Banning Bad, Actually?
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@Yam said in Empire Discussion Thread:
@Tez I need you to split this convo off into a topic called Is Banning Bad, Actually?
Get fucked.
@Faraday said in Empire Discussion Thread:
@Tez said in Empire Discussion Thread:
I think it’s a mistake to treat this as a generic case rather than a specific one.
Why? The convo has long since spun off from WS/Ada into a more generic discussion about whether it’s best to tow a hard line on banning people for “being rude” (which is an incredibly vague line that I’d be willing to bet WE HAVE ALL CROSSED, intentionally or not, at one point or another).
I don’t think it’s true that people are actually all treating it as such. I think – and I say this with GENTLE SARCASM ONLY because TONE IS HARD IN TEXT – that we might all be coming into this from different perspectives based on our own experiences with the people involved and the situation at large. I don’t think it’s really a pure abstract thought exercise here. This is coming from a very specific example.
she/they
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T Tez referenced this topic
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HAVE WE GONE TOO FAR WITH BANNING??
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@Yam we don’t ban enough. Coming off a recent game where I had vibes that another player was a notorious creeper and was doing Weird Shit that maybe wasn’t “bannable” per policy but definitely would’ve gotten them booted if it was my game, I think we should ban liberally and often.
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After 25 years of MUing, I’m of the opinion that people try to give others way too many chances.
I think the sweet spot for me as a staffer is 1. You get 1 screw up that I don’t ban you for, and I will let you know when you have spent your 1. When you screw up the second time, pack your bags.
Even then, there are exceptions. Particularly awful behavior will result in an instant ban with no discussion.
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Having recently played on a game where banning/asking to leave was applied in what I would describe as a fairly liberal manner and for many years on games where it was, in fact, almost impossible to get banned, the experience was dramatically more positive on the game that was relatively zero-tolerance for bad behavior. It was a smaller game than the other ones but, and I cannot overstate this, that was a small price to pay.
Everyone has a bad day sometimes. Sometimes people are bad at regulating how that affects the people they interact with. It does happen. But as the philosopher G.W.Bush once said, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me- you can’t get fooled again.
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Like that whole PVP thing… I think people are fresh off of many years of “well they’re just being a little rude, no need to slam them into oblivion-- oh no. Oh no, they’ve spun out. They’re unpleasant to staff for, and now my players wont ask on the LFRP channel for fear of dealing with this person, but I cannot ban them now, we’re kind of friends :/”
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@Yam Is this in reference to WoD culture? If so, does not apply.
I can only speak for myself in that… being admin on a game is not a customer service position and if you take out your bullshit on admin like it is one even a little bit, you run the risk of being invited to leave. That might be a difficult metric, but so is being a little asshole.
PSA: Don’t treat customer service workers poorly, either.
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@Tez said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
that we might all be coming into this from different perspectives based on our own experiences with the people involved and the situation at large. I don’t think it’s really a pure abstract thought exercise here. This is coming from a very specific example.
Can’t speak for anyone else obviously, but I have been approaching it as a purely abstract thought exercise. I don’t know the game in question or anyone involved in the original situation, and the log we saw alluded to some degree of prior history that we have no context for. Maybe there was just a bad vibe. I have no idea.
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@Faraday said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
@Tez said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
that we might all be coming into this from different perspectives based on our own experiences with the people involved and the situation at large. I don’t think it’s really a pure abstract thought exercise here. This is coming from a very specific example.
Can’t speak for anyone else obviously, but I have been approaching it as a purely abstract thought exercise. I don’t know the game in question or anyone involved in the original situation, and the log we saw alluded to some degree of prior history that we have no context for. Maybe there was just a bad vibe. I have no idea.
Same.
For those who are on the side of ban early and ban often, might I suggest running private, whitelist server for just your friends? Or maybe have a rigorous review process requiring an interview between staff and an applicant before they can CG?
Anyways, I am all for banning someone when they’re being a shit. I just didn’t think Warma Sheen was being a shit in the text provided.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam
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People offer public games because sometimes you get some really cool randos that turn out to be awesome. The tradeoff is that you may have to be firm with some of the bad randos.
I’ve seen folk get kindly shown the door during the CG process, so that is indeed a thing that can work, if the process is long enough for them to display their overall… vibes in public, I guess.
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@Ominous said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
For those who are on the side of ban early and ban often, might I suggest running private, whitelist server for just your friends? Or maybe have a rigorous review process requiring an interview between staff and an applicant before they can CG?
respectfully, no. The amount of time it would take to “rigorously review” applicants sounds like work, and there are plenty of good people out there that want to play games. If there’s trash in the pile, I’ll just throw it out. But I am upfront about my stance and no one has to play with me if they don’t like it.
Besides, more often than not, the real trash that needs to get shown the door doesn’t show themselves as trash until they’ve wiggled into their skin well enough and ‘established’ themselves so you feel obligated to keep them around.
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I can’t really get behind this concern that all the people will leave if their friend is banned. Maybe they will, but maybe that’s just the price you pay to save yourself months of headache.
Maybe their friends are also kind of problematic too.
Sometimes games are small. That’s okay. I have a similar banning policy on CC as Ada does. I am one GM. I work more than full time. I parent. Unfortunately, this means I’m not in the position to uplift people who aren’t able to play nicely with others.
But I want to tell stories, so I will.
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@bear_necessities said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
@Yam we don’t ban enough. Coming off a recent game where I had vibes that another player was a notorious creeper and was doing Weird Shit that maybe wasn’t “bannable” per policy but definitely would’ve gotten them booted if it was my game, I think we should ban liberally and often.
I’m in full agreement that we don’t ban enough and definitely not enough warnings are given. Dealing with problem players takes up unnecessary energy and sanity from staff, energy that can be focused more on the other players that are having fun and enriching the story the game runner is putting together.
To me, playing on a game is a privilege, one that could and should be revoked if a player starts becoming a problem. It can be nice of the staff take extra time to sit that player down and explain to them that they are becoming an issue, but that is definitely optional and up to staff. If that player showed potential to be a fun RPer and being able to change for the better, certainly have that sit down, see how they react. If it seems like it will take too much stress and effort to try, just show them the door. There’s no right or wrong option there.
Some of the problem players seem to have an entitlement attitude, where they feel that they are the main character of the game and they deserve most of the attention, get to make the most decisions, get the most stuff, etc. Instead, players are just playing characters that are working together through their IC actions to build up the story that is being crafted, they are not there to have their character “win the game” at the expense of regardless of others. I know that in the past, before I had gotten a little older and had more MUing experience under my belt, I’ve look back at certain games, I realize, ‘Wow, I was an such an asshole.’
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Anyone who is rude/a chore/a hassle/a drain/mean/a liar when dealing with staff (and let us leave room for grace and assume this is more than an isolated incident) is doing the same shit to everyone else.
If I’m on staff and it’s persistently unpleasant for me to deal with you, I’m not going to inflict you on anyone else either. “Then your game will just become the type of people you personally don’t find unpleasant.” I know, sounds pretty cool to me.
he/him
this machine kills fascists -
just stating for the record, that the two views ‘we don’t ban enough’ and ‘having a hair trigger and banning the first time someone comes off rude might be bad (in the sense that you might miss good people)’ aren’t fundamentally opposing views.
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@Meg That’s valid. I don’t think anyone is actually all that hair trigger. Someone mentioned that there’s a lot the playerbase doesn’t actually see, as staff gets clues from the first login of the potential player, the application, the response to the application, etc. They build up a profile.
I’m not sure anyone is like… immediately banning people for brusquely asking questions. I can think of one player that began with a VERY bad impression on a game I helped run and I wanted them to be shown the door immediately. My fellow staffers told me to chill. This person stuck around for a bit and were more or less fine. Not a huge problem, not a huge asset. Just there. I don’t really think I would’ve missed them if they were nudged off. <<;
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@Ominous said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
I just didn’t think Warma Sheen was being a shit in the text provided.
you’re in the minority there for a reason that I’m not going to spend pages and pages spelling out for you. how much of a shit we’d all probably disagree on but it’s generally just bad form to get upset (“made me feel a certain kind of way” does not translate to anxiety, it translates to frustration, as he explained himself. it’s just a passive aggressive way of saying “it pissed me off”) about tiny delays.
if you don’t get why that’s bothersome, you’re irritating more people than you’re probably aware of.
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@Wizz said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
@Ominous said in Banning Bad, Actually?:
you’re in the minority there for a reason that I’m not going to spend pages and pages spelling out for you.
A rather sizable minority. It’s not like I am dying on a hill alone here, and a few of those taking similar stances as me are not members of the forum that people would normally tag as “unreasonable” or “a nuisance.”
“made me feel a certain kind of way” does not translate to anxiety, it translates to frustration, as he explained himself. it’s just a passive aggressive way of saying “it pissed me off”
I just reread all of Warma Sheen’s posts. I do not see them stating at any point that “made me feel a certain kind of way” was a statement of frustration. In fact, they state it was exactly what I read it as:
@Warma-Sheen said in Empire Discussion Thread:
And I felt weird about having a bunch of open jobs cause I thought maybe I was being too much of a burden, so I closed a bunch of them down.That seems like anxiety not frustration. Maybe I missed something. Can you point to me where Warma Sheen says that was a statement of frustration?
you’re irritating more people than you’re probably aware of.
Probably. I don’t read social situations very well and will ask out of the blue whether I am bothering someone just to make sure that hints aren’t being dropped that I am impervious to.
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I’m not going to sit here and argue with you about it, like I just said. if you didn’t think he was in the wrong, okay.
