Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Planning and discussing Freeciv Longturn gaming
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Corbeau
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Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Corbeau »

Hello all. I have information to share that is probably not of relevance to anybody, but I believe it's interesting and, if it happened to someone else, I would want to know about it because, when you look at it, it's actually fun. Besides, the journalist in me believes that all information should be shared so there you go. I am not posting this in order to incite a reaction of any kind so just take it a it is and feel free to continue with your lives ;)

A few days ago Andreas banned me from all Longturn games (maybe also from all other web games, didn't check) because I "insulted him". (Calling someone a "PR disaster" is apparently a personal insult; oh, well, I probably could have been more tactical or I could have tried to say stuff more privately, but there you have it; I'm a loudmouth and a hot-blooded southerner; sue me :P)

Also, apparently, another reason I was banned was that I was "setting up a competing longturn server" and my goal was to "make Andreas look bad so that people would use my service instead of his", and this is why I will "remain banned forever". I'd gladly share the full PM with "evidence" (links to my posts on this forum) "corroborating" this, it's really amazing, but in some circles publishing private correspondence is considered impolite so I won't.

And I'm not even going to respond to these claims because that may be taken as another personal insult, this time containing certain medical terms.

(For the record, after getting banned, I did move towards trying to learn how to set up a server on my home computer so that I can play with friends, but I very much doubt that my home computer can compete with the whole Freeciv.org, let alone draw people away from it. Speaking of which, if anyone has any advice about how to make it possible for others to connect to the server on my home computer - I hear it's a router issue - do share some advice :) )

Again, this is just information sharing, not a call to... oh, I don't know, whatever. There is already too much paranoia in the air, just keep playing and have fun :D

(Archive: http://forum.freeciv.org/f/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=89735 )
Last edited by Corbeau on Fri Apr 22, 2022 3:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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AndreasR
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by AndreasR »

Freeciv-web <- can be played here in your browser! :lol:

all pr is good pr
Last edited by AndreasR on Mon Jul 08, 2019 8:08 am, edited 3 times in total.
madmax
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by madmax »

FTR:

I find perfectly valid that anyone starts a competing service, even if the real motivation is to make the current one look bad. I'd be very pissed off if I lost users to it, but that's life. A different thing would be to seed discord in a project to make people flee to a different one.

Regarding the message, not only the referenced one, but many others by different authors, I've found quite a few that on first read looked rude or offensive to me. Most times I reread them and try to remember that:
  • English is not my first language.
  • English may not be the author's language, either. They might not even be good at it.
  • Different languages/communities/people have different ways of expressing ideas, and different limits on what's rude and offensive. What's rude for one person is just the usual way of detachedly making a point clear for another.
  • I myself say things to my friends that an outsider may find rude. They know me, they know what I mean and that I'm not insulting or demeaning them, just clearly showing how stupid their actions were. Now, it's easy to lose perspective and I may have communicated in that personal way out here on the net, as if I was talking with a friend, with all the body language, speech inflection and all that help in face to face communication.
  • I don't know what the whole story is. There may be private messages, it may be a rebirth of a long story...
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Corbeau
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Corbeau »

For the record, just to make sure all is clear: there were no private messages before the ban. Someone else also wondered the same thing so I just want to make it clear. Everything is out there in the open. Nor is there an older story, at least not on my side.
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wieder
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by wieder »

Worrying about competing services would be an endless task. Lots of people are running "competing" services. Some even download the compter client from the web and start a competing single player game on a local laptop. Some hard code players playe with friends...

I think it's great. People learn about this great game and in the future they may try something different. For example longturn.org will be starting 3 multiplayer games this year. The first one, SG1 will be a scenario game based in 19th certury Germany and by design there are less than 20 possible openings for those who want to play. And yeah, really that's the upper limit. Once the ame starts, no more playes will be added at a later time. With the exception of replacing idlers with new people. This can't be played with a web browser. Instead you need to have Freeciv 2.5 compatible client.

Not too many people with PC clients want to play that much with a browser impementation and also, the other way around. If you play a browser based game on your cell phone, the chnaces are you are not going to install a PC client even if the full feature set of the game would become available that way.

To me it looks like the web version is so much more flexible to what it comes using it on a range of devices. It scales from mobile phones to very powerful computers. And scales without technical gimmicks.

Meanwhile the installable computer client can pretty much only be used on traditional computers and laptops. With some gimmichs people have been able to use it on talet compiters but that's hc. You get the full features set with this approach but no way to reach the flexibility of the web version. Never gonna happen. Probably.

If someone wants to have a semi-private game with friends and with few people who may want to join the fun, you can contact longturn.org or me directly. We can probably figure out a way to setup a game for you. However on longturn.org stuff happens slowly and the chances are you will not be able to get a game running the same week you ask for it. Also some more people may like to join the fun. We have people who have a very long career playing Freeciv and some of them are very good at it. However most players are just like anyone else. Playing for fun and trying to use English as the game language, even while it's not always that easy for everyone.

What was I saying?

I see no problem in different type of games with very different implementations. Web is for some, isntallable clients for other and some even may like both.

Then there is the matter of rulesets used for those games and I could write a lengthy message about those :D
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Corbeau
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Corbeau »

Problem with forum login, so copy-pasting.
Schwartz wrote:I can't get my login on the FreeCiv Web forum to work, so I'll give my viewpoint here on Discord and I would appreciate it if someone could screen-cap or otherwise copy-paste it as a reply to Corbeau's post. I would have responded earlier but I'm busy dealing with a situation outside of the game. I’ll also try to be to-the-point on each of the four issues I raise here. Before starting, I want to say thank you to Andreas for taking the time to consider my complaint.

1. Corbeau's choice to publish the chat transcript is itself ethically problematic and more importantly I also believe symptomatic. Being as I am a journalist (more about that at the end), I of course did my due diligence even before playing the game, getting a sense of the major personalities from the forum; then when I joined the game I also have talked with several fellow players, new and old. The consensus about Corbeau is more or less that he is an intelligent player who expends his talents on game mechanic exploits and psychological ploys, especially gaslighting and trolling.

I think it’s characteristic that Corbeau not only threatened to publish the transcript of our conversation, not only that he followed through on his threat, but that he is trying to focus his defense upon the lack of specifics in my complaint when in fact my complaint is about his style, both in the game and behind the scenes through chat. The irony, then, is that he is only confirming the essence of my complaint.(edited)
2. On the specific issue about embassies, the transcript as it currently stands needs to be synchronized with in-game events to really understand the play-by-play and why my tone therein shifts from friendly to staunch. I would really need to reconstruct events to do that.

The essence, though, has been stated by Wieder in the forum: thrusting an embassy upon a player would normally be considered an act of war in some situations. Although initially I tried to still work out something with him, I ultimately decided this was one such situation given my own relative weakness vis-a-vis Corbeau, not so much in terms of my position within the game as my lack of experience versus his wealth of it combined with his reputation.

This leads to a broader debate about the game mechanics of embassies, whether the fact that they can be imposed on players constitutes a "bug" or an "accurate simulation" of history. Although I am still pretty new, I think it is inarguably a lacuna at minimum.

I am probably not the only one in this game with a Master’s degree in history, and certainly not the only one with an extensive knowledge of history regardless of education. Embassies usually need the permission of host nations to open and spies usually do not announce themselves upon entering the target territory. Reciprocity is also the cornerstone of international diplomacy since at least Westphalia, certainly at the institutional level of embassies.(edited)
3. Obviously insofar as there is a “Corbeau debate”, people’s feelings about my complaint almost certainly revolve around whether they consider his style of playing fundamentally appropriate or inappropriate.

For those who see it as appropriate, there is a clear and comprehensible logic, which can be boiled down to: Corbeau is just doing what he can to win, like anyone else would or should. If there is a flaw in, say, how embassies operate, then Corbeau is all the better player for exploiting it. If a player isn’t tough or sharp enough to deal with his style of communication, then they aren’t fit to win anyway. Corbeau himself put it aptly: “Trolling is a tool.”

And indeed, maybe those who see Corbeau’s strategy as fundamentally appropriate can even point to history for credence. There have been certain let’s call them Corbeau-esque schools of intelligence and diplomacy, most notably the Soviet tradition in which maskirovka, gaslighting and trolling are tools of the trade. I work as a journalist in post-Soviet Central Asia, I am well-acquainted with the philosophy and I have seen it used in real life. Scary stuff, believe me.

For those of us who see it as inappropriate, however, we can point to not specific historical phenomena but to how history ought to be, maybe where it is ultimately heading. The evolution of MMO’s themselves may be on our side with this. There are some good academic and journalistic articles out there about how MMO’s have been moving from the era of the kind of no-holds-barred playing exemplified by Corbeau toward more friendly, more ethics-based playing.(edited)
4. Finally, yes, I am a journalist. I do happen to also really enjoy FreeCiv, having been a Civilization addict for many years. But I did come here originally to investigate a conspiracy theory in real-time, so to speak. Due to Corbeau’s post, the proverbial cat’s out of the bag, but I still don’t want to get into details about it just for journalistic prudence.

Needless to say, this theory is highly, highly unlikely to be true — indeed, in the brief moment when Corbeau and I were getting along, we had a good laugh at the wildness of the idea. That said, the New York Times and other news agencies have reported upon intelligence agencies infiltrating MMO’s for other reasons, including hunting terrorists who might be using games as meeting-places.

With that in mind, I would like to conclude that as noxious as I think Corbeau’s style of playing was, he’s certainly no terrorist. From the sounds of it, he’s made his own positive contributions to FreeCiv Web. From that perspective, it’s a shame things have come to this.(edited)
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Corbeau
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Corbeau »

Schwartz wrote:Before starting, I want to say thank you to Andreas for taking the time to consider my complaint.
I wouldn't really say that he "took the time".
1. Corbeau's choice to publish the chat transcript is itself ethically problematic and more importantly I also believe symptomatic.
Actually, if this was real life, the complaint would go to a court, there would be hearing, transcripts would be demanded and possibly made public. However, we don't have the court here, the only "court" is "public opinion" - if anyone is actually interested in this and reading this - so handing the information to this "court" is basically the only decent thing to do. The fact that you are objecting to facts being published also reveals things about you and your stance in all this. Some journalist you are.
The consensus about Corbeau is more or less that he is an intelligent player who expends his talents on game mechanic exploits and psychological ploys, especially gaslighting and trolling.
Lovely word, "concensus". You either don't know what it means (which I doubt), or you are directly lying about "having the concensus" or are manipulating and misinterpreting the "information" you received.

Basically, I also asked around, shared information what I had and also received a "concensus" that you are an idiot.

So stop talking about "concensus".
I think it’s characteristic that Corbeau not only threatened to publish the transcript of our conversation, not only that he followed through on his threat,
I never threatened to publish them. Where did I do that? I went out and published it because it was the right thing to do, but I never talked about it anywhere.
but that he is trying to focus his defense upon the lack of specifics in my complaint when in fact my complaint is about his style, both in the game and behind the scenes through chat. The irony, then, is that he is only confirming the essence of my complaint.
Yes, this thing is called "self fulfilling prophecy". I'm sure you've heard of the phrase. If you come to a man who is sitting calmly and repeat to him twenty times "You get annoyed so easily, don't be annoyed", guess what happens.
2. On the specific issue about embassies, the transcript as it currently stands needs to be synchronized with in-game events to really understand the play-by-play and why my tone therein shifts from friendly to staunch. I would really need to reconstruct events to do that.
Please reconstruct events. And after you do that, I will gladly reconstruct you and your "case".
The essence, though, has been stated by Wieder in the forum: thrusting an embassy upon a player would normally be considered an act of war in some situations. Although initially I tried to still work out something with him, I ultimately decided this was one such situation given my own relative weakness vis-a-vis Corbeau, not so much in terms of my position within the game as my lack of experience versus his wealth of it combined with his reputation.
So many words, so little essence. To the point:

Did you agree to an embassy?

Yes, you did.

Did you at any moment object to me creating an embassy?

No, you didn't.

End of story.

Like I told you afterwards, if at any moment you showed doubt, hinted any kind of hesitation, I would have turned my diplomat westward and sent it to Dramon because, get this: he invited me to! However, I was an idiot, I had an idiotic reason to go to you and I made the mistake that I paid dearly. Because you agreed to me creating an embassy.

I'm sorry that you still have no clue about the game you are playing and that you misunderstood what an "embassy" means. Hopefully, now you have learned. I am yet to hope that you will learn about all the consequences and what it actually means in the game, but that is a bit more difficult because it requires intelligence and healthy perception.

And guess what: Dramon is more experienced and I reached a deal with him almost instantly. So, instead of trying to find out what it is that you missed or did wrong, you spread the blame everywhere else. Cool story, bro, but stop wasting other poeple's time.

3. Obviously insofar as there is a “Corbeau debate”, people’s feelings about my complaint almost certainly revolve around whether they consider his style of playing fundamentally appropriate or inappropriate.
... or their perception of my style of playing is slightly different than yours.
For those who see it as appropriate, there is a clear and comprehensible logic, which can be boiled down to: Corbeau is just doing what he can to win, like anyone else would or should. If there is a flaw in, say, how embassies operate, then Corbeau is all the better player for exploiting it. If a player isn’t tough or sharp enough to deal with his style of communication, then they aren’t fit to win anyway. Corbeau himself put it aptly: “Trolling is a tool.”
This is a clear marker that you are a manipulator. This four-word sentence was a part of a thousand word discussion with another person, that discussion had a drastically different tone and was revolving about completely different subjects. I strongly dislike the phrase "taken out of context", but this was so violently ripped out of the whole set of meanings that gave it a different tone that I'd have to spend a lot more words to explain it, which would be pointless right now.

Furthermore, you are now connecting that sentence and "trolling" with a discussion that has absolutely nothing to do with trolling. I published a transcript. Where is my trolling? Please point out my sentences there that can be understood as trolling. I dare you.

As for the rest of the rant about the "expliotative Corbeau-esque style of play", I will repeat what I told you twice already: you need help. Or you need to simply sit down, learn some shit and maybe, when you do, you'll start being embarrassed about everything you spewed out so publicly. I don't really understand why I am spending so much time on this, your words aren't a description of me, they are simply a signature of your flawed perception of the world and ignorance of one of its small corners, namely, this community.
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Corbeau
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Corbeau »

Corbeau wrote:
Schwartz wrote:
but that he is trying to focus his defense upon the lack of specifics in my complaint when in fact my complaint is about his style, both in the game and behind the scenes through chat. The irony, then, is that he is only confirming the essence of my complaint.
Yes, this thing is called "self fulfilling prophecy". I'm sure you've heard of the phrase. If you come to a man who is sitting calmly and repeat to him twenty times "You get annoyed so easily, don't be annoyed", guess what happens.
Actually, come to think of it, this is the wrong reply.

Because there is no "essence of your complaint". Your "complaint" doesn't have an essence. It is a personal, subjective opinion based on twisted perception. Now, I have a feeling what - or who - took part in twisting this perception, but this what - or who - also tried to influence many other people and most of them resisted to the influence one way or another. (At least two of them actually quit the game.) So it's not entirely her fault, it's also your lack of coherence and mental firmness.

But that isnt' the real problem here. You are just a means. A tool. The real problem is that an admin of something so massive followed that opinion and made it official. But that's another story.
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Corbeau
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Corbeau »

Oh, about Wieder's statement about embassies: "Creating unwanted embassies is one strategy and is usually considered hostile if not agreed beforehand. "

Let me use colours to emphasize something:

Creating unwanted embassies is one strategy and is usually considered hostile if not agreed beforehand.
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Re: Freeciv Longturn Web - The gossip section

Post by Lexxie »

here is absolutely no question that what Corbeau just did was unethical.

If you do not want a "drama king" cyber-bullying you by dragging your private freeciv experience through the streets with a gleeful trolling vindictiveness, unethically breaching private details of your freeciv experience, you shouldn't have to, and the admins of this forum should take decisive action to prevent it. But it doesn't hurt to make a declaration to resolve legal ambiguity.


Under appropriate legal apparatuses be they local, national, international, and by agreement between respective nations, or any combination of these where applicable, this statement hereby serves as public announcement that my private digital conversations are private property and my utterances therein are performance held and claimed under copyright and may not be used, released, or replicated without my permission.
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