Regarding the Revision of the Prohibited Activities and Account Penalty Policy

[Kaedan]

Social ostracization is the ONLY appropriate punishment for bad social behaviour; and social ostracization is something you can do in ANY social environment, and its actually EASIER to do in an online environment than in real life.

What other punishment are you going to suggest? Forced blacklisting? That people aren't allowed to decide for themselves if they want to associate with someone or not?

1) Simply ignoring/blacklisting someone only helps AFTER the fact, and only helps for verbal offenses. It also doesn't punish the offender.

2) Social shaming/ostracism doesn't work in an MMO, especially in FF14 since we have giant data centers and the ability to move servers. It's also generally against the ToS of 99.9% of games to name and shame. Interestingly, it used to work a decade ago because populations were small enough.

[MorbolvampireQueen6]

1) Simply ignoring/blacklisting someone only helps AFTER the fact, and only helps for verbal offenses. It also doesn't punish the offender.

2) Social shaming/ostracism doesn't work in an MMO, especially in FF14 since we have giant data centers and the ability to move servers. It's also generally against the ToS of 99.9% of games to name and shame. Interestingly, it used to work a decade ago because populations were small enough.

Expect 1 thing
I agree if you verbal abuse or name shame or in gameplay shame a person should be banned... however out of 100 case only 2 ppl are banned over those things or harassment the other 98 are typically ppl just not liking what the other person is talking about that isn't mature enough 2 blacklist...

For example if your in a spot rping any dark and some dude rides up and stands there 4 45mind then reports after he harasses them calling them edgy etc and when you report that type of harassment the gms don't do a thing.. this is just a fact ive been through it over 15 times.. or if you talk about certain manga genes a person can say that genric is insult and you get in trouble that i know for a fact my first char back in reborn was named bloom theyaoiangel and got enforced unfairly over to name change....

Ppl who rlly think this will just punish bad behavior has no idea the reality of it you assume thats the case most likely for you being like everyone else over all

[MistakeNot]

From translations given earlier in the thread, it seems that they stated the same concerns - they just (I assume) haven't spun off into pages of hyperbole about how we'll all get banned for saying minor things and causing unintended offence (which I must repeat, yet again, does not automatically mean action is taken against you).

Of course we won't all be banned or punished for minor stuff.

But given how the new rules are worded it will be almost impossible not to break some of them at some point, unwittingly or not.
If you then get punished for that rulebreaking depends first of all on if someone reports you, and then on the subjective judgement of a GM. Subjective, because objectively a break of the rules is a break of the rules.

That the rules are worded such that many people, as evidenced by discussions here, are still not quite sure what some of the rules actually mean does not exactly improve anything.

SE could just have replaced all the text of the new rules with "Don't do anything bad" without anything really changing.

[LunaProtege]

1) Simply ignoring/blacklisting someone only helps AFTER the fact, and only helps for verbal offenses. It also doesn't punish the offender.

The problem with that statement is that people don't tend to find isolated incidents truly damaging. If someone starts making things hard for someone, and they're immediately blocked, the person on the receiving end will have forgotten about it by the next day… The things that people genuinely find infuriating with every fibre of their being is when it takes place over a period of months or years. So if you block them on day one, it never gets to the point where it really effects you.

Its also not really worth punishing someone for an isolated incident, because if they do it only once, the purpose of a punishment (correcting behaviour) becomes meaningless.

[Kaedan]

The problem with that statement is that people don't tend to find isolated incidents truly damaging. If someone starts making things hard for someone, and they're immediately blocked, they'll have forgotten about it by the next day… The things that people genuinely find infuriating with every fibre of their being is when it takes place over a period of months or years. So if you block them on day one, it never gets to the point where it really effects you.

Its also not really worth punishing someone for an isolated incident, because if they do it only happens once, the purpose of a punishment (correcting behaviour) becomes meaningless.

That only covers part of what I said. Remember, blacklisting only helps with verbal, not other forms of in-game harassment.

And frankly, if the offender is doing it to one person, they are doing it to others as well, so yes, punishment is deserved and the troll simply moves on to his next victim (if he doesn't continue with non-verbal forms of harassment).

[Osteichthyes]

Well this won't be abused, not at all, never has in any circumstance. Nope. Perfectly fine.

[Granyala]

We are striving to create a comfortable environment for our players, so that, if they do experience a negative incident, we are able to assist them as much as possible (and, if necessary, get involved in the situation). Please understand that these changes were necessary in order for us to achieve that goal.

You are not.
You are creating an environment in which people will be afraid to talk to strangers, because someone, somewhere might find something offensive and some GM that is in a foul mood can ban me for literally anything I say.

I'm always for being polite and constructive, after all I don't want to be insulted in a leisure time activity, so I make every effort not to insult anyone myself.
BUT: keep in mind that servers are mixed populations from all kinds of countries.
EG: Stuff that is okay to say in Germany, may be super offensive to state in Japan. How am I supposed to know that?

These rules are so vague, they don't provide safe guidelines, they provide GMs with a "carte blanche".

No, I don't agree with you and I do not understand how this is "necessary".

[LunaProtege]

That only covers part of what I said. Remember, blacklisting only helps with verbal, not other forms of in-game harassment.

And frankly, if the offender is doing it to one person, they are doing it to others as well, so yes, punishment is deserved and the troll simply moves on to his next victim (if he doesn't continue with non-verbal forms of harassment).

You're going to have to be more specific on what you mean by "non-verbal" harassment. Because as far as I'm concerned, the way FFXIV is built, there's very little one can do to interact other than use words. Even emotes are little more than glorified text unless you're zoomed right in to purposefully view it.

Maybe you mean not being a team player in dungeons and raids? Assuming blacklisted people can't be matched with you in dungeons, then you can blacklist them and you've only lost however much time that they've not been helpful, probably 5 mins, worst case maybe 30 mins.

Maybe you mean the Company Chest, which you can prevent theft from by simply not giving random recruits who haven't been vetted for character access to it.

If the "non-verbal harassment" is literally just them doing emotes or gestures, then the simplest solution is to make blacklisted people invisible to you, and you invisible to them. That way, they're reduced to zero points of contact.

As for someone doing it with multiple people; in that case they may require some form of disincentive, but the increasing number of people that they cannot play with will itself serve as an eventual comeuppance. Imagine them entering Duty Finder, and even though they're a Tank, they find that their estimated waiting time is "until the end of time".

[Insertcoins]

There is a way for the community to police itself in the online environment; for one, the block button, that's a tool placed into the hands of the players, with that you effectively remove that player's influence from your play. Things may be different in a game like Rust where its full loot PvP; but that can be policed just by joining together to fight in PvP against them. And that kind of play is the appeal of such games.

They can also spread the reputation of certain players, so that anybody that doesn't want to associate with that behaviour can give them a wide berth, and those that do can take a beeline to them. Even the worst case scenario of people clearing out the company chests, can be made impossible without active interference from GMs just by denying them access to the chest; either never give them permission, or if they aren't in the FC after, spread their reputation so that nobody will ever let them have access to their company chest. The company chest isn't even a social behaviour issue so much as a theft issue, and yet you can still police it yourself.

Social ostracization is the ONLY appropriate punishment for bad social behaviour; and social ostracization is something you can do in ANY social environment, and its actually EASIER to do in an online environment than in real life.

What other punishment are you going to suggest? Forced blacklisting? That people aren't allowed to decide for themselves if they want to associate with someone or not?

If any of that worked we wouldn't have the tightening of the current rules in the first place. People seem to forget this. The players DON'T police themselves as a whole, mostly cause you run into the big issue when issues happen, the whole " Not my problem." And noone acts. Too many times I've seen people get into issues and everyone just watches like it's a car wreck and do nothing.

[Stereomix]

"As this change in course requires changes to our fundamental policies, and such a change would be difficult to reverse, we spent considerable time carefully reviewing its potential impact."


Based on this quote from the announcement now is the only time in which we have to make our concerns known in hopes of real change before new rules are implemented.