This discussion originated on the Polish sub-forum (
http://fodev.net/forum/index.php?topic=6885.0). Strangely enough, the ideas and reflexions brought up there surprisingly were met with acceptance of virtually everyone involved, with personal feuds and disagreements being cast aside. It made me hope that maybe, if such a level of understanding could be reached here, in the English part, a solution agreeable for everyone could be reached - so I undertook to take it here and start a thread describing our cause.
Now I understand that taking up this issue may cause unnecessary emotions and grief, so I'd like to start with a little disclaimer.
It is not the purpose of this thread to start a witch hunt or, for the matter of the fact declare anyone guilty or seek retribution. What's done is done, the past should be left behind.
It is not the purpose of this thread to start a forum gang war. The way I see it, everyone is going to benefit and the only people that possibly could have anything against this idea have some dirt on their hands.
It is not the puprpose of this thread to start a crusade against the GMs in general. The way I see it, they could benefit greatly from introducing the mechanics I'm about to propose or a functional replacement for them since their credibility would be significantly raised.
After this longish, but necessary introduction I'd like to outline the problem and offer a possible solution.
THE PROBLEMBasically, the problem is the complete lack of transparency when it comes to GM actions. I'm not talking about their powers in general, but the impossibility of finding out who did what at times. There's also an obvious problem when it comes to the course of action some of these people take which at times is puzzling to say the least.
The first part of the problem is manifested by actions harmful to the players impossible to explain by anything aside from GM intervention. Such actions include spontaneous teleportation, sneak item theft 1 hex away from char, NPCs reacting in ways beyond their AI routine, spawning hostile NPCs, slaps for large ammounts of - AP, players having information they could not possibly have otherwise (for example instantly recognizing a new character as a person's alt) etc. Most of us have seen something like that at least once and while admittedly, it tends be funny at times, some of those actions were clearly unprovoked and made with malicious intent. While some of these actions could be explained by unidentified bugs, the rate of occurence and the sense of purpose prevalent in some situations is enough to make quite a lot of people suspicious and demanding explanation.
Now, I do understand that one can live with that, but along with the almighty GM sneak it opens up a new world of paranoia and fear for the gangs recognized as powerful on this server. The line of reasoning is simple and impossible to rebuff - if there are GMs supporting some players while combating others with silly things like that, how can a player be sure that his faction is not being spied on during TC hours or in their base? This issue is further aggravated by the irrefutable fact that there
are screenshots of GMs being on a gang mumble. Yes, there is no solid proof, but there is enough reasonable suspicion and lack of trust to seek a solution.
As to the second part of the problem - some GMs seem to follow an agenda well outside the "official" server rules. They make rules on the fly: "no camping here", "no caravan traps of any kind", "no swearing" (and I do mean swearing, without any racial slurrs involved) are possibly the most common ones. Furthermore, they tend to follow their sympathies and antipathies from the time before they were GMs, with quite a few gangs having their own "angry God"... who happens to be angry even when they don't really sin. Again, it's very hard to present such instances of abuse with reasonable ammount of proof because screenshots are always out of context and can be edited, and in the end it all comes down to GM's word against the player's word.
Last, but not least, there's an Orwellian model of the appeal system at work, not only in the game, but also on IRC. You think a GM did something wrong? Of course you could appeal... to him. Of course if you know who and where to ask and your case is severe enough, you could get your case resolved, but for obvious reasons doing things this way is next to impossible for either new or generally unliked players. Even worse, questioning a GM, even if one has a reasonable point, quite often leads to airstrikes, IRC bans and threadlocks being employed, especially if the said GM is looking like losing the argument. I hope I don't have to explain how such a system is simply wrong and doesn't make the game player-friendly.
And yeah, I know wasteland is harsh, but the point of this thread is that it should be
equally harsh to everyone.
THE RESULTS OF HOW THINGS AREThe issue of the Devs allowing GMs to be malicious to other players without provocation is, I hope, out of the question, so I won't even bring this it under discussion here assuming such actions are strictly prohibited.
In the state of affairs we have, nobody wins aside from the few unidentified egomaniacs and cheaters that caused the emergence of this thread. The consequences of letting them continue carrying on the way they were are as follows:
- the playerbase obviously loses, being deprived of a fair gaming environment;
- the fair GMs lose because they lose respect as a group and people start treating all GMs as enemies, threat etc., avoiding them and making their job harder;
- the Devs lose with the playerbase, risking the failure of their project (nobody enjoys playing rigged games) and losing the most important betatesters (the ones who are aware of this situation and most prone to being upset by it are the ones most experienced a most likely to find bugs).
Furthermore, having such a morally ambiguous opposition between the GMs and players encourages cheating on the part of the players, with two simple psychological mechanisms working for it: "if they are supposed to enforce the law and set the standards and they cheat, why can't I?" and "they cheated me out of X and punished me for no reason, I have to cheat to compensate".
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONSI suggest one, or a combination of the following measures to be introduced to change this situation and make GM actions transparent:
1. Makes the logs of GM actions available to all players on a new, separate forum sub-board. Each GM would have his own thread, the logs would appear with a 24 hour lag to avoid leaking any information sensitive to their current work. This sub-board would be impossible to moderate by anyone except the devteam. The logs should be created via a script that'd filter through the general server log to work around the high ammount of micromanagement doing it manually would entice. People could just check any suspicious situations and report any instances of abuse to the devs. The logs would be automatically removed after a sensible preset ammount of time to conserve server space if necessary.
2. Internet poker inspired solution. Make similiar a board, with screenshots instead of logs. The screenshots would be made at random, quite short intervals, unknown to the GMs and uploaded to a relevant section with a timestamp (imaged linked instead of being pasted into the board to make it more streamlined). If there's a suspicion of abuse, the player would check the time and check the relevant screenshots. Screenshots would be automatically removed after a sensible, preset ammount of time to conserve server space.
3. Make a person with a strong sense of justice from outside the GM and player groups responsible for assessing the complaints against GM and/or moderator abuse to avoid the aforementioned people being able to be judges in their own cause.
4. Make an all-inclusive list of actions prohibited to be performed in-game. That means that any actions outside the list are allowed and can not be punished by any GMs.
All of these suggestions except #2 would be quite easy to implement and would in my opinion greatly increase the quality, efficiency and transparency of GM work, as well as giving the community some sort of real control over their behaviour and a good, reliable tool of fighting pathology whenever it shows its ugly head.
CLOSING REMARKSI strongly urge GMs to respond to this thread without hostility or the usual authoritarian attitude, because none of these suggestions was brought up with hurting you in mind. In fact, I don't see how any reasonable, upright member of the community concerned with the future of this great project have anything against introducing this sort of checks and balances to the GM trade. I'd also like the GMs to refrain from moderating in this thread, as it may and most probably will bring accusations of dishonesty to the table and start a flame - and when dealing with such a serious (and possibly gamebreaking) threat/issue, we should do all in our power to avoid this. There's enough people with moderator powers who are not GMs to keep this one thread civilized. For the same reasons, I urge players who feel hurt by any GM actions to refrain from acting overtly emotional and from pointing fingers or turning this thread into some sort of a lynching party. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't post instances of GM abuse if you have solid proof, I'm just asking that should you do so, act in a civilized manner.
Finally, should anyone feel threatened by this thread and think it'd be a good idea to close or junk it - it's been authorised by Ghosthack, so I think that filling in a letter of resignation instead would be much simpler and less dramatic.
And once again - do
NOT troll or flame here.
