Clarification of rules regarding killing out of suspicion

[Monorail Cat]

There have been several incidents lately on TTT where certain players have killed other players, based ONLY on some suspicion of the other person being a traitor.  It is disputed whether or not this is RDM.  I believe it is, and here's why: 

Say we're playing on a large map, like Peach's Castle, with good sniping possibilities, and it's my round to be the traitor.  So, I grab a rifle, and go sit in a corner to wait for some picks.  While I'm waiting, there is a small firefight near me, where an innocent kills my T buddy.  I decide not to engage, and claim that I didn't know which one was the actual traitor (This is a perfectly valid excuse for an innocent to let other players know why he didn't engage the traitor).  Well, one player sees me sitting off to the side, and decides that because I didn't participate in the firefight against my T buddy, I must be the traitor because I'm sitting in a corner, all suspicious.  So, without any proof, he kills me before I've even made a move, and the round ends.

I used this scenario because this happened to me some days ago, and it is incredibly unfair.  I was killed because of a MERE SUSPICION that I was a traitor. 
This has been happening in different ways, and both innocents and traitors are killed because of a suspicion without any sort of concrete evidence or deductive reasoning. 

Now, some people may be wondering about where the line should be drawn, for example, what is enough to make someone decide you are a traitor?  In my opinion, I believe that it's suspicious enough when people:
1) fire a shot at another player, but miss, and play it off as a slipped finger,
2) walk away without IDing a corpse, either they noticed you and left, or didn't notice you and still left,
3) don't participate in shooting at a definite KOS,
4) carry away an un-ID'd body, either noticed or unnoticed.

However, I don't believe that it is suspicious enough when people:
1) are following someone else,
2) appear to be aiming at people's heads,
3) standing in a doorway to prevent access (though this is usually a dick move)
4) drop a weapon which was the same type as what killed another player (Player killed by M4, I drop my M4 and grab something else)
5) leave a firefight that is confusing and unsure (Player X says "I'm pretty sure it's Player y, so let's all shoot him!" Nope, wasn't him, so Player Y shoots Player X, who was also innocent, and chaos ensues, so people leave for fear of losing more karma or being killed by crossfire)

 

This is an issue for some players so, I would like the line to be drawn:  When do you need to have enough "proof" in suspicions in order to kill someone?

[Tezuni]

I've experienced recurring negative encounters with a certain player on TTT since the re-launch of the server, whom has demonstrated a pattern of killing based solely off of suspicion, arguing by way of semantics that such killing is not 'random', and therefore not 'RDM'.  Following the dispute, they seemed to subsequently revel in attempting to egg me on through several maps after the fact, which I've of course met with silence.  Keep in mind this is one of our own regulars.  In light of that I would also be appreciative of a clear answer from the admins on the situation if possible, so that I may take the appropriate measures if it continues to happen.  Cheers.

[ٶȻhriʂ]

We all know where the line is. You're VIP, if you feel like it's justified do something about it.


No matter who it is.

[Tezuni]

You have a point Chris, and while I agree, the uncertainty among other present VIPs has lead me to give the benefit of the doubt and err on the side of caution in the unlikely chance there is any ground to the argument that subjective levels of suspicion is justifiable reasoning for killing.

[coolzeldad]

Hmm, I think this is a question on how the game "should" be played?

Personally, based of Monorail's example, I wouldn't have been able to shoot him with confidence knowing just that, because it seems to me there's not enough reason.

But, I see how he could suspect you. In my case, I would watch you more closely from that point on, but not attack you unless further proof was available.

The question is, whether or not that should be a rule, and how to enforce it, especially with how subjective those situations could get...

I'm not sure, I say lets keep this discussion going to see if we can solidify some rule or guideline.

[Deathie]

So full disclosure. I'm not an admin partially because I don't want to be involved in community affairs like this anymore. My opinion, and the entirety of this post, should NOT be treated as that from an authority.

With that said, I'll leave my opinion on this kind of thing, if it even matters.

Having a black and white rules list with an organic gamemode like TTT isn't healthy for the game.

With the exception of say, first blood RDM 5 seconds into the round, almost every case is going to be extremely situational, circumstantial, and with a HUGE margin for meta-gaming.
"Does player X favor this kind of weapon? Player X often does this when he's a traitor, and the murder matches his MO. Player X was one of the only two people unaccounted for during the murder, and the evidence leans more against his favor."

The goal of the traitor should be to eliminate all the players without getting caught.
The goal of an innocent should be to prove your innocence and to not incriminate yourself.
The goal of a detective should be to track down traitors based on evidence and witness testimonies.

My server only had three rules because I wanted to leave enough grey area so that people didn't need to play internet lawyer when they were being banned.

• You may not kill another player without a good reason.
• You may not exploit flaws in the design of a map or the game mechanics.
• You may not harass or otherwise target other players outside of normal gameplay.

This isn't my server, though. Our karma system was tweaked in a way so that as an innocent you wouldn't want to T-bait, and as a traitor, you would be walking on thin glass trying your best to not get caught. That doesn't change the fact that killing someone FOR A REASON is NOT RANDOM.

By imposing an arbitrary set of rules like "are following someone else", "appear to be aiming at people's heads", and "dropping a weapon which was the same type as what killed another player", you're restricting the skill ceiling of the game immensely.

Not to mention you're creating a very simple guideline for a T to follow to kill everyone, and if anyone tries to stop them for those reasons, it's bannable.

[Monorail Cat]

• You may not kill another player without a good reason.

In your opinion, what is a "good reason"?  This is what I'm trying to point out.  Half the time the person in question has killed someone out of suspicion, it was definitely not a good enough reason to me and several other members.

[Deathie]

In your opinion, what is a "good reason"?  This is what I'm trying to point out.  Half the time the person in question has killed someone out of suspicion, it was definitely not a good enough reason to me and several other members.

"Good reason" was anything other than "I kind of felt like it" and "I just don't like the guy".

Don't get me wrong, someone using this excuse to do it constantly or to target a specific player is bad. That's why rules against excessive RDM and target RDM exist.

Like, take the Peaches Castle example. You gave yourself a reason to be suspected. It wasn't "I did something to be suspected", it was your lack of action that led to your demise.

And assume you were innocent. Isn't that the point of the karma system? To punish people who gamble poorly?

[Prox]

If everything happened precisely as you've told us then the guy who killed you probably didn't have enough proof. I believe there is that option on the score board that lets tag people as innocent, suspicious, traitor etc.  Killing a traitor before he was able to do anything requires a good reason and by your description of that situation that happened to you I don't think it was enough for that guy to kill you.

[ursus]

Lets find out what the rules say using the power of reading.










There we go. That's the rules. If someone is following the rules but you think they deserve to be punished anyway, you either ask to change the rules or accept that your judgments are subjective and learn to cope with that. You learned about rule of law in high school.


To be fair, though, I'll talk about this one:



This is way too ambiguous. We know they have to "do something" before they can be suspected or killed, but it doesn't say whether or not you have to witness them do it with full certainty. If you hear a gun go off, you hear someone die, and you see someone walk out from that direction holding a shotgun less one round, is that enough to kill them? If they didn't do it but you think they did, is it RDM if you kill them? Where is the line drawn on how concrete your "evidence" has to be? It could be that the traitor is still in the room and about to come out to kill the person you just saw.

Longer rant:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The reason TTT is a good gamemode is that there's literally infinite situations you can find yourself in, and those situations can be as complex as the players make them. You aren't supposed to be certain about anything. If you're a traitor and you get killed because you incriminate yourself, that just means you need to improve your skills. Like Deathie said, when you try to impose specific rules on what constitutes incriminating evidence to protect traitors you end up restricting the skill ceiling and making the game less fun. This gamemode is about asymmetrical psychological gameplay with opportunities for social engineering mixed in, and the only rules outside of those imposed by the gamemode itself should only be in place to decide how to punish people who manage to go beyond the game's inherent ability to enforce the rules.

If you let people kill on any suspicion, you give people an incentive to ghost and render the gamemode completely un-fun. If you can only kill someone when you're 100% certain they're a traitor and that rule is enforced with steep karma loss, you give innocents an incentive to bait their own teammates. A line has to be drawn somewhere in the middle. That's what the rules are for. But complaining that you're being killed on suspicion with insufficient evidence is the equivalent of a silver player in CS:GO calling hacks on everyone who lands a headshot on them, when in reality they just don't understand the game mechanics well enough. You're assuming that you're the most skilled player in the world, and that anyone who outperforms you is either cheating or just lucky.


More simply, if you get killed as a traitor, you can reduce the situation to two possibilities:

• Someone thought you were a traitor and was confident enough in their judgment to kill you.
• Someone didn't know whether you were a traitor, but killed you anyway because they didn't care about karma loss.

If you get killed as a traitor, either someone killed you for absolutely no reason or you drew suspicion somehow. It's also possible that someone suspected you based on wrong information and you were just unlucky, but there's nothing you can do about that. There's a reason that insurance forms have a checkbox for "Acts of God." Shit happens.

The reason that the rules only explicitly punish excessive RDM (4+), targeted RDM, round-start RDM, and RDM that circumvents karma is that the gamemode already punishes you for it otherwise. You lose the same amount of points for killing an innocent teammate as you gain for killing an enemy traitor. Your karma actually goes down more when you kill an innocent teammate than when you kill an enemy traitor.

The reason for this is so that if you were truly killing people at random, basic probability dictates that you would end up with a negative score and minimum karma because  only 1 out of every 4 players (rounding up, including detectives) is assigned the role of traitor. The higher someone's score is, the better they are at figuring out who is traitor while innocent and killing innocents while traitor. While the situations that exist from round to round are always different, the one thing that stays consistent is the numbers. The numbers tell you who is playing well and who is not.

It happens that score is tracked on TTT, so I'll use that as an example:




These are the 10 players with the highest total score over the server's lifetime, which is about 2 weeks. Cable and I, along with Blah, Monorail, Sora, and Apie, have score/min values from 1.27 to 1.33 (Which is well within the ~15% standard deviation of this value, since gametracker often misses the 6th round's score). Since we also have some of the highest playtimes, it is almost mathematically impossible that any of us are killing players at random. This impossibility increases as playtime (sample size) increases, of which we also have the highest.

All of that being said, I think any reason that's logically sound is a good one. Your goal as an innocent is to figure out how to decide whether or not someone is a traitor, and you have absolutely no tools within the game to help you. You're supposed to rely on your own deductive reasoning.

Traitors get instant-kill knives, silenced pistols, body armor, disguisers, healing kits, high-caliber snipers, several kinds of bombs, flare guns to burn bodies, radar decoys, and anything else people feel like modding in. As an innocent, you get absolutely nothing. Even as a detective, your tools for finding traitors are foggy on purpose. Your DNA scanner only points you in the general direction of the person who killed someone unless they're literally standing in front of you, and even then you can only be sure if they're standing still when it refreshes. You can put down a portable tester that will tell you who is innocent with 100% certainty, but as a traitor you want to avoid it for obvious reasons. The game is specifically designed in a way that encourages you to train your instincts and trust them, and uses a simple reward/punishment system to do it.

I will say this: If you think people are RDMing too much, ask coolz to make the karma penalties steeper. It's his call. Otherwise, we can at least agree that the rules themselves are too vague.

[Tezuni]

This is all IMO.

You should not kill someone unless:
1. You see them kill/attack someone and flee the scene without ID'ing.
2. They kill an innocent.
2. They are attacking a crowd.
3. You have DNA evidence.
4. Every other hard-evidence based scenario not listed here


Otherwise,
An arbitrary type of suspicion can be conjured up such as "oh, he was standing in a doorway and I suspected he killed someone inside" (happened to me today on TTT).   
When you kill without hard evidence, on a whim or suspicion, you not not just risking your own karma.  The victim may retaliate and kill you first, losing their karma in the process.

TTT isn't meant to be shoot first and hope you guessed right, you should have to find evidence before you kill, and use suspicion to guide who you pay special attention to.

[ursus]

When you kill without hard evidence, on a whim or suspicion, you not not just risking your own karma.  The victim may retaliate and kill you first, losing their karma in the process.

I know of a way to fix this, but I'm going to suggest it in a separate thread so I don't derail.

[Deathie]

You should not kill someone unless:
1. You see them kill/attack someone and flee the scene without ID'ing.
2. They kill an innocent.
2. They are attacking a crowd.
3. You have DNA evidence.
4. Every other hard-evidence based scenario not listed here

It's great to have a code of ethics, but if everyone followed your code, then it wouldn't even be a game anymore. It'd be just like playing CSGO with bots that stare back at you as you senselessly murder their comrades.

Posing "you can only kill with hard evidence" as a rule is incredibly restrictive, and removes any pressure or skill needed from traitors.

Like, I'm not even trying to defend being innocent and killing for a shitty reason. I love my T rounds because there's a thrill from knowing that you can be cornered at any moment, for any reason. You have to be meticulous in covering your tracks since any sliver of doubt can put you at risk.

The game isn't "wait for the police to arrive, thoroughly investigate the scene, and determine the culprit after a thorough DNA analysis, cross reference fingerprints, interviews, and six weeks of paperwork". It's "And Then There Were None" with a wacky tone. You're on a time limit to stop the culprit(s) before you're killed.

[Prox]

If you're alone and you see someone coming at you in such manner that you feel like they're about to kill you then it's perfectly fine to begin shooting them although I believe that it goes without saying that you should inform that player that you don't want him to approach you.

The rule list for TTT was made some over four years ago with combined efforts of mine and community. Since then many people were able to make changes to it and right now looking at the rule #3 I do not entirely agree with that because in some cases (like the one I've mentioned above) you can be pretty sure who the traitor is without him "doing anything". However that shouldn't be confused with just merely being suspicious to a certain degree since this gamemode has tag function for that sort of reason.

[Tiger Guy]

The problem is that everyone's "good reasons" to kill a suspected traitor is different. Someone who plays more textbook TTT may only kill someone if they see them shooting someone else without reason or if multiple people have called them a T and then died.

Some people, like me, play a style of TTT that is highly based on intuition. Sometimes I just know that someone's a traitor. That doesn't mean I KOS them immediately, but it means that I'm more willing to shoot them if they do traitorious things. It's a very high-risk/high-reward style of playing TTT and I enjoy playing like that, since it still puts me on the edge after 5 years of playing TTT.

As you may assume, I don't really have a problem with how ursus plays. It's a very on the edge playstyle, opposed to playing the good boy innocent. If ursus fucks up and kills an inno, their karma will go down and say "you should probably think more before you shoot someone on suspicion, ya dingus!". If ursus kills you on suspicion and it turns out you're a traitor, tough shit man. Even if YOU think you did nothing wrong, ursus's anecdotal evidence may prove that you have a 90% chance of being a traitor and kill you before you kill anyone else.

It may be bullshit that you get shot by someone for what you think is not enough evidence, but it adds more variety to TTT. If ursus's and my playstyle was deemed banable, it would remove a lot of fun out of TTT and make it the utimate Good Cop game.