Torture Reports

[Eirikr]

So, I keep forgetting to ask about this: Torturing gives you a random assortment of letters a captured character has received. For the most part, that makes sense... but why does torture net you OOC messages, too? It seems to me that those should be excluded... Was it just difficult to code?

Forgive me if this has been a topic before.

[Anaris]

Because if they didn't, people would just put stuff they wanted to protect from torture into OOC messages.

[Eirikr]

Because if they didn't, people would just put stuff they wanted to protect from torture into OOC messages.

Ah, okay. That makes sense. Since torture also nets you a range of letters, it doesn't really have an impact on "success", either, right?

[Chenier]

Because if they didn't, people would just put stuff they wanted to protect from torture into OOC messages.

Which would obviously be an abuse of game mechanics and thus justify sanctions... Not a valid reason, imo.

[Anaris]

Which would obviously be an abuse of game mechanics and thus justify sanctions... Not a valid reason, imo.

Please don't necro month-plus-old threads just to bitch about game mechanics that go back nearly a decade.

[Penchant]

Which would obviously be an abuse of game mechanics and thus justify sanctions... Not a valid reason, imo.

So you are trying to say a much better idea would be for volunteers to constantly read through ever single OOC message to make sure no one is abusing it? I think not.

[egamma]

OOC message should only contain information like "heading out of town for the weekend" and "you can refuse to become marshal via the politics tab". There should be no reason why you would care that someone else received that information via torture report.

[Eirikr]

OOC message should only contain information like "heading out of town for the weekend" and "you can refuse to become marshal via the politics tab". There should be no reason why you would care that someone else received that information via torture report.

The original question was posed with the opposite purpose: Because the torturer doesn't (shouldn't) care about OOC messages (due to that very cited content), they shouldn't appear in torture reports. It was never aimed at protecting others' OOC messages, but rather (potentially, depending on the algorithm) increasing the efficiency and realism of torture reports. (After all, I can't imagine a noble yelling out that some voice in his head was trying to talk to other voices in other nobles' heads.)

In a major sense, getting an OOC message is wasted information for a torturer, especially if they could have got another letter instead.

[Dishman]

(After all, I can't imagine a noble yelling out that some voice in his head was trying to talk to other voices in other nobles' heads.)

It makes a strange kind of sense....wouldn't you expect someone being tortured to spew a bit of nonesense at times?

[De-Legro]

It makes a strange kind of sense....wouldn't you expect someone being tortured to spew a bit of nonesense at times?

Yes, in fact the "information" gathered by torture is famously unreliable IRL

[Chenier]

Please don't necro month-plus-old threads just to bitch about game mechanics that go back nearly a decade.

For some reason it looked like a new post. I don't really go looking through old posts for the sake of bitching.

So you are trying to say a much better idea would be for volunteers to constantly read through ever single OOC message to make sure no one is abusing it? I think not.

This is a non-sequitur. Do we currently have volunteers spying on IRC and MSN too, for the sake of catching people communicating IC info OOC, though OOG means? No. So why would this change require that?

Public OOC orders and the like are... public, so there'd be plenty of witnesses available to denounce it. No need for a secret police there. Private OOC messages are no more hidden than primate instant messages OOG, so no point in setting up a secret police there either.

[Anaris]

Either way, the solution here is simple: OOC messages should be caught by torture reports at exactly the same rate as IC messages, but they should not count against the number of total messages to be caught.

Thus, if you get 1 OOC message in a torture report, you will be guaranteed to get 1 extra IC message as well. And if someone's trying to send IC information in OOC messages, all they will do to torture reports is make them more informative.

This is not a trivial fix, I suspect, but it should be the kind of thing we can do alongside converting torture to Doctrine.

[Tom]

Actually, that's trying a technical solution for a social problem.

People who intentionally use OOC messaging in order to hide information from potential disclosure through torture are the kind of people that are not playing a game with friends, they are playing to win and they don't belong into the game. The solution is not to include OOC messages in torture reports, the solution is to kick people out of the game who are playing abusive.

[Eirikr]

Actually, that's trying a technical solution for a social problem.

People who intentionally use OOC messaging in order to hide information from potential disclosure through torture are the kind of people that are not playing a game with friends, they are playing to win and they don't belong into the game. The solution is not to include OOC messages in torture reports, the solution is to kick people out of the game who are playing abusive.

Honestly, this was one of my original thoughts, but it seemed a little extreme. Second chances and all of that, especially during times of diminished user base. It may also be quite difficult to enforce.

The technical solution is (potentially) a happy medium, IMO.

[Anaris]

Actually, that's trying a technical solution for a social problem.

People who intentionally use OOC messaging in order to hide information from potential disclosure through torture are the kind of people that are not playing a game with friends, they are playing to win and they don't belong into the game. The solution is not to include OOC messages in torture reports, the solution is to kick people out of the game who are playing abusive.

Right—because we always have perfect reporting of people doing bad things in order to help their realm win.

It's a nice theory, Tom, and I do not in any way oppose making it clear that sending IC information OOC for the purpose of avoiding torture is a serious offence, but I also don't see any reason not to implement the technical solution.

The problem is, you can say this about nearly any potentially exploitable part of the game, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever close exploitable loopholes.