Sexual harassment

[Penthea]

Sexual harassment in mmorpg. Lol. Just blacklist ppl and stop being spoiled snowflake.

This attitude is exactly why victims are slow to come forward.

Blacklisting doesn't always work. Some are unfortunate enough to come across those who make alts, buy extra accounts, make several skype/discord accounts, and use their manipulative ways to get personal information such as email addresses from mutual friends. It can be especially difficult to get a player to leave you alone if the majority of their abuse was done outside the game. GM's can't act on information that isn't from the game.

Though it seems that this sort of harassment is typically done by guys, girls sometimes do it too. I encountered two who did to friends of mine, one who engaged in the stalker behaviour in the above paragraph. Harassment doesn't discriminate. It could happen to anyone.

I have personally experienced harassment completely based on my gender. There have been many incidents in which players who barely acknowledged my existence did a 180 when they found out I'm female, and bombarded me with offers of help, gifts, often inappropriate compliments and very probing conversation. Others were more clever. They slowly crept into being my friend before using claims of depression as a tool to get me to pity them enough to be their girlfriend.

These attempts never worked on me long enough to trap me but that didn't mean I found them comical or easy to deal with. Most guys just dropped the act and left me alone as soon as they saw it wasn't working, but a few felt the need to get revenge on me for daring to say no which usually resulted in rumours and exclusion. It's not easy to dispel rumours when you're the newer person in a community. The pressure of feeling disliked got to me enough that I left.

As a result of this I am very guarded around players I don't know, which is very frustrating because it can give the wrong impression and I'm painfully aware of it when it does. However the flip side is my experiences lent me knowledge in how to spot the signs of predatory and anti-social behaviour, and how to deal with it. Which is very handy to have as a fc leader.

All this being said the majority of player encounters in my very long mmo career have been mundane or good experiences. But I'd be lying if I said I went more than a year without encountering or hearing about someone who preys on other people. It is sadly pretty common.

[Nulstat]

Really reminds me of Inotep, Artemisa and Gedran story in wow.

Always nice to see my hilarious teenage stupidity come back to haunt me 14 or so years later.

That is nothing like this - unless you count the vile, vile messages I fielded for months after the event, and simply blocking people (and hitting block cap within the first ten minutes) didn't stop those messages from happening. Please don't try to lessen someone's struggle just because you don't understand. In the two weeks following my return to Gedran posting that, I had over two thousand exceptionally crude, sexual, and downright threatening whispers to deal with. Some enterprising individuals did not just find out the name of my alts, they found out my e-mail addresses and even my physical home address. They found out my phone number, they found out my school(s). I had kids and teachers at school who knew about the event. I had several communities, forums that I just RP'd on, and chatrooms that knew. That event spread across the internet and even into the real world like wild-fire. There was no getting away from it, and once it hit the real world, absolutely no blocking people.

Sometimes, 'just block and move on' is impossible. Stop telling people to sit down and shut up when they feel uncomfortable, it's archaic behavior that shouldn't have a place in any community worth being a part of. While everyone's threshold for tolerance is different, when people cross into the lines of what sexual harassment (or harassment at all), they should be held accountable if the victim chooses to outcry.

If you don't feel harassed, that's great! I, personally, have a pretty high tolerance (especially after the aforementioned event) and it takes a lot to make me uncomfortable, especially given my hobbies. That doesn't mean that someone else who is harassed by definition has to be okay with it.

[Nhadaly]

Ive been told my character is pretty and such and my character has been hit on, but nothing too offensive or anything thats "sexual harassment" i take compliments about my character, i like them personally.

[Kerwin]

Hughe Mongus.

HUMUNGOUS WHAT?

IS THATS SEXUAL HARRASSMENT?

lol. Me2 all aboard.

[Alestorm]

I'm sure many of us have been told our character's are pretty/handsome. Though there are a few that take it to an extreme. The only MMO I had anything like that was WoW.

[DreamAngel-Ren]

One time, I was hanging with a group of friends, and this one character came up and asked "Am I single?" My dumbass said yes, and they invited me to their party (it was just me and him). I was thinking, "Oh, we're about to go on a friendly date to get to know one another.." PFFFFF So we teleported to Costa Del Sol and we went to an area where hardly anyone roams there. Next thing you know, they strip down to their underwear XD I was like, "I didn't bring my swimwear (to go swimming)." and they was like, "It's okay, just go commando." and then they went all up on my character. I immediately knew where this was heading so I backed away and said, "Whoa, there bud! I don't know you that well to go that way." Then finally, they was like, "You don't want to be my kinky gf?" My answer: "NO."

I told them that we could still be friends, but they weren't havin' it and just left. The whole thing was a "WTF, what just happened" moment, really didn't bother me at all.


Besides all that, if someone harasses you, just block them, simple as that.

[Okamimaru]

Read, laughed.

If that kinda thing is funny to you then I don't know what to say... at least not on the forums... without catching a ban...

[Kerwin]

If that kinda thing is funny to you then I don't know what to say... at least not on the forums... without catching a ban...

It's funny. It's just another round of FC drama.

[Rogatum]

It's funny. It's just another round of FC drama.

I agree, those feels when FC drama in a game on the high end has 800k active players across each region makes it to PC gamer. FFXIV is in the big time boys, step up from kotaku. I did get a good laugh reading that.

[Abelfei]

It's a video game. At any point you can blacklist or turn it off. Get over it.