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Two Sleuths with one Brain
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Sleuth Admin
Sleuth Admin
Tale Spinner

Nov-17-2006 00:24

“Never explain yourself. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.”
--Elbert Hubbard

I’ve been putting off addressing the growing dissonance over what some players believe to be unfair abuse of the agency system. There have been several reasons for my hesitancy. First, I wanted to see if the community could come to some sort of consensus (or near consensus) without a dictatorial decision from me. Second, it’s a complicated issue and I wanted to decide on an official position before jumping into the fray. And lastly, navigating this kind of social minefield is always tricky and I’m a much better game designer than I am a conflict mediator.

It seems that patience with my hands-off approach has now run its course. I’ve gotten several direct appeals from players that I should intercede, clarify, pontificate or proselytize, and that the time for me to speak up is now.

Many sleuth players have voiced the opinion that it is unfair to combine cases from multiple accounts in order to raise a single detective’s standing in the High Scores List faster than would be possible without sharing cases. This basic argument has given rise to several related disagreements, along with a healthy dose of finger-calling and name-pointing. There are several threads in Sleuth Talk devoted to these debates, so I’ll assume that everybody reading this has a grasp of the arguments on both sides.

First off, I think it’s important to note that everybody on the high scores lists has put an enormous amount of time and energy into a difficult game and should be proud of what they’ve accomplished. We’re not talking about a bug that allows for solving mysteries in under a minute or an exploit that gives you thousands of free experience points. Every detective on those lists represents thousands of solved cases and many, many hours of game play.



Replies

Sleuth Admin
Sleuth Admin
Tale Spinner

Nov-17-2006 00:24

I’ve always been hesitant to state rules that cannot be enforced by the game system. We tend to have a fairly civilized and community here, but that doesn’t change the fact that Sleuth is a competitive game and many of the players take that competition seriously. It is very difficult and time consuming to enforce such rules effectively.

There are four “honor system” rules that we do expect all players to follow. I’ve never listed them all together like this but they all have been publicly stated at various points in the past.

1) Abusive, obscene and uncivil posts are not acceptable on the public message boards, and repeated, unwanted private messages will get you banned.
2) Taking advantage of bugs or exploits to gain an advantage in the game is forbidden. This includes URL manipulation, cookie editing, server attacks, network sniffing, etc.
3) Repeated theft of items from agency lockers can get you blacklisted. When these situations are brought to our attention, we usually do what we can to inform agency directors and help them keep track of the perpetrator’s current detective name, but we do reserve the right to block the user from the system entirely.
4) A single player should not be the primary controller of any more than two detectives in a single agency. The only time when we can positively identify individual players is at the subscription purchase. So in practice, this is interpreted to mean that no more than two detectives in a single agency can be subscribed by the same person.

Those four rules are pretty much it. Up to this point, anything else that the system allows you to do has been considered legal.



Sleuth Admin
Sleuth Admin
Tale Spinner

Nov-17-2006 00:24

From time to time, these rules have proven to be insufficient. People were able to gain advantage that skewed competitiveness in ways that the community as a whole were not happy with. In those cases, we were able to make technical rule changes that accomplished what would have otherwise required adding additional “honor system” rules to the list above. In this case, I hope we can address the complaints that have been raised by tweaking the game system.

Our solution to this is simple, we’re eliminating agencies!

No? Ok, I guess we’ll need to come up with something else…

We will be enacting two rule changes over the next few days that are intended to create a scheme of diminishing returns when sharing cases between detectives.

A. When a mystery is completed, half of the experience will go to the detective who finished the case, and half to the detective who started it. Obviously, if those are the same detective, they will get all of the experience as usual.
B. Ex-subscribers who are still in agencies will no longer be allowed to access case files. The logic behind this is that there are some agencies with several members whose original players have stopped playing the game, but those detectives are still used by their agency mates. In those cases we cannot tell how many “real” players are behind the agency because the subscriptions were originally purchased by different people. Limiting case file access to current subscriptions should alleviate these problems.

In addition to these two changes, I’m going to seriously look at enacting a technical rule that will prevent password sharing inside of an agency. I understand that password sharing is common practice, but it raises all sorts of problems for us.


crunchpatty
crunchpatty
Old Shoe

Nov-17-2006 00:49

"Our solution to this is simple, we’re eliminating agencies!"

Thanks for making me crap my man-pampers. Geez...them things is expensive yo...

biggie528
biggie528
Lucky Stiff

Nov-17-2006 01:32

Thank you for the clarification Ben, this all seems very fair and well thought out.

Crunch my heart skipped a beat at that too lol

Logan Creed
Logan Creed

Nov-17-2006 02:03

Oh… he wrote more after the eliminating agencies comment?

*Steps away and stops spray-painting “Anarchy in the UK” on the side of The Hitchhikers: London office*

Thanks, Ben and Sunny. This all seems simple and fair.


Evita
Evita
Well-Connected

Nov-17-2006 02:56

I am glad that I had just put my coffee down just before reading the agencies suggestion...

Those are very sensible and well thought out changes - you are a great conflict mediator after all!

roamie
roamie
Well-Connected

Nov-17-2006 05:10

I had to run and grab my inhaler after the asthma attack "we are eliminating agencies" caused. However, after taking a few puffs and returning from the emergency room to see if my chest pains were really a heart attack or just stress related I was able to read the rest of the message. **whew**

Thanks Ben for the mediation. I'm still freaking out about the no-password sharing, but I'll get over it with some counseling.

Odietrying
Odietrying
Old Shoe

Nov-17-2006 05:35

I agree with roamie, I'm a little upset about losing password-sharing, but can't really complain about it.

Serges
Serges
Vigilante

Nov-17-2006 05:42

I'm with Roamie and Odie in that blocking PW-sharing is a scary concept. But if it comes from Mount Sleuth-lympus, so be it. It just means that agencies will have to adjust their strategies to fit the new paradigm.

I do have a concern though that might or might not make a difference...

My wife's agency (Milliway's Cigar Room) has 3 detectives-- herself and 2 characters that are for all intents and purposes "abandoned". She has occasionally left the agency to take part in item trades, and the only way to get back in would be to use an abandoned teammate's password to send herself an invitation. Would any PW-sharing changes affect her ability to rejoin her agency as it is right now?

Lady Ruby Caplan
Lady Ruby Caplan
Well-Connected

Nov-17-2006 05:49

I think the rules are fair. Thank you for your feedback on what has happened and for posting once and for all, the ''honour system'' and rules in one place. :)


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