Is private tgstation streaming allowed?

[Timberpoes]

This isn't the same as public streaming (i.e. via Twitch) when you're not a Registered Streamer, which is definitely against the rules.

Private streaming is sharing ongoing rounds of SS13 with your friends via other methods, such as in your own private Discord server or using any sort of VoIP software that allows screen sharing, etc and is not inherently available for the public to see.

Is privately streaming SS13 allowed in the following two circumstances:
1. To people that don't play SS13?
2. To people that do play SS13 but aren't currently playing?

Bonus questions:
With number 2, does it matter if person's decision whether or not to join a shift is influenced by watching a private stream and seeing the events of that shift?
Does Rule 2 Precedent 2 apply to private streams?

2. Due to their tendency to reveal a lot of information from the current round, streaming is not permitted on our servers, with the exception of special events pre-designated by admins and those who register through streaming applications.

[Jackraxxus]

Is privately streaming SS13 allowed in the following two circumstances:
1. To people that don't play SS13?
2. To people that do play SS13 but aren't currently playing?

1. Yeah
2. idk but it should be

If u join a round after having watched someone stream it u should be banned idc about the deciding to join a round bcuz by participating in a stream of the round you have already made your choice to sit out.
The precedent about public streamers should not apply in this case and the suggestion that someone apply for the streamers program to stream to their friends on discord isn't just 'lol' it's 'lol, lmao'

[britgrenadier1]

Wholeheartedly agree with the above. Privately streaming should be fine regardless of if they play or not, it’s only when the stream viewer joins the live round that it becomes a problem.

[DrAmazing343]

I'm also in total agreement with the above— I've seen the example of "my friend watching me over my shoulder is okay" being pretty much universally agreed upon as okay versus "I'm streaming this to my friend" being illegal. Really, what's the difference until they join a round? I'm more than willing to put more trust in our players here. Anything but making this allowed is a bit semantic I think

[Itseasytosee2me]

I have no idea how you would police letting uninvolved people watch your gameplay, and why anyone would care about someone who isn't playing see's a players screen.
Choosing to play because of seeing something happening on someones stream is using metainfo though, so it would make sense to ban it.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

I have no idea how you would police letting uninvolved people watch your gameplay, and why anyone would care about someone who isn't playing see's a players screen.
Choosing to play because of seeing something happening on someones stream is using metainfo though, so it would make sense to ban it.

There are methods applications can use to detect streaming. I'm no coder, but I can think of several instances like DDLC and Bennet Foddy both being games that detected streaming, so I imagine if they really wanted to, code team could detect streaming and then compare ckeys to registered streamers.

Onto the topic at hand, I think private streaming is fine, both to people who are not players of the game, and people who are players, but not actively in a shift. As for the bonus question, that's a lot harder. Personally I'm fine with it if they join because they see it's lowpop and they want to help out, or they see it's some big epic shift where the crew is in an epic battle royale versus a blob and they want to join, but I'm not okay with it if they see their friend died and so they want to hop in to save them - that'd just be straight metacomming at that point. But I'm not sure if/where you can draw a rules-enforceable line on this.

[PapaMichael]

i am fully in favor about a common-sense policy allowing this, but i do kinda worry about the difficulty of drawing a clear line distinguishing allowed activities from disallowed ones.
where would you draw the line here?

• streaming in a dm to my girlfriend in canada who has never played the game before
• streaming in a dm to someone plays occasionally but who i trust
• streaming to a 2 other people in a private dm
• streaming to a private dm of several people, some of whom are watching, some of whom are not
• streaming in a small private discord of a half-dozen people, some of whom are watching, some of whom are not
• oh fuck we're right back at the metacord problem

[iwishforducks]

I think we need to look into the exact purpose Rule 2 serves to really answer this question.

2. Do not use information gained outside of in-character means.
I.e. metagaming. This especially refers to communication between players outside of the game via things like Discord, known as metacomms. Characters are otherwise allowed to know everything about ingame mechanics or antagonists, as well as keep persistent friendships or relationships with other characters when not for the purpose of unfair advantage by teaming up together for little IC reason.

Rule 2 serves explicitly to stop a player from using outside information to gain an advantage in-round. If a player is not playing the round, or straight up does not play space station 13, then I fail to see how they could use that information in the first place.

With that said, to answer some of the scenarios above with my own:

1. Streaming to your Girlfriend that has never played Space Station 13 in DMs is obviously OK. She's not going to use any information in the round, because she would have to be playing on the servers in the first place to use the information.
2. Streaming to a friend group's server that has literally never heard of Space Station 13 and you bring it up as something interesting to show off. This is also fine, because again, nobody in that call is playing Space Station 13- or on TG for that matter either. They can't use the information.
3. Streaming in a server with other TG players... This is bad. Because you really have no guarantee of who is going to be watching your stream. But again, as long as the people in the call aren't playing the round, then is there really any impact at all?

Now here's the thing, all of these scenarios are OK by the literal definition of the rules. No-one is actually using outside information gained outside of in-character means. But the issue really becomes about responsibility. What happens when one of those friends in the call start playing the round? If you ask everyone if they're in the round, and they respond with "no" but actually are, whose responsibility does it ultimately become? Where's the line to draw for irresponsibly streaming to people who could very well use the information? IMO you definitely have a responsibility as the streamer to make sure no-one in the call is currently playing the round. It's a case-by-case common sense thing (gasp) that admins gotta make the call of when handing out bans for people being Stupid with it.

[Justice12354]

Now here's the thing, all of these scenarios are OK by the literal definition of the rules. No-one is actually using outside information gained outside of in-character means. But the issue really becomes about responsibility. What happens when one of those friends in the call start playing the round? If you ask everyone if they're in the round, and they respond with "no" but actually are, whose responsibility does it ultimately become? Where's the line to draw for irresponsibly streaming to people who could very well use the information? IMO you definitely have a responsibility as the streamer to make sure no-one in the call is currently playing the round. It's a case-by-case common sense thing (gasp) that admins gotta make the call of when handing out bans for people being Stupid with it.

Good point! If the person streaming claims they were unaware of the other players being in the game (I'd even dare to say that regardless of whether they asked), then imo it's not their fault. The worst outcome is they actually knew they were doing ic ooc, but the other player is ded, so there's a visible severe warning/punishment, and it's only a matter of time to catch 'em if they wanna keep metacomming.

[iwishforducks]

Now here's the thing, all of these scenarios are OK by the literal definition of the rules. No-one is actually using outside information gained outside of in-character means. But the issue really becomes about responsibility. What happens when one of those friends in the call start playing the round? If you ask everyone if they're in the round, and they respond with "no" but actually are, whose responsibility does it ultimately become? Where's the line to draw for irresponsibly streaming to people who could very well use the information? IMO you definitely have a responsibility as the streamer to make sure no-one in the call is currently playing the round. It's a case-by-case common sense thing (gasp) that admins gotta make the call of when handing out bans for people being Stupid with it.

Good point! If the person streaming claims they were unaware of the other players being in the game (I'd even dare to say that regardless of whether they asked), then imo it's not their fault. The worst outcome is they actually knew they were doing ic ooc, but the other player is ded, so there's a visible severe warning/punishment, and it's only a matter of time to catch 'em if they wanna keep metacomming.

It becomes a big issue of being able to verify those claims that they didn't know. But, yeah, best case scenario someone in the call just wasn't communicating they were in the round and was using the stream's information. But y'know, if you know there's TG players in the call you should do some amount of homework to make sure they're not in-round. Not that I genuinely expect people to be interrogating others constantly over VC if they're in-round. Just some light homework of checking the who tab and seeing if you recognize ckeys is good enough faith in my book.

I mean, streaming the round in the TG discord would be really dumb because literally everyone in the server plays TG and you don't know everyone personally enough to know for a fact if they're abusing the stream's information. This is generally why public streaming needs to be vetted, since streamers are not expected to shoulder any of that responsibility.

[britgrenadier1]

I think we need to look into the exact purpose Rule 2 serves to really answer this question.

2. Do not use information gained outside of in-character means.
I.e. metagaming. This especially refers to communication between players outside of the game via things like Discord, known as metacomms. Characters are otherwise allowed to know everything about ingame mechanics or antagonists, as well as keep persistent friendships or relationships with other characters when not for the purpose of unfair advantage by teaming up together for little IC reason.

Rule 2 serves explicitly to stop a player from using outside information to gain an advantage in-round. If a player is not playing the round, or straight up does not play space station 13, then I fail to see how they could use that information in the first place.

With that said, to answer some of the scenarios above with my own:

1. Streaming to your Girlfriend that has never played Space Station 13 in DMs is obviously OK. She's not going to use any information in the round, because she would have to be playing on the servers in the first place to use the information.
2. Streaming to a friend group's server that has literally never heard of Space Station 13 and you bring it up as something interesting to show off. This is also fine, because again, nobody in that call is playing Space Station 13- or on TG for that matter either. They can't use the information.
3. Streaming in a server with other TG players... This is bad. Because you really have no guarantee of who is going to be watching your stream. But again, as long as the people in the call aren't playing the round, then is there really any impact at all?

Now here's the thing, all of these scenarios are OK by the literal definition of the rules. No-one is actually using outside information gained outside of in-character means. But the issue really becomes about responsibility. What happens when one of those friends in the call start playing the round? If you ask everyone if they're in the round, and they respond with "no" but actually are, whose responsibility does it ultimately become? Where's the line to draw for irresponsibly streaming to people who could very well use the information? IMO you definitely have a responsibility as the streamer to make sure no-one in the call is currently playing the round. It's a case-by-case common sense thing (gasp) that admins gotta make the call of when handing out bans for people being Stupid with it.

At this point, you would ban all players involved, and the streamer takes a mental note to have better/more trustworthy friends. I think you just draw a line at if the viewers join or not. If they dont join, its okay, if they do, its not.

[Justice12354]

It becomes a big issue of being able to verify those claims that they didn't know. But, yeah, best case scenario someone in the call just wasn't communicating they were in the round and was using the stream's information. But y'know, if you know there's TG players in the call you should do some amount of homework to make sure they're not in-round. Not that I genuinely expect people to be interrogating others constantly over VC if they're in-round. Just some light homework of checking the who tab and seeing if you recognize ckeys is good enough faith in my book.

I mean, streaming the round in the TG discord would be really dumb because literally everyone in the server plays TG and you don't know everyone personally enough to know for a fact if they're abusing the stream's information. This is generally why public streaming needs to be vetted, since streamers are not expected to shoulder any of that responsibility.

Yeah, I agree, that's why I'd most likely just take those claims at face value and not try to look for some verification, unless there was some damning evidence.

Regarding the homework part, I wouldn't expect players to do that because it's really easy to lie about that as well: "I did check the who verb, but I just did not see the ckey in the list!!"; while, on the other hand, if that player claims they did not do their homework, then I still think there's a very reasonable scenario where the streamer was not intending to stream the game to an in-round player. This just feels like either an exhaustive checklist work that can vary any second if another player wants to do something really stupid, or a mostly pointless task. I do think that's a good practice, but I wouldn't codify it.

(The following is no longer regarding the quote)

I also do not believe we should be using the streaming system to determine whether a player is allowed to stream the game to their friends or not, as it can force players who, due to their community conduct, will be unallowed to do something that should not be defined by unrelated factors of your community conduct. Imagine wanting to share ur screen to ur friends and going "Oh, wait, I have to go fill in a streamer application. Silly me!", or "Wait. I got removed from the streaming system because I called someone a bitch. Dang it!". This makes absolutely no sense, especially when this same streaming system seems to aim towards content creation rather than some sort of "This person acknowledges that they should not use the stream to share in-game information with other in-game players" (which doesn't make sense either honestly, bc the moment you join our servers you must acknowledge our rules).

Basically, contextually and logically, Rule 2 Precedent 2 doesn't make sense for these scenarios.

We should only be intervening if the players watching the stream are actually playing the game.

[bingusdingus]

Instead of trying to explain all the different situations you could apply to streaming with lots of annoying words like I am known to do. I made a handy dandy flowchart that describes my opinion on the matter. (For posterity "You shouldn't stream" and "bruh" both just mean no. Bruh is more like no, and you're also breaking the rules.)



It probably doesn't cover every possibility, but I feel like it at least gives a good overview of what I personally feel in this situation.

[dendydoom]

the truth is that it's not allowed, but the reality is that if you're streaming to 1 person in a DM who doesn't even play, we can't and won't do anything to stop you, because we can't police what you're doing in total privacy. and a lot of us don't really mind because the impact is minimal.

the reason we refuse to endorse this is because it creates this uneasy scenario where it can quickly become not okay. you're streaming to a friend and we say it's fine. then they decide they want to play too, and join the round. woops, now you're both metacomming and are permabanned.

we don't want this to happen so we don't want to invite that situation by telling you that it's fine and then permabanning you the moment it's not fine. the official advice from us is that, for the sake of the game and your fellow participants, you shouldn't do it.

but, ultimately, if you trust your friend to not abuse that and you're absolutely not doing it in any way where there's any way for that info to be used unfairly because you're streaming it to them in a DM, then there's realistically absolutely nothing we can do to stop you. they should absolutely not join the round if they're choosing to watch you.

i don't really understand why the need to be facetiming your friends at the d&d table, it's distracting to you and rude to the people you're playing with who are making the effort to be engaged, but whatever.

if you're streaming to a server of people then you don't control their actions and they can very easily get you banned, whether we allow this very narrow exception or not. this is something we are much more against because it creates a cliquish culture that very easily (and has done, many times in the past) leads to people pushing the line again and again which inevitably explodes into lots of drama and headaches.