that any code-based solution will be susceptible to being gamed to breaking the preferences of one party or the other (revealing hidden alts, or being subject to interaction with an Undesirable) unless some amount of randomization gets used in key spots. I state this not as a complaint or mandate, but just because this has some hallmarks of other security problems I've seen which were insoluble until certain randomizing factors were thrown in - and I think it's a neat topic.
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On the alts question, I'm mostly on the "don't make them public" side because of tradition. The other bit is that people will try to hide the alts anyway.
The biggest reasons for making them public are to prevent people from being sneaky with their alts, in ways that probably shouldn't be allowed anyway. This includes ban-dodging.
I personally don't see a reason to hide my own alts. While I'd rather people figure out who they are from me, or work it out on their own, I don't have any truly "secret" alts. Also, you can't hide "alts" in tabletop games or anything else offline. The online world lets us play the shell game a lot easier, though I'm not sure why we should do that.
Still, people are going to want to do it anyway, so if the system handles things behind the scenes so someone can look like more than one PG, if they have the skill and drive to pull it off, more power to 'em. I think no-one should ever need more than one real PG account, then, and the admin's job would be much easier that way.
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I'm still completely baffled as to the point of a PG login.
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