nerevarine1138 wrote: »nerevarine1138 wrote: »Plenty of people in this thread (yourself included, it seems) want the GMs to be regulating this kind of behavior, which I see as extremely problematic.
There are mechanical issues introduced by making ignored players disappear in the game world, but those have already been brought up (and ignored) in this thread enough.
So what is your solution to this problem? Usually I agree with a fair amount of what you say, but this time you seem to be against GM involvement and against using phasing to remove people... so how would you prefer to see this situation resolved?
I'm not against the idea of ignore-phasing in principle, but I don't see how it works on a more practical level. How is PvP in Cyrodiil dealt with? What about the upcoming PvP side of the Justice System?
There would have to be exceptions within the ignore-phasing, and I see a lot of room for problems there. More importantly, I don't think that people dancing in their underwear merits such strong measures. If you find it annoying, fine. I'm not saying that feeling isn't valid. But that's what willpower is for.
If you had ever actually been physically bullied by someone before: you would know how ridiculous it is to try and compare that to watching a video game elf dance in their underwear. They aren't even in the same universe.
MornaBaine wrote: »nerevarine1138 wrote: »nerevarine1138 wrote: »Plenty of people in this thread (yourself included, it seems) want the GMs to be regulating this kind of behavior, which I see as extremely problematic.
There are mechanical issues introduced by making ignored players disappear in the game world, but those have already been brought up (and ignored) in this thread enough.
So what is your solution to this problem? Usually I agree with a fair amount of what you say, but this time you seem to be against GM involvement and against using phasing to remove people... so how would you prefer to see this situation resolved?
I'm not against the idea of ignore-phasing in principle, but I don't see how it works on a more practical level. How is PvP in Cyrodiil dealt with? What about the upcoming PvP side of the Justice System?
There would have to be exceptions within the ignore-phasing, and I see a lot of room for problems there. More importantly, I don't think that people dancing in their underwear merits such strong measures. If you find it annoying, fine. I'm not saying that feeling isn't valid. But that's what willpower is for.
You keep pretending that it was "just" that there were "people dancing in their underwear." It's been explained repeatedly that it was MUCH MORE than that in the initial incident that prompted this thread in the first place.
That you do not see how "ignore phasing" might work on a practical level does not in any way mean that the idea should not be investigated further. Only the devs at ZOS have any idea if it can work in this game. So I would really like to hear from them on this issue.
This is the #1 reason why megaservers just can't work for RP. They should have added one just for that and I bet it could of brought more people to the game (well after the bots and big bugs were fixed) which means more money. Hope you find a way to fix it.
nerevarine1138 wrote: ». More importantly, I don't think that people dancing in their underwear merits such strong measures. If you find it annoying, fine. I'm not saying that feeling isn't valid. But that's what willpower is for.
newtinmpls wrote: »nerevarine1138 wrote: ». More importantly, I don't think that people dancing in their underwear merits such strong measures. If you find it annoying, fine. I'm not saying that feeling isn't valid. But that's what willpower is for.
Really .... do people actually read what they are replying to? Or is the concept of someone dancing in their underwear so enticing that it just overwhelms all other considerations?
I do not mean to be pointing fingers at any one player - but Neravarine (love the name, BTW), your comment was just so perfect and I had reached the point of taking psychic damage from the appearance of deliberate misunderstanding.
Yes, physical bullying is more physically damaging than cyber bullying. However this is just another form of bullying. And "it's just a joke" or "it's not that bad" are deflections that are making the problem worse.
IF someone is deliberately seeking to distress another - that's bullying. Yes it can be hard to detect IF the person is subtle. However when said person actually says in chat something along the lines of "I hate you" while doing very obvious emotes - well..... all I can say is that what with the existence of screenshots (and that's not even a hard mod or anything) that person is not very bright.
And yes, game people can't be everywhere so with large RP events, it's probably a good idea to let them know. Identifying folks who just can't resist a chance to attempt to cause pain. I doubt there are that many. I hope there aren't that many.
And I also concede that things can be misunderstood. I know of a very dear man who ended up losing his job over "sexual harassment" that in my very fierce opinion was nothing of the kind. So I tend to lean on the side of the person's intentions have to be pretty provable and pretty obvious.
In the particular case used as example here, it seems like things were in fact pretty obvious. That's not going to be the case every time. That doesn't mean we give up trying to have a good atmosphere.
Oh and on re-reading my post I suppose I don't have a solution other than to keep trying and communicating.
nerevarine1138 wrote: »
If I were to stand in the center of Rawl'kha, slap on my Maw of the Infernal Hat (and nothing else) and start dancing, occasionally yelling, "Disco Inferno!", it wouldn't be griefing. But apparently doing the same thing in an RP event is supposed to change the rules.
nerevarine1138 wrote: »The fact remains that you (and others) are arguing that character behavior, without any offensive chat or clear attempts to grief, ought to be regulated more strictly when RPers are feeling annoyed by it. That's not a good system.
Where we disagree is you see the use of emotes as a lesser version of bullying. I simply see it as playing the game - or to coin a popular phrase in his thread - as role playing.
This is the #1 reason why megaservers just can't work for RP. They should have added one just for that and I bet it could of brought more people to the game (well after the bots and big bugs were fixed) which means more money. Hope you find a way to fix it.
This was supposed to be solved w/ the questionnaire right after creating your character that would have placed RPers on a layer of the server w/ other people who enjoyed RP, etc.
But this idea was scrapped in beta, and everybody gets to play "happily" together now.
I don't have an opinion on it either way, tbh, but I just find it interesting that on one hand ZOS constantly showcases the RP guilds and their events, but then on the other they stand idly by while these same players are becoming more and more harassed in game.
Perhaps it might have been a good idea to put SOME kind of loose measure in place when the questionnaire was scrapped.
/shrug
nerevarine1138 wrote: »newtinmpls wrote: »nerevarine1138 wrote: ». More importantly, I don't think that people dancing in their underwear merits such strong measures. If you find it annoying, fine. I'm not saying that feeling isn't valid. But that's what willpower is for.
Really .... do people actually read what they are replying to? Or is the concept of someone dancing in their underwear so enticing that it just overwhelms all other considerations?
I do not mean to be pointing fingers at any one player - but Neravarine (love the name, BTW), your comment was just so perfect and I had reached the point of taking psychic damage from the appearance of deliberate misunderstanding.
Yes, physical bullying is more physically damaging than cyber bullying. However this is just another form of bullying. And "it's just a joke" or "it's not that bad" are deflections that are making the problem worse.
IF someone is deliberately seeking to distress another - that's bullying. Yes it can be hard to detect IF the person is subtle. However when said person actually says in chat something along the lines of "I hate you" while doing very obvious emotes - well..... all I can say is that what with the existence of screenshots (and that's not even a hard mod or anything) that person is not very bright.
And yes, game people can't be everywhere so with large RP events, it's probably a good idea to let them know. Identifying folks who just can't resist a chance to attempt to cause pain. I doubt there are that many. I hope there aren't that many.
And I also concede that things can be misunderstood. I know of a very dear man who ended up losing his job over "sexual harassment" that in my very fierce opinion was nothing of the kind. So I tend to lean on the side of the person's intentions have to be pretty provable and pretty obvious.
In the particular case used as example here, it seems like things were in fact pretty obvious. That's not going to be the case every time. That doesn't mean we give up trying to have a good atmosphere.
Oh and on re-reading my post I suppose I don't have a solution other than to keep trying and communicating.
The thing that I take issue with is that RP events somehow get special treatment here.
If I were to stand in the center of Rawl'kha, slap on my Maw of the Infernal Hat (and nothing else) and start dancing, occasionally yelling, "Disco Inferno!", it wouldn't be griefing. But apparently doing the same thing in an RP event is supposed to change the rules.
farrier_ESO wrote: »I think nevarine (and others) are inadvertently attacking a strawman here, the "special snowflake" strawman.nerevarine1138 wrote: »The fact remains that you (and others) are arguing that character behavior, without any offensive chat or clear attempts to grief, ought to be regulated more strictly when RPers are feeling annoyed by it. That's not a good system.
Who is asking for more than either better-manned GMming of harassment, or more powerful player-empowerment tools (Phasing, visual ignore in PvE zones, etc) to avoid or ignore harassment?
Where is it written -- and I might have missed it -- that the GMs should police RP events particularly, and should consider harassment a more serious issue if there are RPers there? Or that "RPers being annoyed" should constitute some special-snowflake form of harassment?
If you complain that people are not understanding that you know there was harassment in this case, perhaps that's because your arguments are against imaginary strawman cases where there is no harassment and the RPers are just being whiny gits... this is a case which nobody is talking about but you.
[quote="nerevarine1138;1700404"The thing that I take issue with is that RP events somehow get special treatment here.
If I were to stand in the center of Rawl'kha, slap on my Maw of the Infernal Hat (and nothing else) and start dancing, occasionally yelling, "Disco Inferno!", it wouldn't be griefing. But apparently doing the same thing in an RP event is supposed to change the rules.
Where we disagree is you see the use of emotes as a lesser version of bullying. I simply see it as playing the game - or to coin a popular phrase in his thread - as role playing.
I am against a techno fix. They never seem to work out.
farrier_ESO wrote: »I am against a techno fix. They never seem to work out.
In my experience of running MUDs, MMOs, forums, IRC channels, newsgroups, and other online communities, I have found providing the users the tools to avoid harassment is by far and away the most powerful thing you can do to improve the feel of a community.
There are, essentially, three possible approaches to handling trolls.
The first is to do nothing. No moderation, let them run riot, it will sort itself out and reach a stable equilibrium. This can work well, so long as you are okay with having a really toxic, cliquey, elitist equilibrium. It's ideal for small groups, but fails to scale very well at all: in my experience, growing communities invariably either die from drama, or form sets of rules and enforce them.
The next is to have moderators handle everything. This is common on IRC, and is really very difficult to get the tone right. Done well, you get a benevolent dictatorship. Done wrongly, you just get a dictatorship.
The final option, and the one most often chosen by vote, is to provide powerful tools to the players themselves (gamewide ignoring, up/downvoting, kick/ban from private areas, lockable private areas, etc). This places the power to mediate their game experience in the hands of the players themselves.
It's always faster and better to be able to handle things yourself, and only escalate to the authorities if necessary. So if someone is a jerk to you, you'd probably just ignore them. If they are a jerk in your house, you'd kick them out and don't let them back in. If they are a jerk in general, you'd warn people about them. If they're a co-worker, you might warn your boss about it.
You would probably never call 911 on someone, or take them to court, just for being a jerk.
Seems to me, the same should be able to be true in online communities, too. The GMs are the police, the courts, the last line of approach after all else has failed.
Unfortunately, if "all else" isn't much, then the GMs get called a lot, get overworked, get poor response times, and eventually, if they are effective, make the game feel like a police state where nobody can have fun.
newtinmpls wrote: »I was thinking about this. When I see someone being a jerk in chat, mostly I ignore them. But does that just contribute to their ability to cause misery to others or in other ways?
farrier_ESO wrote: »If you had ever actually been physically bullied by someone before: you would know how ridiculous it is to try and compare that to watching a video game elf dance in their underwear. They aren't even in the same universe.
Thankfully, cyberbullying is now recognized in most states and civilized countries as a serious offense.
From a game-design point of view, the best place to start reading on in game harassment is probably Julian Dibell's "A *** in Cyberspace" (1993), which is a decently short article, quite famous in the game-design world, and considered one of the must-reads for both multiplayer game designers and community managers.
http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-***-in-cyberspace/
Well worth reading even for players.
timidobserver wrote: »Yup, it is also illegal to push a live moose from an airplane in Alaska.
amber_picchiottino_ESO wrote: »I'm not sure I follow....Basically you want to restrict others' ability to do as they please so you can do as you please? I don't get it. This is a public mmo. These things happen, in every game, and always will. It's far easier to write in "And then, the homeless of Daggerfall(or wherever), whose lives had been consumed by their skooma addiction, happened upon 'Eddie's' wake. Eddie probably would have had a chuckle or two, but we were all too consumed in our grief."
MornaBaine wrote: »amber_picchiottino_ESO wrote: »I'm not sure I follow....Basically you want to restrict others' ability to do as they please so you can do as you please? I don't get it. This is a public mmo. These things happen, in every game, and always will. It's far easier to write in "And then, the homeless of Daggerfall(or wherever), whose lives had been consumed by their skooma addiction, happened upon 'Eddie's' wake. Eddie probably would have had a chuckle or two, but we were all too consumed in our grief."
I think it's pretty clear that you don't get it. What is most ardently desired are the tools to fully ignore other players which would actually make it so that ANY player could do WHATEVER THEY WANTED TO and no one would feel the need to involve a GM to censure them. Don't care for all the underwear dancers in a bank? /Ignore them and they magically disappear from your sight. Don't like see those poncy roleplayers all dancing to a lute player in the hall of the castle in Wayrest and seeing all their silly dialogue? /Ignore and poof that party disappears from your sight. Meanwhile, that bank underwear dancers dance on, unaware of who is seeing their antics and who is not...and the RP partiers dance on in the castle with no idea of who is seeing them or not. It's a beautiful live and let live concept and what -I- don't get iswhy anyone WOULDN'T want it if it can in fact be implemented.
MornaBaine wrote: »amber_picchiottino_ESO wrote: »I'm not sure I follow....Basically you want to restrict others' ability to do as they please so you can do as you please? I don't get it. This is a public mmo. These things happen, in every game, and always will. It's far easier to write in "And then, the homeless of Daggerfall(or wherever), whose lives had been consumed by their skooma addiction, happened upon 'Eddie's' wake. Eddie probably would have had a chuckle or two, but we were all too consumed in our grief."
I think it's pretty clear that you don't get it. What is most ardently desired are the tools to fully ignore other players which would actually make it so that ANY player could do WHATEVER THEY WANTED TO and no one would feel the need to involve a GM to censure them. Don't care for all the underwear dancers in a bank? /Ignore them and they magically disappear from your sight. Don't like see those poncy roleplayers all dancing to a lute player in the hall of the castle in Wayrest and seeing all their silly dialogue? /Ignore and poof that party disappears from your sight. Meanwhile, that bank underwear dancers dance on, unaware of who is seeing their antics and who is not...and the RP partiers dance on in the castle with no idea of who is seeing them or not. It's a beautiful live and let live concept and what -I- don't get iswhy anyone WOULDN'T want it if it can in fact be implemented.
Is there someone who wouldn't want this? Really?? I'd love to hear the reason!
Some of us put people on ignore for pretty frivolous reasons. : P
Didn't like the way they act in zone chat. Didn't like them spamming abilities in town. Didn't like the silly outfit they were wearing, etc.
Only now, they would simply be missing entirely from the game world. I don't think that's what ZOS intends.
But, like I said, I have no real vested interest in the topic one way or another, and I do respect that other players wish to enjoy the game in different ways, so to each their own, I suppose.
/shrug
phreatophile wrote: »MornaBaine wrote: »amber_picchiottino_ESO wrote: »I'm not sure I follow....Basically you want to restrict others' ability to do as they please so you can do as you please? I don't get it. This is a public mmo. These things happen, in every game, and always will. It's far easier to write in "And then, the homeless of Daggerfall(or wherever), whose lives had been consumed by their skooma addiction, happened upon 'Eddie's' wake. Eddie probably would have had a chuckle or two, but we were all too consumed in our grief."
I think it's pretty clear that you don't get it. What is most ardently desired are the tools to fully ignore other players which would actually make it so that ANY player could do WHATEVER THEY WANTED TO and no one would feel the need to involve a GM to censure them. Don't care for all the underwear dancers in a bank? /Ignore them and they magically disappear from your sight. Don't like see those poncy roleplayers all dancing to a lute player in the hall of the castle in Wayrest and seeing all their silly dialogue? /Ignore and poof that party disappears from your sight. Meanwhile, that bank underwear dancers dance on, unaware of who is seeing their antics and who is not...and the RP partiers dance on in the castle with no idea of who is seeing them or not. It's a beautiful live and let live concept and what -I- don't get iswhy anyone WOULDN'T want it if it can in fact be implemented.
Is there someone who wouldn't want this? Really?? I'd love to hear the reason!
Because they enjoy harassing people.
I can see a few problems with the idea of removing them from the game world.
Prime example, what if you got invited to a group with them in, or they to a group you were in, for a Dungeon or something?