Crime & Punishment

[n3xus]

Wow so many views and responses!

@teox

trying to look objectively, the guild leader of the biggest guild saying racist things on guild chat isnt really in private imo. i know you cant approve of that machi, how many people hear it? how many people in your guild are young players, being exposed to racist comments?

Do I approve of racism? Nah, you're right I don't. I lived in the "dirty south" for a couple of years and, unless u've had bad experiences with it, I doubt you can comprehend how bad it can get down there. I have so many different examples of my time there. The only one I'll mention is that one high school, for the first time ever, had an interracial prom. Yes that's right. They actually had 3 proms. One for "whites", one for "blacks" and one for the whole school. There is no way I will tolerate any hate CRIME. I will tolerate freedom of speech as much as I can. However, I do believe that guild chat should be considered private. Most of the new people I personally invited to the guild, I specifically warned them about guild chat and certain attitudes. Guess what? Almost all of them said "ok fine with me." That is all I will allow myself to do. I will give them the option of joining or not and tell them information they need to know. If they ask about other guilds, I give objective statements. I don't specifically trash other guilds like other people do. To me, they chose to play on heRO. Then they chose to come in despite my warnings. That's as far as I will go in terms of parenting someone. I won't take all of a teen's autonomy away from him/her.

@azure

Thanks for your honest and well-said post. In no way did I ever feel u were attacking at all. With that said...

I don't think you can complain about censorship in a privately run game, on a privately owned server, run by an individual who pays out of pocket to keep the game going. This isn't the public domain, and you are not entitled to freedom of speech.

I thought I could? The GMs usually try to say that we are allowed to complain and voice our opinions over and over again. There's even a whining and suggestions section in the forums for it. Despite the fact that some players feel they can't speak out in fear, GMs encourage the player base to do so. I just thought I would on censorship.

I would maintain, however, that if you think about doing or saying something public that could get banned, then perhaps you should restrain yourself from saying it at all. I know this is far too idealistic to happen, but I'm a huge optimist. Sorry.

I wish your ideals would be passed to more people. And I agree about the whole public chat thing. But too much restraint is not a good idea too. Gotta let off steam somehow. Guild chat, guild forums, i think these are places where stuff like that should be allowed.

There's no other way to decide with just urbandictionary alone, especially when it comes to someone's intention. The only way that we GMs can think of at that time is to check the logs relevant to the time of the event.

We thought about the "privacy" matter, but if nothing wrong was committed, it will clear their name of all accusations.

Perfectly acceptable. Warrants are used for search and seizure all the time. Thank you for admitting this. But how do we know that our chats don't get monitored more often? Trust? Some of us are fine with that. Some will never be.

checking guild chats isnt anything new .. Ben used to pop in OoC's chat from time to time and he hasnt been here in ages.

Oh man I forgot about that lol.

We make fun of each others race or ethnicity plenty of times as a joke in guild chat. Its pretty obvious to tell if one is joking or not if they were actually reading the guild chat while the joke was being made. Reading off a little log...you just cant take circumstances of the actual chat along with it...I can assure you that none of my guildies would ever actually diss each others race seriously.

Kyouhei is right. If you're in our guild, you'll see us talk smack about each other all the time. If you're in our hunting party, oh man you'll REALLY see how often we think each person's failing their part. An hour later, we're fishing together. As I tell some of the new people in our guild, it's gonna take some time to understand loa's general sense of humor. If the only pieces that are taken are the smack talking, of course it's going to look real bad.

You just had to put my name in your thread, hm machi?

You're name was brought in as an example, nothing more nothing less. The rest of your post doesn't seem to address the point I was trying to make in the section u quoted. Just like the starburst example, what does a player's name have to do with a player's action in terms of inappropriate name and character deletion?

I'm not saying that I'm perfect, some personal arguments did happen between us. These were kept private and I didn't show them off.

What Kiki was saying was that you aren't completely guilt-free. There are times you sit in prontera talking smack about loa members in french. Do we report these? No, don't really care to. We tolerate it. You also said publicly on main how loa ruined certain events. I was there for one of them so I'll speak to that. U yourself admitted to me that u made the mistake and ended up provoking loa members. Your mistake instigated problems and yet you blamed loa for ruining an event. Just 2 examples. Please don't make it look like you are guilt-free in this.

If you give up your password and your stuff gets ganked or your character gets deleted it isnt the gm's fault. You took that responsibility when you decided to make your sole private account a communal one.

I wholeheartedly agree. However, buddha's hp was partially hacked. The only thing I could think of to make it right is to have a partial item restore as well as levels since the GMs weren't able to change the password in time.

I said players, which means more than one player, I was not pinpointing just Jason, I know there's other people who do it, my whole point here was towards all that do it. People would probably not have as much crap on their plate if they leveled the ground with those they hate.

I see now GM-Loki. Yes that was my mistake. I didn't know u generalized it and didn't aim it specifically at Jason. Sorry. But people will feel the need to talk crap about each other at one point. Will this person that vents out in anger "privately" now be labeled as a coward? If person A prefers to just keep it inside and not talk about it in public to keep the status quo, that should be a personal choice for them. I (and it sounds like azure too) seem to prefer this method of keeping things civil. But people need to vent eventually and if it's done in private, person A is suddenly a coward? Just because a person chooses to do one thing differently does not automatically label them a coward. In fact, if I were to play out your scenario in the work place slandering my co-worker in public, it could get me fired XD. That's why I would rather keep it civil in a public setting and vent to the appropirate people in private. Thoughts like being labeled as a "coward" doesn't seem to have much objectivity in it and one of a GM's job is to maintain objectivity at ALL times. If I know the GM sees me as a coward, it's a bit harder to bring up issues. Loki, I am not saying you're not objective. Quite the contrary, everyone is equally pissed at your quests! All I'm saying in this one particular time, u slipped.