Holy now a bannable spell.

[MsQi]

He was killing all those enemies in town, right?

I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. He said others were doing it and he joined in. It's a communal participation thing. It's like when people start clapping or stomping their feet or chanting and others around join in. Like when one healer needlessly heals another and they just start healing each like crazy. It happens in every mmo. It's a very natural, human, thing to do.

[SturmChurro]

So it was "communal" spamming?! Even worse, I hope they all got banned! That must have been so obnoxious! If two people jump off a bridge you shouldn't jump off it too!

[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.

[MsQi]

So it was "communal" spamming?! Even worse, I hope they all got banned! That must have been so obnoxious! If two people jump off a bridge you shouldn't jump off it too!

Wow, this has absolutely nothing to with jumping off a bridge. Perhaps you and the GMS should come down from your ivory towers and spend some time with real salt of the earth human beings. But, you've probably lost too much spine for that.

[SturmChurro]

Wow, this has absolutely nothing to with jumping off a bridge. Perhaps you and the GMS should come down from your ivory towers and spend some time with real salt of the earth human beings. But, you've probably lost too much spine for that.

What exactly are you so vehemently defending here? A group of morons right to spam an entire hub zone with a very loud, bright spell? What purpose does this "communal" activity have? At least bards are presumably trying to play music. This is worthless.

[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.

[Fynlar]

By this logic, then crafters are bannable by spamming "Failed to attach materia" in the chat log, or its a bannable offence to craft in general in cities.

Time to mass report those pesky crafters! They all spam chat with their abilities. XD

Uhh, no? They're actually playing the game and doing something productive, unlike Holy / Ring spammers who aren't doing anything but trying to be annoying.

[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 ***