News: Linda Carlson on Community and Offensive Players

[GeoGnome]

All of these overt attempts to weed out malicious and bitter people, for some reason is misconstrude as Censorship, like someone is threatening your 1st amendment rights here in the US. It then often leads to people becoming more rude and malicious because they don't understand what 'Free speech' actually means... Wherever is that wonderful example I found earlier... link

Look folks, this isn't how Communist china got started. Only someone with a shaky, non-critical view on history would say something that breathtakingly idiotic. No one is taking away your ability to be critical of SOE. You have the right to speak, but you also have the right to be responsible for what you say. If you are saying something that is overtly threatening and is going to offend a large group of people, because you yourself are kind of a child, then you wont get banned. If this policy was such that people would get banned for making wild accusations and behaving like the kind of immature man child that gaming is sterotyped for... well I can think of like 3 people that would have been banned months ago.

They are just stating that if you behave like a tit, if you actively harass or bully someone, you will get banned, making stupid comments on reddit instead of IG doesn't make you immune from recrimination.

Again: You have the right to free speech, but if you say something that is offensive, the rest of humanity has the right to step in and call you a moron, your right to free speech doesn't supersede someone else's, and other people have all the rights in the world to limit you if you are speaking counter to the public good.

[VaderShake]

It's their game they can make their rules....but make no mistake any multiplayer game policy is less about the players and their behavior than it is about the companies potential liability and any impact a negative experience may have on overall sales.

Here are some helpful hints to the Narci.....erm I mean people who are easily offended: http://meanttobehappy.com/10-ways-yo...sily-offended/

Been playing online a long time and when there were no rules the players managed to sort things out just fine.

[Crator]

Originally Posted by VaderShake

Been playing online a long time and when there were no rules the players managed to sort things out just fine.

At what expense? That's the reason why companies would have a community relations department. To mitigate the issues that cause many customers to just up and leave, never to be seen again.

[maradine]

Originally Posted by VaderShake

Been playing online a long time and when there were no rules the players managed to sort things out just fine.

Sometimes. And sometimes they produced toxic communities full of entitled, offensive children. There was online gaming long before there was residentially available Internet and it wasn't always pretty.

SOE has every right to build and encourage whatever type of community they wish. Gamers of all identities have the right to play in a community where they feel included and unobjectified. People who want to be offensive and use the "suck it up, thinskin" defense have the right to speak however they wish. But that confluence of competing rights takes us to precisely where we are - enforced community standards.

[EvilNinjadude]

Yo. I'm back with constructive stuff.

I went from your link, GeoGnome, over to reddit, where a link was posted to an article showing a slightly different stance. The following is from the comments:

Originally Posted by Brasse

Linda here... believe me, we RARELY even ban people from our forums. To be banned from our games takes an extremely offensive or sustained series of actions, and we document them very, very carefully, because we are fully accountable for these deicisons. It's not anybody's idea of fun here, and we strongly prefer to use reason and discussion before having to take those steps.

;-)#

Adapted for BBCode, naturally.

So this is where you turn when you're banned for "social behavior". However, there's people I know who've been banned for in-game "third-party-software-use" that they haven't committed (because they turn to r/planetside instead of a hacker board which would have told them how to effectively avoid being b& in the first place) whom this information won't exactly be useful for.

Also, while we're at it,

[GeoGnome]

Originally Posted by EvilNinjadude

So this is where you turn when you're banned for "social behavior". However, there's people I know who've been banned for in-game "third-party-software-use" that they haven't committed (because they turn to r/planetside instead of a hacker board which would have told them how to effectively avoid being b& in the first place) whom this information won't exactly be useful for.

Yeah, I have heard anecdotal accounts of that happening myself, thing is, and I hate to sound callous here, but with any system that is there to limit people behaving like baboons, you will get a few innocent people slipping through the cracks. No system in which people were asked to monitor and police other people, in the history of mankind, has not persecuted, prosecuted, or punished an innocent person. This is just one of those imperfects of humanity you just have to deal with. I mean it's like what TB said there, a community devoid of toxic assholes is a better community overall. It is going to be people who openly and overtly harass and abuse other people.

It isn't like the community isn't doing this itself.

There are people I know of, who have been banned from joining outfits, because those outfits don't want that kind of person in their group. This is the same thing, scaled up.

[snafus]

If people are banned for behaving badly in a SOE game I'm all for allowing SOE to punish them accordingly. But when a company puts themselves in open dialogue on social media they need to accept the fact that mean words will be said. As long as someone isn't threatening life or limb I would hope SOE employees would have the testicular fortitude to ignore negative individuals. As I mentioned on Reddit this all reminds me of when schools suspend kids for fighting outside of school. Shit just doesn't make since to me.

[PredatorFour]

Originally Posted by snafus

If people are banned for behaving badly in a SOE game I'm all for allowing SOE to punish them accordingly. But when a company puts themselves in open dialogue on social media they need to accept the fact that mean words will be said. As long as someone isn't threatening life or limb I would hope SOE employees would have the testicular fortitude to ignore negative individuals. As I mentioned on Reddit this all reminds me of when schools suspend kids for fighting outside of school. Shit just doesn't make since to me.

When you put it like that, i agree. Social networking is just bound to draw attention, good or bad.

[Skittles]

I call bullshit. Before too long you're going to have a 'No Negativity' problem here and issues stemming from that.

Ya-ya-ya, I get what someone said on the 1st page, but Im quick posting and too lazy to flip back for it, but essentially you have SOE just trying to intercept any possible legal actions that 'party A was offended by party B on an SOE site' lawsuit.

This whole society has become completely emo about everything. Don't bully, don't talk shit, don't call out someone on being retarded, don't name call, don't do X,y, z because low-n-behold someone is going to get a hurt feeling and then next thing you know they're eating a bullet because they're so pathetically weak minded they cant handle their own emotions. Its unbelievable really. Kids today cant even hug in school, don't fight on or off campus, don't tell someone theyre dumb or next thing you know we're going to suspend you.

If there weren't so many panzy ass hippy pacifist parents so afraid to put a hand on their kid, to give them a little tough love, to tell them "Timmy hit you? Well. Go hit that little fucker back" instead of "well, I'll go talk to his dad (if he's around) and sue him" we'd probably have a lot better off kids. Its the whole thing of watching their kids act like complete asses in the grocery store to get something instead of one good backhand to get them to realize, "you know what? you don't always get what you want" kind of thing.

I will concede however, that some policing is totally necessary for racism, harassment, and all the other usual suspects, but what is suggested by the topic is just a 1st step towards basically a muted community where eventually the only reason to even have a chat function in a game will be to spam gold farming, PUGs, and guild spamming sanctuary/warp gates.

[EvilNinjadude]

Originally Posted by Skittles

I will concede however, that some policing is totally necessary for racism, harassment, and all the other usual suspects, but what is suggested by the topic is just a 1st step towards basically a muted community where eventually the only reason to even have a chat function in a game will be to spam gold farming, PUGs, and guild spamming sanctuary/warp gates.

Have you read what's been written on the reddit post? If not, do it. Some of what those people write really puts a bitter taste into my mouth. Some people have no respect for either other players or the developers.

As was said earlier, I think this is less about stopping the interactions between players at lower levels from getting out of hand, but rather going after the big piles of BS out there, the BCPs inside and outside the game that are interacting with it.

I think this is a good thing, as long as
a) This is as far as it goes
b) This is properly and conscientiously enforced.

[Babyfark McGeez]

I don't get the fuzz.

First of all, if you are an insufferable jackass on social medias AND use the same email for your game account (or how else are they going about this?), why would i care if they ban you? Chances are you will be even more intolerable with an "anonymous" game character.

Second, it's their game, and as far as i know they can do whatever the fuck they want. It's not public space. Freedom of speech does not apply here. Read the EULA.

It may seem a littlebit excessive to spend resources for investigating players outside of their SOE realms, especially when you consider the layoffs they just had, but that's all.

[Mastachief]

They never banned buzzcutnobhead so i ponder just how far you can go.

[ChipMHazard]

Originally Posted by Mastachief

They never banned buzzcutnobhead so i ponder just how far you can go.

Aye it's clear that although it was their "official" stance back then they never enforced it to the degree that they claimed they would. This makes you wonder if it's a change in attitude or just PR.

[Captain1nsaneo]

Originally Posted by snafus

If people are banned for behaving badly in a SOE game I'm all for allowing SOE to punish them accordingly. But when a company puts themselves in open dialogue on social media they need to accept the fact that mean words will be said. As long as someone isn't threatening life or limb I would hope SOE employees would have the testicular fortitude to ignore negative individuals. As I mentioned on Reddit this all reminds me of when schools suspend kids for fighting outside of school. Shit just doesn't make since to me.

Devs are humans too and should be able to manage their own accounts freely and block people. I fully agree that this reminds of schools suspending kids for things that happened off campus. If it's not in your territory you shouldn't penalize for it as it's not your business. Besides, if that person screwed up outside your game they're likely to screw up in it as well. You just need to wait and watch and then when they do screw up you can show whoever they messed with that you are acting to remove such things and it gives the victim a concrete example of action making it personal. Such an experience would make the victim more loyal to the company as they now see the company as actively looking out for them.

It's like they don't even want to play mind games.

[bpostal]

Originally Posted by maradine

Sometimes. And sometimes they produced toxic communities full of entitled, offensive children. There was online gaming long before there was residentially available Internet and it wasn't always pretty.

SOE has every right to build and encourage whatever type of community they wish. Gamers of all identities have the right to play in a community where they feel included and unobjectified. People who want to be offensive and use the "suck it up, thinskin" defense have the right to speak however they wish. But that confluence of competing rights takes us to precisely where we are - enforced community standards.

One of the key points about gaming prior to the widespread acceptance of internet; If one of your buddies is being annoying as hell during a LAN party, you can always slap the shit outta him or wait for him to pass out and them duct tape him to the ceiling.

Unfortunately we can't do that over the internet. So we have trolls.