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/showthread.php?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.

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.

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?

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...2#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.

[Iduncare]

if i can add anything on to this. heRO has been slipping recently, even before Jason and them got banned, everything has such harsh rules and no one gets away with anything, anything being:
something they did do
something they did not do
something someone thought someone did but has no proof

All of the above i have seen end up in bans or jails, which should not have, im not saying (if i can say...) to change your rules, just be more lenient, and contact the person who did the offense instead of making a rash judgment on them. Its not a simple matter, but its not too confusing, a few changes with hard work could make this place a better welcome to new RO players and old RO players changing servers or coming back to this one... lately it doesnt seem that welcoming

[teOx]

that mohekan thing made me lol. what a stupid urbandictionary entry.

ill agree with 1 thing right away. the passwords do take more than a month to work out, and in some cases multiple months and still no progress. i know its not a priority but maybe it should be moved SLIGHTLY up on the priority list to avoid stuff like buddha and biro's stories.

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? if its in party or PM that would be unpunishable of course. obviously no one reported it but hey who would report their leader? hell i doubt i would report ex even if i saw him botting or something.

something they did do
something they did not do
something someone thought someone did but has no proof

can you give an example of the last 2? my memory fails and i dont remember anything like that.

[Idunknow]

There was a purging of guild titles in LoA and "iHAx" (mine) was deleted whereas "Balls of Steel" was not.?

My guild title was also deleted when there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. Suck my kiss? What's the implicit message behind that? Not to mention that it is the name of a popular song...

What Machi is saying is completely true. Either too many rules have been written out for this server or the GMs are taking actions too suddenly and seriously. If enough players get dragged away from the server, the server will have fewer players, meaning fewer votes, more negative perspectives of the server?

Do we really want fewer players? I think not.

[azurerogue]

n3xus, I think you have many good points, and you phrased everything very intelligently and in a mostly neutral fashion, I believe. I mean no offense in any way, but I would like to point a few things out, if I may:

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.

Even if it seems like that, and I am not one to speak on what happened / did not happen with reports - if their had been nothing to report in the first place this could not have happened. I don't care if anyone agrees with the punishments or not, and I don't want to get into whether or not I do. The point is that if there was no offense to report, nothing could be done. I'm not trying to say it's all good and happy, but just pointing the fact out.

By implementing a few rules, yes it could accomodate younger people. At the same time, this is like censorship.

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.

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.

I don't know Jason, and I don't believe I've ever spoken to him in game that I can remember. Along with that, I do not know the facts of what happened at all, just what I've read on the forums so far and inferred from what people have said - but I do agree with you somewhat, and I know that everyone (or close to it) says something negative about someone else behind their back at some point. 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.

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.

Final point. I like this paragraph a lot, and I personally don't see anything wrong with a well-phrased, kindly-worded inquiry to the GMs as long as there's no malice behind it. I have no doubt that the GMs are handling this situation in the best way they can find. And regardless of what any of us may think, I know that there has been a great amount of discussion among the GMs and they are trying their best to do what they think is right.

Sorry for the long-ish response, and thank you for your post n3xus.

EDIT: Fixed a few typos.

[Niirnaeth]

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.

It doesn't just look like, it is obvious that a large group of people sent in reports together. Screenshots from 2007 were sent in, players that have not played in months being banned because of their actions taken last year, and all of these bans coming at the exact same time is clearly pointing to a large effort to discredit LoA and its members. If the mistreatment that was reported was so offensive it would have been reported when it happened. There is even an incident from October 2007 that was reported and only now sent in.

It is interesting that only now when LoA has become so powerful and practically triples its enemies numbers for woe that all of this is sent in. What ever happened to fighting your enemy and beating them with skill and hard work? Sure some of LoA's members were rude to other players but the majority of the guild were good people. Some players on this server tend to take the outcomes of woe far too seriously and develop what can only be described as hatred towards their enemies. As much as members of other guilds complain about the way LoA acts and says them talking behind others backs is cowardly you need only read their guild chat or private forums and the same attitude is there.

Whats truly cowardly is not having the balls to show up and fight LoA on the battlefield, instead sending reports about their supposed mistreatments so that their players get banned and hopefully their guild falls apart as a result. Is shit like Bhoops, Baby Joose, and other play on words so offensive to you that you are mentally anguished enough to demand they be reprimanded for it? Its bullshit if any of you truly say that they are the ones who treat others poorly when the stuff that you say behind their backs is the same if not worse. The only difference is that LoA is the more public rulebreakers and anything they do is under scrutiny.

Its truly pathetic that instead of accepting a loss and working harder to achieve victory that people need to stoop to this level of cowardice to gain the the upper hand. Victory gained through dishonest means is worthless. If you hack and win you truly prove nothing and these tactics employed against LoA are no better. LoA proved to be a worthy enemy and gave those who wanted a challenge a reason to play. If LoA is truly gone then this server has lost a big part of what it meant to represent your guild in the war of emperium.

[GM-Ayu]

Neither did we know about the two names until mentioned. We thought that Jason was making fun of Swift/Jose instead since the names sound similar. Urbandictionary is indeed like wikipedia where anyone can add to it. So, we did investigate if it's a genuine coincidence that they stumbled upon a word with a meaning they don't know, or are they fully up to bypass the rule while obeying it. GM Auron and I splitted up the logs around the day of annoucement of name changes, up to 1 week (approximately) after that.

I found nothing about Fainn, as I pointed out how I furthered my research in the other thread and found Fainn to be an accepted and used last name originated from Dublin. But GM decision is a group decision and not just calling of any one particular GM. I will let the other GMs speak for Fainn's case.

As for Jason's case, Mercador from LoA as well warned Jason that the GM team will not allow his name, also saying that urbandictionary will show offense. If this event didn't exist, true that maybe Jason just happened to be unlucky to choose a name that happens to have a sexual overtone. However, his very own guildmate warned him about it. He could have checked, and asked the GM about it at that time. This is said on Jan 11, at the advanced fishing spot with Mercador. On the 15th, Jason mentioned that he should have picked another name which was definitely blunt in offense that has the same definition as his previous name, except that he plans to use homonyms. Jason never contacted the GMs to change to a new list of names either for possible offenses, except to change Joose to Juice but that was after name change deadline. Aki declined his request at that time, since all the GMs are still unaware of the name's meaning. She declined on the basis that free name change deadlines are over.

Name changes did not solely rely on urbandictionary, but also the context of the case as well. Context points for this particular case that this character name was thought of while trying to push the rules to its very limit.

As for other characters whose names are offensive in the future, likewise we will use similar treatment. We first research the name, then judge depending on context of the character name creation, and put both of these factor together.

It maybe worthwhile to note that some reports are indeed rejected because they find some party names belonging to LoA characters offensive. None of the GMs can find faults with them, and while I was asked by Pandora to help GM-Auron to look up the context of Jason's character, I also looked up the reporters' context. Some of them have admitted pretty well that they are trying to find "excuses" to "do the ex-LoAers in" within the logs for a 'finishing blow' after the recent events. These rulesharks' (people who uses loopholes and rules to their own advantage against other people) future reports will be deemed weak and mild, treated with far less priority in the future.

Guess that there are subjective elements when it comes to interpret what is "acceptable" (even IRL, anything regarding what is acceptable is highly debatable), but we try our best to serve all players equally and fairly. heRO is pretty clogged up with rules already for a list of guidelines for what is appropriate or not. We do realize that the rules are still unclear in some parts, and that's why we are slowly adding bits and parts to the rules lately to reduce the gray area.

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Now for the password issue, yes we admit that we should be treating with a lot more faster speed. However, instead of making some short term solution to the problems, we are trying to get our long lost Control Panel back up so players can change their own password bypassing the GM's manual changes. This has long been a significant problem, but sadly we have little technical luck. Hopefully password problems will be short term if we can fix up the CP.

For Buddha's individual case, I went to bed already after restoring her Champion, and we cleared the problem with the Champion's account. As for the High Priest, I just got back home and have close to no deep understanding about it. I'll need to talk with Buddha and the other GMs about it first. Since it does not only involve the character deletion but item transfer and multiple other accounts this time, it makes investigation lengthy and difficult.

However, I doubt that anyone can say sharing password with other people is NOT part of the problem. This is not just to heRO, but anything regarding passwords and online accounts. You should *never* share your password or beware to face full consequences of whatever happened on the account as a result of the other controllers to the account doing horrible things on that character. There are previous cases regarding fishing macros and sharing accounts already, and we will ban the character that committed the act, regardless of who is the controller of the account. [There are rare, extreme, exceptional cases of course, such as hacking and so on]

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For Silvanel's case, it is already being worked on actually. The problem involves Silvanel's IP showing up as logging on to more than just his own account. We are reviewing his case already, as he requested and cooperating with us.

For Ryan's case, I know as much as what the ban thread reads o_O; Some sort of violation on the special conditions placed on them for their return. However, seems like he admitted to rulebreaking already. If he did that because he gave up or anything, I encourage him to PM us (I don't think he's banned in forum) about it.

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EDIT: I didn't see Kamina's post when I started typing. We considered the time factor before. Some of us GMs think that if a report is sent in but the date is back months ago, then it is the players' fault that they did not report as they should have at the time of relevancy. Some of us GMs think that time should not matter, as for example a theft committed in real life, even if it was committed a year ago, it is still treated as a crime. There is indeed much debate about the 2007 Oct comment. In the end, we decided that as of that one incident alone, Jason was to have the one week ban and one week mute on that particular character who said the comment. This punishment satisfied both sides of the GM team that it is a heavy punishment over a racist comment, but punishment was lowered due to the time problem.


(I probably left out a lot of other things I should answer to o_O; Did I miss anything?)


Thanks for your concern and suggestions about heRO server. We will certainly take them up with serious consideration. ^_^

[jman212]

" obviously no one reported it but hey who would report their leader? hell i doubt i would report ex even if i saw him botting or something." --Teeooxxx

Is this the same reason you didn't report your brother? Anyways I figure its my guild, i can say w/e the fk i want in it? But i guess not..Spying gms can ban you for that if they don't like you. And deleting my High Priest "Baby Joose" is just plain fking retarded, you guys are like 20+ fking years old, and Baby Joose offends you. That name is really not that sexual, I remember it was a tleast 3 months before anyone even knew what "Skeet" was and no one complained until Ms Namine came to hero, acting as if she had never sinned in her life

[Niirnaeth]

If swearing said in guild chat is ban worthy then I and many others are deserving of a ban.

[teOx]

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.??

It doesn't just look like, it is obvious that a large group of people sent in reports together. Screenshots from 2007 were sent in, players that have not played in months being banned because of their actions taken last year, and all of these bans coming at the exact same time is clearly pointing to a large effort to discredit LoA and its members. If the mistreatment that was reported was so offensive it would have been reported when it happened. There is even an incident from October 2007 that was reported and only now sent in.

It is interesting that only now when LoA has become so powerful and practically triples its enemies numbers for woe that all of this is sent in. What ever happened to fighting your enemy and beating them with skill and hard work? Sure some of LoA's members were rude to other players but the majority of the guild were good people. Some players on this server tend to take the outcomes of woe far too seriously and develop what can only be described as hatred towards their enemies. As much as members of other guilds complain about the way LoA acts and says them talking behind others backs is cowardly you need only read their guild chat or private forums and the same attitude is there.

Whats truly cowardly is not having the balls to show up and fight LoA on the battlefield, instead sending reports about their supposed mistreatments so that their players get banned and hopefully their guild falls apart as a result. Is shit like Bhoops, Baby Joose, and other play on words so offensive to you that you are mentally anguished enough to demand they be reprimanded for it? Its bullshit if any of you truly say that they are the ones who treat others poorly when the stuff that you say behind their backs is the same if not worse. The only difference is that LoA is the more public rulebreakers and anything they do is under scrutiny.

Its truly pathetic that instead of accepting a loss and working harder to achieve victory that people need to stoop to this level of cowardice to gain the the upper hand. Victory gained through dishonest means is worthless. If you hack and win you truly prove nothing and these tactics employed against LoA are no better. LoA proved to be a worthy enemy and gave those who wanted a challenge a reason to play. If LoA is truly gone then this server has lost a big part of what it meant to represent your guild in the war of emperium.

lol kamina. you, for one, know every single detail about what happened.

check to see if anything happened with the goal of beating loa in woe, or had anything to do with woe at all.

come back to me when you realize my point and why i dont like ur post . kinda jumped the gun there a bit...