"I would love to hear staff's current stance on SIC as far as how it is perceived ICly. Specifically, I would like to hear if staff feels we need to pretend there are millions we are hearing on SIC and in the who list and we should RP our characters with this in mind similar to how we RP ambient population in rooms, if SIC is some how limited based on grouping or algorithms or the like so what we hear and see is all our characters hear and see SIC wise, if it's something else entirely, or if it's intentionally undefined."
I have gone ahead and updated 'help sic' to include information on how the SIC should be perceived and why you ICly don't hear millions of voices all the time.
The gist is as follows (also available in help sic):
MILLIONS OF VOICES IN YOUR HEAD? AI TO THE RESCUE.
The SIC connects everyone in Withmore who is currently not in a signal deadzone. However, that would make the public SIC channel (used by using 'cm') very loud. From an OOC perspective, we can't spam everyone with thousands of messages a second, that isn't fun. Thus there is an IC reason why you don't see millions of SIC messages an hour.
The IC explanation that follows is purely for RP purposes and can be considered common knowledge by anyone in the city. The game is not actually filtering any public SIC messages that are actually sent by PCs or NPCs in the game (unless you use cignore to ignore someone). This is JUST the IC excuse for there not being millions of messages a minute rattling around in your head.
There is a chained artificial intelligence used by New Light Media whose sole purpose is gate keeping what messages each person in the city receives. This AI uses a number of contextual and meta data clues to determine if you receive one of the millions of messages being sent every minute by the people in the city. A few examples of this include: Proximity, relevancy, entertainment value, advertising value, judicial value, etc. Essentially, you can imagine that an AI is filtering out messages that you aren't going to care about or that are not relevant to you based on billions of datapoints it has collected for each person living in the city. It is very good at its job.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR RP
It's acceptable to acknowledge ICly that you are not receiving millions of messages, and that all messages you send are being filtered through an AI that ensures you aren't being spammed. You can be confident that any messages you would find relevant WILL be shown to you, and that any messages you send WILL be shown to people you would want them shown to. You also can be confident that duplicate messages sent by many senders (such as if a bomb went off and everyone was talking about it) are filtered down so that you can have a reasonable conversation with the people the AI has decided will be part of the list of contacts relevant to you.
This means that you can reasonably assume that when you send a message on the SIC, it isn't being sent to all 65 million people in the city. The exceptions to this are those in positions of authority/relevancy, such as the WJF, Media Personalities, etc., who can be confident that their public messages (where applicable) go out to the whole city.
Again, none of this 'filtering' of messages ACTUALLY happens in the game. This is just an IC reason for why you don't see millions of messages.
SIC WHO
The same 'filtering' is applied to the 'who' command to show who is online. You can consider the 'who' list you see to be an IC representation of people on network that the AI thinks is relevant to you. The 'who' list should be considered 'volatile' in character, as it would be changing moment to moment as the AI decides in real time who is relevant to you based on all the data it has. Again, no actual filtering is happening. You're seeing the full list of people who are actually online / NPCs / not in a deadzone.
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If you have questions, please respond here and I'll answer / update the help file if needed.
-- S
