Games ending before they begin

I and the admins have been aware of and notified of trend of games being opened and never getting anywhere after character creation, by one or more people behind a number of accounts. This is obviously an unfortunate component of Play-by-Post RPGs (and the internet in general), but none the less sucks. The last thing I want is for people to start up on the site, get into one such game, and feel like it's representative of the site; I'd like to think it's not.

That said, the admins and I are taking some action:
1) Anyone on Discord MUST have their username set to the same as their Gamers' Plane username. This only affects your username on the GP Discord, but will now be required. Anything not matching will result in being removed from the server until you change said username.
2) We're taking an increased look at users who start games and they get nowhere after chargen; if we notice patterns, we'll act on them.
3) I'm increasing what data I collect from users, and suspicious activity will be met with more quick responses.

If you notice any funky details, be mindful of the fact that a fellow player may have a legitimate purpose behind their actions, but if you feel like there's something an admin or I should look at, PM us or send me an email (contact@gamersplane.com). We'll continue to look for solutions to problems like these to make GP as great a site as it can be.

To this end, if anyone is knowledgeable in web security or knows someone who is, please do reach out, and I'd love to make this site better for all of you.

There are no good solutions to this sort of problem, and so we may be left with partially bad ones. I applaud and support the admins in attempting to address this issue in whatever way they see fit.

Speaking of possibly bad solutions, public shaming is one method. A public resource of failed on launch games: game systems, name of the game, dates, and GMs. For fairness, the GM's explanation if given could be added. I think that such a resource, if instituted, should be Locked from comment, and kindness and understanding should be the norm in the tone of any post.

Note: If this advice isn't warranted in this venue, please delete without notice. Thanks!

What if I have two usernames on here and am not on your Discord server? I have one username for Zombie/Apocalyse games I play and run. I have this username for every other game I play and run. And I don't follow your Discord at all, but I'm not sure how that would even work if I was to join your discord.

And honestly, when I run a game on here, if someone applies doesn't have some user history, I generally pass them over when they apply. If a GM is posting they want to run a game and has no user history, I generally won't join. Users start to recognise other usernames here after a while, and those that have some history with the website generally are less inclined to abandon their accounts than people that don't, I've noticed.
It's not necessarily a fair process for new members, but if I get the impression that they're genuine about playing or joining my game, I can always have a chat with them in PM and see if they genuinely want to play or if they're likely to ghost the players mid game.

And if it's Savage Worlds, forget about it. I've had so many DMs ghost their players in games using that system, I just breeze past IC posts for that game anymore.

I know of spambots signing up to forums, but do we know what the motivation might be to start a game, accept players, and then not actually start playing? If there's a scam involved at some point, what is it? Or is it just regular would-be GMs with poor follow-through?

If the problem were that real users of the site were creating and ghosting games, this might be an effective way to discourage them from doing it. (It might also have the effect of making new GMs afraid to even try, so there's that to consider.)

But the actual problem we're facing appears to be that someone has been creating a series of sockpuppet accounts for well over a year, and then creating games that the perpetrator has no intention of running. Most of them are ghosted in late-stage character generation, immediately after the "GM" approves the characters, or after a tiny amount of gameplay has begun. Then the "GM" abruptly disappears, sometimes retiring the game, almost invariably without notice or explanation.

Obviously, the activity level escalated significantly over the mid-to-latter part of 2020, which is probably why it raised suspicions. Everyone knows that there's a certain amount of caveat emptor involved with online gaming and that ghosting is always a risk; however, it reached ridiculous levels last year, to the point where the perpetrator even began taunting the site by advertising games he'd offered (and ghosted) under a previous sockpuppet.It's impossible to say what he's getting out of it, but he seems to be doing it on multiple internet locations. Some of his games have been advertised on Reddit, and I found one on another PvP website after just a cursory search. So he's not only victimizing GP, but this does appear to be a favorite hunting ground.

Good point, didn't think about it particular. For now, I'm inclined to say as long as you match one, you're good.

Can we have a registrar of players who take up a slot in a game and then are never heard from again? Who are these people? Why do they do this? :,(

In my short time on GP I’ve seen games hobbled by promising players fail to make it to char gen. Or if they make it to char gen, they don’t make it to Thread #1.

It certainly takes all the air out of a game right at the get-go!

At this point, and probably ever, I'm hesitant to resort to public shaming. It will only lead to accusations and I won't tolerate that. I'm happy to investigate concerns with the data I have under the hood, but I don't want finger pointing.

How about a reputation system, with some community input?

Basically, you get a small and steady increase in rep just for participating in a game, maybe by posting as per the posting rate listed on a game's page. This would suffice for most people.

Other players in a game can "like" you if you're a great player, to increase rep by a bigger amount. Other players in a game can also "dislike" you if they're having problems, which would drop rep. I think the likes/dislikes would be hidden, and only the rep would be on display.

I have to say, while I have nothing against Funfungiguy, I have concerns about people playing with multiple accounts on this site. The post as character functionality already allows for people to create custom personas for each game, and if someone has multiple accounts with no apparent connection, it becomes very hard to maintain accountability. Imagine kicking someone from a game for bad behavior and not knowing that they're in another game with you because they have a second username. There's potential for abuse there.

I like the "like" part and dis-like the "dislike" part. BGG (Board Game Geek) had tried several different systems (1-10 rating / likes-dislikes) before settling on just the "thumbs up" approach. Both the rating and like/dislike led to people abusing the negative aspect of the system, where someone would just go negative against someone they disliked for no real reason.

Not to say that would happen here, but, I'm not saying it wouldn't either.

Any sort of reputation system is laughably useless on a site where having multiple accounts is allowed. (Side note: I'm pretty creeped out to learn that people other than our nefarious ghosting fake GM have multiple accounts. I can't think of a single reason why that would be necessary, and as has been pointed out, the potential for abuse is huge.)

I, for one, do have a second account. It's Crawllock (which is how I pronounce my user name). I made it entirely to fill in the mandatory one player minimum for solo games, including a game I made for GM Notes and staging posts for other games.

Can't you just close an empty game to keep people from applying and use that for staging posts without having any players in it?

I was aware of your second account and your reason for creating it. But I'm still creeped out that there are people using multiple accounts for posting.

It's hard for a site to run on trust and good faith if it's acceptable to have multiple accounts and there's no way to know who you're really talking to. It's especially difficult when we have someone creating scads of accounts (including multiple older accounts) and all of them pretending to be unique users, posting fake games and tricking people into wasting their time and creative effort.

True, the rep system as suggested could be abused, and probably would need more consideration. I think that having a like system only doesn't really work though, because that puts newbies and problem players into the same boat. Maybe if time were also calculated into rep? But it also doesn't provide a way to specifically find problem players.

Ideally, rep would be autonomous, to be less prone to abuse. In BoardGameArena, which is a board game site, the rep system automatically drops rep when you leave a game without notice, or go afk for too long. But that's not so easy to do in this situation here, where ghosting isn't as easily measured, since they're technically still in the game.

Maybe you could assign rep by using the posting rate as a measure, with those that fail to meet up with it drop rep? Most games would be set as a few times per week for time flexibility. It doesn't really account for legitimate hiatuses, but maybe a hiatus feature could be added in conjuncture, where a player could be marked as being on hiatus.

As a GM I would be happy with nothing more than being able to visit a user's profile and seeing the overall number of posts they've made. I can already see the date that someone signed up, number of characters they've created, and the number of games they've run. I can draw my own conclusions from that, I think.

This would be a great starting point, and maybe the easiest to apply. I'm new around here, but didn't have much trouble finding a game to join. I think that it needs to stay that way, and as a GM a player with 10 posts and 10 games joined isn't as promising as a player with 10 posts and 0 games.

While raw # of posts, too, can be gamed, a chart or table showing posts per week for the past year or so would require much more effort to spoof thus be more reliable.

I like this idea.