Stalking and Harassment, GM/Square Enix Refusal to act

[RedLolly]

Not as a hroth though, they're unattractive enough to be safe.
seconds.

Oh my sweet summer child. Stay this innocent.


But I do consistently see the same weird behavior in NOT using every tool at your disposal to keep people away from you and never grasp the full reasons why.

[RaionKansen]

Its what happens when you really steep yourself in the social spaces like venues. The lines tend to get blurred between OOC and OC. Parasocial 1 sided appearance based friendships end up forming.

But the social community does like to be victims and sympathy farm, rather then ya know. Not give the player the time of day.

2 weeks of DnD, ignored tells, and indifference will have the problem solve itself out of boredom.

I have no idea what OOC or OC is.

I can assure you that nobody in my situation has been "going to venues" to "deserve" this kind of harassment.

Most people don't "Deserve" anything but its immature/naive to act careless because of that ideal. At the end of the day you have to be responsible for yourself and the situations you put yourself in. Life and bad things will still happen regardless unfortunately, but you can at least give yourself the best chance of staying out of harms way.

I feel a lot of the time people just intentionally not use their blacklist so they can claim they're being stalked and harassed for attention.

Hope this helps.

Its either that or they've burned all the bridges in their (e)RP space

I see a lot of victim-blaming and deflection in this thread.

It's not victim blaming. Eventually you have to grow up be accountable for the spaces or situations you place yourself in. "Blame" is the wrong word to use. Its typically used in a manipulative way. Should you be able to go anywhere you want and have a good time without worrying about being harassed/assaulted? Absolutely. Does the world work that way? Absolutely not. You have to take care of yourself and use good discernment.

[Uzephi]

It's not victim blaming. Eventually you have to grow up be accountable for the spaces or situations you place yourself in. "Blame" is the wrong word to use. Its typically used in a manipulative way. Should you be able to go anywhere you want and have a good time without worrying about being harassed/assaulted? Absolutely. Does the world work that way? Absolutely not. You have to take care of yourself and use good discernment.

The world let's you have restraining orders against the behaviors depicted in this thread. Until Square has a viable digital equivalent, you cannot bring real world issues into this, since there is a real solution there. You are victim blaming because the real world has solutions and you're essentially telling these people it's their fault to expect the game to have these basic guard rails in place. The game is basically stripping you of a basic human right 99% of the world agrees upon. You have the right to not be stalked and hunted like the individuals in this thread experience in game.

[Solowing]

The world let's you have restraining orders against the behaviors depicted in this thread. Until Square has a viable digital equivalent, you cannot bring real world issues into this, since there is a real solution there. You are victim blaming because the real world has solutions and you're essentially telling these people it's their fault to expect the game to have these basic guard rails in place. The game is basically stripping you of a basic human right 99% of the world agrees upon. You have the right to not be stalked and hunted like the individuals in this thread experience in game.

The game strips you of rights?

You don't think that's a bit of gross hyperbole?

Square has gone above and beyond to really look out for the player experience here. They're stripping you rights because you don't have the exact type of social blocking features?

I think its pretty robust. But because they didn't give you the perfect one.You wanted , it's a microaggression against you? You're like purity testing the people who are on your side.
I

[Solowing]

No amount of GMs or rules can make up for the fact that most millennials are terrible parents who are too busy watching and posting tiktoks to monitor their children.
You don't have to edate someone for them to stalk you, some people are so mentally deranged that they can easily fall in love your XIV character alone without you even saying anything.
Not as a hroth though, they're unattractive enough to be safe.
If someones stalking you into your house, lock your house. "I dont want to" ok then ban them from entering your house. But really, just lock it-I dont get people who refuse to. It takes 000.2 seconds.

People.\nWant to try to upkeep the performance to be seen as a good person. So they willfully engage with these people for the social karma, or they simply ignore all the red flags they give off.

They tend to be overly friendly , overly sharing and overly clingy. Once I see those traits , I disengage from chatting, or just go Grey rock. And they tend to move on and seek players they get more engagement from.

[RedLolly]

I have no idea what OOC or OC is.

"Out of character" and "original character." In the context of RP, essentially not know when the player is just being themselves or "acting" as their character in the setting of role-play.

Unfortunately, lots of role-players are just bad enough at acting that being "in character" is indistinguishable from from just hanging out with that person in game.

[Astronis]

The game is basically stripping you of a basic human right 99% of the world agrees upon.

Shall we start a letter writing campaign to Amnesty International?

"Out of character" and "original character." In the context of RP, essentially not know when the player is just being themselves or "acting" as their character in the setting of role-play.

Unfortunately, lots of role-players are just bad enough at acting that being "in character" is indistinguishable from from just hanging out with that person in game.

And a fair bit of RP drama starts because roleplayers aren't always great at keeping the fiction fiction regarding their feelings. Not that that's what happened in the specific case that restarted this thread, but I'm sure it contributes sometimes.

[KihyiFelhede]

Thread completely derailed by people who want to debate *why* stalking and harassment happens instead of the material points we brought up. Awesome. To recap the issues:

- Estate book spam/vandalism, which would qualify as low-level griefing, seems to have no remedy other than removing the book entirely. As per ToS this should result in account suspension and eventually a permanent ban.
- 10 day refresh on housing ban is an unnecessary preventative measure. There are very good reasons to keep someone banned permanently, the previous issue being one of them, and you can manually remove it. If the 10 days is so important then it should be a toggle for 1 day, 10 days, perma etc.
- Seems to be conflicting reports on whether or not character-generated noise such as instruments can be heard over a block. Regardless, someone spamming noise is disruptive and a GM who monitors the situation should easily be able to tell if the person is being malicious.
- Blocked phrases list should be longer and ideally incorporate wildcard characters for real in-depth filtering. a, A, 4, á substituted in the same word should be able to fully filter the message, e.g. the common /shout spam of "gamba".
- Blacklisting does not resolve the issue if someone is causing a public disturbance. In this case, every player in the instance will have to blacklist them, and they can still cause trouble if they grief (e.g. provoking NMs in Eureka to get attention). If someone uses your name, there are two issues: If you blacklist them, that just means you won't see it and won't know if they're doing it; Everyone else in the area will see that message if they haven't blocked the person and like it or not you are now associated with the troll.
- A person who is abusing the free trial system should not be able to keep coming back with a new throwaway email. IP bans should be handed out liberally.
- Overall I should point out that when you leave the burden on us, the players, to deal with people violating ToS, it makes it less fun to play. Why should we have to take an extra 5 steps to play the game the way everyone else does? It becomes our burden when someone else is breaking the very rules that squenix supposedly set up to prevent this kind of thing. God forbid the million dollar company invest some time and resources into keeping griefers out of their MMO.

[Brynne]

Thread completely derailed by people who want to debate *why* stalking and harassment happens instead of the material points we brought up. Awesome. To recap the issues:

- Estate book spam/vandalism, which would qualify as low-level griefing, seems to have no remedy other than removing the book entirely. As per ToS this should result in account suspension and eventually a permanent ban.
- 10 day refresh on housing ban is an unnecessary preventative measure. There are very good reasons to keep someone banned permanently, the previous issue being one of them, and you can manually remove it. If the 10 days is so important then it should be a toggle for 1 day, 10 days, perma etc.
- Seems to be conflicting reports on whether or not character-generated noise such as instruments can be heard over a block. Regardless, someone spamming noise is disruptive and a GM who monitors the situation should easily be able to tell if the person is being malicious.
- Blocked phrases list should be longer and ideally incorporate wildcard characters for real in-depth filtering. a, A, 4, á substituted in the same word should be able to fully filter the message, e.g. the common /shout spam of "gamba".
- Blacklisting does not resolve the issue if someone is causing a public disturbance. In this case, every player in the instance will have to blacklist them, and they can still cause trouble if they grief (e.g. provoking NMs in Eureka to get attention). If someone uses your name, there are two issues: If you blacklist them, that just means you won't see it and won't know if they're doing it; Everyone else in the area will see that message if they haven't blocked the person and like it or not you are now associated with the troll.
- A person who is abusing the free trial system should not be able to keep coming back with a new throwaway email. IP bans should be handed out liberally.
- Overall I should point out that when you leave the burden on us, the players, to deal with people violating ToS, it makes it less fun to play. Why should we have to take an extra 5 steps to play the game the way everyone else does? It becomes our burden when someone else is breaking the very rules that squenix supposedly set up to prevent this kind of thing. God forbid the million dollar company invest some time and resources into keeping griefers out of their MMO.

This is a good list, and I'll add one more:
- Adding someone to the blacklist should remove you from their friends list if they have you on it. Just because someone was once a friend doesn't mean they should be able to track when you're online after you've blacklisted them.

[Solowing]

Thread completely derailed by people who want to debate *why* stalking and harassment happens instead of the material points we brought up. Awesome. To recap the issues:

- Estate book spam/vandalism, which would qualify as low-level griefing, seems to have no remedy other than removing the book entirely. As per ToS this should result in account suspension and eventually a permanent ban.
- 10 day refresh on housing ban is an unnecessary preventative measure. There are very good reasons to keep someone banned permanently, the previous issue being one of them, and you can manually remove it. If the 10 days is so important then it should be a toggle for 1 day, 10 days, perma etc.
- Seems to be conflicting reports on whether or not character-generated noise such as instruments can be heard over a block. Regardless, someone spamming noise is disruptive and a GM who monitors the situation should easily be able to tell if the person is being malicious.
- Blocked phrases list should be longer and ideally incorporate wildcard characters for real in-depth filtering. a, A, 4, á substituted in the same word should be able to fully filter the message, e.g. the common /shout spam of "gamba".
- Blacklisting does not resolve the issue if someone is causing a public disturbance. In this case, every player in the instance will have to blacklist them, and they can still cause trouble if they grief (e.g. provoking NMs in Eureka to get attention). If someone uses your name, there are two issues: If you blacklist them, that just means you won't see it and won't know if they're doing it; Everyone else in the area will see that message if they haven't blocked the person and like it or not you are now associated with the troll.
- A person who is abusing the free trial system should not be able to keep coming back with a new throwaway email. IP bans should be handed out liberally.
- Overall I should point out that when you leave the burden on us, the players, to deal with people violating ToS, it makes it less fun to play. Why should we have to take an extra 5 steps to play the game the way everyone else does? It becomes our burden when someone else is breaking the very rules that squenix supposedly set up to prevent this kind of thing. God forbid the million dollar company invest some time and resources into keeping griefers out of their MMO.

Well, if you ask why the stalking happens, you can find ways to prevent it. Rather than willfully or unwittingly walking into a lions den.

Preemptively , look out for yourself now to save yourself from headaches later. Remember it's the internet nobody knows they're talking to a well adjusted person , a serial killer or a unstable person.

But the asking for tools is logical and makes sense