'Account' command and cabal applicants

[Abandoned Realms]

Effective immediately, cabal applicants will require an associated
ACCOUNT (see HELP VERIFY) to be considered for induction.

Any currently pending cabal applicants are required to associate their
characters with an account.

[Dogran]

Nice how will people be able to tell? Will there be a feature in the applicants command that shows if they are verified or not?

[Nycticora]

There's an 'account' command imms can use (and should use before thumbs-up-ing and applicant). If someone gets inducted by morts this won't currently get checked, but in that case expect the cabal imm to pester you to verify your account.

This information will never be visible to other players, only to you and imms. In the future we will add features to this to allow such as marking a player 'in good standing' or something that would let them do such as qualify for vamping without imm intervention or prove via a forum post that they definitely did play a certain character. There's a lot of stuff on the drawing board for the 'account' command that's going to take awhile and some player adoption before it becomes feasible.

Start using it sooner than later and you'll get more of the benefits of it when cool changes come around.

[Dogran]

Yeah Currently every one of my characters are verified. I was simply curious if there would be a way for morts to track this, since not all the cabals have truly active imms. Plenty of times I have seen characters inducted without ever seeing the imm throughout the process. Have you guys considered putting in a check that will not let you send the application until the character has been verified? Its not like it needs an imm response to verify, takes two seconds.

[Davairus]

This is completely private, i.e. between you and really old staff members. It is not publically accessible data. Other players definitely won't be able to see your account or its history unless you show them it. There are no plans to ever change that.

We intended to do this originally, but the account command wasn't fleshed out enough at the time. Its in a much better place now, so we are proceeding with our original intentions.

Here are some advantages to having this on cabal applications:

* We will be able to have better turnover on application processing time for our veterans, who have proven themselves responsible
* Imms will be much more cognizant of a player who is deleting repeatedly and wasting other people's time (this is usually a great unknown for a burgeoning cabal, who need to invest a lot of time into applicants but don't want the expense of wasting it on time-wasters)
* We will be exerting a very light pressure on our best players to be aware of the forums and possibly post here and participate in our larger community more.
* We can see a player trying to turn around a bad reputation and ensure he gets that opportunity.

The underlying goal is to improve the quality of the game, and in this case, we're talking about the quality of caballed players. I assume if you have something to hide, you would not want to verify your character. Its kind of like turning on a light and watching the cockroaches run away.

http://abandonedrealms.com/dashboard.php

[Nycticora]

Nah, that's not necessary right now. We'll just pester you to do it after the fact if you get in without it. It'll be in your best interests to have a high-quality account with known characters in it and no busts for multi or ooc so anyone who skirts around it or whatever just won't get the benefits of that. It's a carrot on a stick thing and not a "do it or else" thing

[Craginoth]

Would I automatically be turned down if I choose to not partake in this if I still wanted to apply to a cabal? I speak on my behalf only, I understand completely the nice perks to this if one wanted it to be available. Kinda feels like a governmental program to track people, maybe im just paranoid. Reminds me of cops and the public. Cops=bad.

[Nycticora]

Yeah. I'm not gonna put up with irrationality. Imms can already see every character you have ever played with one grep command in our logdirs. The logs are detailed enough to bust people for multi ex post facto.

[Davairus]

Playing here is at your own risk. I do have your IP address and could theoretically use your connection to this game to install some monitoring software on your computer as well as take full control of it. Its been that way for the last ten years. This is true of any website you visit on the internet and any piece of software you choose to install.
You have much bigger things to worry about than some nerd who Imms a cabal knowing you have a deleted applicant that cussed him out last week, or even some nerd mud implementor. There are real world things that are much bigger than this game that you are alluding to. Worry about those, not this.

[Craginoth]

Maybe it's just the mandatory side of it that bothers me, but I understand, thanks guys.

[Davairus]

This is an understandable concern because of all the NSA stuff in the news, but its not going to cause you a new problem.

The dashboard is already a very well-loved feature by the players who beta tested it. You can use it to see if your characters need to be played more to avoid getting deleted, to make sure you didn't forget your character's name, etc. Zero downsides to using it, unless you were trying to keep a character secret from the Imms (which is already impossible). I will not allow that to turn into any sort of automated fascist penalty system. The only thing it requires is having a forum account and if you want to make an anonymous new one then feel free to do so, we're not stopping you from doing that. There is no problem.

[Thorgoth]

[Mummy]

Is there any way imms could link dead characters to our accounts so we can see a list of all the characters we've had? Maybe categorized into Alive and Dead?

[Olyn]

[Stephen2Aus]

That retrospective list would be amazing.... Doubt it would ever really go back too far, but it would be sweet. Even for us washed up stage 3s.