A Discussion on Metatrust

[Silent Majority]

I kinda do try to treat eveyone with the same familiarity...our characters work and by all seeming logic live together. Presumably their at least a little familiarity going around.

[BurgerWithButter]

I feel I never see too many blatant cases of metatrust, though I’vent been around very long and as others said things don’t seem terrible at the moment (though I could also be blind to them)

Metadistrust is something I’ve seen a bit as well. People identifying antags based on “they’re normally not like this” or “I see them doing this when they’re causing trouble” is an occurrence (I’d like to again say I’ve seen VERY few cases of this myself, I don’t want to say this is a huge issue)

On what Violetsaber said, whitelisted players are trusted a lot more than players that aren’t, and if for example Jimmy Novach showed up as a HOS tomorrow there would be a LOT of eyebrows raised and as I am not whitelisted. On the other end if Bob Whitelisted was mindhacked/faked HOS and executed the bartender for mixing his drink wrong it’d take a while for somebody to go “heeey this seems reallly excessive, what’s up with that?”

I do recall a round not long ago where Violet Kirsch tried to run the bar in HOS attire+ a fake ID, she was immediately investigated and brought to security in maybe 15-20 minutes. I was a security officer that round and helped investigate her and later was the one who arrested her.
I shamefully confess that I follow the appeals/applications thread closely, I knew Violetsaber still had their application out and that part did play a big role in why I was suspicious of them, hell I said something similar to “I don’t recall you getting promoted” during interrogation.

Recently I’ve been making an effort to NOT DO THAT and be less trusting/distrusting of people OOC, especially when playing security. Though I’m not sure if there’s a way to get people to not flag John Unwhitelisted as a syndi when he shows up in a HOS cape OR question Bob Whitelisted’s gross abuse of power until he’s gone full psycho. (Though these examples are VERY RARE)

[Cheese]

Excuse the typos, using a phone.

We are a small swarm of around 300-400 bees visiting the hive daily. Pulling that from Goonhub stats.

I'd say it' around a 150/250 split between EU and US TZs. Pulling that completely out of my ass.

Spread that around the geography, add clock off times, and we are looking at what, 30-40 people one consistently sees?
People are tired after the coalmines. They will settle in ther favorite departments with their favorite people, and, well, they will favor. That's what we monkeys do. Subconciously.

Point is, things seem overall relatively healthy clique-wise compared to some time ago, and meta-trust while absolutely present is largrly unavoidable. Forcing the issue would just scare off folks.
We are in a "putting blorbos in a situation" game a lot of the time, the ol' disbelief suspenders are stretched too thin to hold them "social murder mystery" pants. You and I may have the energy to intentionally seek interaction with the people left tad behind - not everyone will. Leadership by example is nice, but not enough.

The main way to alleviate this further, imo, is to somehow use gameplay to reward playing as a randomname. Interacting more with people you rarely have a reason to visit. Culture changes will follow.

Salvies are a good start.
Hell, just more interdepartmental work would be nice. Goon has the most isolated engineering I ever saw, often made obsolete by a coil of wire and a single borg, paramedics are not really a thing and research serves practically no social function.

Maybe its purely my personal experience, but I never felt the overall station's team coherence. I did in the other corners of the BYOND hub, and those usually had more reasons for people to interact.

[RubberRats]

I have many thoughts on player favoritism and related topics, based on my own experiences with it over the years. This thread was on my mind for a while, but as I wasn't playing as often, I didn't feel like I had anything pertinent to say. However, after a few weeks of playing again, I have definitely noticed a few patterns that have resurfaced lately.

It feels to me like the roleplay servers have a habit of developing fixations around certain characters. Frequently, it seems like most interactions revolve around a handful of station darlings. I have seen on multiple occasions crowds of people hovering around the local blorbo, tripping over each other for a chance to talk to them. This isn't a new pattern of behavior, but it has ended badly in the past and seeing it crop up again makes me itchy.

Another thing I have noticed concerns characters with significant amounts of lore. When a character has a mythos attached to them, it is entirely natural for people to want to know more. However, something I have noticed is that it can sometimes come at the expense of the actual game. It feels like some of these characters get treated with more leniency than normal by security. Whether it's because they have reputations for being theatric, or people just want the sweet juicy lore nuggets, it seems like they're allowed to get away with things that a lesser-known antagonist would be stonewalled or executed for.

I don't know how to fix these problems. But it bothers me every time I see it, and I don't think I'm alone in this. Maybe as more awareness is brought to it, it can be weeded out over time.

[The Panna]

Simply put, I completely understand and agree with RubberRats concerns.

I find it quite uncomfortable when I see reaction when the local station darling appears. It is neither common nor uncommon, it is just a thing that happens. The reasons that I think this is negative for the game are many, but I also see how this is kinda expected/inevitable. There will always be certain popular folks in a community, but considering how SS13 is an extremely social game having a certain few favourites that people want to be around and interact with above other players is just bad, quite bad actually.

There are two ways to mitigate this issue in my opinion:
1. People being aware of their behaviour and who they talk to and interact with in a round.
2. Encourage people to have multiple characters and random-name once in a while. The former will increase the diversity of names and folk people see each round. The latter can give players more perspective about the game and how people interact.
[I am also a proponent of having the byond key removed from character names in LOOC and end of rounds credits but that’s a whole another thing.]

[Piesuu]

I agree with The Panna on byond keys. using LOOC should only display character names, with mentors (and admins) getting a separate optional LOOC that passes on color and the fact they're a mentor/admin without disclosing more detail.
The ability to opt-out from your ckey being shown on end-round credits would also be appreciated.

Not only would both changes benefit players and reduce the amount of information someone can gain to metatrust with, it would also help a lot with the admin problem of being recognized as an admin which comes with a whole host of negatives.

all in all, your CKEY should only be used for administrative purposes if possible and nothing else in-game 

[RubberRats]

Without getting into whether or not it is a good idea generally, I don't think hiding ckeys will do much to curb the issue. All of the worst examples of favoritism and metatrust I have seen have occurred with very well-established characters. Hidden keys do nothing to stop people from going easy on Agent Traitor McTraitorpants because they know that's their friend's syndiesona. If somebody is using information from LOOC to influence how they treat others, that is a very blatant problem that can be addressed easily.

[SnugglyCactus]

This discussion is particularly interesting to me because I play a very beloved character (the popularity of whom I sort of detest), and I’ve gotten metatrusted a fair few times. One time, I had rolled wizard, and I was sort of recruited to defeat a changeling by security because they trusted me to do it? I recall hearing “I hate wizards, but I like Ribbert” over the radio. They did happen to be right about me being mostly useful, and I don’t regret helping because it ended in a changeling with wizard powers catastrophe that made the entire round very entertaining, but I definitely felt odd about the whole thing. I was a wizard. A known antagonist should not have been recruited by security just because it had a funny frog face attached.

I do suppose being able to recognize metatrusting while it’s happening is valuable, but I wish I could figure out a way to stop or prevent it from happening to me and I’d imagine other people feel the same way. And yeah, one could change their playstyle to ward off familiarity, but a very stubborn part of me feels as though that’s just capitulating to the bad habits of others. That being said, this doesn’t happen to me personally incredibly often, but I figured I’d share my insight.

[Torchwick]

This discussion is particularly interesting to me because I play a very beloved character (the popularity of whom I sort of detest), and I’ve gotten metatrusted a fair few times. One time, I had rolled wizard, and I was sort of recruited to defeat a changeling by security because they trusted me to do it? I recall hearing “I hate wizards, but I like Ribbert” over the radio. They did happen to be right about me being mostly useful, and I don’t regret helping because it ended in a changeling with wizard powers catastrophe that made the entire round very entertaining, but I definitely felt odd about the whole thing. I was a wizard. A known antagonist should not have been recruited by security just because it had a funny frog face attached.

I do suppose being able to recognize metatrusting while it’s happening is valuable, but I wish I could figure out a way to stop or prevent it from happening to me and I’d imagine other people feel the same way. And yeah, one could change their playstyle to ward off familiarity, but a very stubborn part of me feels as though that’s just capitulating to the bad habits of others. That being said, this doesn’t happen to me personally incredibly often, but I figured I’d share my insight.

Honestly this. I’ve run into a rut where I’m paranoid that I’m hurting the game and community because the characters I personally love to play are well known. My only solution to this that I hope works thus far is to discourage behavior in which people favour me. Asking specifically for me instead of another doctor just because you know me? I’ll make myself busy and let the other doctors help you. Try to push people into getting RP out of others. I have ahelped scenarios in which what I believe might have been blatant metatrust led to me being handed AA on a stowaway shift. 

It’s difficult on both ends. I’m not saying ‘woe is me I’m popular’, but more like… I wish I didn’t feel guilty for playing the characters I want to play, yk? But yeah— that’s my take. You can’t always help that people enjoy your characters, but you can encourage better behavior and ahelp if it’s too weird.

[JORJ949]

I will say the fake HoS thing is the most obvious version of metatrust that comes to mind and I see it basically every time I fake HoS. My disguise can be abysmal and people could have seen me as another job previously in the round and I'll STILL be trusted as HoS unless I'm actively shooting and killing officers. I've had people when I'm not HoSing mention that I'm whitelisted "Aren't you sometimes a HoS?" or people mention when I'm not playing as a super profitable nt fanboy that I'm clearly evil and then call me out when i make a syndicate announcement "oh that's clearly george" and I honestly regret not ahelping these situations more.

I personally will always go for someone's JOB rather than someone's PERSON as this makes the round far more interesting and I get to meet cool new people. I often see the same Staff Assistants together talking in small groups most the shift and I remember when I started out on RP this made me feel very left out. Moving to RP for me has I think massively improved me talking to random people because the vast majority of people to me are random and I don't know them.

[Ragemorrow]

Reading through all of these; I think it's important to remember that while you can't control the actions of other players, you can control your actions and your responses to situations. If you make a bunch of silly lore and people take interest in it? That's great! Its up to you however to make sure that people aren't being excluded because others take that interest in your character. I would have small clouds of people follow me back in the day, due to my habit of speaking to everyone in a room. That's how I avoid exclusion personally, I *will* talk to everyone in a room with me. And all who walk in. That led to people seeking me out, and I had this worry of "People are going out to their way to talk to me, which might affect others negatively in ways I can't see." So I started to have this belief that I should push away people. But how do you fight exclusion with exclusion?

The answer I found is that we're all responsible in including others. If you're gonna make a story and you wanna include someone you frequently interact with? That's great, and something very unique to the style of this game medium. However, you better include everyone. Your friend? That random new player sitting in the corner with no idea what to do? John Syndicate the baddie who showed up to kill you?  All of them.

You shouldn't beat yourself up for making a fun character that people interact with. I dont think thats on "you". But how you react to the patterns you notice around you are. I never pushed people away from interacting with me. But I always tried to never let it become an exclusive "two-player" interaction.

We all wanna just play a game. We all wanna sit down and do goofy mechanics with a small slice of roleplay. We make characters, we hope people explore them. All of us. Reading peoples posts, none of these concepts are groundbreaking or new. I've played practically one character for 5ish years. It's very difficult for me to gauge how people's interactions with me would have changed if I wasn't that character. But I can reach out to all of those around me and involve them, regardless of if they are someone I've recognized for years, or a fresh character I just met. And so can anyone reading this.

I wanna end on saying, that it can be an issue; and that I hope this doesn't come off as preachy or diminishing or whatever. I just wanted to share my two cents and urge people not to beat themselves up for being liked. But work to make others feel accepted and seen. We're all just here to have a good time.

[Torchwick]

Reading through all of these; I think it's important to remember that while you can't control the actions of other players, you can control your actions and your responses to situations. If you make a bunch of silly lore and people take interest in it? That's great! Its up to you however to make sure that people aren't being excluded because others take that interest in your character. I would have small clouds of people follow me back in the day, due to my habit of speaking to everyone in a room. That's how I avoid exclusion personally, I *will* talk to everyone in a room with me. And all who walk in. That led to people seeking me out, and I had this worry of "People are going out to their way to talk to me, which might affect others negatively in ways I can't see." So I started to have this belief that I should push away people. But how do you fight exclusion with exclusion?

The answer I found is that we're all responsible in including others. If you're gonna make a story and you wanna include someone you frequently interact with? That's great, and something very unique to the style of this game medium. However, you better include everyone. Your friend? That random new player sitting in the corner with no idea what to do? John Syndicate the baddie who showed up to kill you?  All of them.

You shouldn't beat yourself up for making a fun character that people interact with. I dont think thats on "you". But how you react to the patterns you notice around you are. I never pushed people away from interacting with me. But I always tried to never let it become an exclusive "two-player" interaction.

We all wanna just play a game. We all wanna sit down and do goofy mechanics with a small slice of roleplay. We make characters, we hope people explore them. All of us. Reading peoples posts, none of these concepts are groundbreaking or new. I've played practically one character for 5ish years. It's very difficult for me to gauge how people's interactions with me would have changed if I wasn't that character. But I can reach out to all of those around me and involve them, regardless of if they are someone I've recognized for years, or a fresh character I just met. And so can anyone reading this.

I wanna end on saying, that it can be an issue; and that I hope this doesn't come off as preachy or diminishing or whatever. I just wanted to share my two cents and urge people not to beat themselves up for being liked. But work to make others feel accepted and seen. We're all just here to have a good time.

It’s comforting to hear this! Well said tbh. I have found myself pushing away RP opportunities with people I know because it’s always a thought in the back of my mind that maybe people feel excluded, but this also just isn’t fun anymore. Making lore and being creative is the best part of RP servers and discouraging interactions with that aren’t the way to go imo. For me, it’s definitely all about involving other people. Have your drama in the open, let other people give their opinion about the argument your character is having. 

To the point of Syndiesonas, I think they’re fun. Hell, I have one, and it’s discouraging to hear that people find that to be exclusive or lame too. I don’t know everyone’s Syndicate alter ego, but it’s fun to meet the lore energy they bring with similar energy of my own. Monologuing about how they relate to in round characters? I’ll step up to bat on the radio for the good guys whether or not I know you personally or not. It drives conflict and feels more RP and fun. Using them as an excuse to exclude people isn’t cool, but I don’t think having them and making lore around them is bad.

The metatrust and leniency surrounding them is just something people need to work on over time. I will absolutely call for execution for anyone that deserves it in round, friend or not. The lore is just a bonus, not the endgame. I just have to hope and assume that I haven’t done anything outlandishly exclusive, as nobody has poked me over it. That’s the only solace I have I suppose. Try to do good, and all that.

[RubberRats]

For the record, I don't think the blame can be pinned on any one person in most cases. It makes no sense to punish people for making a character that others find appealing. Likewise, there is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to roleplay with a specific person. It only becomes a problem when the behavior rises to the level of outright exclusion, or in aggregate when a larger group decides to put one character on a pedestal.

If you notice any exclusionary behavior or metatrust issues, I encourage you to ahelp it, especially if it makes you uncomfortable. Ultimately, talking about it on forums can only do so much.

[Username Unavailable]

There's some re-occuring characters that I absolutely love meeting, but never go out of my way to do it. Everytime it happens it's natural and not because I'm specifically looking for that character because I like seeing them. OOC IRL I'll be like "hey its that guy!" and that's it.

[laugoose]

as someone who has an issue with desperation over people liking me, it's honestly been quite OKAY on the servers. i don't have experience on other ones, and usually my brain turns off SS13 mode and i go do anything else for a month or two, so getting back and having everyone be comfortable and polite with my character and nothing more is a relief. i have no idea if i've experienced metatrust (i assume not because although i play a lot i also switch between characters) but i can say that a lot of people do not refuse to rp with me or neglect me whatsoever. sometimes it's a little daunting seeing all the big league people talking and interacting, but i can say without a doubt that i have no fear to go up and start interacting, knowing they won't stare daggers at me until i leave.

i've had a few moments that i think people remember (i would call them hype moments and aura but this is serious mode) and i feel comfortable knowing i can go into a round and either meet new people or come up with brand new ideas with old ones. nobody wallows in the past, and i think that's the important part. i do a LOT of text rp and you know it's a bad community when people are more excited about sharing the stories about their old roleplays rather than wanting to create brand new ones.