Staff/Player Transcription leaked by the ALA

ALA - Allanaki Liberation Alliance. Old clan from when Arm was fun??

also nerds

I was actually in this. A staffer animated a mekillot and killed me when I was trying to get to the camp that moved like every other day. He apologized that he was only joking around, but he couldn't rez me because I was waying someone when I died. Ahhh, the good ol days. Also one of the times I quit.

If he truly animated the mekillot he could have just roleplayed and intimated your character.

Do you mind sharing who that was?

See... heres the thing. You, jcarter, and @princehyacinthus have all said things I mostly agree with. but nobody, you included, actually addressed your concluding question.

Q: "What's so arbitrary about this?"

A: It's not in the rules. Seriously. it's not. Thats why its the literal definition of arbitrary

And if you need further convincing...

There are only two ways to govern a group of people: arbitration and rule of law.

Arbitration is where someone makes up shit on the spot. and typically this decision lasts as long as it takes for the arbitrator to just decide another thing. And sometimes its retroactive and sometimes its not but the inconsistency makes it very tryng on people. Arm is insanely arbitrary. most of the rules are hidden in conversations on the gdb if they're written down at all. and they tend to vary by whichever staffer is revoking your karma.

Contrariwise rule of law is based on setting rules down, in advance, and in writing unless the culture lacks written language (e.g. ancient Mongols). rule of law is only retroactive when done so explicitly and typically thats only done to pardon people who were punished by a law that has now been made more lenient. or one revoked entirely. People generally are less miserable and more productive because knowing what is/isnt allowed in advance allows people to pursue clearer paths to their goals.

but now i'm rambling. Lemme demonstrate how buried this arbitrary ruling is...

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Say you're a new player. Never played arm before, dont have friends playing, and maybe this is your first rpi too. You go to Arm's site. What do you see?



The rules section's a little. well. uh. Let's just say it isnt getting prime real estate.

Whats gonna happen? Odds are noob-you is going to click one of the first two links - New to MUds or Create a Charactr. The former links you to the latter, though the link name is "Quickstart" for some reason. odds are you'll wind up going to the page twice if youre being thorough. Create a Character will link you to a metric fuckton of other things, including the Walkthrough. which itself links to a cubic metric fuckton of other things. and none of the pages links to the rules.

But maybe youre really, really dedicated to not fucking up and unintentionally break any rules. Youre the best kind of noob. You actually give a shit about making a good imprssion. So you were paying enough attention to realize you hadnt read any actual rules yet. So you drill down to the Rules link and click the fuck out of it. Here's what you see:



So after reading that clustefuck of IC/OOC mixing nonsense you probably dont come away with the impression communicating IC details is a big deal. In fact there isnt a single rule against it. Because the official rules page on the offical site doesnt even broach the subject of IC or OOC discussion. Neither do any of the other pages Ive mentioned or the pages they link to.

But maybe you were a superdupernoob. Like the best noob ever. and you read the documentation on EVERY. FUCKING. COMMAND. before you played. You would have found this gem for the OOC command:



besides misusing 'nor' it rather strongly implies that it is appropriate to discuss IC information and game mechanics on the gdb. both of which will get you banned. How fucked up is that?

So you go and have your noob adventures. Shit happens and you blog about it. All of a sudden some staffer is telling you that youre banned for dropping IC shit. As Nyr put it: Let's see.. one case where someone decided to write about their recent char experience on a blog and took it very personally. We said its fine, but you cannot play the game. Not only was it incorrect, but weird. A lot of ic discussion of recent events. "Oh, well its freedom of speech," he said, to which we said, "Yes, you have the right to speak freely. You also are free to not play this game anymore."

So yeah. thats the exact meaning of arbitrary. You get hit with a hidden, inconsistently applied rule that contradicts the actual rules and that no one that told you existed in advance. plus in this case it reads like the guy got banned while simultaneously learning the rule existed. So double dick points for nyr/whoever.

Oh and as to the location of the rule he broke... Ive ranted about it a while ago. So Ill just quote:



... and if you went to the thread and read rule 2 youd notice there's absolutely no mention about posting IC information anywhere other than the gdb being against the rules. so. other than reading every thread until youre lucky enough to stumble onto where one staffer said not to do that youd have no way of knowing it was against the rules.

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Funny thing is I agree with your sentiment. i dont think people should be allowed to share IC stuff than can impact gameplay... though banning for doing that should only be in extreme cases like revenge-outing someone to get them killed, or something where youre clearly dropping ic intel with malicious intent.

but regardless, if talking about IC stuff going to be that much of a deal they need to put it in the fucking rules section so people know what they are agreeing to in advance.

Hell fucking yeah, man. Id make suggestions but it might ruin the fun of seeing how long it takes the staff to notice you. If you decide to go ahead, just make sure to break all the rules they didnt document. maybe you can grief them into doing what they should have done two decades ago.

Fantastic post, BF. The way the imms have laid out the 'rules' between the GDB and the helpfiles is ridiculous, confusing, and, as you've aptly put it, arbitrary. For a bunch of people that seem to care so much about enforcing the rules, they certainly don't make it easy to find them all in one place and laid out clearly and concisely. And they don't give a shit how unfair that is.

And the most fucked up thing is that now that this topic was brought up here, no one who cares about their future with the game can go over to the GDB and suggest that they put the "no spreading IC information outside the game" rule on the website, because staff cares more about sniffing out who reads/posts on these forums than actually taking constructive advice.