Staff Comms Monitoring
Does this actually benefit the game?

I have staffed on other M*s in the past and it was possible to mute various comms streams. Staff quickly figured out who was logging into MOO Sex and who was logging in to RP and drive plots.

I hope that the Sindome codebase allows similarly selectivity of comms.

Sharing your contact information on OOC-Chat, or the BGBB is allowed as long as doing so does not alert anyone to what character you play. For example, making a BGBB post or an OOC-Chat post with your Discord information is acceptable as long as it will not give away who you play. However, sharing your OOC contact information in a way which reveals who you play (for example, over local OOC, even if disguised) is prohibited, as it would cause our Conflict of Interest rules to kick in right away. Sharing OOC Contact information through IC means (gridmail, SIC, etc) is forbidden. If you want to share your contact information with a specific player upon deciding to leave the game, you may xhelp and ask the Staff to facilitate the exchange.

I get the impression players and staff have just kind of gotten used to this state of affairs and assume changing it would be worse, but when there is 20 pleading help chastity shouts a week I am left with the impression this doesn't benefit players or junior staff and may actually be making running the game worse for everyone overall.

We're playing a MOO run by GMs, don't you want the GMs to know what's going on in the game? I like when I'm siccing or talking on the phone and I get a GM "think" or another in-game reaction. I love that we have such an active staff base today.

I do not want to be hearing multi-coloured game-wide shaming about other players sexual misadventures whoever they are or whatever their behaviour. I don't want to be hearing about anyone cum on OOC-Chat. I make an effort not to get subjected to this in-game and I certainly don't enjoy having it bleed through anyway. If there are rules to enforce it can be done privately between players and staff and doesn't need to involve the entire player base at once.

Like if you choose to make this bed, then lay in it and keep me out of it.

We can choose whether or not we take it personally when staff shouts a game wide wall of yellow text exhorting us to read help chastity.

We are all adults here.

It is an adult game. Some adults make sex part of their RP. Others don't.

Whether or not they spend "too much" time doing that is a conversation that is never going to be settled. It is as old as online gaming itself.

I'd rather have staff MOO wide remind the entirety of the player base. The alternative is to directly engage with people who are spending hours a day writing erotica. THAT would feel targeted.

Having been on staff and been unable to get plots off the ground because people would rather MOO Sex in their apartments than play the game is frustrating. I can relate.

If you are out there RPing, good. Thank you for contributing to the game in a more inclusive way than romantic, "character building" , MOO Sex and it's tangents. (Finding a third to spice things up, or whatever.)

If staff are feeling frustrated because they have invested a bunch of plot time and resources (gear, chyen, etc.) in characters who then turn into MOO Sex fiends, I hope that staff can find a way to ICly deal with that. I trust and believe that staff can. The staffers here are by far the best I staffers of any MOO I have played on in 30ish years.

I know they have it in them to have an influential NPC make a phone call, send a SIC, show up at the apartment and pound on the door, do whatever it takes to get the point across that they don't appreciate their "investment" sitting idle.

I don't engage in this RP personally but I think it's a stretch to say that most of the game finds this to be a waste of time. There is a sizeable portion of the game that appears to spend their majority of the time doing this or pursuing this.

Inappropriate behaviour thrives where it can disguise itself among what is normal. Blanket public admonishments certainly have done nothing at all to curtain the inappropriate actors in this community now, or ever, and only direct intervention solves those issues. If there is rule breaking behaviour then it should be dealt with immediately and directly not obliquely, if the behaviour is discomforting to staff but within the rules the answer is to broaden and tighten the rules regarding sexual behaviour – something staff should have done long ago but chose not to.

Being exposed to the discomforting consequences of a low standard of behaviour should be galvanizing for higher standards of behaviour, rather than ad-hoc shaming which has been shown to accomplish nothing.

I get it for local OOC however, I admit that confuses me as I have used it to help people with commands one time and then gotten into trouble for it. Then I've used it to discusses schedules for RP and then got told off for that another time.

I really think staff should just stop tiptoeing around the issue and just tell people what not to do. If they notice someone is doing that stuff, then instead of telling all 50 players online to stop sexing, just either tell them directly, or set up something that tells them directly in like a couple hours when things won't be interrupted.

Ad-hoc castigation against the entire player community, including all the players like me who fought against such lax standards for sexual behaviour to begin with, makes it everyone's problem. If you're telling me it's my problem it makes it my problem, so I'm making it my problem.

If it's a problem for staff then let's fix it. I am all too happy to remedy this situation because it effects me too, and I think the community will be safer and better for it. So let's choose:

1) Tighter rules and higher standards for sexual content.

2) Player monitoring only as necessary for active plot engagement

These are the two options I see for fixing this situation instead of making noise about it that goes nowhere and does nothing, as you might imagine I am massively in favour of the first and think it would be long overdue in improving the quality of the community.

I realize in practice some of the staff were against such permissive standards for behaviour and content, I know in fact several of them don't love this situation, but they appear as a non-specific monolith in their choices so there's really no option other than to refer to them in that way. I feel badly for staff who are subjected to content they really shouldn't be, I don't think anyone should be. I direct this more towards senior staff who had more sway in the implementation of these decisions and also somewhat less involvement in the daily results of it.

But these are the symptoms that the community was being badly cultivated, so these shouts are effectively saying 'please don't be such obvious consequences of our choices'. Painting players broad brush as responsible only works if no one remembers how we got here.

I would never, ever want to subject anyone on staff to something that made them uncomfortable or threatened or harassed, but I've never received any reciprocation of that empathy or even hint it might exist, so I'm not exactly falling over myself in feelings of protectiveness of the victimhood of people were fully capable of their own remedy.

Sex and the cyberpunk setting of Sindome go hand in hand. We have nude holograms on the levs, ads that flash across your mind for brothels, nudity on the most prominent media channel, a club that broadcasts acts of debauchery dome wide, celebrities who are encouraged to show it all off for more than just the camera and all for an overwhelming sense that someone is always trying to sell sex to you in some form or fashion.

The suggestion that the behavior of player characters be clamped down on and restricted when the world itself is inherently rife with sexuality, seems ludicrous to me.

I don't particularly care what anyone does as long as it's not in my face, so I can also see where staff is coming from though.

I also think that Glitch addressed it well in saying that maybe the messaging is wrong and I'd be cool with basically anything that isn't just a blanket shout of 'help chastity.' Changing the rules themselves just seems like swinging the pendulum too far for something that's not an actual problem.

This isn't unique to SD either, to the points brought up about the ratio of scheming to slice of life. The majority of a game's playerbase usually won't be major plot movers. They just wanna exist in the world, and that's okay. You can always try to make victims of your schemes.

The shouts in my eyes are only a reminder that other people can see your graphic sex talk. It's meant to be a tongue in cheek "get a room" thing, not a "hey you all are bad players, stop having sex" thing. If someone is taking it as the latter or feeling ashamed because of it, I think that mainly has to do with themselves rather than staff.

I don't engage with immies unless I know exactly who is playing them because there's just the same litany of creeps trying to sleaze back into roleplay undetected, players who should have been banned, players who are banned and just evading (or tacitly accepted). It requires considerable attention and anxiety to keep awareness of the players who have to be avoided and who their latest mask is, meanwhile what peace there is is interrupted by fearmongering shouts about what sexual horrors are going on somewhere, like I needed reminding or blame for that?

There is about six players I feel completely safe roleplaying with in this community, and staff have made an effort to make everyone else constantly suspect either by vague accusations or deliberately hiding dangerous players… like while we're here, why on earth can someone be temp banned for sexual non-consent while having their identity hidden from the rest of the community?! Why the fuck are we spending so much effort to disguise and obfuscate who is being inappropriate or who is fucking dangerous to me or the rest of us? Maybe everyone else thinks this is harmless but I would consider that deeply ignorant of the people that exist in the bottom of the barrel.

Like pick a lane, either it's appropriate or not but don't tell me it's appropriate when it happens to me and out of line when it's someone else. The standards and safety should be for everyone, we shouldn't be afraid of who we're roleplaying with or needing to vet who is getting the side eye from staff or who might have the @rule 5 bans and is back with a new face. It's not fucking fair to have to put up with this shit on top of everything else this game demands.

We have the option to ci chat, cignore someone, leave xooc, not participate on the boards, leave @notes, xhelp, e-mail in. We have the option to state in ooc that we don't want to participate in sexual conduct or roleplay or sexual allusions/flirtations with a character and that must be respected. We have IC resolutions to kill creepy characters if we want to pursue it this way.

It's an adult game with adult themes. And sexual areas are one area we can opt-in or out of. Some public areas of the game used to be much more explicit before it changed with the playerbase or through staff enforcement after people felt it was detracting. I think we're still in a good place right now. People get cracked down on when it goes too far out of line. What people do behind closed doors or between consenting adults (that isn't breaking the rules of the game) it's cool and whatever imo.

Probably some people woudl find more enjoyment if they focused more on plot and the game than sex drama, but if that's a playstyle someone enjoys, it's a playstle someone enjoys.

I think most shouts probably just shouts about some of us getting a little overly frisky in sic or phones and not breaking actual rules. Nearly every time I've encountered a sexual rule breaking player/character it's always been handled via xhelp or notes with a staff response and not once did it involve a shout about help chastity.

If someone is being weird they're generally banned for it from what I have seen. If someone has slipped through the cracks that can be difficult to detect but at the same time I don't think that stricter rules are the answer. All those would do is make anyone who does any kind of erotic roleplay feel targeted and that's the majority of the playerbase.

What am I supposed to interpret from this? There has been a revolving door on rule 5 violators and non-consent harassment that went unchecked because boys will be boys and it's a dark theme and other such self-justifying bullshit. The game has never prioritized making its players feel safe in their roleplay and this just seems obviously to me like an effort to push blame onto the players themselves rather than have staff take responsibility.

But we don't get the luxury of seeing what everyone is doing, and knowing who is safe, and who is the stalker creep back with a new face and innocent identity smiling and wanting to meet. Staff have an obligation to protect us, not to make us fucking fodder to the worst people in existence in the name of having a 'dark setting'. It's hypocritical, it's abandoning their responsibility, and it's fearmongering about people and content they had a choice about mediating and didn't.

If you have specific information about a specific instance, I welcome you to send it to any member of the games Senior Staff listed here - https://www.sindome.org/staff/ or our regular email address so that it can be investigated.

As in my previous post in this topic - the topic will be brought for a staff discussion in the meeting we have next week and then we will take any actions agreed within.

–Glitch