As a player who's never been reported, why aren't behavior penalties ever forgiven?

[Shadha]

It's something I've been thinking about ever since reading a thread on our subreddit a couple of months ago, about a player who was reported for the vulgar slogan of their FC, but they hadn't written the slogan, and were only the leader of the FC due to the automatic promotion system that's meant to keep inactive players from leading. Despite proving all of their claims to the GM, they were issued a warning anyway. And that's a permanent strike, one of three, on their account forever now.

The thread, surprisingly, got 2581 upvotes, with 897 comments. Normally threads discussing the penalty policy don't go so well, which is partly my concern here with this thread. But I do want to be clear, I've never been reported and have no intention of breaking the rules. I enjoy being nice to people, and I'm not demonizing Square Enix or any of their employees. This is only about the penalty policy itself. In fact, I want to talk about it because I enjoy the game so much.

It's unfortunate that the user's Reddit account was deleted recently, but I locally saved the webpages of both the Reddit thread and the Imgur album containing their proof, and I can share them if people want them. But here's a screenshot of the first post, just to validate what I'm saying: https://i.imgur.com/t8nJPFL.png

The thing is, this game is nine years old now. With the current policy, you could have been an obnoxious little teenager and rightfully earned a penalty two, and as a result, you would be at risk of a permanent ban as an adult, after changing as a person. It's easy to believe that no more penalties would be issued undeserved, but that Reddit thread is proof to the contrary. The GMs have to follow the policy, and the policy is very unforgiving.

It just gets worse the longer you play. And if the aim of the system is to improve player behavior, doesn't penalty forgiveness after an extended period of good behavior make sense?

I really wish I could have put this up as a question for Toshio Murouchi when he was answering questions in the live letter XLIII, but that was in March of last year, and this FC slogan mess happened in May of this year...

How do you all feel about it?

If you want to learn more about the penalty policy, read the live letter here: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4651143

[Enla]

Honestly I think strikes should stay on your account for upwards to a year and at that juncture should be able to be appealed or wiped entirely. Sometimes like you said it's just someone being stupid of catching blame for something they didn't do, and after a year has passed without any other incidents it is fair to assume the lesson should have been learned.

[Shadha]

Honestly I think strikes should stay on your account for upwards to a year and at that juncture should be able to be appealed or wiped entirely. Sometimes like you said it's just someone being stupid of catching blame for something they didn't do, and after a year has passed without any other incidents it is fair to assume the lesson should have been learned.

Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Like, a lot of us have a lot of friends in the game, and it would hurt to be separated from them and lose the shared hobby that we have with them. That's why I care about this so much. I almost wish I didn't, because it's a really inconvenient thing to care about. It's not like I can rewrite the ToS. But the thought of how awful that would be has stuck with me ever since I read that Reddit thread. Because it's not just banning bad people from our game, it's like...closing a door in someone's social life, potentially for something relatively minor like losing their patience with a random in a duty, two or three times over the course of six or nine years, depending on whether they played 1.0 or not. Or worse yet, something like the FC slogan issue, where it's a defensible thing, but the GMs have to act anyway.

If they were made leader of the FC due to inactiveness of the previous leader why did they not change the slogan before they were reported? They had to have known it was vulgar and could have easily changed it upon becoming the new leader. Ignoring it they are just as guilty as the person who wrote it.

It was on a character they hardly ever played, so they hadn't seen it. I have Imgur screenshots from the person in question with all the names marked out in case you want to see. That wouldn't count as sharing someone else's personal information, so I can, if you want. But yeah, no, they had no idea until the GM summoned them to the jail.

[Nerian]

Honestly I think strikes should stay on your account for upwards to a year and at that juncture should be able to be appealed or wiped entirely. Sometimes like you said it's just someone being stupid of catching blame for something they didn't do, and after a year has passed without any other incidents it is fair to assume the lesson should have been learned.

Strikes on Accounts Stay Forever Trust me i Know it to 100% cuz i make a DSGVO Request and got a Pic of the Chat and Email blacked like from the FBI why i got this Strike 5 Yeahrs Ago

[Bixillarla]

If they were made leader of the FC due to inactiveness of the previous leader why did they not change the slogan before they were reported? They had to have known it was vulgar and could have easily changed it upon becoming the new leader. Ignoring it they are just as guilty as the person who wrote it.

[Machka]

If they were made leader of the FC due to inactiveness of the previous leader why did they not change the slogan before they were reported? They had to have known it was vulgar and could have easily changed it upon becoming the new leader. Ignoring it they are just as guilty as the person who wrote it.

Just to clarify something from the OP, according to the original account of things (linked by OP) the FC they inherited was on an alt that wasn't even on the same datacenter as the character they usually play. So it's entirely possible they simply did not know that the FC had been passed to them.

I can speak with some firsthand experience about this. In the lull before Shadowbringers, many of us had either unsubbed or simply took a break for a while, with only a handful of us logging in sporadically. Hours before servers went down for the 5.0 patch maintenance I got a ping on discord from my FC leader. Apparently at some point the past few months, their position as FC leader got passed to me due to inactivity, exactly like in the situation described by OP.

At this point I had been playing once or twice a week for over a month, and can honestly say I had absolutely no idea that I was FC leader. It wasn't until I logged in and looked at my rank that I realized I had that shiny gold emblem instead of the usual officer's one. If that could happen to me on my main while playing casually, it could just as easily have happened to someone's alt on an entirely different datacenter.

[SomeRandomHuman]

Because they're permanent I stopped talking outside of my FC chat and linkshells in-game. If I can't moderate the channel, I don't talk in it because now I'm afraid another overly sensitive snowflake is gonna report me over something stupid.

[Whelp]

Because they're permanent I stopped talking outside of my FC chat and linkshells in-game. If I can't moderate the channel, I don't talk in it because now I'm afraid another overly sensitive snowflake is gonna report me over something stupid.

In theory, yes OP I believe that there should at least be an appeals process where you can have (after a certain period of time) one infraction per certain year amount removed from your record. But, because of people like the above quoted, I say keep it like it is. If the way things are now keeps this person only in channels they can moderate (because moderating their own speech is too difficult, I guess?) and other folks who have decided to use the term snowflake to describe human beings with feelings they've hurt with their behavior are keeping to themselves because of it, I say it's working. Like, how mean are you as a person if your answer to "hey that's hurtful" is "I can't even speak around these snowflakes anymore"? I know it sucks for people like that reddit user. I don't know what to suggest to mitigate that kind of collateral damage. All I know is that WoW had millions of players calling each other snowflakes and I don't play that game anymore for reasons. One of which is that. Strict and permanent punishment for poor behavior is part of what keeps FFXIV game chat from looking like WoW's.

[CazzT]

In theory, yes OP I believe that there should at least be an appeals process where you can have (after a certain period of time) one infraction per certain year amount removed from your record. But, because of people like the above quoted, I say keep it like it is. If the way things are now keeps this person only in channels they can moderate (because moderating their own speech is too difficult, I guess?) and other folks who have decided to use the term snowflake to describe human beings with feelings they've hurt with their behavior are keeping to themselves because of it, I say it's working. Like, how mean are you as a person if your answer to "hey that's hurtful" is "I can't even speak around these snowflakes anymore"? I know it sucks for people like that reddit user. I don't know what to suggest to mitigate that kind of collateral damage. All I know is that WoW had millions of players calling each other snowflakes and I don't play that game anymore for reasons. One of which is that. Strict and permanent punishment for poor behavior is part of what keeps FFXIV game chat from looking like WoW's.

Offense is taken, not given. I've seen people reported for things that only the most fragile, hyper-sensitive individual could twist into being offensive in any way. Calling such a person snowflake is both accurate and appropriate, as there are few things more fragile. This is a bad reason to have an overly harsh punishment system.

[Ayer2015]

Offense is taken, not given. I've seen people reported for things that only the most fragile, hyper-sensitive individual could twist into being offensive in any way. Calling such a person snowflake is both accurate and appropriate, as there are few things more fragile. This is a bad reason to have an overly harsh punishment system.

IMO FC chat and link-shells should be exempt from SE oversight. People choose to be in this groups, and people can leave if they don't care for the personalities present. Also, the owners can remove problematic personalities.