Lox Laments: Player Reports

[Dae]

Personally, I did not read all of the text in this conversation so far as most of it makes me think of things I wish to avoid saying. When it comes down to it, there is already a set way to report with much ease. It is not a complicated situation which requires a ton of extra hand holding to get done. You can send in the report via in-game means for in-game problems and use the forums for situations that might arise outside of gamespace. So long as you feel they are Coth-related. There is the Private Message route, the Private discussion forum, which if I understand only GMs can see your threads. Yes, maybe the format pointed out in a spoiler above would be pretty much the only addition I could see needing added.

As for all the skype things I kept reading, that's on you guys. It's not hard to remove yourself from any situation which makes you feel uncomfortable in virtual reality. There are ignore commands and you can always remove yourself from a conversation in skype. Then if you feel you must absolutely talk to certain people there is no shame in just doing a 1 on 1 conversation with your friends or creating a conversation without the offenders.

As far as guildchats go I always assume that whomever the leader/leaders of the guild have final say for what occurs within the chat. Don't like it? Leave the guild.

I feel I may have come across as blunt or harsh but this is a cut and dry situation that I feel shouldn't require any extra nonsense. I'll probably get flak for being the one to come out and say it. It is the internet folks, grow a spine and ignore things. Most of us are adults and should act accordingly. We are becoming too sensitive as a population as a whole when it comes to the internet. I feel like going down this road only adds to that over-sensitivity that is growing. Hell, I get reported in a ton of online games now a days for trash talking but it's not like I actually know or hate any of the people I'm talking to. Half the time what I say isn't even harsh but something along the lines of, "I win you lose!" but they report anyway because that's how people are. I should probably stop here before I go to far on a tangent and end up somewhere I don't need to be.

In a lot of ways, I do get where you're coming from, and at times I, myself, tell people they need to just deal. The thing is, carrying the "grow a spine" mentality to its logical conclusion leads to some permutation of every other internet community out there. CotH simply arrive to its positive aspects, as one of the few RP communities that I can stand ICly, through a "deal with it" attitude. Touchy-feelie is just a part of CotH.

I've watched a lot of internet communities expand and change over a period of several years, and the only ones I've found tolerable at the "+1000 users online at any given point" level are the ones that stuck by a touchy-feelie-super-respect-land mentality for as long as possible. At that point, yes, the community has to grow a thicker skin as a whole to survive, as the fall of the Warcry network demonstrates. But the exploration of what makes a community during a period in which it is still really small and inclusive is what lays the groundwork for the future.

If CotH never gets particularly big, than fine. It gets to be as it is. But I, personally, wouldn't be participating in these sorts of conversations on CotH if I felt it was purposeless BS.

[Loxmardin]

@QuantumLegacy: Indeed, all the tools are there for people to use in order to send in their reports. The issue I've been trying to punch a hole in here is the fact that people seem to avoid submitting their reports for one reason or another since I keep seeing people complaining everywhere about how nothing is ever being done about nothing and how people everywhere are jerks, pretty much. :P

When you're taking part in a community like this one, it's not always so easy as simply removing yourself from one branch and be free, and not a lot of people like to let one person ruin their entire experience and distance themselves from chat rooms because there's one or two select individuals in a larger group that tend to ruin everybody else's good time. All in all, we want to prevent a situation where the bully always wins and the victims have to move to make way since people come on here for a good time and not to deal with drama. ... So, we try to help people sort out their drama, or prevent it from happening at all if we can. ... Most of the time we can't, but every win still makes up for the losses.

I want to stress, though, that the whole Skype business is most of the time very exaggerated. The number of times we, the GM team, have actually used Skype or other materials that doesn't directly come from the server itself are very, very few. We try to avoid that unless it's an issue that inevitably bleeds over into the server and the rest of the community. Language abuse? Suit yourselves. Skype has their own rules. Only the Official CotH Skype Group actually follow the CotH rules and everywhere else, it's "everything goes" as long as, like I mentioned, it doesn't bleed over. In short, no, people don't have to be paranoid about the Skype logs being used against them on CotH if you don't take your problems with you back onto the server and it starts to affect the community as a whole, or your continued stay in it (in the case of stalking or bullying, for example, both of which have occurred before).

[Harmonic]

There's been at least two or three times that I can cite specifically, and who. That's my own experience. That's with GM's trying to police a guild chat I had going though, but, it's really not big deal or I would have brought it up then, and not now. The portion where people seem to be afraid of chat logs seems more like someone saying something happened, that didn't. It'd be very hard to believe that anyone would use logs from Skype to get someone banned over here... because that's not even really tangible proof of anything.

Again though, that's not even close to what I was personally trying to say. My issue was people policing chats that weren't theirs, or that had to do with junk I was running. That gets old quick.

[Kage]

Heh. Good! I don't have to worry about what I say on skype anymore. Them jokes I make..

Anyway, I have yet to really find a reason to report anyone. I don't think I've ever made a report in my entire time here. I tend to let things go, grumble in a skype chat about it, then let it be. Ironically it's the people I grumble to that tell me to get the logs and such (In which case I do).

Anyway, until I see such a time as there is a major rule being broken intentionally and in such a way that it's just.. Bad I probably wont make a report myself. I don't like people getting in trouble regardless on what happened (Course if its bad as I said above, I'll say something to someone) because we're all human. People make mistakes. Not throwing them under the bus is sometimes just a good thing to do.

Oh, I'm also having a hard time remembering things. Been about 17 hours worth of work today, so what I say may be wrong. At the same time though, I like that view point. If I haven't been following it, I plan to. Now, for sleep.

[Loxmardin]

Like I said before... Not every report leads to action. If it is something that deserves a report, it should be reported. You won't be throwing people under the bus; if they don't have a track record of similar or worse kind of behaviour, chances are they won't get in trouble at all or won't even need to hear from us.

Sometimes, though, people get away with bad behaviour because they dish it out in small doses to a bunch of different people. They spread it out, and to one individual person it might seem like a one-time occurence that you won't suffer much from turning a blind eye to just that once, but when we add all the spread-out infractions together it suddenly becomes a much bigger problem.

I'm not saying that people should be encouraged to snitch for the smallest little thing. I do hope that people will send in more reports, though. Like I said, if it's not all that serious, nothing will happen. If we start seeing patterns in a series of reports, though, then we may be inclined to take a closer look. Beyond that, the small-time issues are made note of and recorded but not really touched.