CLOK BBS

It became apparent yesterday that the Karma command can and does get abused.

The situation was: A GM asked over the chat channel for players to chat ideas with regards to ideas on how to improve some abilities for guilds and other improvement ideas. During the course of this conversation, I chatted nothing hateful, nothing in CAPS LOCK, and nothing that resulted in a response of Kent, Please! Or any other complaint stated against me on the chat channel.

Nevertheless, someone decided I did not have the right to participate in this discussion any longer and used Karma to silence me from the chat channel. I received the frustrating message ending in “…Maybe you should try being nicer!”

The primary two frustrations for me is the lack of clarity of rules surrounding the Karma command; also the lack of feedback during the Karma - process. For the former, one is left wondering, “How many other players can decide if I can no longer use chat? Is it two other players? Three other? Is it twenty percent of the number currently logged in? Twenty-five percent? Is it one GM, or is the policy for the GM’s to instruct the player to cease from their hateful chats, and leave Karma only to other players? What if three players want my Karma lowered, but nine players agree with me and want me to keep chatting, do the three trump the other nine?”

I suspect on at least one situation, a player has abused Karma using this method: As he/she was the only player who wanted ‘Joe’ to be silenced, he/she used Karma - on Joe, then logged out, then logged in with another alt to Karma - Joe, and repeated until enough alts succeeded in meeting the invisible requirement to silence Joe. Such a player needs a swift and decisive lesson in the use of the Ignore command, at the least.

The second frustration, the lack of feedback until it’s too late, could be dealt with bringing in a feedback mechanic to the effect of a message, “Joe has had his Karma reduced” over the chat channel. If Joe sees this once, he has the chance to change or voluntarily hush for a while without needing to have other players lower his Karma until it’s too late. Also, it would also help expose the multi-alt abuse described in the previous paragraph.

Personally, when Fredegar does a Karma - on Joe, I would like to see the public message, Fredegar has lowered Joe’s Karma, as the current system protects the cowardly and I don’t like systems that protects the cowardly. If this route won’t be taken, as a second idea, that when lowering someone’s Karma, a reason has to be stated. For example, “Karma - Joe For talking hatefully about Polish people.” Then either everyone, or at least Joe alone, would get the message, Joe's Karma has been lowered for talking hatefully about Polish people. If a reason cannot be provided for lowering someone’s Karma, then why use it? Conversely, if Joe is indeed saying racist things then that needs to be exposed and addressed in it’s own way.

Also, another safety net to abuse of the Karma - command, would be to have a report sent to the GM’s when it is used, similar to BUG reports, etc. (Maybe it already is, I don’t know). If the same player feels the need to daily lower someone else’s Karma, then this player can be introduced to the solution that the Ignore command is.

Perhaps there are other ideas that can deal with abuse of the Karma command, but these are the ones I could come up with. What do you think?

I noticed that the recent change, that curiously, it is no longer possible to raise another player's Karma, only to lower it. I also noted the help file has not caught up with the change.

Karma is so rarely used that adding and adapting it is low on the "to-do" list. GM's can see when someone uses the karma command, and if we catch people doing the above, there will be consequences. People are free to karma anything they deem necessary, so just take the time out, RP and before you know it, you'll be able to chat again.

This was mentioned in another thread, and I'll mention it here. Using question or any other method to circumvent a karma time out will result in you losing all your chat abilities for a while. Don't make us have to police this, we are already busy doing FUN things for the MUD.


Also - having reread your post. We will NEVER make it so that you can see who is using the karma command. The very LAST thing we need is another reason for everyone to fuss and fight over CHAT. There is more than enough of that. Sorry Kent. We're not protecting the cowardly, we're allowing you to deal with chat annoyances privately. Deal with it.

Karma was put into place so that players can moderate each other instead of us having to do it for them. GMs tend to ignore the OOC chat channel more often than not. What little we're willing to do is to watch the Karma alerts we get whenever it's used. If we see someone pop on a bunch of alts to karmasilence someone, we'll take care of it. It hasn't happened yet that I'm aware of, so kudos to people for that.

As the OOC channel is more or less "anything goes", that goes for peoples' right to karma-minus you even if you don't think it was justified or appropriate. I'm sure you're aware that it's possible to annoy, frustrate, offend, or otherwise put someone off even when that isn't your intent. If a person constantly karma-minuses someone as frequently as possible, we'll notice that due to the alerts and put a stop to it as well, as that's a bit over-the-top.

We don't intend to explain what it takes to karma-silence someone. It's intentionally not revealed to the players. So just karma-minus someone and move on, rather than worrying about "was that enough to silence them?" The requirements also frequently change as we deem necessary.

The anonymity isn't to protect cowards, it's to protect nice people. I know some people who would likely not use karma even if they wanted to, if they knew that would risk offending the person they karma-minused because they knew who had done it to them. Also as Zoiya said, it's to prevent further drama and "ganging up" on someone you know just karm-minused you. It would just be "What? Bob just karma-minused me? Well I'm going to do it right back!! Hey friend of mine, karma-minus Bob too, he just tried to karma-minus me! Let's get him!"

Raising karma was removed because many people who were karma-silenced would immediately send tells to everyone online saying "hey, please type this: karma + myname" and we felt that defeated the purpose, and also caused some unnecessary additional drama with people fighting over "karma votes" for or against.

If you want to provide a reason for why you karma-minused someone, feel free to send the reason to the person in a tell, or send a report if you think it's something the GMs should be made aware of.

Kent explained my concerns very well.

Being told to 'deal with it' is like slapping someone's wrist and telling them, 'Run along, now.' It doesn't address the problem.

There is another thread about this, but my copy attempt failed.