Chat highlights and metagaming

[EmpressMaia]

Hello, I was chatting with a few people on discord over the past few days and learned there's players who put common antag key words and extensive lists of departmental words into their highlight groups. I don't believe this is tracked at all by admin tools so it would be hell to observe and enforce anyway. But is intentionally using the chat setting tools to constantly scan for antagonist and department keywords metagaming?

[Jacquerel]

I mean like... chat highlighting is for making particular words stand out to you, no?
It's an entirely invisible personal feature that can only be used to draw your attention to certain things being said, it would be bizarre to log or attempt to moderate how it is being used.

[Vekter]

Yeah, I think this is either too minor to really police or generally impossible for us to actually police. The only road this goes down is the removal of the highlight system, which is 1) a code issue and 2) a vast over-correction for this kind of problem.

I think it might be helpful to post an example of what kind of meta benefit this could give someone? It's not any different than just being really, really aware of what everyone is saying at any given time.

[EmpressMaia]

An example. A player has the full name for the emag item highlighted , nearly the whole screen away . The traitor buys an emag from their uplink and stashes it in thei4 bag. The player a screen away was playing and talking with someon3 else, but due to the word being highlighted, they learn that the other player is a traitor and called it out on common

[Jacquerel]

If they are able to reveal information due to highlighting the information was already on their screen, the highlighting makes it easier to notice but if you wanted to fix this issue the solution would be to not have it print in chat at all.
It doesn't make sense to moderate people highlighting this information which is already given to them, and it would be insane to ever take any administrative action over it when any player without this feature enabled could also see the same thing.

[Vekter]

I think I get what you're saying, but there's not really any way to police this save for making it so you can't highlight certain words or just removing the highlight entirely.

[DrAmazing343]

Non-issue. Chat highlights just allow less observant players to have their attention called to things that need their attention— if your character is, by code, perceptive enough to see an emag stuffed in a bag, then that’s kosher by me. Change the code if you think an attention grabbing highlight grants an unnecessary advantage in subtle text.

[Timberpoes]

Code issue.

The feature is purely client side and was implemented to do precisely what you say players are using for.

We can neither see nor police this and I doubt there's any appetite for headmins or admins to try and strong strongarm code changes to see or police this under any of the reasonable reasons we tend to do so.

There may be issues with players using it to add antag keywords, as the highlighting sorta automatically starts revealing stuff in a very obvious and visible way - if highlighted traitor keywords appear in close proximity etc. but that is genuinely a codebase skill issue.

I suggest the coding channels.

[NecromancerAnne]

I regret to inform you that i can do this already with my eyes and everyone being appalling at utilizing code words.

[RedBaronFlyer]

Ehhhh… I dunno seems like a non-issue. I don’t use it that way but I guess hypothetically it could leave you at an advantage. I just constantly look over at the chat window every few seconds so I don’t think it’d notice a difference.

I regret to inform you that i can do this already with my eyes and everyone being appalling at utilizing code words.

The only times I’ve ever seen code words used on Manuel is purely to meme. Where multiple people have blurted out the same code words round start together.

“I slipped the clown by the bartender while eating a hotdog” is about as subtle as sitting by the harbor in Beirut, Lebanon on a fine afternoon at roughly 6:07 P.M. on August 4th, 2020.

Code words are a cool idea but unprompted code word usage is either too subtle to the point that an a traitor can't even tell if it's just happenstance, or it’s so obvious it immediately gives it away. The only way to make them work is by sitting together and talking or subtly dropping hints over the course of the round but antags tend to move too fast for any James Bond-esque conversations to have two people talk to figure out if their both antags.
People use the radio as in game irc chat so any random off topic stuff that doesn’t immediately relate to the station itself stick out.

[MooCow12]

The only version of this that could be policed is when i had 1984 circuits that spy on people's conversations then blares an alarm and prints statements out on paper when certain words are used.

[DrAmazing343]

I regret to inform you that i can do this already with my eyes and everyone being appalling at utilizing code words.

I’m soooo good at utilizing codewords that not even my fellow traitors realize that I’m using them (hasn’t had someone respond with the proper counter response in 900 years)

On the whole, I think it’s a total dick move to highlight traitor codes for le ebic win, but there’s not a whole lot to be done policywise. It’s iffy even if they post screenshots of their hard R gamer setup with 664 highlighted words because like, what are we gonna do? “Grrr remove those highlights” and there’s no way to tell ever if they never post their setup again.

[RedBaronFlyer]

the sword of Damocles but the sword is a ban and the hair holding the sword back is not revealing you use chat highlights in 2d horizontal spessman simulator

[GamerAndYeahMick]

We appear to be in agreement we can't really do anything about this