Community Toons and Jail Time

donfolstar3

donfolstar3

Dalayan Master
So today someone decided to break the boxing rule and this happened:



I think the rules need to be modified to acknowledge community characters (Project Grin, Project Draist, and any others that can prove they aren't a clever ploy for personal advancement) and stop throwing them in jail because jailing those community characters:
  1. Does nothing to punish the cheater. Their characters are already in jail - punishment achieved. Jailing the community characters is no skin off the perp's back and if anything might give some twisted satisfaction for dragging others down with them.
  2. Leaves the door open for some rapscallion to log on all the community characters at once getting them all jailed just to be a dick. Or would that be being an asshole? Some body part.
  3. Is a detriment to the community. These characters exist to help people and them sitting in the slammer is not helping people.
The reasons provided in OOC for jailing the community characters (which is by no means exhaustive, just what was said at the time):
  • They were used to break the rules
Ok. If I rob a bank on horseback would you shoot my horse? That isn't a hypothetical- my horse wants to know.
  • So he can't log on
??? Community character information is freely available so the perp certainly can log in other community characters and as it stands right now the answer would be to jail those characters which #3 above.
  • Rules are rules.
Which can be changed. Please consider changing them in this instance.

If someone really wants to push the limits and make whole groups of only community characters (why would they do this? they gain nothing) or [insert whatever the scathing response below says] then IP bans are an option, yeah?
 
This is a difficult problem TBH, and one of our big concerns when people started doing community toons. We love the idea, but it takes one bad apple.

So typically, with something like this, we'd 999 jail the chars. That sucks for community toons.

For this, I'm not 100% sure what can be done. IP bans tend not to work well. We COULD simply unjail the toons if people need them, and are logging in from a different IP. Maybe that's best? I dunno what else to do.

Also, if you are going to break the rules, DONT FUCKING USE TOONS THAT PEOPLE WORKED HARD TO PROVIDE TO THE COMMUNITY! It's a jerk thing to do, and you're not going to find a whole lot of people sympathizing with you. Grinkles, Draist and others put in tons of time, and using them to knowingly break the rules (as was the case here) is a lousy thing to do.

So in the mean time, if people want to use the jailed toons, petition us and we can fix it.
 
was there a chance this was a newer player unfamiliar with our rules? our server rules are very different than other emu servers. We should expect these situations if we are going to be on the emu list and respond accordingly.

i am hoping this was a new player so lets give them the benefit of the doubt? Educate them and move on
 
ynnear said:
was there a chance this was a newer player unfamiliar with our rules? our server rules are very different than other emu servers. We should expect these situations if we are going to be on the emu list and respond accordingly.

i am hoping this was a new player so lets give them the benefit of the doubt? Educate them and move on
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Looking at Keltin's gear(not a single twink item)I was thinking the same.
Maybe un-jail and talk to him if he ever logs in again?
 
He admitted in /ooc to knowing the rules and ignoring them because he felt the game was too hard.
 
I did feel as though the punishment (two weeks right at the start of the holiday break) and tone of the dialogue ("fuck you rule breaker") were a bit harsh in this instance, but that is besides the point of the OP. Now to sidetrack my own thread- I am kind of a bleeding heart in general on account of getting second (third, fourth, fifth, etc...) chance irl so take this as you will, but since the offender was new I would have offered him a chance to ask people in /ooc to box the community toons to see what a bunch of nice people we are. Hopefully a few people would have stepped up and helped the guy out, lectured him about the rules some, and shared linkedin profiles or whatever it is normal people do. Maybe that is overly optimistic, but instead of completely alienating a new player (we could benefit from some of those) it maybe would have spread some of that holiday cheer, ya know?

Back on topic. I think Taryth's idea about unjailing community characters when asked is, on paper, a good idea because it stops the immediate problem of boxing and still makes the valuable resource of community characters available- but it seems like more staff work and hinges on staff being available to address such an inane matter. Maybe the happy balance would be to jail the offenders characters for whatever duration is deemed appropriate and also jail any community characters for a shorter set duration- 6 to 24 hours to shut down the boxer but make adept support available again in a timely manner.
 
Went to load a grinkle bot for someone today and found it in jail. =(

Not sure why it is even necessary to jail the community toon (or really to jail it longer than a short period, 1 hour? -- although I guess 14 days is short when compared to the normal 999) -- when you can focus punishment on the actual toon/person that benefits from the multi-boxing? It isn't like a multi-boxer is doing it to benefit the community toons and the consequences from the jailing a community toon will be on pretty much everyone but the rulebreaker.
 
Yeah I really don't get why the community deserves the punishment for some dipshit breaking the rules intentionally if Marthog is right. The bots are a great gift to the community, it's not their fault they were abused. Lump a harder punishment on the rule breaker, not the bots.
 
Masuriya said:
Yeah I really don't get why the community deserves the punishment for some dipshit breaking the rules intentionally if Marthog is right. The bots are a great gift to the community, it's not their fault they were abused. Lump a harder punishment on the rule breaker, not the bots.
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With the way the population numbers are currently, nobody would be doing most adepts without the community characters helping. I've logged in community characters before in order to help new players with adepts, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to do the content. At the moment, we can consider these community characters essential to this content (because in practicality, they are essential.) Because of this, jailing bots is obviously not a good idea/smart. Petitioning to get them out of jail is a waste of time for both the players and the staff. It would make more sense to either not jail the community characters at all. The intent of jailing is to punish the person breaking the rules. This person is punished in no way, shape, or form via jailing of community characters.


As someone mentioned before, we as a community are pretty shitty to new people who break rules. While I think that we generally have the best and most friendly staff and player base of any of the EQ EMUs, we can really work on this type of thing. When I came to this server some years ago and had played the game for all of 2 play sessions, a GM nurfed one of my characters names. The GM was quite honestly a total dick about it (including telling me not to pick such a 'stupid fucking name next time'.) In my head I was like, don't talk to me that way/go fuck yourself you rude prick, but I was polite in response. The truth of the matter is that I had broken the rules, but the reality of the situation was that I blew through a lot of the 'paperwork/reading' on the website in order to get the game up and running to see what it was like. (PS the name was not something obscene like Dildo Ryder...) It's been a while, but I had talked to a few other people, while playing other EMUs, and they had very similar experiences with SoD. More than one of them left the game before the addiction stuck because of the way they were treated... Treating other people with respect, even if they break the rules, is never going to be a bad thing. While I am not talking about specifically talking about the case in this thread, (because I know absolutely zero about it,) sometimes instead of harsh punishment for a first infraction, a warning with some brief helpful guidance is the way to go.
 
if a shitbag does something bad on a community character then the shitbag needs to get punished and so does the community. If you do not follow the rules you deserve to be punished.

I remember a time when "I didnt know" wasn't an excuse and people were all around less shitty.
 
The only name nerf I ever got was for naming a wizard Nacissist. I straight up argued with the GM about it because i'm weird like that. I didn't get jailed, I was just told to change my name.

That being said, I think the community in general could probably tone down the sass/sarcasm a little bit when heckling newer players breaking the rules.
 
This dude honestly said he knew the rules, didn't care, wanted to twink his characters.

[Sat Dec 12 12:25:49 2015] Dissappointed says out of character, 'No, Bromos. What newbie is going to come back to a server after a 14-day ban? I only boxed 2+ because the server is low-pop with no active lower-level community. Lest you're twinked, it's a rough life.'
[Sat Dec 12 12:25:50 2015] Dissappointed says out of character, 'And a 14-day ban for a first offense? Double rough life. As a newbie it seems to me that this community has no care for newer players. If you haven't been here to be able to twink yourself, then this server doesn't care about you as a lowbie.'
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I agree that two weeks for community toon is a bit long. Maybe a couple of days to get the point across, or if someone can petition to get them unjailed so they can actually use them like Taryth said they would (non-rulebreakers, of course) would get them out.
 
*lawyer hat on*

Actually he didn't say he knew the rules. He only said he boxed 2+ because of xyz. Unless he said it somewhere else outside of that SS's of course.
 
If you want, I'll cut out all of the "you have combined" messages & start from where he was on Grinlada complaining about his main toons being jailed, and the continued arguing with Taryth. There was more to the convo, I'm just lazy. :p
 
real talk lowbies I will take you to cmal for aas/explevels and pants.

Unfortunately I don't even know what level you can begin looting things any more due to dumb anti-fun loot code.


Also while he clearly broke the rules I feel like you could choose to be sympathetic to his plight, and that banning some random dude for fourteen days may be more harmful than good when the server population is the issue. But jailing public characters is terrible too and unnecessary.
 
Otcho said:
Unfortunately I don't even know what level you can begin looting things any more due to dumb anti-fun loot code
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i believe you have to be within 15 levels of the slain mob to loot it so being around level 50-55 would allow most things to be looted there.
 
Jailing the public toons for any amount of time punishes him zero extra at all. It's not like he's gonna hop on them and play without his jailed character. I'm a natural devil's advocate and I can't come up with any good reason to jail them at all. Now the dude in question sounds like a pretty big d-bag, so while I don't know him and wasn't there, it sounds like whatever he got on his own chars was warranted, and while our population is far too low..losing him doesn't sound all that painful, idk... (Hell, he actually sounds like he fits right in with a chunk of the server....) Maybe community toons can get some special flag to distinguish them? C-Grinlada
 
huey said:
Jailing the public toons for any amount of time punishes him zero extra at all. It's not like he's gonna hop on them and play without his jailed character. I'm a natural devil's advocate and I can't come up with any good reason to jail them at all. Now the dude in question sounds like a pretty big d-bag, so while I don't know him and wasn't there, it sounds like whatever he got on his own chars was warranted, and while our population is far too low..losing him doesn't sound all that painful, idk... (Hell, he actually sounds like he fits right in with a chunk of the server....) Maybe community toons can get some special flag to distinguish them? C-Grinlada
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it is actually your fault and everyone elses fault therefore everyone should be punished. Its everyone's elite attitude that caused this poor dude to play by himself and he took it into his hands to try to advance to the "fun" part of the game.

When I initially made goonsquad 14.0 everyone and anyone who was within the parameters of not being a dirty ass twink was allowed to join. We ended up picking up initially some newbies and they went ahead and played a bit. I'm not saying that I'm some white knight but sometimes you just got to go out of your way and help them noobs out.

So enjoy your community toons jail time as its deserved.

PS: everyone complains about the population being shit but nobody wants to do anything about it. invite some scrub into your group and let him soak up some fucking good exp. he will forever love you..... unless you're @Ludovician in which case he hates you forever.
 
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