EE questions and concerns.

[BegoneThoth]

I have a few concerns about opening the server to the Steam population at large. As someone that's admin'd for, modded for, and played on a lot of 'community' projects open to Steam and a modern playerbase, there are some things that bother me.

We've seen that 'RP' mods of existing titles like Arma 3, GMod, and GTA5 catapulted those titles to the Steam number 1 best seller list as soon as they gained twitch traction (some servers being text only), so there's no reason to not expect Arelith to do the same. As such I think there are a lot of lessons those games/mods have learned (and some didn't and died) that need to be addressed here. With the server going up to a population iof possibly 400 and being the first EE server, I would like to know what's going on with some of these concerns, because I've seen stuff like this ruin good communities in under a month.

1. EE is based on Steam ID's, and you can get a new Steam ID and play EE for 0 dollars via family sharing in the time it takes to restart Steam. Griefing is way way easier when you can clean-slate with a router and Steam restart, and while it may be easy to do so now, at least the game is old and somewhat obscure, if it gets traction, you can expect to not be able to get rid of people. A few servers of the before-mentioned games had to resort to a whitelist backed by an @ISP email address to curb family sharing or account duplicating, because the desire to grief is very strong once a population gets big.

2. Arelith rule enforcement is on a case by case and reactionary in nature. If 10 individuals make new characters, roll into Cordor, and smash everything they see, that's about it. Unless I'm mistaken, there is no way to get this stuff back aside from an item-by-item DM supervised basis. If this is the case when the game goes live, expect a ton of problems and fixtures getting moved behind locked doors. This is a primary concern, as player created rooms/areas/settlements are a huge part of the server culture, and deserve a level of protection.

3. Streaming and stream culture. RP streams are actually extremely popular and have been for the past few years, with some of the biggest names on Twitch going through periods where they exclusively play RP games. There is a large number of people that are content to sit and watch this kind of gameplay. This has the side-effect of triggering invasions, either streamer called (A streamer is punished for a rule violation, and suddenly the server is over-run with griefers) or people just show up to wreck the stream. Combine with point 1 and you have a really bad cycle, something that drove a lot of the Altis/GTAV servers to go whitelist only. Arelith seems to want to do the opposite and be open to everyone, so I really hope there's some kind of control in place to prevent swaths of people supporting/antagonizing someone on twitch.

4. A ride-on with 3, Altis/GTAV also had unfortunate events where other players were creating 'events' for the streamer to encounter, and I don't know how Arelith plans to handle that sort of thing, players assuming a pseudo DM role to entertain a few thousand viewers.

5. A ride on with 3, a streamer discovers a secret server location while live. Now everyone knows. 'Secret' areas players are not supposed to discuss OOC is extremely foreign to many people.

6.Point 3 but with elections. Vote for who you're watching!

7. Thievery violations are 100% DM enforced after the fact. Disarm removes items from players. When the population gets big you can expect the popularity of these to explode. Combine with 1 and 3 and you have the recipe for some very frustrating mobs of griefing. There needs to be some kind of system implemented to fast-track resolving this sort of thing, because as it is currently it can take a week or more to get a situation resolved, when we have 100 current players, not up to 400.

8. Input sanitation. Is the backend 100% able to support funky characters brought into the game by the new localization options? A Minecraft server I was on lost it's entire DB as people found out they could use a text-revering character to inject any code they wanted. Considering how the server has issues pulling up characters with specific symbols in their names, I would hope there's a pass done before the game goes live and a whole new population of people start tinkering with something they have no investment in or attachment to. See also 1.

These are issues faced by other RP titles that have launched recently, within the past few years, and most center around products entering 'modern' gaming culture. The issues that have come from this have been combated by a combination of whitelists, demanding a amount of time before mechanically allowing for theft/vandalism, disallowing family sharing by checking steam profiles for other games via the API on new logons, and automating controls on thievery/vandalism.

I would like to be assured that we are prepared to handle this kind of thing.

(For the record I'm pro EE)

[Cortex]

2. You can roll back all fixtures to a certain date.

3. On streaming, you could always make a rule that prohibites public streaming, could maybe backfire, but if that's a concern, that's one way to do it.

[BegoneThoth]

An idea I had was similar to something that was implemented on a MC server, the short of it would be making it so you had to hit level 7 before you could pickpocket, disarm, or smash fixtures.

Mechanically enforced.

[Nitro]

I quite strongly doubt Arelith or NWN in general is ever going to breach big or even moderate onto the twitch RP streaming scene. All the modern RP games being streamed are more akin to GMOD RP than Arelith, not to mention that it's a very dated game both graphically and mechanically.

Quite honestly watching an Arelith stream would probably be dull as bricks, and I can't imagine any streamer of a decent sub count managing to keep interest while streaming it, and that is if they don't get bored of the grind themselves.

[BegoneThoth]

You would think that but weekly actual D&D streams get tons and tons of views.

Either way a bunch of these issues are just going to come about due to more people, and need to be addressed beforehand.

[High Primate]

Yeah, but the people in D&D streams aren't computer animated blocks with little brick hands spamming their voicesets and playing the same animation over and over again at crafting stations. A high amount of this game in spent sifting through crafting dialogues and selling stuff, and other boring things that would not hold attention in a stream.

[Nitro]

Yeah, those D&D streams are popular because it's a group of 4-7 people sitting together, sharing bants and playing a D&D campaign. It doesn't even begin to compare to playing on Arelith.

[Cortex]

Another thing that makes them popular are the people streaming, takes a certain set of characteristics to get viewers. You don't wanna be DSP.

[Freyason]

I don't think you can compare something like Critical Role with nwn.

[Weerd]

Yeah, but the people in D&D streams aren't computer animated blocks with little brick hands spamming their voicesets and playing the same animation over and over again at crafting stations. A high amount of this game in spent sifting through crafting dialogues and selling stuff, and other boring things that would not hold attention in a stream.

M...Minecraft?

[BegoneThoth]

I don't think you can compare something like Critical Role with nwn.

I think you can. Not to mention there are plenty of people that already exclusively play a 'character' in RP games and get 10k plus people watching them.

But the point wasn't streaming, the point was implementing some kind of basic automatic anti-grief measures that don't rely on getting a DM to observe and do a thing. We already have a system but it can take days or more to get a DM on it, and in that time a lot can happen. It's a potential issue that doesn't need to be there.

Let's assume 1% of the population is more interested in griefing and being a general menace. If you have 40 people on, it's not really that likely you'll hit one. But if you open the floodgates and we go to the proposed max of 400, it's a LOT more likely there are going to be more of those guys around.

Spyre mentioned something about Beamdog or the master-server getting around family sharing, but I'd have to see it to believe it, I see no reason to assume spammed family shared accounts won't look exactly like legitimate new accounts to the master server.

[Queen Titania]

It might get as hectic as you are worried about, but it also may very well not be. The Admin team has probably already thought about this.

If we detect corruption in elections? We can easily remove the person in power. We can (But never expect it) roll back for extreme thefts and fixture losses. And if it gets very humongous, the team can become larger to accommodate it. If PvP gets out of hand, you can make the main areas no PvP. (And I believe Skaal at this moment is).

There is no predicting or perfect preparing, but there is certainly hoping for the best out of people, and trusting the team to handle it, and adapting quickly.

Also, for the record on 7, theft cases usually are a 24 hour time period for investigation, and not a week thing, we wait for the logs to generate first, and nine times out of ten it tends to be someone who actually has access to one's storage. Griefing cases are even faster resolved.

Very much expect an active DM team around release time.

But for now, EE is still well and far off, a year away about. Too early for this sort of post IMO.

[Improv]

Whoa, a year away?

[MalKalz]

In their views. Not the official stance, mind you.

As for DM cases - Titania touched on the matter. DMs wait for logs to generate and act promptly when they are available. This is not days. This is within the same day (Unless there is reason for it extending beyond a single day). However, there is not full transparency; however, notification that matters have been looked into.

I am confident the efficiency of the team now is still able to handle the population. If not, there will be additional bodies added at the discretion of the admin team. However, reading everything above seems like hypothetical reaches of worst case scenario which is uncertain to eve happen. I’d recommend having a bit more faith in the teams involved with how it will all be handled. There are some talented individuals involved with Beamdog that will ensure a lot of concerns are removed. And the Arelith team is very focused on ensuring a smooth transition.

[Queen Titania]

Whoa, a year away?

This was my guess! Based on their recent streams, to me, it looks like there is a lot more development to go, which I think is a good thing if it delivers some of the things that are promised.

[Ork]

I believe in the team around Arelith to make decisions that suit the server's best intent. It's clear from their interactions so far, their core values on how to admin Arelith revolve explicitly around cultivating an environment of roleplay. If issues arise in the future of EE, they will address them as they've addressed every other issue we've encountered.

[High Primate]

Here's an idea:

If rule-breakage through streaming becomes an issue then the admin and community can develop or elaborate on the five golden rules to specifically cover it. There can be provisos that explain that breaking the rules through external channels like YouTube or Discord is still against the rules. Rules #1 and #4 could note this, specifically. This might be an opportunity to refine or add to the text of the five golden rules to make them more accessible and applicable to modern players. A person can do whatever they want with Discord and YouTube, but the server admins have the right to discipline or ban them if what they are doing is detrimental to their server.

[High Primate]

We could also make a rule that stream-postings, if they contain, say, information about a character's secrets, are against the rules if they are posted without the consent of the player of that character.

[Mithreas]

There's actually a more immediate problem for massive popularity... the server can only support a limited number of players! Spamming connect to get in is more of a hassle than a few low level PvP happy folks.

I don't call the shots any more, but back when NWN was still young, Arelith had a simple defense mechanism against griefers - it made the early levels slow to get past, meaning that most griefers got bored before they could cause any real havok (level 3 half orc barbarians with greataxes notwithstanding) and it was a manageable task for the DM team to clean them up.

If we start seeing similar problems, then I will advise that we do a similar thing - which is easy, since the XP system we use has an independent scale for levels 1-7 that we can tweak as needed.

[Cortex]

making lower levels dull to prevent griefing is a horrible idea and essentially giving the trolls a victory in trolling everyone else into annoying leveling

essentially not only boring the trolls but the legitimate players as well

[Mithreas]

It worked very well for Arelith for many years.

It encouraged a focus on story and roleplay rather than mechanical progression, which was a further self-selection for the sort of players we wanted to encourage and promote (as one of many servers with different focuses). There's nothing wrong with catering for more types of players if the environment allows it, but as this thread alludes to, the task of protecting the server is not a simple one, and this was a trade-off we made in the past.

Because, if you're grouping up and adventuring with your buddies, you should be having a lot more fun than the frustrated troll who can't cause the havok they want to.

[Red Ropes]

making lower levels dull to prevent griefing is a horrible idea and essentially giving the trolls a victory in trolling everyone else into annoying leveling

essentially not only boring the trolls but the legitimate players as well

yea, don't punish players. just ban trolls who are fewer than legitimate players.

problem solved

[Peppermint]

Neverwinter Nights has boasted a ton of servers during its lifetime. Numbers aren't as impressive these days as they once were, but even so, one fact has remained constant since the beginning: ease of progression and griefer attitudes seem to have a tenuous correlation at best. And by "tenuous", I mean that even the most cursory observation of the game and player behaviors (in NwN and virtual worlds as a whole) would reveal the notion to be patent nonsense.

I've played (and even administrated) multiple large servers (not to mention many other online games in general), as I'm sure is the case for many other players here. I don't think I'm alone when I say my experience suggests this: generally speaking, griefers are more interested in playing around your system than playing along with it. Even the most basic barrier is enough to stop them so long as it doesn't appeal to their sense of 'ingenuity', because they're more interested in frustrating other players than being frustrated. When there are so many people out there to grief, why focus on the place that has any barriers at all, however small? (And on reflection, that's just common sense.)

Times have changed. We're in the year 2017. The server is in good hands. Attitudes have changed, knowledge is greater (and the game and its players better understood), and tools are better now than they ever were. I'd be mighty surprised if the team took such a draconian approach on modern Arelith. Now's the time to look forward, not back.

tl;dr Relax.

[ActionReplay]

Its difficult to say what what will really happen if NWN EE see a player boost. Its a valid concern to think we might see an increase in griefing. But if that needs to be addressed we just have to make some automated checks against this, e.g if you are under a certain level and do bad things for X number of times you are gonna have a bad time. Something like that is really not perfect but would deal with a bunch of newly created characters just wanna cause harm to the server.

[DM Always This Late]

I think there could be some creative coding solutions to safe guard starting areas and create barriers as peppermint said.

But it should be easy enough as a DM to just hang out and watch. I can do that easily while doing other computer work and respond fast to situations so I'm not too concerned about rampant griefing.
And 100% will cut out extra extra time during EE's first months to make sure everything is smooth sailing.

the last case of rampant griefers were kind of amusing to deal with. They didn't get far and it's always fun to wield the insant death commands striking down barbarian axe wielding griefers left and right with a click of a button! Then throwing their cursed souls into the soulcage for eternal damnation! *Evil laugh!* and erasing their damage is easily done.

( : Joking aside, I think we'll be alright.