Lore Forum Decorum - Just What is Meant by Good/Bad Faith?

[Lyth]

I think that this is the best place to discuss the concerns around alt account posting on this subforum that have recently come up in another thread. This is more of a meta discussion, but it's always a good thing to have the appropriate awareness and to be able to judge it for yourself.

There are several motivating factors that drive people engage in this sort of behavior. Roleplaying is perhaps one reason. Influencing popular opinion is another. One individual posting or upvoting across different accounts might give the impression that a view is much more popular than it actually is. In some cases, you might be bombarded with responses from the same person across different accounts to pressure you into backing down.

A final motive for this is to make statements that the poster in question doesn't want to be affiliated with or held accountable for. I think this last one is probably the most dangerous one, and is the one that worries me the most. Some people might feel that posting on a throwaway alt account is a free ticket to being openly abusive and insulting to others without putting their main posting account at risk of punishment.

The easiest way to detect and address this is at a moderator or administrator level, simply because there's a lot more transparency around who is actually posting.

There are plenty ways to judge this for yourself as well, though. It's extremely difficult for someone to disguise their 'writing voice' for an extended period of time, so you'll see them slip in and out of it. It's also difficult to maintain uniquely different personas, and you will frequently see recurring patterns, themes, signature styles, and obsessions spill out across several alts.

What first caught my attention was a copy-pasted in-game quote. There was a text line featuring the player character's name, except that it did not match up with the poster in question. This was very quickly edited, but the original post was fortunately permanently snapshotted in a reply quote. That gave me the first link that I needed.

Character names can be changed, of course, but that doesn't mean that they don't carry personal significance, if you know where to look. And that's pretty much how I was able to confirm the rest. Again, none of this is hard. The entire thing was careless. But you just need to have the index of suspicion first.

I just wanted to take a moment to look at some assorted responses that I've recently come across with regards to this topic.

I know the person of which you speak as personally as one can know someone on the internet (that is to say, I interact with them more..... personally than they'd ever deign to entertain you with) and I know for a FACT that they are not, in fact alts of the same person. Despite them, and I quote, "Now sharing the same face". Isn't that rather unavoidable when you play an MMO with 4 face options per race/gender combo?

This was absolutely fascinating to me, because I hadn't actually shared any identifiable details about my discoveries. So I continued to observe.

Seeing as how I'm as far from a male Hyur as is possible and don't intend to change.

And again, this is really interesting, because at no point did anyone mention any demographic features of the characters in question.

Piecing together your own statements, one can infer that you are discussing the following:

• Two male Hyur characters who use the same face option
• One character has changed their appearance to do so

I imagine that narrows the subject of your discussion down somewhat. Everyone goes for the exciting character backgrounds, unfortunately. You're probably more likely to encounter someone claiming to be part-Garlean nowadays than you are to actually see a Hyur character. But that was an interesting little puzzle. Forging on ahead.

The upvotes are probably not representative at all and are a particularly easy metric to game, if one has the wherewithal to do so, anyway.

This is an older quote related to the subject, but I don't think that this statement has ever really been correct. Voting patterns are an incredibly easy way to tell at a glance if someone is gaming the system. Even when people agree with us, not every comment is met with the same level of enthusiasm. And again, this is generally even easier to see at a forum moderator/administrator level, because a vote is not just a number.

I'm sure names could be hidden to avoid falling victim to the naming and shaming rules, too, if that's the reason for holding back!

Names are always important, Theodric. Especially when roleplaying a character. You can choose to forget them, but you can't truly discard them.

I will say, however, that it is probably worthwhile to look at the rules. It's an interesting read.

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Ultimately, the place that this topic needs to be discussed and resolved is higher up, ideally in one of the live letter Q+A sessions. There's an increasing perception in the broader playerbase that the forums have run into lot of issues around toxicity, insults, brigading, and alt posting. That in turn deters them from posting in here, which limits its effectiveness as a community feedback tool. I'm grateful that this problem is starting to get highlighted in streaming circles as well, which means there's momentum for change. It's just a question of making the dev team more aware of it.

In the interim, though, I encourage you to be critical of what you see in here, and take heart. Things will improve for the better. One thing that does give me hope is that fact that I still see interesting discussions on the actual game lore in here, off the frontlines where all the angry shouting takes place. And hopefully moving the story focus away from the Amaurotians will help to alleviate some of these old grudges.

'The rains have ceased, and we have been graced with another beautiful day.'