(01-30-2025, 01:49 AM)Wesker Wrote: Now with this, more cases of lobbying, behind the scenes influence, & people using the rule to skeet the system from or for encounters will just amplify dramatically.
Whole problem of 1.0. it's all good if you trust in staff and they can avoid bias. If you don't then you just always play with fear. Or rather, don't play because who wants to play a game knowing you can be publicly called out, hundreds of people seeing that you are selectively called "a dick" and made an example of at any time by the arbitrary system.
Staff has been between a rock and a hard place - there's definitely a change in the culture with regards to grudges and resentments resulting in some pretty bad faith unsporting play, and also the ever present seal clubbing. Trying to nail down a good, workable definition of gank that still allows for people to play flexibly without feeling the need to have forced completely 'fair' duels has been the topic of actual hours of argument - but we have decided to err on the side of reserving gank sanctions for only obvious cases.
I definitely have seen people exercise restraint more in uneven fights - though there's definitely an element of not wanting to be sanctioned, instead of just a pure desire to be sporting. I don't know if this will start putting things back to when we had a more prominent culture of people playing for fun rather than 'to win' - we'll have to see on a longer term and reassess our approach accordingly.
I'm coming to see that while the ideal case is that we change how people approach playing the game to maximize a healthy environment - it could potentially be more effective just to remove toxic people that consistently pop up wherever we notice a problem. Granted, that's not a great solution either - but making more and more rules eventually becomes just treating the symptoms at the expense of everyone's sanity rather than getting at the disease directly.
