Player Banned: Mort

[Haste]

Mort was not sanctioned for the use of setmessages.

While I do personally believe that it is a problem when players don't participate, at all, in the roleplay environment except by tossing some pre-written engagement notice setmessages into local chat to technically abide by the server rules, that is not what this sanction is about. It is a separate discussion that rears its head every couple years, and the community (and staff team) have yet to find a genuinely good solution to this problem. The official Discovery server is a roleplay server, and most people in our community can probably see that it is among the reasons the server has stood the test of time -- unlike most of the Freelancer servers still around.

And that is where this sanction comes in. In order to have a functioning, healthy roleplaying environment, minimum standards have to be enforced. Among those enforced standards is this section of rule 1.1:

Communication in-game and in the roleplaying areas of the forums must be in-character and appropriate for Discovery Freelancer's setting.

Messages like "on the radar contact" are not in character. They are references to other players' (limited) English skills. Mort knows this. Almost everyone who's posted in this thread knows this. There was a point in time at which I personally got a chuckle out of these references, and I think there is a time and place for players to be a little bit silly and post some well-disguised (meta-)references to things outside of the game. But that time is not "all the time", and "well-disguised" is not the eighty-seventh literal copy-paste of the same message.

This reminds me of what I posted recently, so I'll just drop the quote here:

Once upon a time, I was a bit of a toxic asshole. Even more so than I am today -- if you can imagine. I would go around flying ships with shitpost names, write in all lowercase with broken grammar and spelling, and try to bait people (worse than myself) into fighting me so I could then wipe the floor with them. I found this really quite funny, and barely played the game "as intended" anymore -- actually participating in the roleplay environment. At the time, I had little respect for the staff team. I thought they were corrupt, or idiots. Probably corrupt idiots, actually.

However, one day an administrator PMed me, and told me that I kept popping up in staff discussions and violation reports, and that eventually I was going to have to face the consequences of my actions. There wasn't a warning, a big credit fine, no ships were deleted and I wasn't banned. I was just PMed on good old Skype by an administrator, and he and I had a chat. I took his words to heart -- even though I also thought he was just about the only competent person on the administrative staff team at the time -- and learned to behave just a little bit better. I think had I been sanctioned instead, all it would've done is reinforce my feelings about the inadequacy of the staff team, and my behaviour wouldn't have improved at all.

Now, a perfectly valid question to ask in response to the above quote is, of course, to ask why Mort wasn't warned, just like I was. To be quite honest, I don't have a good answer to that right now. Staff decisions are made by vote, and I was one of the people who voted for a month ban. I will say that nobody who voted on this sanction voted for a lesser punishment. I do know that I was worried a warning alone wouldn't get the message across, and that Mort would just laugh it off and continue playing the same way -- simply delaying this same ban (or a more severe one) until the next violation report(s) came in.

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Now, I'm going to quote HonourWolf to address other community concerns:

[snip]

Admins are citing low RP interactions yet don't go after the Zoner Whales that fly through house space, drop cargo to ram into them, or give dogshit one word replies to avoid interaction at all cause.

Do people who dock at the first sign of trouble exhibit low-quality interactions as well?

Those interactions are equally problematic. Nobody on the staff team is saying they're acceptable. Roleplay standards have been dropping for many years and have reached a point where a lot of people have started questioning whether the "RP" in the server name still belongs there. If we want to fix that and reverse the trend, a single ban is obviously not going to do the trick.

But we can only act on rule violations we're made aware of. If there's no report, there's likely not going to be a sanction either, unless a staff member was around to witness it happening. In addition, "(nearly) silent powertraders" are often -- but not always -- relatively new players. Newer players are often thrown a bone, and rather than big public sanctions we'll try and warn them in private if possible (though we often have to resort to putting their ship in Bastille to get their attention).