Author Topic: Punishments in cases of harassment  (Read 15536 times)

Geronus

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Re: Punishments in cases of harassment
« Topic Start: July 29, 2013, 09:44:00 PM »
My question is: What crime is worse than driving players away from the game?

Harassment can do that just as easily as multi-cheating if not more so. If your personal actions drive away players from the game because you are breaking the rules in some manner, then in my opinion you deserve the harshest punishments possible. If that requires Tom's personal approval, then that shouldn't stop the Magistrates from ruling on that, and requesting Tom to take that action.

If Tom's willing to consider it, then so will we. But until he says something one way or another, permanent account locks are not on the table as a routine punishment, even for something as serious as harassment.

Beyond this narrow question of how Tom would view such a punishment option, I also would have reservations about using it for all but the most clear-cut of harassment cases. These tend to be highly subjective, contextual, and subject to disputing interpretations as it is. Using such a harsh punishment in cases that tend to have significant shades of grey could very easily lead to injustice being done.

At the very minimum, titles ought to be stripped and banned from receiving them for X amount of time.

This is exactly what we did. The ban only applies if a position is actually stripped however, so in the case that led to this thread, the affected character was able to gain a type of position that he had not held prior to the punishment being applied because it was never stripped in the first place. That said, he will not be able to regain any of his previously held titles for at least 30 days.

As a general response to this point, which titles should be stripped? As I mentioned, we do have the ability to strip as many or as few titles as we want from each character on any given account. In the prior case, we chose to strip just one character, because it was felt that it was that character and his goals/responsibilities which led the player to do what he did, but in theory we could have stripped them all, from every single character on his account. That doesn't seem just to me, but I'm still curious as to what people think about how we should use this option in the future.

Temporary account locks for less than a week are seemingly meaningless punishments in my opinion, and are essentially warnings.

We considered locking the account for a week (which would have required special Dev assistance), but the vote was ultimately for a 3-day lock. Three days is still a long time, however. A lot can happen in three days that is detrimental to your characters, let alone an entire week. I went away this weekend and lost a whole unit on one character, while missing the chance to influence some rather important political developments on two more.

What makes a week so much better than three days? This is a serious question. I would like opinions about the efficacy of locks as punishments and whether we need to add options for longer locks, or possibly replace the mechanic altogether.