Bannings

[hellfrog]

@Evilgrayson
I had my way at RTA

[IoleRae]

@Evilgrayson

Thank you. It helps me a lot to see that other people can read that I’m not the only one who’s had the particular experience I have had with her. It feels petty and awful for me to say the “trigger” for her was that she was jealous, but it doesn’t have the same feel when other people point it out.

[Meg]

@hellfrog every time I see choke frog icon, I smile. Thanks, frg and rae.

[helvetica]

@Meg said in Bannings:

@hellfrog every time I see choke frog icon, I smile. Thanks, frg and rae.

So, my father and stepmother live by this pond with all of these bullfrogs. And any time I’ve visited, it’s far away so I have to stay over, and their croaking is ~maddening~ you start to hear your own name or like an earworm song. But there’s also this huge feral cat that prowls the pond that my dad’s been trying to capture for years. And you’ll hear: “Ribboooot, riboooot, ribb-dsfskjfgsf!!!”

And that’s what choke frog means to me. touches heart

ETA: That wasn’t clear because I was excited. The cat eats the frogs.

[Herja]

One of the creepiest parts, to me, about her behavior at Arx was that she could have snuck back onto the game anonymously and been just fine. Unless you have been banned, we have no rule about not getting to make a fresh start on the game. But that wasn’t enough for her. She had to engage with not only people that made it clear that they didn’t want to play with her before and put in no contact requests to that effect but also people that SHE PUT IN NC REQUESTS for. We have had a few really gross creepers run through Arx, but she is by far the absolutely worst one yet, in my opinion.

I would love it if I never had to talk about her ever again, but that requires that she stop doing shit like this and I don’t think she is capable of that.

[Evilgrayson]

@IoleRae It’s only a few days ago that I found out who she’d been, and I immediately raged. There aren’t many people I remember from a decade ago without prompting, but that character name is etched in my memory with a massive flashing light and a really loud warning siren.

It’s not just you. It hasn’t been just you.

And to anyone she’s made a victim of, or who’s feeling isolated, or just isn’t connecting to people? Reach out to me on game or on the board, and if I can I’ll help, just as I’ve done many times before. I can usually help connect people to other bits of a game, to plots they might find fun, or people they’ll get on with. It’s more difficult on Arx than it was when I had a staffer’s view of what was going on, but I’ll help. And I’ll even mitigate my arse of a character to do it, because helping people find fun is far more important.

[sao]

I think one of the things that is most frustrating about the new MSB (I swear I’ll get off this horse anytime now) is that the whole point of the Hog Pit was to be able to call out abusive pieces of shit, so having her running around the kinder friendly message board pretending to be a new person who oozes rainbows and compassion from her pores is like shit icing on an ugly damn cake.

UGH.

Oh well. Hopefully enough of the community has been warned at this point that she won’t be able to find as much traction the next time . . . That’s all I can hope.

[Pavel]

@Herja As a sort of confirmation to this point, I absolutely did that myself. Not on Arx, but just in general after I was fired from The Reach for being a gross power-abuse monster. I just… flew under the radar for a bit. I’m sure people knew it was me, but I didn’t let myself be in the same position to repeat the same behaviour.

When a behaviour has become a habit, it’s absolutely difficult to change. So I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy to be not-a-shit. But if @IoleRae and I can both manage that at least once in our MUing careers, anyone can do it with enough effort and will.

ETA: And to counter-argue against a point raised on my leaving post elsewhere: The main game I play now is run by a person directly affected by what I did back then. And the main coder is the guy that fired me. I’m absolutely not hiding what I did. I owned it (eventually) and I continue to do so. It was also a decade ago.

ETA2 (I have no self control): It was a decade ago and I stopped doing it.

[Herja]

@Pavel And you know, I am absolutely in support of fresh starts. If someone comes back and doesn’t just keep repeating the same behavior. I think changing that mindset, especially in a space where I think it can be easy to get caught up in the toxicity of certain personalities, is difficult so major props to you and @IoleRae for being able to manage it. I strongly believe that people are capable of change.

[Pavel]

@Herja Definitely. I’m sure there are people out there that still hate me and refuse to play with me ever again. And that’s fine. An apology isn’t about being forgiven, it’s about expressing regret and making a promise to do better. That’s literally all.

[Testament]

Banning someone on a game is kind of a, well, it’s not all that effective. Or I guess, it’s effective, to a point. Unless you want to get into IP banning, and even that can be mitigated if you’re really determined and/or feel like paying the money for a NordVPN.

Thinking about it, and how I view it, if someone was banned for really shitty behavior and then they eventually sneak back on unnoticed by any and all who they might’ve wronged. It tells me one of two things.

Either A, they’re sociopath who lacks social skills to realize they aren’t wanted and simply doesn’t care. In this case, their behavior will eventually show up and they’ll be caught, banned, rinse/repeat. See; Cullen, DWOPP, etc etc.

Or B, they realize the error of what they were doing wrong, did some kind of self-evaluation and changed their behavior. In light of B, that doesn’t make them coming back to the game right, but unless you get really draconian about tracking people, it’s just something that most games have to deal with.

[Herja]

Also, I am only speaking for Arx where the amount of players and story going on means that someone can come back and engage in play away from people that want nothing to do with them. I’m not sure that would be as easy on a smaller game where there isn’t space to do that.

[GF]

@Herja said in Bannings:

She had to engage with not only people that made it clear that they didn’t want to play with her before and put in no contact requests to that effect but also people that SHE PUT IN NC REQUESTS for.

If you feel guilty about hiding your identity, you assume everyone is watching you to try to see through it; and in that mindset, you think to yourself that avoiding the same people you avoided before would be a clue to the people investigating you.

[IoleRae]

@Pavel said in Bannings:

@Herja As a sort of confirmation to this point, I absolutely did that myself. Not on Arx, but just in general after I was fired from The Reach for being a gross power-abuse monster. I just… flew under the radar for a bit. I’m sure people knew it was me, but I didn’t let myself be in the same position to repeat the same behaviour.

When a behaviour has become a habit, it’s absolutely difficult to change. So I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy to be not-a-shit. But if @IoleRae and I can both manage that at least once in our MUing careers, anyone can do it with enough effort and will.

ETA: And to counter-argue against a point raised on my leaving post elsewhere: The main game I play now is run by a person directly affected by what I did back then. And the main coder is the guy that fired me. I’m absolutely not hiding what I did. I owned it (eventually) and I continue to do so. It was also a decade ago.

ETA2 (I have no self control): It was a decade ago and I stopped doing it.

Yup. Step one for me was also ‘put self in position where incapable of repeating problematic behavior that you want to stop’. One of my various issues is related to PVP…so I don’t do it any more. So on, so forth. I don’t trust that the habits won’t resurface, can’t guarantee my approach will be healthy, so I refrain. It IS hard. It’s also do-able. Everybody CAN change. They just have to want to.

[Herja]

@GF No one was investigating her before her same bad behaviors started to come up and she was being pushy toward people who had already been burned by her. We weren’t actively looking for her. No one cared. When she ‘left’ the first time, she wasn’t banned. Had she come back and not reverted back to her usual manipulative behaviors, she never would have been found out because Arx staff has better things to do than keep tabs on every player that has flounced and then snuck back on a couple weeks later.

[Pavel]

As much as we have the reputation of holding grudges, I’ve found this community, on the whole, to be exceedingly forgiving - assuming two things have happened: 1) Time has passed, and 2) the behaviour has markedly changed.

How many times have our legendary creepers/problem people been given chances? It’s often to our detriment, but we forgive so easily - we never forget, but we’re willing to coat the memory with vaseline if you behave.

ETA (help I have a problem): This is, of course, only my own experiences and my own perceptions of the experiences of others.

[Roz]

@Testament said in Bannings:

Banning someone on a game is kind of a, well, it’s not all that effective. Or I guess, it’s effective, to a point. Unless you want to get into IP banning, and even that can be mitigated if you’re really determined and/or feel like paying the money for a NordVPN.

Thinking about it, and how I view it, if someone was banned for really shitty behavior and then they eventually sneak back on unnoticed by any and all who they might’ve wronged. It tells me one of two things.

Either A, they’re sociopath who lacks social skills to realize they aren’t wanted and simply doesn’t care. In this case, their behavior will eventually show up and they’ll be caught, banned, rinse/repeat. See; Cullen, DWOPP, etc etc.

Or B, they realize the error of what they were doing wrong, did some kind of self-evaluation and changed their behavior. In light of B, that doesn’t make them coming back to the game right, but unless you get really draconian about tracking people, it’s just something that most games have to deal with.

Bans – especially public bans – do have an additional value to a game or community beyond the immediate “get rid of the person doing the bad thing.”

They also make a public show of what a community will or won’t tolerate. They provide evidence to regular players of what behaviors won’t fly, which helps make it easier and safer for players to report bad behavior – which, as we all know, is always an ongoing struggle.

Bans aren’t technologically foolproof, and we all know that. But their value to a community, I’d say, goes far beyond that.

[IoleRae]

@Roz

Agree. “we saw/someone showed us this behavior and we stopped it” is the real value. That’s what makes people feel safe. Or me, anyway.

[Testament]

@Roz Nah, not devaluing the use of bans. By no means am I saying don’t bother banning someone because they’ll ‘just come back’. I think it’s a good show of support to the playerbase to say “This is messed up behavior and we’re not going to stand for it.” That’s a good thing, to me.

I’m just realistic enough to tell myself that some of them will come back, because again, I think a lot of the trouble cases feel as if they’re not doing anything wrong. Along with that sense of not getting the last word in.

[Herja]

@Roz All of this. I have no expectation that a ban will prevent someone determined from jumping back on the game but what those bans do is establish the culture of the game and let people who aren’t manipulative jerks know where the boundaries are and, I think more importantly, know that they can report those related behaviors and that they will be taken seriously even if they don’t result in a ban right away.