webcam.now.im (spying)

[kook]

[Edit by Crush: Added Poll]

My brainpowers are limited today so this is gonna be patchy and random-pointy:

if you have noticed the chars webcam.now.im, and yesterday added webcam.now.im 2 and webcam.now.im 3, these guys are real "webcams", you can see what they see here: http://webcam.now.im/

It probably wont hurt to offer my apology for sneaking them into the game. I got excited for the idea, hoping such "webcam" could be eventually considered to be placed on the mana world homepage and serve to attract new players and other fun things. Thoughts about a full duplex (chat) interface between tmw and web were thrown around too, etc.

Expecting it wouldnt stand the test of a beforehand discussion, i simply rented a vps and created the first webcam. Only a few people at a time would be told what it was, allowing me to get some feedback on the technical side of things and improve, and see every persons own reaction, without prophets proclaiming apocalypse.

Did i think this would fare? 50/50...

While i dont think this is the good time to show the webcam to the world, one of the reasons paradoxically being:

not solved:
how to name the webcam characters to make it loud and clear what they are? is it even possible? I dare you to come up with a good name.

figure out a good way for people to let me know i should nuke their chars. Contacting me ingame or on irc (sirdancealot) doesnt seem to be too reliable. Neither is talking to the webcam chars.

, some unnamed person with secret characters he does not want to disclose but magically wants hidden (nuked) from the webcams, and with access to e-mail, threatened that this post must be made now, or webcams gone, which would probably be permanent..

some notes from todays IRC convo:
you never know if the other player is not a secret webcam or screenshotter. To get it a bit further, you dont know who your hidden GM is, and you dont know who your host is. (wink, wink, password changers.)
Along these lines was my logic that a webcam, even not known to be a webcam, is not inherently more dangerous than any other unknown char sitting with you in hurnscald.

The pics are small:
the pics are PNGs to keep tmw pixel-art crisp, and each takes about 400kb or something. wouldnt be a good advertising to stream compressed jpgs..

I am still waiting for comfycheeks to explain how he/she tried to contact me (repeatedly) with the intent to be removed from the cams? It comes to mind that meway was running around with such webcam on day 1 and talking about it and since then people think they are his.

some more questions:

do you like my webcam?:P
webcam 2 could keep casting #inwilt on the GY so it could be seen if anyone is there.
webcam 3 was intended to go watch candor.

silly mustaches on everyone to cover up their identities? okay...

as on the requests for nukes for now, here or PM or irc sirdancealot or ingame kook

oh and go to hell you haters, i'll go to bed soon, get a GM to kick them if you need. have your drama.

[melkior]

oh and go to hell you haters, i'll go to bed soon, get a GM to kick them if you need. have your drama.

This post might've been much easier to take seriously as an attempt at discussing the webcams without the unnecessary vitriol in this last line.

[kook]

well, i guess i got iptabled or something, coz i cant reach themanaworld.org anymore.

[baseballboy]

I think it's a great idea. I personally don't have anything to hide, especially not in general chat. It's not like it's invading anyone's privacy. I think your approach was wrong, but you did apologies. I'm all for it!

-BBB

[meway]

I actually enjoy the cameras and I think it would be nice to have added to the website. As for privacy the only thing logically I can think of is to use the settings/tools menu to hide player names. People may argue that you can still see the name on server.themanaworld.org even if its not on the webcam. This isn't always true. When a developer or GM has @hide on they cannot be seen on this list. Your camera becomes an issue when it gives information not intended by the server like hidden char names. Your cameras are placed in high traffic areas so its not really avoidable.

[Lt. KLAG [24th.KDF]]

oh and go to hell you haters, i'll go to bed soon, get a GM to kick them if you need. have your drama.

This post might've been much easier to take seriously as an attempt at discussing the webcams without the unnecessary vitriol in this last line.

+1

[Chicka-Maria]

Personally, I don't enjoy someone looking at a cam just to see my player activity. If there was a way I could get permanently nuked I wouldn't care for the matter. The cam could allow harassment if players wanted to, they might see a player Isn't in Hurnscald so they must be doing something else and a player can go search for them elsewhere with an alt without even having to go to Hurnscald or a place the cam is. Also, why should there even be a cam in Hurnscald? Seeing players sit in town all day does not promote the game well, a place like candor would probably be better.

For the name removal meway suggested, It probably wouldn't work due to uniqueness of players either where they are sitting or how they are dressed, It's not hard to guess who is who.

But this is just my opinion, feel free to express any negative or positives on that note.

regards,
Chicka

[Crush]

Also, why should there even be a cam in Hurnscald? Seeing players sit in town all day does not promote the game well, a place like candor would probably be better.

It shows that the game is populated by a community - a very important point for marketing.

Some technical suggestions:

* The server can make characters invisible to others (@invisible). That could be used to make the cam-bots less obstructive
* The client the bots run on could be modified to remove the GUI (maybe except for chat) and the local player character
* When the PNG screenshots are too large, I would suggest to reduce the color depth from 32bit to 8bit. This doesn't hurt the pixel art style of TMW much. Here is one of the screenshots reduced to 256 colors using GIMP. This reduced the filesize from 347 kb to 92 kb. As you can see it is nearly indistinguishable from one with full 32bit color:

cam0-comp.png (92.06 KiB) Viewed 5803 times

For comparison, the same screenshot in jpeg, which is slightly larger (118 kb):

cam0.jpg (118.21 KiB) Viewed 5798 times

[Nard]

TMW is a public game which runs on a public server, there is no restriction to admission. You are legally responsible of all the words you say in public chat, That's the main legal reason why GMs are required. It is just like the Forum, the wiki, IRC channels, or any social network. As soon as you are in game, your presence is a public one, even if we do not know the real person who is hidden behind your character (RPG). Just as I can't see any way to prevent or forbid any player to publish a screenshot or a captured video on Utube. Also, the difference is slight between TMW and a browser game: or social natwork ones: mmORPG, and a littleone with a forum based RPG. If you have problems with the "privacy" of your characters, run or play a private server.

@Crush: The official client can already hide almost everything.

[melkior]

Personally, I have a couple of problems with the cams:

• I don't see many online games broadcasting player in-game activity, and I fail to see how it benefits TMW
• While they could be used as a marketing device, I honestly don't think town chat is a selling point for TMW (in most cases)
• A lot of people who dislike the idea, might have numerous characters — asking to have each and every one of them nuked is an unnecessary burden both for them and the person operating the cam
• Current method of having the characters nuked from the cam doesn't allow for secret characters staying secret
• kook, don't take this personally, but your attitude both here and on IRC regarding the webcams doesn't really inspire trust in you, and I see that as a problem, as you're the person operating them

I could go on, if I really wanted to. The point is, none of us signed up for this game as a social experiment. If someone wants to see what I'm doing or saying in the game, they're free to register for it, or just log on if they already have an account. This isn't reality television. Yes, public chat is public, but only for those who have taken their time to register and log in. I think it should stay that way.

Also, from a marketing point of view... well, sometimes the town is pretty dead, and so are the other areas, and if someone was to stumble onto the cam during that time, they'd hardly be impressed. Some might even give up because the cam exists.

If you want to showcase the gameplay and social interactions in the game, make a video. Don't use something that can easily be exploited and show a picture that leaves a lot to be desired.

[kook]

sorry for the strong words.

crush:
thanks for the heads-up on the file sizes, it will need more investigation how to do it from the script and not too cpu intensively.
i gathered some notes in the readme: https://github.com/koo5/webcam.now.im
i disabled displaying own name and health bar for now, maybe that makes the chars less obtrusive. making them invisible doesnt sound acceptable.

chicka-maria: you have been erased.

meway:
i dont understand hiding player names? what is the reasoning behind that? what is "information not intended by the server like hidden char names"?

i dont know what to think about making the cam visible from the homepage. it would need to be made clear when there is usually activity and when not. it could really mean quite a lot of people coming and watching..i dont think im comfortable with that myself. I dont want to kill nice hurnscald chats. Maybe only the candor cam could be available.

Im myself a privacy, distribucy, freak, i used to run my own jabber and mail servers, i was "there" when diaspora went public and ran my own instance etc. Im not taking this lightly.

would be nice to have in future:
bot-like commands to immediately erase a character or chat log. probably some log file grepping and xsendkeys could work.

[Piateluca]

nice

[Kazenawa]

I personnally see it nor good nor bad.

About privacy, i know that anyway that's not in game, especially in public chat, that people will learn a lot about me. Anyway, if you want to keep a good privacy, don't tell anything about yourself, especially in a place where you can't even know the person you're talking to. Cams doesn't change anything.

Why does an external person to this game would know your ingame nickname ? If he knows it, that's your only fault, because you revealed her/him your nickname by yourself.
So yes, an external person could stay in front of Kook's page to observe one particular player, but anyway, what do you care of it, if he knows nothing about you ?
Anyway, at least from what I know, our game doesn't forbid being AFK for new players. About observation, a person who would like to observe in town would just have to create an account and stay silently in town... Who will care about it, or who will suspect this new char to actually be a spy, or an unknown and unrevealed cam ?
If you want to keep your privacy intact, don't use the internet, or reveals nothing about your personal information somewhere or to someone...


About some advertisement of the game...

I doubt that a new player will be really attracted to join us if she/he sees some players most of the time sat. As far as i know, public chat isn't used that much, we seem more dead than anything else for a newcomer (how many new players i've seen wondering if everyone is dead here ?).
Even in case of talking, that still doesn't mean it will attract a potential new player.

I suggest that you put a cam in town, Cindy, Candor, maybe Graveyard and why not some videoshot of Illia, but those only when something happens, orelse it has none interest at all for advertisement.
A player who wants to know more about the game won't wait even 10 minutes watching webcams if she/he sees nothing happening or even moving. At least that's my personal belief.
You should try some way to enable cams in a place only when there are real activity.


To my opinion, that's a nice thought, but to be really effective it requires improvement and agreement of most of us.

[AnonDuck]

Wut? The data available isn't anything someone couldn't gather themselves and requires no special server access. Obviously public.

I think the webcam thing is pretty cool and sometimes even useful. An idea: You could use imagemagick's 'compare' tool to count the number of pixels that have changed since the last screen shot. Then you could provide a feed that shows the most active area by movement. Modifying the client to report player idle times and a few other statistics would be more accurate though..

If that works out it solves the issue of what area to show for marketing - whichever area's most active

[Nard]

An idea: You could use imagemagick's 'compare' tool to count the number of pixels that have changed since the last screen shot. ...

At the moment The program uses an utility (scrot) to get a screenshot, then dispalys it. I'm sure that 4144 or other mana developers could help to retrieve the client screen in a faster way. Then it could be easier to assemble frames into a movie and use a streaming codec which does the job you suggest.
Btw, if this is done, it would be nice to be able to record videos directly from client: better quality, better frame rate, useful for advertizing or issue reporting...