Letter to the trolls

[Stuart.croll]

To whom it may concern,

I am a gamer. I have been playing video games for quite a while because I get enjoyment from them and from interacting with the players who play them. You might say that there's a communal aspect to enjoying a good multiplayer video game: a sportsmanlike player wants everyone who plays to have fun, regardless of whether or not they win. I, for one, am a believer in good sportsmanship, whether in a real life sport or in a video game. Without sportsmanship, a game becomes unenjoyable for everyone but the person who is "winning," or making the other players miserable. I don't call that winning. I call that being a dick. Yeah, strong language. It's warranted.

The fact of the matter is that communities, both in the real world and on the Internet, thrive due to cooperation and collaboration. People build friendships and establish groups in order to spend more time together and thus have more fun. When people instead set out to make each other miserable, it's not fun. That is, unless a few people are really good at it. Trolling, as it's called, has emerged from the Internet due to the inability for someone's actions on the Internet to be connected with an entity any more permanent than a username or IP address. And sometimes, dynamic IP addresses and switches of user names even render this impossible. Basically, we're left with hordes of truly anonymous people making good, honest people miserable.

Some of these undesirable people spend time on the Discovery server. I demand they grow up or that they leave.

I have no desire to come and play on this server if I have to constantly screenshot every one of my interactions in order to protect myself against the trolls or to help promote the enforcement of the rules. Trolls? I'm talking about people who ride the edge of the rules in order to infuriate others or to gain personal satisfaction. I'm talking about people who project their selfish OOC motives onto their RP in order to feel good about themselves at the expense of another person's experience. I'm talking about people who forge fake friendships in order to steal shared characters and credits. The rules don't exist so you can twist and bend them to make others miserable. The rules are here so we have a heuristic to get rid of you and have fun without you giving us trouble. Is it sinking in yet?

I don't write walls of text like this very often because I find them distasteful, but I felt that this needed to be said. If you are here making people miserable on purpose for your own satisfaction, get the hell out. If you are not concerned with creating a fun, positive experience for everyone, and if your extreme RP is more important than being polite and having fun, get the hell out. I don't want to see you here, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that regard. If you have trouble seeing the problem with torturing others who are trying to enjoy a game, go see a psychiatrist and get medicine. Until then, get the hell out.

Yours truly,
a gamer

Excellent sentiments. Shame you are always going to be disappointed.

Regs

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