I can think of one way this would work. If everyone had to create an account that managed their characters and you could then enable non-immortal snooping. You would have to log in to your account (no need to have a character) and snoop others to check out what is going on. Then create a cooldown timer on the account if you do snoop, so that it cannot be abused.
Live Snoop Feed
There also would need to be a setting to prevent from people snooping you, because who would want to reveal all their hiding spots for someone snooping at them? IMMs already abuse(d) this, I wouldn't want it to spread. ;) (I hope that's just a bad joke without any reality.)
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He's on to us, guys. time for F-3000 to have an 'accident'.
This is Forsaken Lands, not hide and seek!
F-3000, have you seen my collection of stairs? Watch your step...
Would it be possible to snip away the massive derail of this thread? This could be a good topic.
I spent a bit of time thinking about to handle the request and this is the solution I've come up with:
I think the best option would be to have it 'snoop' a buffered log (or feed/etc.). This buffered log could be displayed from a point in the past, determined by the length of the log/feed. For example, when line 1001 is recorded to the log, line 1 is displayed on the web feed. This eliminates a lot of trouble with timing the feed. Delaying the feed (with an unknown, hard to predict time lapse to thwart those cunning players who might count hours) would stop most avenues of abuse.
It would also be nice to parse out things like score, prompt, tells, etc. Something like a 3rd person view. Ideally, it would be triggered on a player say/emote and/or PK action so as to display something interesting. This feed could follow that player until a timeout (maybe 5 mins) or set length of time (say 15 minutes), before it would look for new targets. The timeout would be from trigger inactivity, defaulting to waiting for another trigger from any player. This would ensure it follows the RP/PK action in the game. A player could use an 'auto' setting to disable being a valid target for this feed, enabling privacy for those that want it for a moment or forever. The player would receive a message they are going to be watched (and when the feed ends its focus on them), so they would be reminded to turn off the feed if needed and know they are the target of the feed.
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Actually, since we're on it... Long, long time ago I was exploring the Caranduin, minding my own business, when Virigoth - with his DK - appeared out of nowhere and wiped the floor with me. When I was collecting my stuff from my corpse, he came as IMM and asked me if I noticed anything odd. Well yea, you just came out of thin air and squashed me like a bug.
Okay okay, a little exaggerating, plus "the guy who made the thing" vs. nearly complete n00b fight, go figure. Perfect example of silent kill, btw - saw the DK first time ever, and BAM. But he was bug hunting, so I forgave it. What else I could have... :D
[Edit] Sorry Celerity, did read your post about underailing after posting. This theme nicely hides the "next page"-thingies.
[Edit] But seriously, I don't think this is a good idea at all. If you want to do passive snooping, make an adventurer and pretend you're not there.
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I think the main benefit of this would be for recruiting new players who might visit our website but can't be bothered to make a character/get a client. It is also a permanent solution to an out of date front page post that has often made the game look abandoned.
Probably would be good for hooking previous players back in too. Once you start watching, you have a good chance of playing again.
Recruitment tools are incredibly valuable, so I hope the idea gets some discussion and consideration.
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I don't think people understand when threads are just trolling. Snoop-bot 9000 is, no offense to the supporters, a terrible -TERRIBLE- idea. Let's be real, here. It would not improve RP, it would provide a lot of OOC information and PK advantage. The benefits you noted are great, however, far out-weighed by the negative aspects. The immortal staff isn't even trusted with snooping for a very long time. All to ensure that IC information is not abused. To protect players from OOC behavior.
I very highly doubt that Mali was being serious with this thread.
We'd be better served recruiting with other methods.
There is no scenario in which implementing something like this would not immediately, almost hilariously, result in some seriously atrocious abuse.
Mali is always a troll, but in spite of the original intent, I do believe the idea has serious potential. I think maybe you missed my first post in the thread. I think I've covered most avenues of abuse there, such as:
All information is out of date (online players/locations)
Can't see private stats (prompt/score/etc)
Snoop target can't be chosen and rotates
Player-set opt in/out
What other avenues of abuse are you worried about?
To make it even safer:
Make each snoop log an event. The event would begin when the target is chosen and finish when the timeout/duration expires. If the event is too few lines, automatically purge it to remove uninteresting ones. Once a number of viable events have been saved (100?), display them on the web feed in a random, rotating order. This would severely disrupt chronological orientation, further protecting players. Old events will be overwritten by new ones after a certain point. Exceptional events could be flagged to be a permanent part of the rotation. Do not allow the feed history to buffer back more than several events to keep it from being easily searchable. Think of events as snapshots and teasers instead of complete personal logs.
If nothing else, make it all staff-only viewable and you have an RP autologger for rewarding RP that occurs when staff is offline or busy.
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An in-game discussion can be months old, and the information still not out of date. What's more is that even if it follows a player that opts in, it will still catch and record info from players that have not (cabal skill, passing conversation, etc.). And even IF we take the time to build all of these safety measures... what's so different from just posting an RP log? You get the exact same end result. A log of RP in which all participants agree to making public, edited so that OOC info is removed, posted after the fact and readable by the playerbase.
There's literally no benefit to these over RP logs.
+1 natu
13 hours ago, Naruthiron said:
An in-game discussion can be months old, and the information still not out of date. What's more is that even if it follows a player that opts in, it will still catch and record info from players that have not (cabal skill, passing conversation, etc.). And even IF we take the time to build all of these safety measures... what's so different from just posting an RP log? You get the exact same end result. A log of RP in which all participants agree to making public, edited so that OOC info is removed, posted after the fact and readable by the playerbase.
There's literally no benefit to these over RP logs.
True that. The only thing that made this idea so "romantic" was the fact that it is happening real time, right now. Which, as nice as it sounds, is simply not possible, and if we are to make those records appear after a certain period of time, they they are after all, no different than an RP log.
I guess only IMMs can have the pleasure of experiencing other people's RP real time.
Would be interesting if there was a snoop feed for RP stuff happening. Like if an IMM found it important enough, they could either set it to a room or be invis while snooping on RPing players.
Though I agree, it'd be a problem for PK situations as it shows habits.
yep i hate everything about this. If you wanna interact with my character, log in.
I wasn't trolling!
I still support this idea.
An alternative would be a bot-recorder. Watching fights or RP as it occurs is way better than reading it after the fact.
Maybe I will start recording fight video and post it up for your viewing pleasure.
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Just stream the game live if you want. Save vods and upload them if you want recordings of previously live events from your POV. Cut out the middlemen.
AR is doing this. I'm not entirely sure how it works. Almost acts like as a PK happens, it jumps to that person and follows them around for a time.
http://magewares.net/ (its typically just idle not showing anything, so start scrolling up to see what it DID show)
That's just about right!
That's just about right!
We should make some characters to gang/full loot/ sac AR characters. Just an age old friendly f you from one pbase to the other.
Their imms used to come by just to insult us. Strythe, Odoacer, and the rest. Random trivia: Temple of Streyb has some Easter eggs to Odoacer's gf back in the day
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