I've noticed that RPoL tracks a member's history of games.  It shows how long their games have gone for, the last post, the games deleted, etc.

Is there something like that for a member's history as a player? I just recently started a game and I'm already feeling like most of the players are fizzling.  Hopefully it's not that my game sucks already.
Either way, it would be nice if that was something we could use to vet potential ghosters.

It's not a thing, and it's been pretty much said several times that it won't be a thing, because it would interfere with player anonymity within games.

The best you can do as a GM is keep a blacklist, and if you have associates that also GM, compare them.

Ok, thanks.  I'm pretty new, so I don't have other GMs to collaborate with at the moment.

Thanks for the advice.

I have been here a couple decades.. i stated  out  as player only..and games died  because GMs  ghosted, or saw something shiny .. i finally stepped up  after a  Starship troopers  game died..and i had some really good players with me.

 so> i started my space game 12  years+..I still have one player who was a character member..i have had  folks leave and come back..we have had players die in RL..and I have bounced peole  for  being  antagonistic to my other players..for  fo ghosting.

 as aGM. you can look at the list  if you want to Ban, or  lurk someone..it will show you all the   Players user names who signed up.. if you have a 'bad' outcome with  a user  then yiu jus  ban them..or? make a list and  refuse their  RTJ,

 That's as close  as yu can get.. as a plyer? you'll never know , unless they sue the same Character lot.

Why is player anonymity so important?

 in all the years  i have GMed.. i had  a couple women who were stalked  by players from game to game as they tried to figure out  where they went.. one of the ladies  left the boards  years  ago.,. the other one is  still in my games..  i warned the stalker off..and he never attempted   my games again... but  you need to feel safe in here...you want to tell folks who you are, that's up to you..but it shouldn't be site wide knowledge.

This.  ^^^

Also...

Which games a user joins as a player is nobody's business but theirs, as far as RPoL is concerned.

If you post in GM Bob's game today, but don't have time to post anywhere else because your mom is sick and you have your three kid brothers to take care of, then you won't have GM Bill hassling you about why you posted in Bob's game but not his.

Now, obviously, if Bob and Bill are brothers, then word will probably get back to Bill that you posted in one of Bob's games, but there's nothing we can do about that.  Bill finding out you posted in Bob's game from some site stat list (which doesn't explain why you posted in one game, but not the other)... that we can do something about.

That's all very valid and something I hadn't considered.

I wonder if there's something more general they could provide like:

Number of games as an active player (filters out games they haven't posted to in the last month).

Number of bans (I feel like this could be important to know)

Average daily posts (throughout the forums)

Again, you'd be violating a player's anonymity. It's nobody's business to know how many bans they have received from GMs. Bans usually happen because something arose and usually, they won't carry that type of problem to another game. It wouldn't be fair to the player when joining a game and a GM goes "Sorry, you have too many game bans, can't allow that."

As far as average posts, posts are already tracked on your member profile. You usually can tell who's active on the forums just by visually seeing them in the forums.

And for games they partake in, some will list the ones they're in through their bio, but again, it's nobody's business how many games they are in.

And do what with it? You don't know what the quality of a player's posts are based on the quantity, just that he might be over extended. Or he might not be.

Or go the other way, and give the slot to someone not in a game. And hope.

The information really doesn't tell you much, one way or the other. You need a lot more information to decide if some one is a good poster or just over extended.




This is meaningless, often as not. Is the player not posting because he's not posting, or because the GM isn't posting and the player has nothing to respond to? Until the GM tells me what I see through the open doorway, I can't really interact with the new room, after all.

And posting to forums isn't the same as posting to games. I'm in 3 slow moving games. I tend to post more to forums than to the games, but that's due to a lack of things to respond to in game. I'm not a very frequent poster to forums compared to many, when it comes down to it.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:15, Mon 07 Aug 2023.

And as others have said, posting in forums bears no relation to posting in games.

<--- Here it says I have over 16,180 posts to my name (those are purely forum posts, not games).

As for games... in the last two years I've posted in one game, and that a fairly slow-moving one.

So no link between the two, whatsoever.

OK. I guess I'm completely wrong about everything.  Thanks.

posting rates?  doesn';t matter. I want active players. All GMs   dobut ti comes  down to these  3  things

1...GM availability  how  do they keep the game running?

2... Player  availability ..how often  can the post,due to RL?

3... Player  interest. i have had peole say they are slow at postign, tht got into the game  and become some of my most active. i had  people brag  about hiow they post, only to lose interest in my games and  Ghost or leave

 so? yeah?  leave  everything as is. I have  had  no probles in the time that i have been here..

In reply to Elim6394 (msg # 8):

I get what you're looking for...but there are so many variables beyond what you're suggesting...

Number of active games?  Well...is the player working multiple jobs, or is the player retired/disabled and has loads of time?  Those have a tremendous impact.  So does player health...one of my fellow players suffered a stroke several weeks ago, and is still working on recovering.  She posts as often as she feels able, but considering that she still only has partial control of one hand, ANY post is a major undertaking for her right now.  Should she be penalized for that?  I've had fellow players who are still in college...their posting rate/activity rate plummets at the end of every semester when finals are oncoming, over spring break, and sometimes during the holidays (since they go home to visit family and don't have the same kind of freedom to post that they did at school, for various reasons.)  They've all been solid players that, were I a GM, I would be absolutely thrilled to have in my game...but your suggested stat-tracking would flag them as problematic on some level.

Number of bans?  To the best of my knowledge, there is no formal 'ban' protocol on RPOL, unless someone egregiously and repeatedly violates the TOU, in which case the only ban that matters is the ban from the site (which means you wouldn't have to worry about them trying to get into your game.)  GMs may ban or not ban as they see fit, and as a result, with no hard criteria for why someone got banned, this could be a useless stat to track, as well (if there was any sort of way to track it).  It could represent, just as easily, a player with a really difficult personality or a player with really poor judgment who keeps applying to games with really difficult GMs (which DOES happen), or a player who had an unfortunate event crop up in their life that made them unavailable online for an extended period that triggered a lot of GMs banning them for ghosting.  Without solid criteria for a ban that accounts for peripheral issues, it doesn't give you the kind of information you seem to be expecting from it.

Others have already addressed the average daily posts, so I'll just leave that one alone.

It's a little different for GMs...they create and own the games, so they are responsible for keeping them running.  But if a GM lets a game languish in inactivity for months or even years, that inactivity would also be reflected in the players' (hypothetical) stats, even though that situation is entirely out of their control.  And even with the GMs' situation being different, it's still a pretty widely held stance that you have to take those stats with a grain of salt, because there are so many potential exceptional situations that the stats don't really account for.  But a GM allowing their game to founder into inactivity would also impact the stats of all the players in that game...to borrow an example from my own history, should I be counted as 'ghosting' the three games I have on my "Games You Play In Or Peruse" list that have gone inactive because the GMs didn't have time to keep running them, due to Real Life issues?  I haven't posted in them in months (or even years, in at least one case...I still have them listed because I have had GMs give up on games for RL reasons in the past, only to return to them a couple of years later when those reasons had been resolved).

By the time you start trying to count up all the potential exceptions to be accounted for, you're talking about some extensive coding, for something that's of extremely limited value to the vast majority of users on the site.  It's a pretty limited 'bang for your buck' exchange, to do something that most GMs who seem to care about it have already figured out how to do on their own, to some extent.