Steam recently began complying with Australian legislop and requiring age verification to view adult materials. Their ID of choice? A credit card. Not a debit card, not an ID card, but a credit card. The Reserve Bank of Australia reports that only 18% of adults under 30 in Australia own a credit card (Livermore et al., 2023, p. 21).

@Faraday said:

and they’re so easy to circumvent that they do virtually nothing to keep kids out of spaces they shouldn’t be in.

Especially with Firefox and other browsers just straight-up having a VPN button to push, for free (with limits, but c’mon), right there. Even the least technologically interested child will learn that pushing that button gives you access to The Good Stuff.

Livermore, T., Mulqueeney, J., Nguyen, T., & Watson, B. (2023). The evolution of consumer payments in Australia: Results from the 2022 Consumer Payments Survey (Research Discussion Paper No. 2023-08). Reserve Bank of Australia. https://doi.org/10.47688/rdp2023-08

@Aria Can’t slap them, I’ve got this tricky shoulder y’see…

@junipersky said:

I’m okay with an additional step to help me out as a parent.

I’d be more okay with it if it weren’t implemented so stupidly.

And even then, we have rights to privacy just as strong as your rights to security. It’s an age-old debate between security and liberty, and in the era of rising authoritarianism, it’s hard to simply accept “help me protect the children” as justification, even if that’s a side benefit to the loss of personal liberty.

@Shygaming said:

I think people are missing the much bigger picture here.

No, most of us know that. We care about it. We also try to avoid talking about politics, it’s like the one rule we have.

@Apos And there was a really high (or seemingly high) involvement in FASHION throughout all of this.

I don’t know if this is entirely an RL peeve, since it has crossover, but I just saw a question on r/AskHistorians that frames MUing as something that happened in the Distant Past. Things I have personally done shouldn’t exist in the same conversational context as Alexander the fucking Generally Alright.

@MisterBoring It does have specific provisions relating to online games, so it’s a very big maybe.

@Aria said:

her neighbor’s sister’s pastor’s hamster

Wait, President Gerald R. Fluff died? And this is how you tell me?!

@Aria Did this revelation happen in the same way my family usually reveals big bits of our history, in that the preceeding conversation was absolutely unrelated?

@Gashlycrumb said:

Suggesting that the game hire a new staffer just to tend to players that the existing one doesn’t like seems ridiculous.

Why does it seem ridiculous to hire someone to cover an area you can’t? That’s one of the best reasons to hire someone. Whether they dislike a certain set or players, aren’t comfortable with them, or for whatever reason cannot interact with them, then the best thing to do is to engage someone who can and will do that.

All staff should hire The Other Dude. Whenever a player becomes so irritating, so poorly behaved, or so… arduous to deal with, you just send their stuff to The Other Dude and they will be responsible for “gently offboarding” the player in question.

That shall be their only job.

It turns out that for some reason I can’t access the game’s website. No idea why, no real care to investigate either. But it’s like Saint Carlo Acutis himself is looking out for me.

@voiceinthevoid I think it can be right to say that staff as a collective entity have a level of responsibility to ensure that jobs are answered and decisions are made (and announced, where necessary). I don’t believe that an individual staffer does. So if you’re annoyed by a player, pass the job to someone else. If there is nobody else, hire someone else or get rid of the problem player.

@Gashlycrumb said:

I believe that’s a core element of the job

I believe that it’s a core part of the player’s job not to be so fucking irritating that staff would rather run WoD combat than deal with them.

@Gashlycrumb said:

Not on the simplest level. They’re excusing it, though.

Expressing that we understand why someone does something isn’t the same as excusing or agreeing with it.

@Gashlycrumb said:

Seems to me more like you just want to deny that it’s reasonable for me to have understood you the way I did.

It might have been reasonable the first time. But when I literally said

Pavel said:

You’re taking general suggestions and advice and treating them as immediate instructions.

That should have indicated to you that I was not giving you immediate instructions for a situation you are in, but instead giving advice and suggestions for a generalised genre of situations.

Multiple interpretations are frequently possible; I’m not the clearest of writers much of the time. But when I specifically correct your initial assumption, and your immediate reaction is to repeat it, that’s incredibly frustrating to deal with.

@Gashlycrumb said:

@Pavel Okay. It came across that way to me is all, then.

Yes. Then you were told it wasn’t, and you insisted. That is what makes you frustrating to deal with. You don’t accept correction, and you assume everyone is operating with the same knowledge/belief/frame of reference as you.

That doesn’t excuse unprofessional behaviour.

@Gashlycrumb said:

It’s immediate instructions that assume I didn’t already do that

No. No it isn’t. It’s literally not that at all. I wrote it, I know what it is.

@Gashlycrumb said:

I am not sure why it’s being taken as a given that I’m still playing there.

It isn’t. You’re taking general suggestions and advice and treating them as immediate instructions.

@Gashlycrumb said:

What “more problems” did I cause?

I don’t know. You, yourself, said:

@Gashlycrumb said:

The player is gonna get cheesed off and it’s likely that they will, understandably, act like they’re cheesed off.

Which is what I’m going off of.

@Meg We broke the site yesterday, so they’ve had to change things around: