Automated Ball-Busting Spamcrafting Account Notes

[staff member name redacted] announced it sometime last Spring. It's on the GDB somewhere, but I don't really want to go wading through all that to look. Maybe someone will find and post the link.

The announcement definitely isn't a figment of my imagination because I tend to play lots of merchants and couldn't help but to think that some of his diction was, aheh, crafted to be an attack on players who weren't "crafting correctly." A staff culture of criticism rears its ugly head again. 

Edit: in fact, the announcement has been discussed on this board before, maybe in my peace out to Arm thread, and there was a discussion about how the crafting skills result in items being made with blinding speed once a character reaches a certain skill level - and how the game seems to encourage lots of crafting while new edicts on "proper behavior" stand in contrast to this. 

To really grasp the absurdity of this, it helps to have played in a time before crafting was implemented. More so, it helps to have played a GMH family member during the time RIGHT AS the crafting code was implemented - only to shun it and have all crafting skills removed. Then later, after adapting to the "new" code with a later GMH family member, find that you are critiqued for "faultily" adopting said system - by people who weren't even around when the system was implemented. It's like, if you play this game long enough, you find that it's really hard to do things "correctly" because the definition of what is "correct" is contingent on one thing, really:

the perceptions, philosophies, etc, of people who may not have even played as long as you and who do not view ArmageddonMUD as a singularity or within context, but through the scope of only their own experience.

Just remembered, the crafting account notes announcement was made around the same time that the announcement for the opening of PC clans and warehouses - so maybe, in April or May of last year.

What it seemed like to me was a preemptive effort to dismiss the efforts of aspiring clan builders by writing them off as twinks, code abusers, etc - and having the "automated bad account notes" present to reinforce such a stance.

To be sure, there was no clarity from the staff on what is "too much" or "too frequently" when it comes to crafting. In this respect, it is similar to psionicist unspoken "guidelines" which are left intentionally vague or, more accurately, no guidelines - not even skeletal ones - are listed. So, the result of this is clear:

Players are left with an arbitrary system in which they are not told when what they're doing is wrong until they do it - and then, they are warned/reprimanded/criticized/threatened/otherwise harassed after having no clear rules in the first place. When I pointed this out to Morgenes about the psionicist "rules," he conceded that I was right and apologized for getting as pissed as he got at me. Well, the same thing is true for this new crafting tattle tell code. 

What this does is pave the way for some players to receive more criticism than others based, well, probably largely on the mood/temperament/past experiences of a specific staff member... Not really anything to do with concrete rules for play at all. Just arbitrary bullshit that lets someone like [staff member name redacted] to righteously punish the "twinks" - the ones they don't like, anyway.  

Sorry, i just refuse to go to the GDB. It's there, though.

At the earlier levels (registered merchant / warehouse lease holder), we recognize that PCs may have to sell things to NPCs in order to make ends meet if they are selling goods. However, from Shopkeeper up, goods and services should be geared towards fulfilling PC needs. Spamcrafting or flooding NPC merchant shops may face an OOC/IC response (blacklisting at merchants, for instance). Use common sense.


Did you mean this, Kronibas? (related to making a minor Merchant House)

Well, I said "quietly" because *** mentioned it on a thread, not as an announcement.

Again, I am 100% sure that this isn't some figment of my imagination.

Maybe they scrapped the whole deal, which would be a good thing. But, the way I remember him talking about it, the tattle tell code had been actively worked on and was soon to be implemented.

I remember him using the word "spam crafting," so maybe try searching for that phrase and "account notes" or something.

I honestly don't think the staff would implement that kind of note system. There is a server stability risk in doing it. If they set the threshold for spamcrafting at something they consider to be "spamming" but the playerbase doesn't. A single merchant account could be flagged repeatedly. Multiply that by all guilds and subguilds that provide crafting and account notes could very quickly get flooded with these automated flags. It'd just be really efficient processing wise.

If they really super wanted to automate it than I guess they could design the script to flag a single character on an account once in the characters lifetime. But that still would mean the script is running in the background constantly running checks on the rate people are crafting which would be a pretty heinous use of server resources.

EDIT - If I'm wrong than that would be pretty horrifying.