OOC responses to personal player-character issues and events

[Jirato]

This is a response to the "Who's the star of your guild?" thread, that I am making a new thread for to not derail the original. It mainly addresses suggestions of more open OOC involvement from the GMs.

Bottom line up front: Our ears and eyes are open, our mouths are not. We will nudge you ICly if we feel that it is needed, we will not tell you what's going on OOCly.

I'm trying to avoid as much OOC input about character developments as possible. There have been way too many issues in the past. "Well, when I talked to GM X, they said my character...", "GM Y said this event....", and so on and so on. Even in that thread, there was a specific mention along the lines of "OOC communication with the guru at the time led me to believe my standing with the guild was getting stronger." This needs to stop. We actually have a non-disclosure agreement. This is a fairly new thing within the past couple months, and it's actually kind of hard to stick to (Look at all these cool projects we have planned for you guys!), but we fully intend to stick to it, especially when it comes to personal player character issues and events. You should NOT be told by a GM, on an OOC level, and be openly discussing with the GMs, how a specific faction views your character.

Non-Disclosure:
-Do not discuss any aspect of your GM duties with players outside of official CLOK chats.
This includes, but is not limited to, current or upcoming projects, gameplay mechanics, deep lore, information regarding other PCs or GMs, events, or disciplinary actions.
-Maintain anonymity of yourself and others.

We will NOT:
Counsel you about your character about the best course of action to take involving their IC actions and possible repercussions. / Tell your character that X action will have Y repercussions.
Tell you how NPCs or organizations view your characters or are going to react to things that have happened or that are speculated to happen.
Give you any sort of insight on personal events and situations such as, but not limited to, inner light or joining a restricted guild/group.
Reveal why certain in-character actions were taken for or against your or another character.

We will:
Listen and carefully consider any feedback about any of the above, if you just want to tell us how you feel about a situation, we will read it. We will not be able to respond OOCly with detailed information regarding it, however.

We will give and have given plenty of IC warning before something as drastic as being kicked out of a guild happens. That's what guild probation is for. Getting banned from a town is another issue, but I'd think it's fairly obvious. If you don't want to get kicked out of somewhere, don't break their rules, subvert them, or openly declare war on them. The game world is a wild and dangerous place. Stuff happens. Your characters don't live in some sheltered well-protected environment, they live in a wild rough and tumble quarantine zone where trust is extremely hard to earn. Especially when you have a reputation of being one of those crazy "undying" people.

[Fayne]

I just wanted to clear up some ambiguity I may have caused in my post.

I'll explain more in the email I'm sending to you (I'm in the middle of writing it now), but I think I made it seem like I was on probation in my guild before I was kicked out. Well, that's kinda true, but in fact I had been removed from probation about a week or so prior. So, I'm not complaining that I was kicked from the guild while in bad standing with them, I would expect that. When I was kicked, I hadn't done anything to put me back into bad standing with the guild prior to the events of that day, and I went from trying to get my character back into the right mindset for her guild to having to decide whether or not to leave the guild (IC I should add; if I had wanted to throw RP out the window, I could have said I wanted to stay right then and there, but remember, IC my character had only been off of probation for about a week, and being on probation for so long had caused doubts to creep into her thoughts), to being forced to leave/kicked out of the guild in less than an hour. To say I had no fair warning I was about to be kicked out of my guild would be an understatement.

And because I don't want to get anyone in trouble, the OOC communication I was having at the time with the guru was hopefully before the non-disclosure thingy. It was initiated by me out of frustration with how limited I felt at the time due to being on probation, and since this was before Generalization, it was just that much more frustrating. I was never given any direct suggestions as to what I should do to improve my standing in the guild, but I was told at least once that sometging I had done had helped me significantly. Maybe that would be breaking the non-disclosure rule, but I know it helped to encourage me, and it gave me motivation to keep up the RP I was doing when otherwise I wasn't seeing any results at all. Sometimes a bread crumb can be enough to keep you going when you're starving, you know?

[Jirato]

To clarify, this official policy of ours came about after Vinz had left, he wasn't bound by it and I'm not saying he was out of line at any point, since I wasn't privy to those conversations and exactly what they entailed.

You are more than welcome to vent and share your frustrations with us. We actually want to know, believe it or not. An unhappy player is not good for the game. We just can't provide details of character developments in response. We can listen, let you know that we've considered it, and MAYBE even offer some vague remarks, "I'd think that over more carefully if I were you.", "You're on the right track, keep it up!", "We hadn't thought of it that way.", and so on. But we're not going to sit down with you one on one and tell you all the nitty gritty details of what's going to go down OOCly. If we did that, there's not much of a point to it being a game anymore.