Completely arbitrary bans?

[Leith]

So I am posting here on behalf of a friend due to what we think is a really unfair move. So my friend just got banned from the forums until the next month merely for expressing his own opinion regarding the way the mythology tomestone items (AF2 and relic +1 items) are handled. This was his post:

to be completely fair af + is the best gear in game and who wants a face roll to get gear and unlike other mmo's where the gear comes and goes every 10 minutes your gear is actually worth something on this game.........the way they have it makes it fair for those that are casual players......also the af gear that you got during the story is to easy in my eyes and should be made more difficult

Can it actually get more face-roll friendly than it currently is? Think about it for a second. You can already "face roll" it in here. This gear isn't hard to get AT ALL. You cap your weekly mythology tomestones by repeating a mind-numbingly easy instance ad nauseam, and in 3 weeks you can get your new amazing body piece or pants, or 2 weeks for any other piece. Or use those 3 weeks worth of tomestones for a +1 relic. BUT the fact that it takes 3 weeks doesn't make it hard to procure. It is incredibly lame that literally all you have to do to obtain some of the game's best gear is WAIT (and pay more monthly fees) so you can just BUY it. It only takes time to obtain because of an artificial limitation that is just a slap in the face of anybody who's paying for their own play time.

It is the most blatantly obvious time sink I've ever seen put into a game, it is designed pretty much to force you to progress at a fixed pace, it takes ALL sense of wonder away from otherwise awesome gear, and it makes no freaking sense lore-wise. Normally you start seeing online games tear apart the game's lore (and pretty much all logic behind the game's design) in favor of "convenience" and "accessibility" (and god, how much I've come to hate those two terms...) in their later years, when their population starts dwindling, as some sort of desperate move to keep their playerbase somewhat entertained. But this game is doing it RIGHT AFTER IT'S "GLORIOUS" RELAUNCH. Why?

This is common practice for SE to make you work for months on a single item or a set of gear. It took me 4 months to build a relic weapon in FFXI only to have it obsolete by SE introducing new weapons in an expansion. I was ok w/ that because I had felt I accomplished something other players either didn't or even attempt. For me its what makes the game fun and keeps me logging in everyday.

Using XI as an example to defend this is a terrible idea. While, yes, XI was full of time sinks and achieving something could take a long while (it took me thirteen months (13) to complete my beloved Usukane armor set and that was doing Salvage almost daily), the game always made you feel like you were working towards a goal - that if you kept trying, at some point you might achieve what you seek. At no point did the game ever just stop you and tell you "Hey, this is as much as you can accomplish in any given time frame. See you in the next X weeks"; that is just cheap.

Soo yeah, my issue with AF2/AF+1/whatever you wanna call it is not so much how long it can take to obtain (which still is pretty long imo, but w/e, this is a MMO - or whatever there's left of that genre), but the fact that it's all on a vendor, without any lore to back it up or whatever even though it is equipment emblematic of each job and the way to obtain the (current) best weapons in the game, which is incredibly freaking lame; and that the currency this vendor uses comes from grinding easy content to no end, while limited to a very specific amount of progress per week again, which is awful - it's like good ol' fatigue with a vengeance. And I remember people absolutely despised fatigue, so how the hell comes there's people that are actually fine with this crap!?

Also, uh... why was my previous post deleted again, mods? Was I being rude or insulting to someone? Did I hit a nerve or something? I... I don't get it. O_o

Considering all the NPC fanfare that accompanies your retrieval of AF items in your class quests, I think it would have been much cooler to see Relic Reborn-type quests for your AF2.

This. Though not a repeat of the relic quest, obviously, but, you know... something at least, not just putting them on a vendor for no apparent reason at all and throwing in an insane and terribly obvious time-sink to boot...

On the e-mail they sent him, they said that the cause of this ban was for "posting aimed to create a negative impact on the community or its members." What? Now how is voicing a personal opinion regarding something game-related specifically "aimed to create a negative impact on the community"? How are these bans being handled even? I hope I don't get banned too for posting this. I don't post much if at all on these forums, but still... geez...

[Mansayhi]

They did make it like everything is controlled by a timer. I loved the way they did xi, no huge amounts of time limits on everything/ (besides on a few things which I could understand, like you had to wait 3 days to do the run for the dark knight armor)

[Contradiction]

I can't be much of a judge, but my impression is that perhaps the ban wasn't so much for the existance of his opinion but rather the manner in which it was put across. I don't know what else he posted but even in that post alone I can see a swashbuckling undertone which I find a bit unsettling. Perhaps more so in sequence rather than 1 post in isolation, though I don't know what came before it.

Few places where we can draw "the line in the sand", but I tend to think that it's best to NOT resort to a 'combative' style of writing. It wouldn't create a foul mood for the others and more importantly the point comes across more clearly. Less likely to wind people up, less likely it would develop into something else.

It might just be an "age thing" though; I suppose I used to argue in a more combative tone which faded as I got older. Maybe I just realized that, in order to make the same point, I could do so in a very neutral tone and be extremely effective for it.