Crime & Punishment

[n3xus]

Please read the whole thing as i will try to look at both sides. If i'm missing anything, let me know.

Loa/sparta/twilight sky were not as bad as people portrayed them to be. It's just that over the years, hate kept building on both sides as between players.

Look at marivel's case. It was no secret that some people didn't like her on hero. At one point, she was accused of botting in the middle of woe. And marivel was banned. Now to loa members, this seemed totally unfair. Why? Because we knew the truth that marivel was not botting. To us, it seemed like a very subjective decision on the gm team's part. To her credit, pandora did unban marivel eventually when more facts came out. This was an unpopular move to many, but pandora did the right thing with the unbanning. Even though, it could be looked at as the GM team acting hastily. They did what they could in a bad situation.

When astro and kyouhei were allowed to come back from their ban, they started an objective post about classes mounted on pecos being medium or not (http://pandoraonline.net/forum/showthrea...tid=3552). Both of them gave accurate descriptions and stuck to facts. However, the first gm response was extremely subjective. This does not breed an open environment for suggestions. It in fact, will make people scared to speak out b/c they might end up on the bad side of the gm team. As the thread showed, this is something that needed to be brought up as it went for another 20 pages of discussion. However, the inital gm response was a bit biased and negative.

Now come the character deletions of baby joose and fainn.

GM-Aki Wrote:The rule was clear
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Restriction in character creation
Below is the list of letters/numbers/symbols allowed in creation of a character's name. Make sure to also choose a name that is appropriate (aka no slander, profanity, insult, etc!). Player names who do not respect this rule will be sent to jail until a new name is chosen, the character can also be deleted if the name is too offensive.

We decided to believe that the players would be responsible and choose non offensive names, they decided to not follow the rules.

This is the concequence. They had one chance to change their names, they chose an offensive one. Chance is over.

A lot of things were already said about this in the ban list thread. However, i am still SIGNIFICANTLY confused on this. I actually thought about changing my name for about 5 seconds. Fainn actually sounds nice. I had NO clue what it meant till today. Apparently, neither did bridget. Had i changed my name to fainn, would i have been banned? Probably not, first offense and all. Now at this point, i could still choose a name. i usually go with M names and maybe i'll go with the mohican tribe. i'll go with MOHEKAN. All of a sudden, my character gets deleted. Why? Because it might mean something TOO offensive as deemed by the GMs.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=MOHEKAN

Having absolutely no ill-will towards anyone, my account of 2.5 years might be deleted if it's offensive enough without any warning. Who knows? Maybe a member of the Mohican tribe is part of the GM team and found it offensive. Does this rule seem a little off to anyone else? For Baby Joose and Fainn, pandora said the GM team read the chat logs and saw that the names were meant to offend. I probably wouldn't be deleted since I wasn't trying to offend, but how many rounds of name-changing would this drag out to possibly? Maybe after one or 2 times, the GMs could just mandate a name instead of deleting outright. Seems to me a bit extreme.

Just to drive the point home, what if i create a new character and name him Juice is Loose. I then create a guild called Starburst with a starburst wrapper as the emblem. We then create other characters with flavors as names: lemon, strawberry, grape, and lime. But someone else wants to join with their baby mage, naively called baby juice. I'm guessing this would probably be thought of as "cute" by some people. But as soon as "Baby Juice" and "Juice is Loose" switch guilds to Loa, then how long will it take for their names to be reported? Read that last question over and over again till you can read it objectively. My guess is people probably won't report until those characters start acting disprespectfully. Well what does a name have to do with the way a person acts? If the name is offensive, it's offensive period.

Moreoever, the GMs stated that Jason brought this down upon himself with his actions and words towards other players. Again, what does one's actions have to do with a name? This alone shows that this was a biased decision. Astro's example of "Cucu" seems to be pretty valid. Just because he is nicer to a a larger group of people than Jason, does his pretty offensive name become appropriate? I'm not asking for his name to be changed. None of this stuff bothered me personally. But I just want the rule to be made clearer.

My point is if this is a rule the GMs want to enforce, then the responsiblity should lie strictly on them to accept or deny the name change. A player cannot be made to literally go to urban dictionary everytime and check Ainn, Bainn, Cainn, Dainn, Fainn..., Ain, Bain, Cain, Dain, Fain..., Caint, Daint, Faint.

Sorry but I am not exaggerating. I am at a complete loss as to what is deemed an appropriate name and what isn't. There was a purging of guild titles in LoA and "iHAx" (mine) was deleted whereas "Balls of Steel" was not. Now I ask you, which of these two resemble slander, profanity, or insult more? Why was "iHax" deleted because to me, it does not look inappropriate at all in a computer game. The word "appropriate" is subjective itself to 10, 15, 20 year olds. Will there be a blacklist of words also, like "hack"? Clarificaiton on this rule and what it entails please.

GM-Auron Wrote:We got lots of reports all in a small time frame of 1-2 days

This is also pretty strange. It looks like someone tried to actually organize people into sending a slew of reports in to deal with certain loa members. Almost.


Anyway, I had more than one neutral party say that these deletions did not look like a 100% objective decision. Perhaps next time, the GM team can mandate a name after 2-3 player-attempted failures?

GM-Ayu Wrote:Rules specify on no slander, profanity and insult. Almost everyone can recognize what is slander/profanity. Usually in real life, the argument is more about if slander/profanity is considered offensive to be usable or not, rather than what is slander/profanity. In heRO, we took the stand for you and say "yes, they are offensive."

Use the common sense, maturity and standards of what you should and shouldn't say in front of young children then Icon_biggrin

Bolded for emphasis. It was already shown that RO is rated T for Teen, ages 13 and up. I understand that it would be a great thing for younger people to come and enjoy heRO. However, that's not what this game was designed for. By implementing a few rules, yes it could accomodate younger people. At the same time, this is like censorship. TV programs, movies, games, etc, were mandated to have a viewer rating. That is as far as the government goes. The rest is up to the parents or responsible adult to let the kid play/watch. It is not up to the GM team to fully regulate what is shown on the screen. If that were the case, then the dancer sprite should be re-done to add clothes. Highly doubtful that 10 year old children should be exposed to that much innuendo, right? I understand and respect what the GM team is trying to do. It is highly commendable. The implementation though, is lacking something. I don't know what. Fine line to walk.

As for GM-Loki, he basically called Jason a coward for talking about people behind their backs. This is sort of "you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't." If Jason were to say anything in public or to someone's face, it's an immediate jail, mute, or ban. If Jason says it in guild forums or guild chat or PM's, then he is a coward. What would you have Jason do? Jason does have the right to express himself and his opinions. Even the Klu Klux Klan is allowed to hold peaceful meetings and pass out pamphlets and have web pages according to the 1st amendment, freedom of speech. Does Canada work that differently? Jason's attitude has toned down in the past couple of years, if you can believe that. He still pisses people off ingame. But it wasn't like before. He says things in private to us in guild to vent, etc. I don't think he should be called a coward for that. Do you? It's kind of ironic that it's the LoA members who seem to have more patience, acceptance, and tolerance of other people's views as the relative number of reports coming from us isn't that high.

And I also don't understand Silv's ban. Maybe a temp ban would have made more sense to get his side of the story.

Moroever, Biro asked for a pw change a month ago and it still has not been changed. The account ended up being robbed. Whose fault is this? Obviously it's the player for trusting another person. But the player realized this and asked for a pw change. The GMs did not do their job and 1 month is much more than enough time. Is this also the player's fault? Because the GMs did not do this particular job, all the items disappeared. The player suffers for the GMs' mistake. Will the player be compensated for this? Apparently not. Not hard for a tech gm to restore a backup of the database for Biro. This would have resulted in duplicates getting into the economy but what else could be done for Biro? Partial storage restore? Remember that a month went by without a pw change.

This ties in with what happened to Buddha recently. It sounds like Buddha did try to get both account passwords changed. It was great to see that the pw change this time only took 5 days for buddha's champion. But it wasn't done for buddha's hp as buddha had asked. It sounds like the hp account was half-hacked (http://pandoraonline.net/forum/showthrea...pid66392). So, since this did involve hacking, will a half-restore be at least considered for the hp account and not the champion account? Giving out account information is a player's responsibility. Having them changed is a GM's responsiblity.

All i'm saying is that things are not as one-sided as some people make it out to be. Yes I will admit that some of our guys are definitely a handful when it comes to rule breaking and bending. Some definitely like to push people's buttons and instigate. I'm not defending their actions/words by any means. I'm only bringing up some slightly questionable GM actions.

I will be the first to say that HeRO is the best low-rate server I've ever played on. Partly because the GM team acts more responsible than other servers I've been on. Corruption is certainly kept to a minimum. I haven't seen any low-rate server go for so long without having something big going on like unbalanced donation items, GMs taking the money and running, GM corruption, etc. But they're not perfect and it seems like lately, the GM team's objectvity is slipping in terms of punishment. I don't want to feel like I'm slowly falling into that movie Equilibrium, if anyone's seen that. A character deletion is much harder to undo than a ban. The GM team set the bar high for themselves and that's why they're the best I've seen. Being a good GM is hard work and the team here does it well. It is clear that a ton of players love this server and are having a lot of fun. Try to maintain and don't let HeRO keep slipping.