a /as analogy

[crendalerst]

This was previously posted on the officers forum, but I'm putting it here for all to see:

Well I was just thinking, and I came up with the following analogy which may help GMs to better explain when and how /as should be used.

In game chat can be considered a lot like a school if we look at it on the following levels of who will hear what you say:

/s anyone in your immediate area (hallway, classroom, etc.)
/y similar to /s but covers a bit larger area, maybe from a hall to nearby classrooms.
/c your classroom, may be some people you like, may be some people you don't like, but you're all there for a common goal.
/gu your closest friends, who you should be comfortable talking with and joking around with about most things.
/g the people you are with right now, working on a common project, some may be close friends, some may not be.
/as the entire school.
/b similar to /y but can cover larger or smaller area depending...
/bc same as /c.
/send used to say something private that you only want one person to hear

So if you go by this sort of analogy or way of thinking about communication in the game and who can hear what, which I think most people do for almost everything except /as, then you should never say anything in /as unless you think that it is important that everyone in your entire school hears it. For example, the gymnasium is on fire (relics are under threat), yeah you should probably say something. The school football team just won a huge game away from home (we just took an enemy keep and opened DF), its a matter of pride, celebrate it. You just got 100% on your physics test(you just dinged level 42), if you said that to your entire school I think you'd have troubles walking home safely . There's a big party on friday night(Aglon is leading a ML raid), tell everyone the more the merrier. Does anyone have a spare pocket protector??(WTB Scroll of idiots 3 of 10)..

Well I think you get my drift. /as is not a place for bragging or strutting your stuff, do that in /sends to that hot chick, or in /gu with your best friends. /as is somewhere where everyone CAN relay information if they HAVE to, but they should use discretion when they say something there and always question whether half of the entire realm really needs to hear it.

[Macs]

WTB algebra scroll 2 of 3

[reme]

anyone else think this is quite possibly the worste analogy ever? sweet lord crend, about 90% of the people who play this game do so with the intent to FORGET school/work, not to have to go back to that same way of thinking. Also, the explaination you are giving is quite possibly the most dumbed down explaination possible. here's /as in a nutshell.


/as is designed for guilds to be able to communicate with one and other in order for the realm to be more organized and on the same page.


if you put anything more into it thats a personal prefference of the ALLIANCE LEAAAAADER, not crendalerst.

Personally I think today I must have seen 30 /as messages talking about some football game. I could care less! but there was some up-beat chatter and I liked listening to it while I farmed.

know what I dont like? when people say crap like "WTB idiot scroll 3/10". Because that is negative and rude in all aspects.


here's my analogy for ya.... daoc is like... well its like a game see, and if you were to think of it like that, it makes understanding how to use /as alot easier. For example, if you want the entire realm to know that you are anal as hell, be sure and correct everything that everyone says in the rudest way possible over /as. However if you would like things to change, /send may be the way to go.

:bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang: :bang:

seriously, please stop trying to lead, there should be a law against it.... let buffmomma lead... hell anyone but you plz.

[crendalerst]

I'm sorry you feel that way rem, but take a step back and read what you just typed, you sound like about the most selfish person in the world. This is a game, not everyone enjoys what you do, and you have to take that into consideration in a channel like /as where half the realm is going to hear what you say. I'll admit the analogy is dumbed down. Yet even dumbed down it still didn't get through to you, would you like it in a picture book next time?

edit: the wtb idiot scroll example was just that, an example, if you could get your head around your hate for me you would realise that you can actually substitute the name of a real scroll in there. Also for the ding level 42 thing, you can substitute a different non-50 level in there as well, get this, you could even substitute in mini-dings... I'm sorry wasn't aware that you have no abstract thinking capabilities, from now on I will take this into account in any post which I think you may read.

[Aglon]

A number of the members of The Fianna have turned off /as because the spam problem has gotten out of control. It's not so much a question of whether it's about selling scrolls or football, it's just a question of relevance - it's not.

IMO, it is a bad thing if the /as channel gets so cluttered with stuff of narrow interest (WTB/WTS, off-topic stuff, swearing, arguing, etc) that people turn it off. We lose our ability to communicate as a realm when people turn off /as. We lose our ability to rally troops to defend, and we lose our ability to post truely meaningful communication like major cross-guild events.

[Noleader]

A number of the members of The Fianna have turned off /as because the spam problem has gotten out of control.
May I ask were are /as leader is? Spam is out of control and most of the people in the allinace are opting to turn it off.

[PoxTheSmall]

IMHO, if folks turn off alliance due to spam, then that means there's a problem. I think we've all been guilty of saying off topic things in alliance from time to time, but not to the point that it'd be considered spam in most cases. Moderation is the key, if folks lose sight of it and continually spam, they should at least be told to pace themselves or have their privs revoked. After all, alliance really is a privilage, it's definately not people's right to be able to communicate through it.

[Coplann]

problem is we dont have moderators. if someone persues this on his/her own we just end up with more spam, argues, insults etc.

I can tell my guildies to stfu, I cant do it for the other dozen guilds.

[Aglon]

This not something the /as leader can do much about. It's up to the guild masters of each guild in the alliance to clamp down on spam where necessary, and to be visible in the fight against it.

This means GMs need to be watching /as when they are playing. And they need to note when members of their guilds start spamming, and put a stop to it.

It also means that when someone asks for the spam to be reduced on /as and gets a bitter or flippant response, all the GMs on should get on /as and tell the offender they are out of line. Visibile unanimity here would be more effective than anything else we can do. The reason the spam continues, in many cases, is not enough people will speak out against it when it gets out of hand because they feel unsupported.

IMO, detailed rules about what constitutes spam are not productive. When /as is really quiet and not much is happening, we can tolerate more than we can during primetime. WTB/WTS are not a problem - when it's quiet. They can be a huge problem during a ML event. the only important rules for /as are no bad language, insensitive comments and keep traffic to a minimum.

[PoxTheSmall]

Exactly on board with Aglon there.

A while back, there was an unspoken rule that during Prime-time, spam was a no-no, and that during non-peak time, folks were welcome to say more off topic type things, but still to not completely spam /as.

[Allison]

I agree with most everyone here. Spam is a problem. It will kill this alliance, like so many others, if it's not remedied.

[crendalerst]

Well said Aglon, I try when I'm on to moderate the /as a bit, but unfortunately I'm known as a "/as nazi" because of that (sorry about the term cop and cal, no offense meant to either of you).. Certain people see the alliance as their stage though where they can talk about anything, and don't care about the other 100+ people that have to endure it. I've gotten a lot of flack for trying to enforce rules, and there's a lot of people that don't like me, but honestly if it helps to keep the alliance functional then it's for the best.

[Allison]

I can't imagine anyone not liking you, Cren ... what, with that cute tushy of yours and all. ;)

[Aglon]

I have not been as good as I should be about supporting people clamping down on spam. It helps if we have well-known names chime in with support. Frequently I miss stuff in /as because I spend a lot of my in-game time in tell-hell (especially if I'm leading a raid). Still, that's an explanation, not an excuse.

I'll be making an effort to watch /as closer starting tonight and to be a more visible part of helping to control the spam. it's a REAL problem, according to many of my friends and IMO as well.

[Macs]

when crend posted this analogy in the GM/officer forum I thought it was not only right on, but pure genius. It's a perfect analogy, and still is. It's a logical comparison so that it can be understood better by those that dont realize the implications of certain use of /asend.

And I still WTB idiot scroll 2 of 3 so I can activate my artifact of the ultimate moron. Then my life long goal to be negative and rude in all aspects will be complete!


:D

[Macs]

I can't imagine anyone not liking you, Cren ... what, with that cute tushy of yours and all. ;)
OMG PICTURES!!!!!! POST THEM NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111

[reme]

"IMO, detailed rules about what constitutes spam are not productive. When /as is really quiet and not much is happening, we can tolerate more than we can during primetime. WTB/WTS are not a problem - when it's quiet. They can be a huge problem during a ML event. the only important rules for /as are no bad language, insensitive comments and keep traffic to a minimum."



I agree with you here aglon. Funny thing is... even tho crend agrees also he seems to spend alot of time coming up with long winded examples of the concrete way /as is used no matter what.


and no I dont hate you crend, I simply don't like that at one time you were a leader but you chose to step down for whatever reason, but you still feel it is nessisery to bark at people over /as and be disrespectfull to them. Nothing gives you the right to be rude to people, not how long you've played the game, not how high level you are, not who you are, nothing. EVERYTHING over /as should be presented in a manner that reflects respect and curtosy. Not that i have any say in the level of respect put forward on /as.... but I think most people feel the same.


also I understand full well the variations on your little examples. My example is more in-line with what aglon was saying, the talk of football during an off-peak time when there was little rvr and little realm activities going on was perfectly fine for me. I still say that a permanent fix for this would be a market chat channel that is added to the chat options, like bg was added. Untill we lobby for something like that, its going to be very diffacult to get everyone to cut down, at least not to the levels before TOA. Fighting a mythic-implemented feature (scrolls and scroll tradability) is a big mistake. Finding a solution is what needs to be done. All i've heard from you crend is fighting it. Instead of thinking of new ideas, you re-idderate what everyone already knew about /as but couldn't help. Think of something usefull instead of writting out childerens instructions on how to use /as.


Since the beginning of /as we've tried to keep it to a certain standard. In those days, the game was a bit simpler. Now there are TONS of quests, encounters, items, crafts, variables, scrolls, zones, and of course rvr/bgs to be discussed. It is illogical to continue to hang on to old methods. Untill mythic changes it, its hard to expect spam to just completely die down.
I would appriciate it if everyone would please visit this thread: http://vnboards.ign.com/message.asp?topic=62543132&replies=0
and post your thoughts I would appriciate it, I put it up on the Fronteirs discussion boards in the hopes that mythic is paying the most attention to this board.

[crendalerst]

Rem all I'm hearing from you is solutions that only mythic can make. We have to deal with what we have right now, if any change does come from mythic it will be a long time coming, and there are people that are teetering on wanting to leave the alliance already because of the spam issue.

The reason that I enforce spam rules is because I am a GM, and although it is the GM of the offending member's guild who should normally stop them from spamming, all of the other GMs are expected to help with this as well. So actually more people should be doing what I've been doing. Sure sometimes I may make a joke to get someone to stop spamming and it might be taken rudely. But do you have any idea how many times I've been flamed for enforcing rules that all guilds have agreed to and said that they would enforce for their guild and haven't?

The rudest thing in my opinion is to be selfish on /as and that is done by saying self centered things that 100+ people really don't care about at all. Sure mess around on /as a bit if it's a non-peak time, and there's nothing going on. But in prime-time when there's multiple raids, and RvR going on /as needs to be used minimally, because otherwise people aren't going to be able to see what's happening in the event they're involved in and they'll just shut /as off. Then with /as off they won't have any idea if something important that they'd like to be involved in has come up.

[Brey]

Crend - Good analogy

Reme - For Christ's sake stop with your "I hate Crend thinking." Listen to what he is saying instead of the fact that someone you don't like is speaking.

Reme - One more thing. Buffmomma is the Alliance leader. She is not the alliance. Read what she wrote in the other thread. It is a well thought out and written answer.

Coplann - You can always tell me or my guildies to STFU :)



Reme - you have some great ideas about what Mythic can do to aid us in this endeavor, but as a few other people have stated between this thread and the other is that those ideas are not helping and cannot help us with our current plight. We need a fix to our problem now, not in three months when a new chat channel is added.

Many good people have stopped watching the /as channel. It is overly spammy. If all you wanted to do was to log on to watch spam floating on your screen, then I would say that perhaps a nice chat channel would be best. I believe IRC fits that bill well.

If you want to log on and view messages THAT PERTAIN TO THE ALLIANCE then you turn on the alliance chat. That's what the alliance chat is for. Things that pertain to the alliance. Sure talking about football on Sunday morning when you do a /who all and the response is like 250 is fine. But (yes I know that isn't proper sentence structure ;) ), when you log in at 9pm EST, go afk for 5 min and come back to a full screen of WTB WTS BS, then you have to admit there is a problem there.


I think we have all (OK maybe not all, but many of us) at one point or another let our emotions guide our actions on alliance chat in some off colored manner. What I mean by that is we all make mistakes. There is however a distinct difference between making a mistake and being overly obnoxious. Not ever farming for a scroll and spamming (yes spamming) over alliance WTB Morety's Fart Scroll 1/5 is rude and lacks respect for everyone else in the alliance.

Peace,
Moecha/Brey

[Morety]

The scroll spam, once per hour, on the hour to get it all over with at once was a decent idea.

Also, if someone were to set up a bot, who had a public cg that everyone knew to join would be great to create a Scrollspam CG (tm). Problem would be LD's, logging off etc. But asking in /as "who's got scrollspam cg?" would fall in line okay with "who's got emain cg?".

Either one would take training of people to do. And spamming for a Morety's Fart Scroll should be acceptable as it's a powerful weapon, and good for all of Hibernia.

[crendalerst]

"And spamming for a Morety's Fart Scroll should be acceptable as it's a powerful weapon, and good for all of Hibernia."

Sorry I'm gonna have to call you on this one Mo, if anymore of these weapons are released our entire land will be covered in a brown haze for years to come.

I'm still a fan of people making the Scrollspam CG (tm), because as Ailia stated, having people spamming like mad for 5 minutes could be even worse than the current situation.

[Aglon]

>>>Funny thing is... even tho crend agrees also he seems to spend alot of time coming up with long winded examples of the concrete way /as is used no matter what.<<<

I do not consider analogies the same as rules. I think making detailed analogies help a LOT with getting across the essence of what we want without creating hard-and-fast rules that are too inflexible.

I am tempted to suggest the following:

1 - An all-alliance meeting on this topic, to be held over /as.
2 - At the beginning of the meeting, all GMs remove /as speak from all ranks except rank 0.
3 - All the GMs speak out about the spam problem and ask people to be more respectful.

Tempted, but not quite ready. I'm sure some GMs would miss the meeting, and we'd have a huge row on /as while the GMs were trying to get across rules of common courtesy. You'd think this would not be that hard, but you'd be wrong... :D

[crendalerst]

The GMs could have a meeting, decide a common stance, then we could have an all-alliance meeting on the topic where if anyone from any guild has questions they can direct it to their GM, then each guild could be given an allotment of time to have their say.

[reme]

lemme just say that my attacks on crend were for the rude manner in which he chooses to approch people on /as. If it went how he wanted, then he should have contacted my GM or sent me a tell, not to mention that he jumped all over me for the only scroll request i'd made all day. It may have been just his frustration missdirected but still it wasn't appropriate over /as.

Belittling attitude towards realmmates is never appropriate. if someone is offending you there's no reason to not /send them.


as for the spam, I never said it was a good idea or anything. I would like to see it solved also, and for now the cg seems to be a temp solution, a lil inconvenient but still. And i've stated before in my posts that i like people's sugguestions, and rather than copy their's i decided to add myown idea. Not an immediate solution no.. but a static trade channel for an alliance, and a static rvr cg would be really usefull.



as for the analogy... it seemed to me that everyone here has a full understanding of what /as is about, and therefore it was not productive, and the dumbed-down way in which it was described seemed a bit condescending. And seeing that I was already being exposed to crend's rude side, it was easy for me to take it as such.


I have made my effort in the last few days to curb myown guild's /as spam, even tho i'm only an officer, I will do my part in this sense.

[Fea Bonita]

*huff, puff*
Finally able to post something! Hi guys!

Suggesting to Mythic to add an 'in game trade channel' good idea. Creating our own in the meantime also good idea. I will have Kiika available for that whenever possible.
Short message in the alliance motd should help people get used to the idea.
*slaps the other puter on to get things started*

Lets get this thing working rrrrrrrrrright now! :)

[Faithe]

I have a question:

What about the Broadcast Channel? Does anyone use this for anything? It seems to me that it might be an option for trades and chatter during prime time.

Plus it has the advantage of being able to access trades outside of our /as.

/Broadcast can = Shopping & Tradeskill network

[Aglon]

I have a question:

What about the Broadcast Channel? Does anyone use this for anything? It seems to me that it might be an option for trades and chatter during prime time.

Plus it has the advantage of being able to access trades outside of our /as.

/Broadcast can = Shopping & Tradeskill network

/b works good, if you and a lot of people are all in a zone where /b works. If the whole realm was having a party in TNN, this would be ideal.

The real problem is /b is limited in range, and not available in about 99% of the surface area of the game.

Mythic has consistently resisted the player community requests to implement a trade channel, or LFG channels. I think this is because they don't want to undermine the need for guilds to form alliances - they don't WANT a realm-wide channel of any sort.

However, they could at least provide a second trade channel for an alliance - one that most of us could ignore. :D

[Faithe]

Aha, well that explains why nobody uses /b.

Broadcast = useless chat tab

[Aalladorn]

We over in the GOTN alliance have Made it simple, If it's not appropriate, you ask the persons to stop and take it to tells or a cg . If they refuse you lodge a cpmplaint in the Alliance officers garrison of the forums or the GM of that or those paticular guilds. It's then up to that Guild to to adresss the issue, if they don't they are under the threat of expelltion from the alliance. This is not taken lightly we will call for discussion and a vote from the Alliance counsil if it comes to that. All in all we allow off subject conversation during slow times, sometimes an interesting or funny dialog insues and it keeps things interesting. When it comes to on times we frown on off subject entries and will immediatley let the person or persons know they need to move it to some where else , so far it has worked well only time will tell if it will in the future.

Aall

[Aglon]

We over in the GOTN alliance have Made it simple, If it's not appropriate, you ask the persons to stop and take it to tells or a cg . If they refuse you lodge a cpmplaint in the Alliance officers garrison of the forums or the GM of that or those paticular guilds. It's then up to that Guild to to adresss the issue, if they don't they are under the threat of expelltion from the alliance. This is not taken lightly we will call for discussion and a vote from the Alliance counsil if it comes to that. All in all we allow off subject conversation during slow times, sometimes an interesting or funny dialog insues and it keeps things interesting. When it comes to on times we frown on off subject entries and will immediatley let the person or persons know they need to move it to some where else , so far it has worked well only time will tell if it will in the future.

Aall

This is pretty much exactly the policy in the RS alliance too. The problem is we have hundreds of people logged in at one time. This policy is much easier to enforce in a smaller alliance. So far, I would rate our enforcement a "4 out of 10" at best.

[Aalladorn]

Aye I forgot the size differnce that has to be a pain, I do remeber times in As1 when it was large and I would shut down /as due to usless chatter. I feel for you Aglon, amd I hope you folks get it worked out.

Aall