Holy now a bannable spell.

[Saefinn]

God forbid players to have fun, because someone could find it offensive, report them and ban.

Bad performance on bard - ban
Spamming skills in town with someone for fun - ban
Crafting in city - ban
Writing emotes - ban
Beating someone with emotes - ban
Standing next to someone - ban
Writing "hahaha" in chat - ban

Be nice or ban, inhuman order to be hold in a virtual world because something is annoying to someone, no meanies allowed lol
I hope Tencent will take over SE and bring some common sense into the game.

You would think that common sense would dictate when you only have a part of the story that you don’t jump to conclusions and overreact.

[Nedkel]

You would think that common sense would dictate when you only have a part of the story that you don’t jump to conclusions and overreact.

All it takes is a prof that you are doing it "intentionally" against someone, anything you do in public around someone could get you in trouble.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

All it takes is a prof that you are doing it "intentionally" against someone, anything you do in public around someone could get you in trouble.

No, not anything- just intentionally spamming around other people. That's like saying 'well if racial slurs get me banned, that must mean saying anything will get me banned'. It won't, don't be a tool and you won't get suspended again, not hard to figure it out.

[Saefinn]

All it takes is a prof that you are doing it "intentionally" against someone, anything you do in public around someone could get you in trouble.

Then let's break it down, because that's another assumption.
The information presented by the log:
- The player in question was SUSPENDED, not banned.
- The player in question was told by the GMing the issue was they were spamming
- The player in question established that they were spamming holy
- The player in question admitted to having a previous strike

That's ALL we know.

Let's consider some possibilities:
- The player was emote & skill spamming RPers whilst they were RPing. This is quite a common tactic by trolls
- The player was target specific people to harass and obnoxiously spam with their behaviour, possibly following them to do it, or doing in the space they were trying to do stuff
- It could be that there behaviours that were compounded as part of them being reported for spamming
- Their first strike could have been for similar trollish behaviour
- Any of the above and the people affected possibly asked multiple times for them to stop, but the OP chose to persist
- And other things I've probably not considered

Was it this dictatorship and GM abuse of power that people seem to decry it to be? I think of the "get to the gulag" rant I saw in another thread where I commonly did all the thing he said we'd get banned for. And for this thread here, if the case, we'd see it a lot more prevalent.

With regards to 'proof' we are not privy to any of the 'proof' in this situation, you're seemingly just assuming only weak evidence is all that's needed. For all we know there could have been an admission of guilt, because I have seen trolls do exactly that because they're cocky nothing will happen.

So what do I think is likely? My years of having worked customer complaints and years of being an FC leader and dealing with cases of drama llama, there's a few problems that are easy to spot when somebody comes by to publicise a problem.

1) The 'evidence' they provide either puts them in favour or somebody else in a bad light (or both)
2) They present it in a manner that favours how they want you to see it.
3) They omit information that could turn the whole situation on its head. So whilst everything you've been presented, could still be accurate, but in the way of tabloid journalism, what's been omitted could tell an entirely different story.
4) They don't show or tell you the whole picture

In customer complaints, I had the liberty of being able to gather evidence, particularly in listening to the calls they're complaining about.
As an FC leader, I can approach the party and get their side of the story and if they followed my golden rule, they'd have logged /everything/.
In this situation here? I doubt even if we got a hold of the GM in question of if they read this thread they'd be at liberty to disclose more info about a complaint because they may not be allowed to discuss actions taken against players aside from to the player in question. And possible there's legal issues for somebody representing a company to do that too (like GDPR or Data Protection).

My option then? Take it with a pinch of salt. Accept it's possible that it's a fair representation, but also accept that it could be totally wrong. When the other party is not there to defend their side, I find it wholly unfair to simply take the one side we know.

[Nedkel]

Then let's break it down, because that's another assumption.
The information presented by the log:
- The player in question was SUSPENDED, not banned.
- The player in question was told by the GMing the issue was they were spamming
- The player in question established that they were spamming holy
- The player in question admitted to having a previous strike
That's ALL we know.

The guy has been suspended because he broke ToS, he has been reported and asked to stop, he did not so he got it.
I am not arguing he did not break the ToS because he clearly did, what i want to help you realize that:

- The game has an option for everyone to turn everone visuals off
- The guy has been banned despite the option being available in the game

He was spamming those abilities not to harass anyone intentionally but to play with other few people who were spamming abilities with him just for fun. What does that mean? It means GM could suspend your account for virtually anything as long as someone offended by you will come up with good reason to report you.
You could get banned by using in game features, being able to use skills in towns is one of them, that means you could get punished for using any features if someone will find it annoying and report it to the GM.

ToS is so wiggly written that anyone could interpret on its own and come up with different results. Terms of service allows to punish anyone for anything as long as a reporter come up with the evidence or anything, my friend got warned for "suspicious behavior" in pvp not long time ago, to this day he has no idea what was the deal.

[Vidu]

The guy has been suspended because he broke ToS, he has been reported and asked to stop, he did not so he got it.
I am not arguing he did not break the ToS because he clearly did, what i want to help you realize that:

- The game has an option for everyone to turn everone visuals off
- The guy has been banned despite the option being available in the game

He was spamming those abilities not to harass anyone intentionally but to play with other few people who were spamming abilities with him just for fun. What does that mean? It means GM could suspend your account for virtually anything as long as someone offended by you will come up with good reason to report you.
You could get banned by using in game features, being able to use skills in towns is one of them, that means you could get punished for using any features if someone will find it annoying and report it to the GM.

ToS is so wiggly written that anyone could interpret on its own and come up with different results. Terms of service allows to punish anyone for anything as long as a reporter come up with the evidence or anything, my friend got warned for "suspicious behavior" in pvp not long time ago, to this day he has no idea what was the deal.

They actually had an official respons to this line of thinking a while back - I'll admit that I'm to lazy to look for it right now, but the bottomline was that the ToS are "wiggly" on purpose, to allow for judgment calls. If there were tight definitions on whats okay and what isnt, people would find ways to juuuust stay on the egdes of those lines or finding work arounds to "technically" not break the ToS but still being annoying or insulting.

I dare say that as long as you play the game in a "minding your own buisness"-style, you have little to worry about. After all those wiggly guidelines not only mean that we're on the mercy of the GMs, but also that they take a look at the context to make decisions based on that, since the ToS are wiggly to allow for that.
So all this "but there is holy spam in dungeons!" or "there is crafting next to the market board!" becomes nothing more than hyperbole, since we should expect GMs to look at the context and determine wether or not the report warrants that actions are being taken.
Holy-spam in cities is not the intended use for that skill and while people might consider it "fun", I dont think its to surprising that other people might consider it "annoying" - and since it has no real use or purpose and could be done pretty much anywhere else (for example a place where it doesnt annoy the 30+ people currently in Limsa), it does seems somewhat fair and reasonable to me to interpret this has disrupting other peoples gaming experience.
I do think that the "guideline" offered by the GM in this scenario isnt a bad one: Dont act like a jerk and be aware that you're not alone in this fantasy world and you'll be fine.

[Saefinn]

The guy has been suspended because he broke ToS, he has been reported and asked to stop, he did not so he got it.
I am not arguing he did not break the ToS because he clearly did, what i want to help you realize that:

- The game has an option for everyone to turn everone visuals off
- The guy has been banned despite the option being available in the game

He was spamming those abilities not to harass anyone intentionally but to play with other few people who were spamming abilities with him just for fun. What does that mean? It means GM could suspend your account for virtually anything as long as someone offended by you will come up with good reason to report you.
You could get banned by using in game features, being able to use skills in towns is one of them, that means you could get punished for using any features if someone will find it annoying and report it to the GM.

ToS is so wiggly written that anyone could interpret on its own and come up with different results. Terms of service allows to punish anyone for anything as long as a reporter come up with the evidence or anything, my friend got warned for "suspicious behavior" in pvp not long time ago, to this day he has no idea what was the deal.

He claimed to be doing it to not harass intentionally and was just spamming for fun. He claimed he joined in with other people.

Whilst I accept he /might/ not be being disingenuous and that it's bad GMing, but this ties back to not jumping to conclusions when we have only a part of the story. But when people are caught doing something wrong it's not uncommon for people to back pedal and try to paint their own innocence. Hence again, my points about "take it with a pinch of salt". And I think about the amount of times I heard customers say "I wasn't rude, I was calm and stated my case, it might have gotten a little heated, but the agent was really rude to me" -listens back to the call and the customer was raging, rude, nasty and the agent was not letting themselves be spoken to in such a poor manner and didn't instigate it- Or a case as an FC member I am sent a log about how somebody was aggressive with them and then find the other person sends me the full log showing the part of the story where they were a lot worse and instigated it. Drawing conclusions without the full picture can easily mean you draw the wrong ones.

With regards to the options on visuals. It's still a nuisance. If we were to go back to the RP example I brought up, any emote special effects or none in the right places can be very distracting & annoying, but that is a very specific scenario.

But just because I have means of lessening or stopping a person from trolling or harassing me, that doesn't change the fact that they shouldn't be trolling or harassing.

With wiggliness, I concur with Vidu. And it's nothing new for an online community either. You can't write rules for every circumstance and situation nor as a catch all, so there needs to be a level of judgement within those rules that allows for such flexibility, whereby the right call is suspension, but the player is capable of arguing their way out on a technicality. As an FC lead I have a rule that says the FC lead can override any ruling, I've only ever had to use it once or twice and that's because the situations called for it. I don't use it unless I have to. If I start using it as an abuse of power that's when I start losing members.

And in the terms of combatting trolling, arguably judgement calls are needed. A good troll can troll you whilst respecting a rigid set of rules despite them well, very clearly trolling.

It can also mean errors in judgement, for sure, people are only human, this can occur regardless of community or game as long as humans are involved, regardless of rules and it is unfortunate should it happen. It could even be as simple as that, the GM in question could have got the end of the stick & made the wrong judgement call and not this whole melodrama about how people'll now get banned for spamming holy or bards performing and so on.

I expect there's an escalation process should that occur, I've seen it in other games, but never looked into it here (because I haven't needed to), but as an example of a game where I did: I was able to get a permaban lifted on Runescape, despite it being one so severe they wouldn't lift it, but I wasn't even logged in when the offence took place. They rereviewed the evidence, my account had been compromised, they lifted the ban and forced me to reset my password and told me to be more careful in my account's security. Even though I technically was responsible for my account's security (even by their own terms) so was not blameless, they still lifted it. If they don't have that here, then the lack of one would be fair criticism to have.

[frostmagemari]

It really is amazing how many people in the XIV community are vindictive pieces of work just waiting to make sure someone "gets theirs" when they do something stupid.

[DubiousDisk]

It really is amazing how many people in the XIV community are vindictive pieces of work just waiting to make sure someone "gets theirs" when they do something stupid.

Welcome to Final Fantasy XIV, the game is hot fire, but the community is hot ***

[Lium]

You would think that common sense would dictate when you only have a part of the story that you don’t jump to conclusions and overreact.

I'm too lazy to look through this whole thread. What was the other side of the story? Figured we weren't getting the whole thing.