Scamming?

[Goku]

Is scamming against the rules or not?

[Crush]

As you can read on http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... =12&t=2922 it is currently not against the rules.

But the game masters are currently discussing a rule change to make scamming illegal. The problem is mostly finding a proper definition of "scamming" you can write into the game rules and enforce properly.

[Goku]

But GM's are already enforcing it with atleast a temp ban? According to CapitanAwesome?

But it would be hard to write down what would be considered scamming. And surely just screenshots wouldn't be enough to get someone punished..?

[Armadeus]

How can scamming not be against the rules? isn't there a rule against it not being against the rules?...

[Wombat]

If/until new rules develop, I'm willing to work with other players on outting scammers and their tricks. Please make screenshots of scamming occurrences and post them in this forum (Player Talk) and I'll upload them to the Los Viscerales site.

I initially wanted to put more time into exposing this problem to new people, but I fear alerting new people of these threats in a character-to-character way is difficult as is getting people together to make this apparent to others. With the new updates, there are more players on, but less in town, so making "public" announcements as a player is rough on time if we are attempting to touch more players.

My suggestion would be for GMs to make global announcements alerting people of these tactics. If the GMs are cool with this, then I'd like to work with other players and the GMs on drafting some sort of announcement they could use.

My suggestion to the Devs would be to make a friendly bot or the constable NPC have global announcement powers to announce things in a scheduled way, so people become aware of "scammers" through global announcements and the NPC could be spoken to directly about scamming awareness in some way.

[Rotonen]

As far as scamming is considered, use common sense when approached by strangers.

If you fall for such things in a game, just be glad you took the lesson there, where you did not lose wealth, health or even your life.

We are not your parents.

This is my personal stand.

[Wombat]

As far as scamming is considered, use common sense when approached by strangers.

If you fall for such things in a game, just be glad you took the lesson there, where you did not lose wealth, health or even your life.

We are not your parents.

This is my personal stand.

While I agree more with this position, I also think some type of awareness makes more sense rather than enforcement. Attempting to ban scammers just creates all sorts of problems imo and would extend GM powers abilities further than just simply attempting to create awareness. It would require GMs to follow around "suspects" invisible and/or pose as a regular characters to get scammers in the act and I'm against this type of GM behavior. However, I think it is acceptable for player groups to do this because they have no banning authority and it gives player groups some sense of purpose in the role of protecting players, whereas GMs would find reason to extend any additional powers (as they've already done) as time passes and people forget why they were granted the ability to spy and trick players into a ban.

[Wombat]

Lore shared some tips on Scamming at the HMC meeting today and I figured I'd post that on this thread. I'll write something with more details and I encourage others to do the same so we can create some awareness of scammers and prevent scamming from remaining such a problem for players.