Books

As a response to my question about abuse.... that's pretty lacking. Let's say I wanted to trash someone's reputation.. and there's no YouTube video or signed document proving I'm lying?

 

We don't need a game at all with that logic. Of course we could lawyer this whole thing in the forums but what fun would that be?

 

Does not a functional or enforceable system make. I'm not trying to discourage any of this mind you.. certainly nothing wrong with recipes and YouTube videos. I'm just saying it's not a perfect system. Anyone who engages in it and fails to cover their backside with a little extra effort is potentially at risk. But then.. that's always the case with any agreement isn't it?

 

Uh...so you quoted me and asserted that we didn't need books. I thought that was cute because it was the EXACT same thing I said to you (except I said it before you did). It just kinda feels like you didn't actually read my post... and probably not my dev+ post where I said this months ago.

Like I said, I've spent months on this topic so I know I'm in a good spot when it comes to taking questions and lawyering people on this subject.

 

Then I guess you just got away with something. But since you're a liar (you being the person in the example you gave), are you going to stop there or try to set someone else up to take the fall again? If you get caught outright lying in another transaction, does that call into play your credibility? I think it does. I think that most people that are paying attention would take whatever you had historically said with a grain of salt and the guy that got his reputation ruined would be back on firm ground again.

Remember, this wouldn't be a global system that would be without fault or failure. People like Lord Andernut would develop very strong reputations that would be backed up by documents that couldn't be forged. So the quick scams would come and go and people would learn who could be trusted and who couldn't. You wouldn't give someone 1 million gold that you just met, for example. You'd work up to that over time.

 

I didn't claim it was perfect, I claimed it was functional.

 

I've talked about it in depth too. So what?

I don't really know what we're arguing about here.

 

The point being the "system" would only protect those who use it. If I were lying and you couldn't prove I was lying.. then how would you know if I did it before or again? Only the victim would know and their word is now suspect. Though at this point we could just round and round circles.. yeah if someone did it enough people would start to wonder.. but then.. people are lied to every day for years and they still buy into it despite the guilty being caught time and again.

Personally, you probably won't find me signing any contacts. If you can't trust me then I probably don't want to deal with you.

Back to part of the subject that actually has relevance. Co-signing a documents could be tricky. Especially if you want them to appear on lines right next to each other. You're not likely going to get that with regular books.

 

Classic reply.

Perhaps you could actually read what I've wrote (the dev+ thread, in entirety)? It stands up to scrutiny. But it is clear you would rather debate with me than take the time to read it. Consider that I've actually done the work on this and provided something that works. None of the points here are new.

As for your 2nd point, I countered your flippant point:

I pointed out that we didn't technically need books in the General Forum. You didn't seem to acknowledge that. You stated the same thing in this topic as a tautology. Despite agreeing with you, and pointing out that I made that observation before you, you felt it was somehow necessary to reply with the above. I judge that to be non-sequitur.

 

@Devs

Uh, please just consider putting in the stuff I was asking for. I have no idea why this turned into a "debate".

 

What you want is attestation.

Spoiler: ...

We need published books to be non-editable, to prevent forgery. Already having the books creator as part of the metadata on the in-game book object allows for signatures. I would recommend the last line of the book be the exact name of the character as it would appear on the metadata as the creator. Of course you could add titles, guilds, positions, etc, so long as it is obvious which part should be an exact match of the creator.

And maybe add an approximate timestamp, say the day, around the time the book is to be officially published, perhaps at the top of the first page. Having it in the metadata as the actual timestamp is still useable. There is only one way to have the official metadata timestamp match what is in the text of the book, and that is having the game provide support.

I have no idea what they plan to support for formatting or other fancy feature of books. One simple markup is to use something like [[signature]] and [[timestamp]] in the plain text of the book, but when rendered in-game it gets replaced with the value of creator and timestamp from the metadata. I used [[signature]] instead of creator since they could also render that in fancy script like in the merchant UI. Doesn't really matter what it is called.

Back to attestation. Given an immutable book with signature and timestamp, about the only thing you can do (currently) is reproduce the entire contents of the book verbatim, and sign your name to that (publish the book). I'd recommend some kind of start and stop bar or horizontal rule to separate the original content from the attester's signature.

Want multiple signatures, just keep making new books with lots of nested signatures, or lots of books attesting to the original work, or combinations of both. Either way it is a lot of books. Each attestation lends credibility to the previous signer's credibility, etc. You are building a Web of Trust, though perhaps without all of the crypto. Of course it only works if you trust others (but if you didn't you wouldn't sign, and hopefully there won't be a good forgery skill in game).

Spoiler: more...

You can add a bit of crypto to help with the signatures. You want a message authentication code, but a basic digest will work. MD5, but SHA-256 would be better. Just normalize the plain text as it appears in the book, hash that, and include the hash in the to-be-published book. Lots of signatures with lots of hashes means you can verify the message text. Normalizing it helps prevent issues with whitespace or extra line feeds. But you still need to verify it against the original work/book.

 

Never admitting to being wrong is probably a character flaw, but hey....

That's all pretty heavy weight, and only fixes one problem: forgery. As has been debated here, this doesn't prevent people reneging on the contract. You could "easily" get people to create digital signatures (with message recovery) and you'd then have the strongest notion of non-forgery, but I can imagine people still trying replay attacks or simply "forgetting" to pay. Even including timestamps would not necessarily solve replays: bviously it should, but I'm figuring that people might try it anyway. In which case it becomes a debate over who said what in the beginning.

I still think public records are the more necessary feature for trust and accountability.

 

Question for discussion purposes: Should we be allowed to fake documents?

 

I think not.
I think that Books should have to things you cannot fake.
1) Maker's mark.
2) Signature (simialr to the one in trade window).

Of course if someone does not notice that the document was signed by someone else...

 

As far as the story line of the game goes, probably not. It doesn't seem likely to play a (big enough) part to warrant the in-game mechanics and development time. If you can fake documents, then you might as well be able to fake crafter's marks as well. It's all a lot of work, that probably doesn't provide a lot of benefit.

From an RP standpoint, you could just ignore the creator's name on the description/info of the book, and only go by what is actually written in the contents of the book.

From a technical standpoint, any crafted/created item by a player is going to include information about the actual player (the character's name, character's internal id, and the account id) and probably the time it was created. Stuff useful for tracking information, bugs, exploits, and the like. Whether or not any of that information is visible to the public in-game is a separate issue.

 

Idea: I think that when we trade with someone and both parties need to agree to the trade we could simply treat placing a signature on a document as an item. This way you could trade those 120k borrowed from Pax for their signature on the document.

Also the general idea of signing stuff is awesome. You would have books created by author that are either signed (rare), unsigned (uncommon), and reprinted by others (common - everyone can "steal" your work unfortunately). I don't like the stealing part but I see no way around it other than registering the book title so it cannot be used by others but this leads to copyrighting wars on common and short titles.

 

The allmighty hand of god oracle is going to prevent YOU from faking signatures... now thats power...

 

I don't think that works well in the game environment that's being created. I like the spirit of the idea though.

 

Ya, it works on so many levels. Id like to know whose works I was buying and then authors could be sought after.

 

Just cause I haven't seen actual implementation suggested.. I'll throw an idea out there that came up last year.. embedded code in book editing. ie <sig>

So whenever the code shows up you get a signature line with a check button like you have when purchasing from a vendor. Whomever clicks the button puts their signature on that line.

tags or codes would allow you to place an optional timestamp as well. Click the button.. record the time in that space. Rather simple in principle.. no idea how hard to implement to a degree.. least it's not rocket science.