Message #93055

[Anaris]

This is why I asked.

They were clearly active and doing stuff. They were not banned for not doing anything, they were banned for misbehaviour. The IR does not give you the right to act in any way you like without consequences. Its intention is clearly explained - to make sure that OOC takes priority and nobody feels forced to log in if real life is more imporant.

If someone is active, you can ban them for the way they act. Not following orders is a perfectly acceptable ban reason, provided you've made sure that they could have, i.e. it's not just inactivity.

I think the IR is clear in that it refers to OOC activity, not IC activity. Your character does not have a right to be inactive. That's a right of the player, not the character.

Note that just logging in is not enough to establish someone is active in an OOC sense - we've stuff like the quick play link for a reason. That someone logged in yesterday only tells you they had enough time to click two links. But for any periods of reasonable length, you can assume that they had ample opportunity.

And last not least, playing with friends cuts both ways. If you get an important phone call during a board game, you tell the others to wait or go on without you, depending on how long you'll expect it to last.


Wow, that's a lot of words for a few simple facts.

tl;dr: The IR refers to OOC inactivity. If the players are clearly active, then an IC ban based on what their characters do or fail to do is perfectly acceptable.

Thanks, Tom.

I'm going to save the link to this post as one of my Useful BattleMaster Links, because there have been a number of times I've wished I could point someone to you saying exactly this.