Relationships through the web interface

I am wondering if we could get a widget for adding/changing impressions and relationship trust levels through the web. There are times when I am reflecting on a recent encounter while at work, say, and I don't want to log in because I really can't play, but I want to record my thoughts about an impression or relationship change while I am thinking about them. VERY often I'm too wrapped up in the moment to impression effectively during RP,  but later I can't log in to make them.

On a related note, how committed are we to not being able to impression people for the first time when they aren't in the room? This is not ideal for me, for the above reasons, but also I have talked to some who find it VERY frustrating because they emote at a relatively slow pace and people have often left the room before they get a chance to impression them!

I am vaguely aware of theoretical potential for 'abuse', sort of?  But honestly I can't think of anything sufficiently dangerous to outweigh the above concerns. Am I missing something there?

I'm thinking about this... and I don't have a well-considered answer yet. 

What the code does is that it searches first through people in your location -- and then, it searches through your bank of already-made relationships. I'm not sure I want to open the command up to searching the whole database of players or NPCs from the get-go.

Because you get experience from updating an impression, I'd like this to happen as a result of roleplay happening... whether it's in a cutscene or in-game. Cutscenes give a chance to update relationships on the web. But it's true that... if you were logged in, you could just update all your relationships every day if you wanted, and then it's pretty much the same as doing it from the web. 

So it's not very well-considered design, and maybe you should always have to be with someone in the room to do an impression. Or should there be some tracker of who you've interacted with within the past 24 hours, and you can only make impressions of them, either on the web or in-game?


Last thought: maybe when you interact with someone, it automatically makes an 'acquaintance' relationship if you don't have one set up already?

I'm a bit cautious of adding yet another process-heavy aspect to the emote system, but maybe it'd be worth it.

Sorry about the rambling post, but I wouldn't mind some discussion and ideas on this situation, because I don't have much thoughts on it myself yet and maybe someone else has a good idea.

There was talk of rambling and I was summoned.

Joking aside, I don't love the idea of being able to do an initial impression of someone when they're not in the same room for the following reason: It could just get weird. I'll take our opening day as an example. Things were pretty chaotic and several of us were getting approved and making it through the portal in waves and then we were in the game world. The FIRST THING that happened to me when I teleported into the IC play area was someone doing an impression of my character. No IC introductions. No nothing. Just an impression.

I still have never met this person and learned their name, though I've since seen them about (though not recently).

I could just see something like that but taken to the next level in the sense of you're just minding your own business somewhere, alone, and then you get alerted that some stranger just did an impression of, "I've still yet to meet Esfandiar but I've heard he's a really cool dude with a great mustache. Hopefully, this error will be rectified soon," (and maybe they set your relationship type to MYSTERY or something). That'd be weird. Maybe that's not really a concern, but that'd be my first concern. I don't want someone to just be able to go through the entire list of PCs and NPCs and start making random impressions of them willy-nilly without any RP to back it up simply for the sake of farming XP.

I don't THINK anyone would actually do that. But I'm a, "Hope for the best, but plan for the worst," type of person.

That was just my initial thought. I'll stew over this some more myself and see if I come up with anything more useful.

For people who have trouble catching someone before they leave, having everyone you tag be made an acquaintance if they aren't already is a possible solution.

None of those really address my problem of not really being able to juggle RP and impression writing very effectively. Sometimes it takes me until the next day, reflecting, to know what I want the impression to be, and then if I can't do it outside the game client I have to write it down somewhere on my phone or something to keep it for later, I suppose.

Which is theoretically fine, but I am honestly a little dubious about preventing people from doing convenient, sensible things because some hypothetical person might abuse the opportunity to do illogical but mechanically rewarding things. Obviously security is necessary, and making it impossible to abuse a piece of code is the most sure fire way of ensuring it is never abused, even once.

But I do find myself wondering how real is the danger that people will, I don't know? Impression people they've never even heard of just because they're on the pull-down list? This seems to me to be the most extreme example of possible abuse, since impressioning people you have heard of is theoretically justifiable, at least logically - some people are infamous, after all, and frankly I would be tickled to get an impression from someone I had never met based on their having heard of my character from others. But suppose someone did make a habit of impressioning people on the list? Am I the only one who doesn't feel that a little free xp decides anyone's fate in a narrative driven game? Also, you could have alerts set up for unrealistic behaviors like, say, impressioning 200% of the average number in a week, and investigate those on an as-needed basis, if it were a serious concern.

A lot of us, myself included, come from gaming cultures where there is an adversarial relationship between players and staff based on the expectation that anyone who can cheat will, and on the assumption that someone who does cheat is somehow ruining the game for everyone else. But a lot of my favorite refinements to the genre have come out of admins not making that assumption. For instance, on the RPIs that I started on, letting players desc their own equipment would never have remotely been considered and any such suggestion would have been met with open derision on the basis that we all supposedly know that players can't be trusted - to stay on theme, to be honest about what they do and don't have, to confine themselves to appropriate boundaries, etc. But I've seen multiple instances now of games allowing that without anything exploding. 
 

I am not responsible for making sure SoA is balanced and fair, and I don't know enough about the mechanics involved to have a truly informed opinion about exactly how problematic abuse of a free impression system would be. But I would like to raise the question - is it a geniuine danger, or is this an inherited superstition from the Olden Times? Perhaps the answer is yes! I don't know. 

You're making some very fair points, Esfandiar! And, to be clear, I don't personally care if someone is XP farming. More power to them. I was just tossing out my example as... an example of how I could picture it being abused.

Maybe the solution for now is that you can leave an impression (even a first impression) on someone even if they're not in the same room... so long as you have a relationship set on them? And the code automatically sets someone as an acquaintance when you first RP with them, like Pilgrim suggested? And then you have the opportunity to slap an impression on them later at your leisure, which seems like a fair compromise as it would give the opportunity for delayed mulling-it-all-over without just opening the entire system up.

Though that'd be one more thing for Pilgrim to code which is meh for me because it begs the question if it would be worth the time spent on that code? Versus just opening the system up? I'm not sure if I can answer that question. Just something I'm thinking on at the moment.

The main way I was thinking of abuse was more like.. using it as a way to get some information about mysterious people, like being able to find out people's sdescs by their names, and stuff like that. 

I do agree about trusting players and not creating an adversarial relationship based on constant assumptions of cheating. But I also think that people play a game as defined by the mechanical limitations of that game, so if for instance I want people to roleplay with each other, then relationships and the related xp for them should be based around interactions. 

Me and Mistsparrow were talking about this, and I don't know if Mistsparrow is going to post, but... Mistsparrow agreed heavily with Esfandiar's concern about the difficulty of writing an impression for someone in the moment. So I think the fix for this is going to be as follows:
 

• We'll establish a way to track who has been roleplayed with in the last 48 hours (or whatever time frame makes sense).
• Anyone who's been played with on this list will be able to have an impression written about them, from either the website or in-game.

I deeply appreciate this concern being raised in such an honest and constructive way, so we can refine and tighten up some of these alpha systems appropriately.

This thread really speaks to me! I am sometimes (often?) TERRIBLE at updating impressions on-the-fly - there's just so much going on, and my brain is typically working over-drive to keep up, stay in the appropriate headspace, etc. Like Esfandiar says, it is usually after a session in the "down time" when I get a chance to reflect (and honestly, I think that's when my character is sort of reflecting as well) on what that means - the implications, how they feel about the person, their situation, etc. Granted, it isn't as if we lack other channels for expressing this (story development, etc), but I'm often way, way behind on impressions because the reflection happens multiple-minutes afterwards. (There's a long list of characters Yasin has yet to record an impression of because of this - oops!)

I'm not sure of the best solve - to be honest, getting the `relationship type` done quickly isn't a problem for me, so I don't know that it is worth the coding for that to be automatic. But yes, I'd love to be able to then record an impression later, after they've left the room. So maybe, my "wishlist" version of this might be:

1. Still require that someone sets a relationship type. That's the gate, you can't get around that.
2. Like Zahra says, "Maybe the solution for now is that you can leave an impression (even a first impression) on someone even if they're not in the same room... so long as you have a relationship set on them?"
3. Like Esfandiar says, you can update an impression from the web, for those reflective moments while at work? (When I should totally be concentrating on work and not thinking about this world ;-)

This is great, thanks! :D Anyone with other ideas please keep them coming, because I'm probably not going to be able to tackle this particular fix for a while still, so the more we can refine it, the better.

Those solutions would certainly work for me!

Thanks for considering this!

❤️

I'm personally on the same page as Esfandiar here (edit: and Yasin apparently!). I too am TERRIBLE, absolutely terrible, at creating first impressions for people while I'm actually roleplaying. If I don't forget outright because I'm absorbed in the scene, then I'm jarring myself out of the scene to scramble together a first impression while trying to pretend like I'm still fully paying attention and responsive. And trying to tack on an impression when your character is leaving can also be awkward, as you bid people farewell.... but then continue to stand there blankly for the next ten minutes while you write impressions for everyone you were just interacting with.

I also do like features that I can access from the web, because I too can't be in the game at work and it's nice to have some options to still be able to (obviously very responsibly) do Avariathings without being logged in.

While there may be some abusable aspects to being able to freely impression people, the fact that people can already write an impression while being in the same room, but without actually interacting with anyone, isn't much less of an abuse. And as far as I know this hasn't been rampant. Since the focus of Avaria is on stories and character development, and not on winning by grinding xp, it seems to me like there's more benefit to allow people to develop thoughtful impressions in a flexible way, than there is detriment by opening a tiny window for the potential abuse of gaining smidgens of xp by impressioning everyone. I feel like other potential abuses would probably also not turn out to be that big a deal, compared to the reward it would create for thoughtful players.

Also, I ask Pilgrim to please please please code stupid trivial overcomplex stuff like literally all the time, so I'm totally fine with this. YOU'RE WELCOME PILGRIM