then the game would be more enjoyable for everyone. As long as the imms don't truly screw up, I guess. There's also this talk of animosity towards staff and that we should stop complaining and all maybe hold hands and sing kumbaya. Just trust the imms!

But the problem is: I can never trust them again because they betrayed my trust in the worst way possible.

Dear imms,

By logging on, I implicitly give agreement that imms can view (snoop) anything I do in-game. That's alright. I know what I'm getting into.

But I did not give you permission to read my Skype logs, regardless of whether you obtained them yourself or from a third party. If someone sent me 18mb worth of chatlog as "proof" of cheating ring in my MUD, I would do nothing. Because I would not read it. There is a reason such things are not admissible as proof in real life courts.

I was told basically "you are not banned so shut up and get on with it". But the chat was general purpose, and we discussed many things other than CF. Your poking nose had no place in that log. And by admitting you went as far as running it through a translator to be able to understand what the chat was about you are just as guilty as the one who leaked the log to you.

Secrecy of correspondence is guaranteed in both Russian and American constitution, and you have no authority to invade it -- and even if you did, I would still resent you for doing it.

I have animosity towards you, very much so. And I would not be clamoring for transparency so much if I was not convinced that you do not deserve our trust. Thanks.

It's actually not uncommon for private correspondence to be reviewed via the process of discovery in courts, the jury only sees the parts pertaining to the case, but others will filter through it.

Anyway, I don't agree about this trust thing. The person who shared your private conversation with them betrayed your trust. Staff also didn't enter a relationship, or a friendship with you, so to me there is literally zero betrayal of anything here.

It's fine to be morally outraged if you have a different value hierarchy than they do regarding personal privacy, but calling it betrayal is disingenuous.

But in my eyes, they lost any moral right to call for players' trust. Treat a player like #### way too often.

First, not a great analogy considering in court, one can object to it and there is a judge who is a neutral party deciding if someone can or cannot see and/or use private correspondence.

Second, if someone with the information doxed all the Imms would that be a betrayal of trust? I wouldn't consider that person trustworthy no matter where they got the info. This is the first I've heard of this, so I can't speak to specifics.

Remember, he mentioned the Constitution first, so I think a legal comparison was appropriate.

While you can object in court (Relevance), much of the evidence obtained via discovery winds up in public record,
while exact practices appear to vary by state, if all else fails you can get them via FOIA requests. The only things
I know of that are categorically redacted are privileged information, so attorney client privilege, spousal privilege and
the like. Also things change if it's criminal law.

The point was that in the enforcement of law, subject to the Constitution, it is really common for private
correspondence to cease to be private on some level, if not completely. So the constitutional comment doesn't
make sense to me. A better, and much less complex complaint might have been that: judges should not also act as
juries.

As for the second point: that would be very cruel. But you (and Murphy) have a different definition of betrayal from me.
In fact I would say your definition of betrayal doesn't actually have anything to do with the word unless you're presuming
that by both playing the game they've implicitly entered some kind of agreement to respect personal privacy boundaries
as if they were friends, AND that it is hierarchically inferior to rule enforcement.

And if somebody e-mails you, the staff, telling you that they're cheating and that their friends are cheating too, and here
is the proof, then things have already changed because the original party has broken an actual, explicit trust agreement
made previously (don't cheat).

What do you want them to do? Become a CF court? This is asinine to me. Reading the log is the default to me.

"unless you're presuming that by both playing the game they've implicitly entered some kind of agreement to respect personal privacy boundaries as if they were friends, AND that it is hierarchically inferior to rule enforcement."

Did you just say an agreement is needed? So if we're strangers I don't have to respect anyone's privacy?

God I'm glad I don't live in America; the moral standards there are all messed up.

The more you talk the less I think you know about America OR Russia.

In fact, I'm both its president and foreign affairs minister.

We're talking about trust. So, if you want to liken it to a legal proceeding, I guess you'd have to say that every player is a judge and jury and a verdict will be rendered in as many cases as there are players.

I'm not taking a position on these messages, but the IMMs should act in a manner that will allow the majority of the playerbase to trust them. That's all that matters in this case.

I was responding to your comments about how it compares to a legal process. The latter bit has entirely to do with moral arguments.

Perhaps I talk about Law and Ethics in a similar way. You should disregard that because I always talk like that. :D

Here's how I personally think of this type of situation, morally and with regard to trust...

A stranger is writing a letter, but gets distracted and walks away, forgetting they left the letter in the open: it's cruel and morally
indecent to read without their permission. But not a betrayal of trust (they didn't trust you).

A stranger gives you a letter, telling you it contains their correspondence with someone else, and incriminates both of them
in a plot against your community, additionally you are an authority in your community: it's not only fair but required to read it.
The community is trusting you to enforce the rules they've agreed to abide by. Not a betrayal.

A stranger gives you a letter, telling you it contains their correspondence with your personal friend, and incriminates both of them in a plot
against your community: you wouldn't read your friends private correspondence without their permission, and because they are trusting you
not to and you don't think they would do anything terrible (if not why the hell are they your friend?), reading it is a betrayal of trust.

I think Murphy and the Imms are in a situation like the second example, not the third, and the third illustrates my view about "friend like privacy".

edit:I'll admit the third is pretty shoddy/bad, but I'll leave it up because it hopefully it reveals the difference in how we might be using the word trust, for the sake of clarity.
Mine is obviously personal and not some gold standard.

Point being, without writing an essay, this isn't morally black and white and I think it's ridiculous to imply the staff did something abhorrent by reading the skype log.

And yes I agree if they want people to play their game, they should act in a way that coincides with most people's definition of trust.
However my impression is that people who disagree with my assessment of situations like number 2 are largely in the minority.

The difference here is that Skype is a medium of communication outside CF. If the imms incriminate a cheater by listening in to their in-game communications, by tracking their IP address, by monitoring who they group with and how they react to things in game, that's okay.

They have no authority to pursue their CF rules enforcement outside the world of CF. That's like saying if you break the rules we'll come to you and beat you up. Or DDoS your PC. Or phone your employer and tattle to them that you're mudding from work. (Only in our case it's the investigation where they are overstepping their bounds, not the punishment.)

I really do not like false arguments.

I am willing to be civil and ignore grievances for the sake of dialogue, but do not tell me that there is no animosity. Just because you're not seeing something down from your imaginary Asgard doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You complain about our complaining but have you ever tried to, y'know, address it? Instead of being Leopold the Cat and just expecting everyone to magically get along because you asked? Especially after pissing in our cheerios?

No, in this MUD problems end up being stuffed under the bed until everyone forgets about them. I end up hearing (or it gets heavily implied) that our problems doesn't exist. The new balance is fine. The game is just as playable as in 2013. The removed content was not important. The playerbase is not diminishing. There is no animosity.

We will not be mollified by a cookie in the form of new events and immteractions. We want the wrong changes rolled back, starting with the biggest one: edges. It all began with edges.

Just get your head out of the sand already.

I am not sure where in the American constitution you get anything outlining privacy rights. And I doubt after hacking then dumping private conversations to influence the American and other countries elections that the Russian constitution has anything to that affect either.

It outlines the procedure.

Not all legislation goes into the constitution.

for messing up Constitution and Bill of Rights.

But also it doesn’t mention secrecy outside of the right to not self incriminate. Which doesn’t preclude others from leaking your actions.

Nt

Derp

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers

Oh they didn't have skype logs back in the days, right. So that isn't covered.

Lol.

It basically establishes your right to privacy from government snooping without reasonable cause. In this case even if you conclude imms are the government they did not actively seek it out. A third party turned it over (whistle blowing).

The bill of rights is weird since it is a list of ideas as opposed to rules and regulations. So it gets defined organically through the courts and setting of precedence. It also doesn’t “belong” structurally in the constitution because the purpose of the constitution is to layout the structure and mechanism of the government itself. But the symbolic gesture off adding it to say this stuff is really important has had an obvious impact on the country.

In the United States there is no specific constitutional guarantee on the privacy of correspondence. The secrecy of letters and correspondence is derived through litigation from the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In an 1877 case the U.S. Supreme Court stated:

"No law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the Postal Service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the fourth amendment of the Constitution."

...

Whether this means that the imms suddenly have the right to view my Skype mail or not, my opinion has been clearly stated.

It is up to the imms as to what they want to do to amend the situation, but right now, in my eyes, they have no right to ask for trust without putting in significant effort to ensure transparency of their actions.

It's of course up to you to form your own opinion and/or disregard my story. (I have more than one story, this one's just the most recent.)

To put it into the context of the example. You sent a letter to billy. Billy then gave a copy of that letter to the authorities.

Which is different than you mailing a letter with the postal service and them reading it. Or even you putting the letter on your desk and them breaking into your house to get it.

And yes if you send a letter to billy indicating a crime and he turns it over to police they have every right to investigate it and prosecute if warranted.

They did not hack my skype but they DID study what they were sent, when they should have gotten rid of it without reading.

Whether it violates the law or not, I still resent them for it. Stop acting as if the law remark was my only argument and ignoring common sense.

One of the problems with imms is they deem themselves above basic decency as if we players are lesser beings.

That's fair, but I don't agree.

For me, you can only betray the trust of people who are in a trust agreement with you, like friends. For me, you are not implicitly friends with other CF players.
You do however, explicitly agree not to cheat.

Additionally, even if you were, it wouldn't make sense to me for the Staff, the only party that can enforce rules, to hierarchically subordinate rule enforcement
to this friendship-lite arrangement, because consider, with regard to basic decency and trust: don't players also have an agreement with each other not to cheat?

If you've potentially cheated and if the person sending in the 'proof' definitely cheated and is admitting it, why is your privacy with your implicit CF friends (TM)
a higher decency concern than that of the rest of the players right to not have to play with cheaters who are breaking their trust? It's such a big deal that they
should even just ignore the guy who is ADMITTING he is cheating in the chatlog?

Do you see why this isn't a black and white moral issue?

Because alleged cheating only pertains to CF, while the chat is general purpose.

I don't care if the imms know everything I ever said about them and CF, including in private conversations. I do object to them learning the content of my private conversations otherwise, pertaining to matter OF REAL LIFE OUTSIDE OF CF.

So maybe don't share those aspects of your real life with other people in such a forum when those same people may or may not breach your trust in them not to divulge it further? That which you publicly disclose may invalidate any expectation of privacy you may have. I can't put something out into the world and then claim an expectation of privacy after the fact, that's not how the world works. You made a choice to disclose non-CF aspects of your life in a chat. Maybe you did so because you believed there was an implicit, or even an explicit, expectation of privacy therein with the other people in the chat, but either there was none, or if there was it was breached.

The fault lay not with the Imms, no matter how you want to spin it otherwise. It is solely with the person who disclosed it. If Imms receive a file which says here you go, proof of cheating, they will look into it, as they should. Whether that file contains other things as well is irrelevant, and how would the Imms know what the file contained fully until they looked? Should the Imms have asked how the guy came to be in possession of the file before looking at it? Something tells me he was a willing and accepted participant, he didn't hack a computer and steal it. You just trusted someone who ultimately breached that trust.

The person who discloses your private conversations with them is the one who breached your trust, not the third party to whom it was disclosed. Shaapa (I think that is who it was) could have edited it out to show only CF related things, he did not. He could have never shared it at all, but he did. He could have warned the Imms about extraneous non-CF content, but I am doubting he even did that.

It's fine if you want to feel slighted by the Imms for looking at it, but I'd say your anger is misplaced. And Rob is correct, the Imms have a duty to look into allegations of cheating, not to do so would be a greater breach of trust between the Imms and the player base then the breach you perceive.

I did not (thankfully) disclose anything too private in that chat. No true secrets can be trusted to a group of ten people. But that's irrelevant; it's the principle of matter to me.

You must understand that it is eighteen ####ing megabytes of chatlog. It's not like a single incriminating photo that someone shows you and then you cannot unsee it. Surely there was enough time to figure out that you're reading someone else's private mail, and close and delete the file? I would have done so. I would certainly not have the audacity to use it as a "proof" of "cheating".

(Not to mention there was no cheating.)

Namely that the person you are betraying considers you trustworthy.

If they already expected you to mistreat them, then it's not betrayal, though it's still ####ty behavior.

By playing their game and accepting their authority, we place in them a measure of trust. Among other things, it's reasonable to expect that immortals will not mess with my life outside CF.

Even if I am a bad player, which I always tried not to be, it's still a reasonable thing to expect.

I don't think you're a bad player.
I don't think the imms mistreated you, mind I don't know everything that followed.
We definitely agree Shaapa betrayed your trust.

> It basically establishes your right to privacy from government snooping without reasonable cause.

Lol that's ####.

ORANGE MAN BAD

I'm kidding. Please don't do that.

Really, though, if you don't trust the volunteer dungeonmasters of the online equivalent to an elaborate basement D&D game, you still have access to hundreds of other MUDs and the entire Internet outside of carrionfields.org. There's no need to go all Tom Clancy. Our tyranny can only reach so far. You don't sound happy. If you can't be happy here, please go somewhere that you can be.

nt

CF would have been a pretty happy place by now, right?

WRONG. It would've been empty.

Because can you really find one person who was always always happy about CF? Or any other hobby for that matter? Heck, I saw Homard voicing concerns at some point, and that guy is normally a fount of optimism.

From your words I understand that you'd rather have people silently leaving than complaining. This is a wrong position to take.

As to why I am still here: as a MUD developer I stepped on many of the same PR rakes that you guys are stepping on now, and I felt compelled to suggest how you can avoid them. But I guess, everyone must learn from their own mistakes.

Feel free to be intentionally obtuse and dismiss me with a cookie cutter answer like "leave if you're not happy". I mean, I sounded pretty angry, right? And hide this topic for good measure because oh god what if the newbies see it?

Don't be hypocrites and don't ask players to simply trust you. EARN their trust.

Don't say there is no animosity. There is and you want to do something about it instead of wallowing in denial.

I think you and another person have taken what I said to an extreme that I didn't intend. If I was unclear, I apologize. Even if you're just trolling me, I'll explain below to make sure that everyone else understands what I meant.

Everyone's unhappy about *something* in the game. Yeah, I get the frustration over edge point changes, for instance. I was still a player when they were made and I tended to PK a lot. I'd love to see some changes to Hunter Rangers, too.

But I'm talking about something a bit deeper than that. If ANYTHING, in sum, makes you more unhappy than it makes you happy, that is when I would encourage you to evaluate why you're doing it.

I never tried to set forth a "love CF unconditionally or go away" ultimatum. I never said "don't ever complain." There's no threat to ban anyone. It's a lot more nuanced than that. I only ask that you consider if being involved here is not only un-fun for you, but making you actively unhappy. If that's the case, it's better to leave and maybe get happier - and even regain some perspective and appreciation for this place while you're away - than stay and become toxic. I've done that, and it worked for me.

I promise I'm not trying to be mean or nasty here, but you just raised Constitutional arguments that apply only to governments in a bulletin-board post to the volunteer dungeonmasters of a small gaming community. You're saying that I somehow have to earn your trust when I've done nothing to earn your distrust. I don't even know where to begin, I'd rather just keep doing what I'm able to do to make this place a little more special for people while they're here. I don't think you're just angry - I think you are profoundly unhappy and I'm genuinely sorry for that. I just don't think we're equipped to fix it.

Some leave when they are unhappy over happy, some love CF too much and are not quitters so they try to change things so that they are happy again.

I did not say do this because constitution. I said that even your constitution forbids #### that the imms pulled. Feel the difference?

All I'm trying to do is give you advice on how to make CF better. I point out that the game has deep problems, and you keep telling me, basically, that these are my personal problems, not CF's, and that I can deal with them by going away.

(I'm not playing right now.)

>I did not say do this because constitution. I said that even
>your constitution forbids #### that the imms pulled. Feel the
>difference?

If someone forwards you an email that was not intended for you, it's not violating the 4th amendment to read it. It's not violating the 4th amendment to forward someone an email that wasn't intended for them.

I understand, you're upset and feel like your privacy was violated. I'm upset too, that people were using your skype to cheat. You may not feel it's a big deal that people were using your skype to cheat, I don't feel it's a big deal that the imms read a skype log outlining people cheating at CF. There's just a fundamental disconnect here where you want your feelings validated but don't care about our feelings on cheating.

It was not dedicated to CF, at least not for me. I don't want them invading my conversations because SOMEONE ELSE is there who they SUSPECT of cheating.

Not to mention there was no cheating. The extent of CF talks we did have were about the same level as dangeroom talk. I don't agree with Kstat being banned as he did not do anything warranting a ban.

You guys are pointing at my 4th amendment argument and ignoring everything else I said. It was not even my main argument.

There was cheating. There were bans that came out of it. They didn't invade your conversation, someone sent them the conversation because there was cheating going on.

We were pointing out your 4th amendment argument because it was wrong. Don't expect people to ignore it just because you're mad. I am addressing your other points, just not in the way you want me to. You're not my boss, I don't have to agree with you. People used your skype to cheat, someone sent it to the imms. They read it and banned the appropriate parties, I'm not sorry it happened. I am sorry people used a personal conversation you were having to cheat.

"the same level as dangeroom talk"
You don't feel people sharing information OOC is a big deal, other people do. You want your feelings validated but don't care about anyone else.

You don't have to agree with me. You may even consider the imms trustworthy. Good for you.

I did not post this to get people to agree, but I do think they should know. Now they know.

For what it's worth, I am sorry you feel your privacy was violated.

You're very odd these days, Murph.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtKKZxqzhOY

I may be wrong with the particularities, I guess I just can't compete with Mr.Lawyer here who also believes I should let imms piss all over player trust just because the 4th amendment doesn't say online game staff cannot read UNRELATED mail OUTSIDE of their game.

I used to have a better opinion of the people at the helm.

If one thinks that it is fine for someone else to read his personal correspondence - that one is pretty much ####ed on an ethical and intellectual level, acting pretty much as a slave psychologically.

I'm pretty sure even Quas and Swordosaurus would not be fine with that #### being done to them, but sure they are fine with that #### being done to you, Murph :)

Look how much your actions hurt your friend.

And he didn't do whatever they banned him for.
(They didn't actually say what for.)

thanks for your input though :)

I wouldn't like someone reading my private messages. At the same time, I don't like cheaters. You weren't cheating, your friends were. I don't care if the imms review evidence that someone is cheating, but you weren't at it was your privacy that got violated too. This was a much easier argument when you were insinuating they broke the law somehow. Can't you start throwing wild accusations around again?

I was more like "look, even your laws take note that invading privacy is a no-no".