Goonhub
10-04-2024, 01:02 AM
Hi, like zewaka, I'm also posting my thoughts here as Me, Flaborized esq., the person/dog on basketball hoop, and not as a person who's meant to represent what all devs/admins think. These are my words and I didn't pass them though other people to form an official reply or anything, other admins/devs might disagree with the specifics of my views or the way I phrase them. Sorry to other admins if I make us look bad by being Bad, I wanted to share my Thoughts!
This post is, in my view, a clarification of what we've already been doing for years. This doesn't represent a shift in admin behavior, this describes what we've always basically done. Again, in my view, this post was made as clarification because some people were confused about whether or not we want to ban people for having RP relationships or weddings or whatever, and admins wanted to clarify "we don't". I am not as tactful and clean in my language as Jan, and I did not put as much effort into writing this as she and other admins did, but if I were to summarize the point here, it'd be "Don't try to do softcore ERP in-game and disguise it as innocuous cutesy stuff. Don't isolate yourself with your friends and ignore the entire rest of the server for the sake of romance RP."
You might say, "When do we even know when someone has crossed the threshold for either of these?". For the former, it's usually really really obvious that people are trying to skirt the ERP rule. Annoyingly it's hard to give a true cutoff, but we know it when we see it for sure, and the usual antics listed as being OK in the top post are all fine. The admin team are a group of intelligent reasonable adults and IMO we often end up giving people quite a bit of leeway anyways in situations where it's *truly* ambiguous, nobody should reasonably bump into this rule without knowing they're doing it.
For the "Don't isolate yourself with your friends..." bit, this is also usually very clear cut when we run across it in my opinion. No, going on an adventure with your space partner or friends is not a bannable offense. It's not really rocket science here, we can tell apart deliberately exclusionary behavior and people having fun with friends. And this is something we ban people for in particularly egregious, repeated instances. Because of the nature of these things, we can't say like, "Oh we ban you when you rack up 500 exclusionary RP points" or something, but in my personal experience seeing this bans carried out and reading the cases admins make for the bans, we're pretty fair about it.
I don't really understand this point at all. For better or for worse, we, as a society, have decided that it's OK for teens to see violence in media. When you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs", you're adding a secret caveat, "in this video game". I know that sounds a lot like adding "in minecraft" to thinly veil a threat, but it's obviously... not that? If you threaten someone with an RPG in the game, you're not actually threatening the person in real life with an RPG. Real life threats are taken incredibly seriously, if you threaten a real person's well-being (13 or not), that's like, an omega ban. Like that's a, "Don't bother appealing this, we never want that here" level ban.
Romantic RP is not the same thing. There are, again for better or worse, real emotional feelings tied to people's roleplay. I think basically everybody would say that roleplaying a romantic relationship with a 13 year old as an adult is pretty much disgusting! I'll let other people chime in and tell me I'm wrong about this, but I genuinely do not feel the need to explain this bit and I assume we're at least all in agreement about this one thing. Even if we're not, this is the admin position, and I would describe it as immutable. Yes, this only applies to romance. It *is* a special case.
Every single instance I've seen of someone getting banned for "ambiguous" behavior was actually banned for situations I would not call ambiguous whatsoever. All of the bans that have gone through would've still gone through if this server was 18+. We're not policing genuinely harmless behavior, we're policing people who are obviously ERPing but trying to tow the line. The only thing that we're not letting you do because there's people who are 13-18 here is... romance people who are 13-18.
I understand that lots of people are anxious about breaking rules, and want clear definitions of exactly what they can and cannot do, but we can't actually write an exhaustive list here, where it crosses over is difficult to define, but I can give a good set of personal rules if anybody finds them useful. Don't do something in-game with the intent for it to be deliberately titillating. Don't try to deliberately shut people out if they want to RP or play the game with you just because you want alone time with someone you're friends with. Again, you're genuinely not going to cross up against accidentally this if you're reasonable, and the bans I've seen are usually pretty egregious or the person has been warned several times before for the exact same behavior.
I'm personally conflicted on this. There are people who are admins now who started playing this game when they were teens. (All current and future admins will be adults don't worry lol). There's quite a few people who play the game, are teenagers, and are totally fine. I don't specifically think of the violence and drugs and whatever we have in the game and go "Oh it kinda sucks that a middle schooler could be exposed to it." but I'm also not particularly *thrilled* about it. I think the main opposition from the admin team would be like, we're not actually going to take full measures to enforce it, because it's honestly not *that* sensitive. I would be, personally, in my opinion, just ME nobody else consulted, fine with saying "if we find out you're under 16/18/fuck it 21 even we'd ban you, but we're not really gonna go digging for this information particularly". I cannot promise this will actually happen and am just saying, "hey this is what I think about this hot button issue" publicly. The hardest part of this is that we would indeed have to kick out a significant amount of players who are completely fine if we put it at 18 or whatever, which would be a bit sad.
Again, I feel this post was made to clear up confusion some specific people had, and in all honestly to mostly reassure people that Yes, you can have weddings and RP having a space wife and hold hands with your dear space wife as you slip on a banana peel and all that stuff that people like to do. We're not gonna go banning innocent players because of totally innocuous mixups or anything. You will absolutely be warned if you break these rules (unless you do it in like, an obviously bad way. like explicit ERP type stuff) and admins ***frequently*** err on the side of being too lenient instead of being too stern in actually ambiguous situations. 99% of people do not have to worry about this at all and are fine I promise you it's fine to express yourself and play characters honestly within the rules of the game. If we do ban you unreasonably please make a public complaint about it and we'll be forced to show our receipts and it'll be obvious to everybody if we did actually do something wrong.
As a side-note, I'd like if we on both sides could keep things cordial when discussing this here. This is obviously a thing people are invested in but I think it would be nice if everyone was nice to each other no matter how annoying I am with my overlong writeups. I'm not warning anybody here, just like, saying. My posts are overly long because I feel like I have a lot to say usually and I want to try and say it all in as clear of a manner as I can produce sorry for the giant essay I'm just like this!!
Also reading this back I did kinda repeat myself a bit. This doesn't make me look very smart but I'm fine with it because I believe in what I've typed out here and I don't want to restructure this to still make sense while cutting down on that. This isn't really what I *enjoy* spending time on so I'm not gonna meticulously sculpt the post to absolute perfection, I am sorry for the added hassle to reading it, I'm not a great writer.
This post is, in my view, a clarification of what we've already been doing for years. This doesn't represent a shift in admin behavior, this describes what we've always basically done. Again, in my view, this post was made as clarification because some people were confused about whether or not we want to ban people for having RP relationships or weddings or whatever, and admins wanted to clarify "we don't". I am not as tactful and clean in my language as Jan, and I did not put as much effort into writing this as she and other admins did, but if I were to summarize the point here, it'd be "Don't try to do softcore ERP in-game and disguise it as innocuous cutesy stuff. Don't isolate yourself with your friends and ignore the entire rest of the server for the sake of romance RP."
You might say, "When do we even know when someone has crossed the threshold for either of these?". For the former, it's usually really really obvious that people are trying to skirt the ERP rule. Annoyingly it's hard to give a true cutoff, but we know it when we see it for sure, and the usual antics listed as being OK in the top post are all fine. The admin team are a group of intelligent reasonable adults and IMO we often end up giving people quite a bit of leeway anyways in situations where it's *truly* ambiguous, nobody should reasonably bump into this rule without knowing they're doing it.
For the "Don't isolate yourself with your friends..." bit, this is also usually very clear cut when we run across it in my opinion. No, going on an adventure with your space partner or friends is not a bannable offense. It's not really rocket science here, we can tell apart deliberately exclusionary behavior and people having fun with friends. And this is something we ban people for in particularly egregious, repeated instances. Because of the nature of these things, we can't say like, "Oh we ban you when you rack up 500 exclusionary RP points" or something, but in my personal experience seeing this bans carried out and reading the cases admins make for the bans, we're pretty fair about it.
Quote:the "don't say anything you wouldn't say to a 13 year old" obviously falls apart unless you couch it entirely in "romance".
would you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs" to a 13 year old, in a position where you could conceivably do so in game?
what about "i'm going to murder your friends, in front of you, and then kill you too"? is that too far?
I don't really understand this point at all. For better or for worse, we, as a society, have decided that it's OK for teens to see violence in media. When you say "i'm going to rip off your limbs", you're adding a secret caveat, "in this video game". I know that sounds a lot like adding "in minecraft" to thinly veil a threat, but it's obviously... not that? If you threaten someone with an RPG in the game, you're not actually threatening the person in real life with an RPG. Real life threats are taken incredibly seriously, if you threaten a real person's well-being (13 or not), that's like, an omega ban. Like that's a, "Don't bother appealing this, we never want that here" level ban.
Romantic RP is not the same thing. There are, again for better or worse, real emotional feelings tied to people's roleplay. I think basically everybody would say that roleplaying a romantic relationship with a 13 year old as an adult is pretty much disgusting! I'll let other people chime in and tell me I'm wrong about this, but I genuinely do not feel the need to explain this bit and I assume we're at least all in agreement about this one thing. Even if we're not, this is the admin position, and I would describe it as immutable. Yes, this only applies to romance. It *is* a special case.
Quote:Just because a few of them actively would go out of their way to circumvent that protection doesn't mean it's not worth trying. You have a responsability here and you're shifting that responsability onto policing genuinely harmless behaviour by saying "but what if it happens that a minor ended up on the other side of this interaction?"
Every single instance I've seen of someone getting banned for "ambiguous" behavior was actually banned for situations I would not call ambiguous whatsoever. All of the bans that have gone through would've still gone through if this server was 18+. We're not policing genuinely harmless behavior, we're policing people who are obviously ERPing but trying to tow the line. The only thing that we're not letting you do because there's people who are 13-18 here is... romance people who are 13-18.
I understand that lots of people are anxious about breaking rules, and want clear definitions of exactly what they can and cannot do, but we can't actually write an exhaustive list here, where it crosses over is difficult to define, but I can give a good set of personal rules if anybody finds them useful. Don't do something in-game with the intent for it to be deliberately titillating. Don't try to deliberately shut people out if they want to RP or play the game with you just because you want alone time with someone you're friends with. Again, you're genuinely not going to cross up against accidentally this if you're reasonable, and the bans I've seen are usually pretty egregious or the person has been warned several times before for the exact same behavior.
Quote:This doesn't address the fact that minors genuinely shouldn't be here. Anyone under the age of 15 or 16 in particular. The 13+ restriction is way too low - this isn't a game made for them, by them, suitable for them, or safe for them. Most people of that age will be intimidated enough to think twice when a box in the janky old game they decided to try on a whim tells them to enter their date of birth and that they will be permabanned if found to be lying about it.
I'm personally conflicted on this. There are people who are admins now who started playing this game when they were teens. (All current and future admins will be adults don't worry lol). There's quite a few people who play the game, are teenagers, and are totally fine. I don't specifically think of the violence and drugs and whatever we have in the game and go "Oh it kinda sucks that a middle schooler could be exposed to it." but I'm also not particularly *thrilled* about it. I think the main opposition from the admin team would be like, we're not actually going to take full measures to enforce it, because it's honestly not *that* sensitive. I would be, personally, in my opinion, just ME nobody else consulted, fine with saying "if we find out you're under 16/18/fuck it 21 even we'd ban you, but we're not really gonna go digging for this information particularly". I cannot promise this will actually happen and am just saying, "hey this is what I think about this hot button issue" publicly. The hardest part of this is that we would indeed have to kick out a significant amount of players who are completely fine if we put it at 18 or whatever, which would be a bit sad.
Again, I feel this post was made to clear up confusion some specific people had, and in all honestly to mostly reassure people that Yes, you can have weddings and RP having a space wife and hold hands with your dear space wife as you slip on a banana peel and all that stuff that people like to do. We're not gonna go banning innocent players because of totally innocuous mixups or anything. You will absolutely be warned if you break these rules (unless you do it in like, an obviously bad way. like explicit ERP type stuff) and admins ***frequently*** err on the side of being too lenient instead of being too stern in actually ambiguous situations. 99% of people do not have to worry about this at all and are fine I promise you it's fine to express yourself and play characters honestly within the rules of the game. If we do ban you unreasonably please make a public complaint about it and we'll be forced to show our receipts and it'll be obvious to everybody if we did actually do something wrong.
As a side-note, I'd like if we on both sides could keep things cordial when discussing this here. This is obviously a thing people are invested in but I think it would be nice if everyone was nice to each other no matter how annoying I am with my overlong writeups. I'm not warning anybody here, just like, saying. My posts are overly long because I feel like I have a lot to say usually and I want to try and say it all in as clear of a manner as I can produce sorry for the giant essay I'm just like this!!
Also reading this back I did kinda repeat myself a bit. This doesn't make me look very smart but I'm fine with it because I believe in what I've typed out here and I don't want to restructure this to still make sense while cutting down on that. This isn't really what I *enjoy* spending time on so I'm not gonna meticulously sculpt the post to absolute perfection, I am sorry for the added hassle to reading it, I'm not a great writer.