News posts

Okay. I already know this discussion will probably come down to the age-old normal posts vs. several-on-different-boards debate, but I figured I'd kickstart it anyway in case someone has fresh ideas.


How will news work? Right now, we get chunks of posts when someone is supported, when places are attacked, or when a report is made.


Will that still be the system used on DH2 or will we go back to the thing where everyone can post on 19?

I'd like to bring up a suggestion I made over a year ago which was totally shot down. I have seen other games where a separate news system is in place. Basically, news gets posted and sorted by month or season, and when a new month or season comes around, it gets cycled and the information stored. Basically people can type +news/summer and get a list of headlines for a specific group of months, then read through them. Great way to store old news, since we can't really rely on the Wiki to keep up-to-date. Also good about this system is that it allows for both first-person posts and general ones. The problem would be how to moderate it. I'd be in favor of everyone being able to post... as long as staff is on top of it and smacks down abusers.


Imagine! Typing +news/october_2008 and getting a list of headlines for that month. Stuff that would be common knowledge... even for newbies to the game.

And, hey, if you really want a challenge? Make it +searchable for keywords.


Thoughts?

I would like to see two boards:

News and Speeches

That way we can separate news involving RP-world changes
(The induction of a new Jedi, the attack of Hoth, the barfight in sector 350, the occupation of Kuat)

... from PR-Wars
(Mr. X is a lieing cheat because so and so and so, and you should vote me for head honcho of Far-i-stan because I'm so and so good, Mr. Y will die because I'm an invincible stud.)

Sure, there will be a few overlaps, but even an attempt at division is better than what we have now

SexyBoy, I like that idea. I'm not sure how easily I could work it into my coding time, but on the other hand it's a project that any fairly strong MUSHcoder could code; it wouldn't require special knowledge of my proprietary softcode.

I think this is definitely an important discussion to hash through: 1) how will we handle the news? 2) how will we moderate the pr wars? I imagine that strident mutual denunciations between the Sith and Republic will get boring fast, and also that the main broadcasting facilities will be in Sith territory.

Interesting thought. Imagine Republic operatives sneaking into GNN HQ to pirate the broadcast signal for a release, then sneaking out.

Why not have different 'news' boards. Political boards can be devoted to PR and other political stuff, and those not particularly interested in it can not bother to view them(much like news channels on TV today). Maybe a separate news board for factions, and only members of a faction would be able to post there? Operatives would then have to infiltrate the faction to spread media trouble.

There should be a Storyteller News board, as well. This would be the general news and events around the galaxy, plot hooks, etc. Storytellers would also be able to digest the PR banter between the faction boards and write up impartial summaries.

I do like the idea of Republic patriots sending pirate broadcast from ships in space. It is very Daytona-Tampa-Miami.

I pretty much support all of Royal Jelly's suggestions on this topic.

I didn't mean to kill the topic! I'm sorry!

Seriously, what do you guys think would work best? I admit that I am no fan of the current system so I am wide open to changes.

My idea, which may or may not totally suck:

1 .Reporting can only be done by those skilled enough in a particular class. Social, or a new skill, or whatever. None of this "Your news story still goes up but its not trustworthy" that no one payed attention to anyway.

2. Some sort of incentive for being mentioned in a news post, some sort of modifier based upon the reporters skill (But still a flat level that much be reached before reporting can be done.) but the players will need to go out and RP to get their story to someone capable of doing the actual reporting.. Hopefully the incentive, whatever it is, would outweigh the feeling of 'work' that might drive some players to just not bother trying to get their story up.

3. Eliminate praise/boo. Let people praise or boo through RP, not a coded system.

I wholeheartedly agree with #748 and would love to see reporter PCs in the game. With the updated class structure, people who'd want to pursue the path wouldn't be trapped by it.

My only concern with having just reporter PCs write the news is that a good deal of news will fall through the cracks, either because it wasn't something the reporter heard about (or by the time they got done RPing about it, it's too old to be of any value), or due to OOC shenanigans. I've seen the latter happen a lot on DH1, before and after the implementation of the reputation stuff.

As for praise/boo, I hate the stuff, even when it works (which it oftentimes doesn't). When it was praise/denounce it was abused terribly, and probably abused just as much as praise/boo. But, that's a conversation for a reputation thread.

Really good idea, there 748. Reporters never really took off on DH1, and it's probably because it's removed from "adventure" so to speak.

Maybe the position can be voted on by PCs? Maybe it's an IC position (Slicers, and the like make good reporters because they can hack the signal?)

But to answer Royal's concern... maybe if a PC reporter doesn't do a good job, they get 'fired'? And someone new replaces them?

We did have a group of Reporters for a while and they did a good job at first. After a while they got bored and started smear campaigns and "creating news" through less than legal means. It was really fun RP but at that point they kind of lost credibility and the whole thing fell off.

Edit: Not that the loss of credibility is what caused the whole thing to fall off. I think they just got bored and wanted to to try something else.

How do you define a good job, though? A PC can't be at every major event ever, either due to time constraints OOCly or IC reasons. Nor can a PC be in every dark alley when Joe Politician is mugged or assassinated Joe Bountyhunter/Thug-for-Hire.

For the latter case, I can only suggest that players mail logs to storytellers, who would be able to post some form of (hopefully impartial) news about it, but, as it stands, Storytellers already have too much work on their hands.

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that they carried the bulk of the news. They just did a good job of acting like reporters. They found facts, they invaded privacy, and they provided spin on stories.

I don't think we would have much news if we depended on reporter characters alone or staff alone. Whatever we come up with needs to be a combined effort.

My preference for reporting is something like this:

Most reporting can be done by storytellers, but there's major/sexy/cool advantage to being a PC reporter.

The PC reporters are the Lois Lanes of Star Wars; NPC reporters are the faceless staff reporters (pun purely coincidental) who churn out the minor non-front-page stories.

We would need a lot of storytellers to cover everything even if they didn't have much else to do.

This is a shot in the dark just for the sake of discussion but what if we have two news BBs? The first is the general rumor mills, maybe a bit like the AP Newswires, and this would be where most news stories are posted by players. PC reporters and Storytellers can forward some reports to the 'Galactic News' BB or they use several of them in a single fantastic piece of news that they write.

That's pretty interesting.

Galactic level news could have a greater influence on public opinion. Maybe professional reporters could even get paid for really good stories, within reason. We don't want them cranking out news blurbs for cash but I would like to see honest effort rewarded.

Can someone debate me on this? Counter, discuss, disagree, point out flaws, point out cons, point out doubts, what you like, what you don't like ...

If this was the final solution then Gulp or Tah or I would tell you that "We will be doing this". One of my old professors used to say that refining an idea is a bit like refining steel. You need heat to do it. We need you guys to help us refine ideas, give us some discussion.

I think that the yearning is for unbiased news and then the rumor central news. The reality is they generally work hand in hand. A good chunk of news starts off as rumors that get investigated. If PC Reporters perhaps had things to investigate (Politician bribery, unsafe school lunches, etc) then maybe it would be more of a pull. But again this is just throwing another plot hook angle at the ST's.

A thought that perhaps the Republic at the least would want reporters embedded with their forces so that the history and information could be recorded. I think Gulp hit the head with the lois lane comparison, you want those adventures in reporting but in the end it probably wouldn't be a big pull. Your best (and safest) bet is that if someone wants a news report that is legitimate posted, have them submit the log and one of the legion vast look it over before writing a news report summary.

Then of course, just have the usual bickering IC board.

Ugh. I hate the idea of log submissions to somebody for a writeup. It always seems to get backed up and a lot of the news goes unreported.

How can we discourage IC-news bickering, or at least filter it somewhere, and still give players the ability to post news quickly? Is there a way?

Sure. If a player posts information wrongly or skewed in a completely inappropriate way you bring down the hammer on them to discourage them from doing it.

Like any person knows, any rules without consequences means they aren't rules, they are merely words that exist. How many people would obey speed limits if there weren't tickets? You create a consequence for breaking the posting rules, and perhaps players will honor those rules. Granted, it has to be fair, equitable, and across the board. So yes, there is a way, but thus far it's been a tough sell to see good ol' fashioned consequences for people who break the rules like this.

What could be possible consequences? Losing the ability to post? Having an XP deduction? Having a 'reputation' hit? I don't know, but if you want the players to self monitor they'll need to have a discouragement.

In addition, you have other players who refuse to toot their own horns. I'm amongst them, I don't believe that a player should boast about what they've done. The unfortunate thing no one else will either. And even with the above consequences you'll need someone to determine if the posts are too skewed which involves reading.


OR

We just accept the fact that the news is biased. Have players who have been ICly approved to post news the only one who can do it on the news board, players submit through IC means stories to them to write about post about, etc, and they can decide whether to or not. Maybe a tri-board system.

GALACTIC NEWS! This is stuff like global emits, big events, things that too many people saw to go unnoticed, since it is most likely plot related leave this board Staff only and allow that to be run by Wiz/Legion Vast

Editorials This board is for the Approved PCs to post legitimate news. If a PC is found to be making stories or posting crap, GNN revokes their credentials and they lose that capability. If you get 3-4 PCs willing to do this on an IC basis (Maybe not even full time but someone other than staff, Iunno, just batting ideas) it may help filter out some of those good stories that aren't quite big news but stillshould be shared

Tabloids - This is for the bickering crap.

It would be best if all news articles were instead sent in some sort of request queue into the system, in a more immediate fashion for review by the Storytellers.

They could then vote in their respective channel on whether the news post is accurate, skewed or moderate as well as be able to make modifications to make it look accurate, unbiased and smooth.

As for the IC bickering, a separate speech command could be easily coded and set into a tabloid-like board, which would then undergo the same review as mentioned before.

Then, if a news article is considered trustworthy and well written, the source could be ICly rewarded with 1. either an IC position with a fixed paycheck (ie: NGNN Reporter or something) or 2. Decent monetary reward depending on the priority of the news.

I do not, by default, appreciate reputation hits for anything other than speeches and individual IC deeds. To punish someone for sending skewed information once is to go way over the board. A case could be made for repeat offenses, or maybe the person could lose the ability to post further articles. Either way!

Rather than XP hits or removing the ability to post... could posting bad news bring down some IC consequences?

I know, right, ST-stuff. But not always. A ST could get it started in the form of a bounty or an order from the Sith Prince to go take care of this upstart who's disturbed the Sith Prince.

I think the only thing we want to avoid is the posts that go back and forth as in "Responding to response about my response to their response about my response to their speech about they are good. They are not good."

Maybe just a cooldown of 1 news post per day. Not ICly like we have now, but just... you get to post ONCE per day. No penalty for not posting. But that would cut down on the spam back and forth (which often happens when two people are online at the same time.)

We also discussed news being more IC... and it actually costing some like... News Credit to post your story. The Sith on high would dispense them, and the Republic would have some which they'd save up for when they'd hack the galactic news feed and send out their news.

So like you want to post a news story? You need to get access to the Galactic News Net. Once there, you insert the news story, stamp it with the official stamp (this would be what gets expended) and it goes out for the galaxy to see.

"News Stamps" would be a commodity that people would want... the Sith would have them by control of the big news stations... but smugglers and criminal/indie types could get some on the black market. Enough that they could sell them to the Republic.

It's kinda gimmicky... and kinda weird to think about (it's almost like a signed SSL-certificate that proves the news is authentic) but it might lead to some interesting RP. "Reporters" then might have access to one a week and might sell them or make a deal to "lose" them for the right price, etc.

It could lead to more angles for RP. You could be a Smuggler King like Talon Karrde whose chief resource wasn't guns or ships or assassins, but information.

That's not actually a half bad angle FH. The question is the suspension of 'reality' in order to make a more self moderated system (Which basically means 'code' yet again) but not a half bad idea.

I'd been pouring over the political thread and had an angle on that not too far different from what you're pitching, and honestly the two could almost go hand in hand. A sort of ... I don't know how to phrase it. I don't want to say 'IC XP' but almost like a stamp or a 'non-cash credit' to use to conduct such things. A point of some kind that could be used for all these 'extracirricular' things be it generating votes for a campaign, sliming an opponent, publishing a news article, what have you. Have these be that proverbial traded information that you referenced Karrade. I'm just throwing crap out there right now as it's a new idea but I think it could perhaps be fleshed out. The downside as always, is do we want more coded stuff to? It's that balance between coded solutions vs. player generated solutions vs. legion vast based solutions. The triad of evil.

Well it's not really "more" code since Economy is one of the three systems Gulp is coding as a "Code based system" (along with combat and space) which means these can be actual... inventory items. That can be stolen, destroyed, traded, etc.

Even if the IC justification is a bit flimsy... it might not be so bad.