I'm going to address things a bit out-of-order in my response here. I'd like to start with Collie's first reply.
First, I am glad that you brought up the issues with me mentioning that I was a past coordinator. I think you were right to have done so for all of the reasons you stated. I think it could very easily and reasonably be construed that I want my opinion to hold greater weight because of that. So I apologize to you, DoM team, and everyone for having brought that up; it was not prudent to do so. The only thing I really want my opinion to have is a fair shake. Willingness to understand it, and openness to the possibility that it has merit.
Next, you said that my mention of the Ward of Gondar on the Isle raised all kinds of red flags for you. You may not be the only person who feels this way; I remember seeing much debate in the green room channel about what ward is where. But, like... the fact that there
was debate--among
staff, no less--is kind of the problem, isn't it?
None of those details are codified anywhere. (At least not when I started working on this reply, which was a few days ago.) I checked the Settings section on rhydin.org, the pinned posts on the Discord channels, the IC and OOC boards for each sport. As far as I could find, the only way to know that the Arena ward is called the Ward of Gondar is to see someone mention it. And it's the same story for knowing that it only serves the Arena. The Isle's settings pages don't mention a ward at all, but we all take it for granted that one exists, as well as various conventions about what it does. When DoM 4 was finalized, the IC version of changing the game version was deploying a new version of the ward, so IC precedence exists, but it's not documented officially. It seems to me like most players are under the impression that it does the same thing the Arena ward does. And every sport has been taking place in every setting for a long time now. Is it not a reasonable extrapolation that they are all served by the same ward?
For that reason, I don't personally feel that the which-ward-is-where matter deserves all the hubbub it has been given. If it's so important, it should be codified. Now, if the red flags are more for the fact
that I messed with official settings fixtures, rather than what the official settings fixtures
are, that is a different matter entirely. Because that, I 100% deserve. I am not sure that I was particularly clear about it in my original post, but I do recognize that it was bad for me to mess with the official setting fixtures to accomplish what I was setting out to do, and I do apologize for that.
What I was setting out to do was have Ellie and Lillian leave the ring to tend to each other, while inside the ring would be magical/virtual avatar representations of the two of them that would finish the duel. I've been thinking about this whole thing a lot lately, and one road my mind has only just gone down is this. We do a lot of hand-waving around here from time to time, sort of related to the whole informal acceptance of settings fixtures and conventions. If we just moved the characters out of the ring and made those avatars appear without saying anything...
would that have been accepted regardless, without having to have established any sort of prior setup? How did they get there? Is that something the ward could always do? Who made it do that?
Did those questions actually need answers in the first place? For some reason, I felt like those questions needed answers in order for what we were doing to be legitimate, that there had to be an explanation. It wasn't so important that
Neo specifically did anything to it, rather that
something was done. But in reality, maybe my compulsion to create answers that were never actually needed is why things got so messy. Maybe because we hand-wave a lot, it would have been fine to leave it entirely unexplained. But maybe because there's been all this hubbub about what ward is where, it wouldn't have been fine. What do you all think about this matter specifically?
The next thing I want to address is the particularly violent duel Ellie fought that kicked off this topic way back when in the green room, because I feel there are a lot of things mischaracterized/misunderstood about that and its aftermath. I don't want to spend
a lot of time on that (unfortunately, I'm probably going to; *sigh*), because this thread is already dangerously close to becoming "Neo defends his controversial choices" instead of the actual topic: discussing ending duels prematurely. To be honest, I feel like a lot has been said to deflect conversation
away from that topic by talking about all the things I could have and should have done instead of what I did do. I don't think it's intentional, but it is happening. If I recognize this is happening, then why am I bothering? Because I
can't stand being misunderstood, and because I feel that I deserve to be stood up for. Nobody's going to stand up for me except me, and nobody's going to help anyone understand me except me. So please allow me to do that for a bit longer before I close out the post by reprising the real topic.
The player in question for that duel was powergaming me, calling shots on Ellie. The fact that Ellie was taking damage was not so much the problem. First, as has been pointed out to me repeatedly, I never
had to take those called hits. The duel was so long ago that I can't attest to it, but I feel like I narrated her out of taking excessive damage a few times, so it's not like I don't know I can do that. What got Ellie so upset was that the fact that her opponent was treating her like prey, determined to hunt her down, and was continuously putting out predatory vibes. The aforementioned feeling, "I'm not safe, and my opponent really
wants to super duper hurt me." Up until then, she had fought opponents who hit her for real before, and it was
unpleasant, but not really
a problem. After all, it's why she started dueling: let people hit her in a ring so that people who hit her during quests don't kill her. The most distressing opponent she had fought before this was a powerful mage in a mania of excitement, who created a different feeling: "I'm not safe because my opponent is so excited that he doesn't know how to hold back anymore." But the resulting dilemma is the same: now that she knows she can encounter these particularly dangerous opponents, she needed a way to ensure her own safety against them. So the forfeiture thing was one thought I had for accomplishing that goal: is it okay for her to walk out of a duel if her opponent is going way too nuts? But that conversation went badly.
I actually had no ill feelings or frustration toward the other player in that duel at all, despite all of the discussion that pointed fingers at the way he had written. It seemed like the player was not particularly experienced, and powergaming is something that is often done purely by accident when you are inexperienced. That's why the powergaming didn't actually bother me; I figured that's all it was. I apologized to him for my part in what had taken place to cause him all that stress, but I never received a reply. I do recognize that I was never entitled to have my apology accepted, though.
So I want to be absolutely clear on one thing:
My stance on this topic has absolutely, positively nothing to do with keeping my characters safe, and has everything to do with ethical concerns. I already have a multitude of ways to keep Ellie safe. They work fine. That
specific concern is no longer relevant. The main reason I object to the current stance on being unable to quit a duel is because I think it is absolutely essential for our characters to be able, allowed, and not discouraged from withdrawing consent to participating in a duel. I think it is strongly unethical for there to be obstacles to our characters withdrawing consent. That is for
everyone, not just characters who are vulnerable. And even though our characters aren't real, that doesn't make it feel less icky to write under the status quo. I was very frustrated when in the initial discussion in the green room, things kept being brought back to everything I should have done instead to keep my character safe. It's happening here, too. If that's something we want to talk about, that's fine. I actually think it's worth talking about, because I think it's fine to do whatever we can to avoid having to quit a duel. We
should share strategies to that end. I just want to be sure that we all understand that it's not the reason I oppose disallowing forfeiture.
Another thing I want people to understand is that what happened in the Ellie vs Lillian duel was entirely off-the-cuff. When you're writing free-form, stuff
just happens. Me and her player didn't communicate OOC at all prior to or during the duel, up until the PTSD episode. I didn't know that Lillian had a water-related trigger, and she didn't know that Ellie used water spells. When the PTSD episode happened, none of that was planned. I don't want people to think that we planned a big dramatic scene and used an official ranked duel for it. If we'd known this was going to happen, we'd have used the practice duel channel, where you can quit a duel without anyone having to care at all. It just... happened, as things do. So because it just happened, and neither of us were prepared for it, we had to decide what to do next. To be entirely honest, I am
strongly unsettled by the general consensus that Ellie should have continued the duel just because Lillian
said she would have been okay to continue. Have you all truly never been in a situation where you felt pressured to continue doing something that you know that you really can't or shouldn't? Because that's where Lillian was at that moment. (I know because I asked.) I think that suggestion, coming from players, is very ethically tonedeaf and concerning. To have continued just because Lillian said so is a valid decision for some
characters to make who don't care about that sort of thing. That is not a decision
Ellie would make, and I feel that many other characters would also struggle to make that decision. They would feel icky--to put it lightly--if they were forced into it somehow, and I feel that the current stance on ending duels creates that sort of pressure.
I am not going to take any further time to address the strategies shared to avoid ending duels prematurely, however I will say that I do appreciate the time taken to write and share them. That said, I feel it is a distraction. We can come up with all the writing workarounds we want, but until we have a way for one or both characters to step out of a ring without it being a federal issue, I still strongly believe that this is a problem that needs to be solved. And I feel that the most straightforward way is to just let people quit without giving them any fuss. The second most straightforward way is for the setting to accommodate duels being able to continue without the duelists in the ring, and make sure that is communicated clearly as part of official documentation. I think it would be great to have both options. What else can we do?
I don't think that the way we handle OOC forfeitures needs any changes, because it's currently working for what we need it to do. When our players need to get out for any reason at all that exists outside of Rhy'Din, we let them do that. There's no
problem to be solved here.
Collie has mentioned precedence that exists comparatively recently for characters that had abused the ability to forfeit. It's good to know that precedent exists, and I would like to know more about it. Is it a thing of where the characters and/or players wanted a training mode of sorts, but one didn't exist until the practice channel did? Was there actually any exploitation taking place?
I actually don't even disagree that we should be doing everything we can to prevent ending a duel prematurely. I do feel frustration when I'm playing other games online and someone just quits. I get it, really. Our time is valuable, and even though
it feels great when someone quits on you when you're just about to win, it's also a bit of a waste of your time in the sense that even though you have a big moral W, you don't gain any progress in the ranked grind. So I think it's worth taking time to look at what other games do about quitters and how they dissuade them.
We can look at SoulCalibur VI for one particular idea. If a player quits the game for any reason, they receive a penalty:
a reduction in rank points. We're already more flexible than SCVI is. First, we do allow quits for a subset of reasons with no penalty at all. Second, SCVI's ranked queue is randomized, but on RoD,
we pick our opponents. If you know someone's going to quit on you, but they're the only one the SCVI matchmaking can pair you with, you just have to deal with that. This is one regard where Tekken 7 is better; when you receive a ranked match pairing, you are given a choice to accept or decline the match, and are told whether they are wired or wifi, and what their disconnect percentage is. That is, what percentage of games do they quit? When you're looking at quit percentages under 5%, that's regular network weirdness. Above 15%, you've almost certainly got a serial ragequitter. In between, it's hard to tell. But you can just decline matches with serial ragequitters and people playing on wifi who are going to make your experience miserable.
An aside: I'm using the term "quit" intentionally. Forfeit implies that the other person gets a win. This is what the Nexus Bot implies in the ?help documentation. But that by and large seems to not be the case with the forfeitures we have dealt with thus far and are the subject of this thread; these duels have been simply discarded. I think that's fine to prevent people from taking advantage of quitters to inflate their records. Quit means the duel just... stops. No result. So that's why I'm using that word.
So there are two measures we can take if we choose not to put any obstacles in the way of quitting a match. First is informal policing by exclusion. Simply choosing not to play with someone you know is a quitter or otherwise problematic, a la Tekken 7. And we already do this! When two players are having critical problems with each other that they can't solve by communication, they simply do not play with each other. Sorry if that's awkward to talk about, but we can't act like it doesn't happen, and it is a useful vehicle for dissuading problematic play.
The second is that if we want to make quitting a duel for IC reasons possible while dissuading its frequent use or abuse, we can attach a penalty to it. The penalty I have in mind:
If you initiate quitting a duel, you lose wins from your record. How many wins? I think
two is good. One might be too light; you can make up this consequence by just winning another duel. Three
might be too heavy, but I wouldn't be opposed to it. If we're going to focus on record padding as a potential abuse vector, then let's attack that angle specifically by putting someone's record on the line for quitting. There are characters who would happily take that trade to be able to provide comfort for their opponent in a bad situation, and there are characters who wouldn't and would have to do something else. The important thing is that the option would exist, whereas right now, it doesn't.
This would become inconsistent with OOC quits, but again, we do a bunch of hand-waving to prevent stress for our players. A giant hand grabs Anubis when his player is unable to write an exit. We all just accept things like that, and I think that's a good thing. So we can--and
should--just hand-wave away OOC quits, too. Which we already do. There's also the work for the standings keeper that we have to consider. Quitting a duel is already something that happens rarely. Attaching a consequence to quitting but allowing it to happen would cause it to happen slightly less rarely, but with the system as it currently is now, the standings keeper would have to do work differentiating the two types. For that reason, I think that we should create a more formal separation between a regular quit that happens for IC reasons, and an emergency quit that happens for OOC reasons, even going so far as having separate commands and handling for them for the Nexus Bot.
We could change the documentation for ?forfeit to say that N wins will be subtracted instead of taking a loss (as losses are now meaningless), and add a new command, maybe ?emergency, to request the current situation we have for OOC quits; staff intervention to end the duel with no consequence. If the bot does the work subtracting the wins for an IC quit, the standings keeper doesn't have to care that it's happening unless it starts happening frequently. The situation for OOC quits does not change. Which, together, means they receive little to no additional work.
This creates a situation where if both players and both characters agree to quit a duel, they can just do it and it's not a federal issue. Maybe we could even split the penalty among both duelists if they agree to it, but characters with higher ranks could offer to take the hit. I think that the ability to quit is much more important than whether there are consequences or deterrents, and I think that the current staff position of "seriously, just don't" is much more harmful than dinging a character's dueling record.
I think there is one situation that players are worried about, understandably so, where it's not mutual, like the duel is currently close to a win that one player or character really wants after working hard for it, even if the player and/or character sympathize with the opposing character's discomfort or inability to continue a duel. That's why I think there should also be settings accommodations that allow one or both duelists to leave a ring while still continuing a duel. The players should ideally communicate about what to do and agree on the best course of action. And I think that losing wins and potential player avoidance are adequate deterrents to not being communicative about this.
What do you all think about these ideas?
): Don't even bother roleplaying the rest of the duel at all if your characters agree to end it. You can finish the duel OOC, while the characters are doing something else entirely. So, basically, what Robert said. Is that what you're trying to get at here, Arthour? I think that's a fine idea. We also have to make sure that we're okay with doing that sort of hand-waving, and whether or not we're okay with that is still unclear.