Ban Notice for Lumi, Aegis, Mewni, and Croakie

With the bans covering the same issues; and much of the appeals posing the same arguments against their bans, this post will be a Net-Cover of all appeals; as they are all concerning the one ‘Four-Person-Ban’ which occurred.  We will in our best efforts attempt to make it clear explicitly why this ban was enacted, and hopefully make it clear why there will be no repeal for a ban of this caliber. As well as communicate with all hope, that this was not a crack-pot decision of one or two GMS; but a unanimous decision by the team to go forward with them. We’ll start from the top, and go through each of the cases, charges, and explanations to the best possible clarity without putting other players at open-risk of Harassment. 

"For repeatedly gatekeeping, metagaming, harassment, and OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly."


This caught our attention and was investigated over the course of a few months, starting sometime in January. This was not an abrupt decision, it’s been a coalescence of evidence stacking up against them over time to form a clear pattern and equally clear intent.

The reason these four got the same ban message, the same sentence (barring Croakie’s time, which included a slight typo that we’ll remedy when the correct time is up), and were lumped in together is because they all acted with coordinated efforts to achieve the same goal.

You might remember that this is the same ban that Blade was dealt, for excluding the other half of the donship. This is also intentional, as they perpetrated the same thing.

With the added harassment charge, in this case.


So with that in mind and the way that we always handle harassment cases and try to curb the potential for backlash, we’ll explain the charges as best we can.


Gatekeeping

Normally private game-related servers for IC groups are an issue due to the fact that GMs can’t moderate them effectively and sometimes echo chambers tend to bring out the worst in people, as one of our previous threads mentioned.

But in this case, one was used to completely exclude not just one player in a position of IC power that’s meant to be on equal footing, but a host of other players on that side of Meiaquar.

It would be one thing to have a private echo chamber with the usual problems that come from them, but it’s another thing entirely when said chamber is used to discuss and plan important nation-related things that should be done in a place where both sides of an IC faction can see, on an OOC level.

To throw a metaphorical ‘benefit of the doubt’ bone, if the concern was that someone might metagame with that information if it were made available to them on an OOC level, then that should be discussed with GMs instead so we can ensure everyone plays fair.


Metagaming

Also known as OOC in IC, this includes things like fabricating IC reasons to be upset using OOC information for something that doesn’t exist and didn’t happen ICly.

It also includes making up reasons ICly to try to justify an OOC agenda of kicking someone out of a position of power that’s inconvenient to your aims of attacking another faction for more OOC reasons.

Likely with enough time and enough people turning a blind eye to it (or worse, being complicit in it), these things could have amounted to something of actual IC substance and the lines would have blurred too much to act upon.

Especially with a coordinated effort between several different parties.

But thankfully, we caught it early.


Harassment

All of these things were targeted attacks for OOC reasons and a history of issues between the offending parties and the victims.

Harassment is a broad, blanket statement that we use to include things that fall under the umbrella of targeted attacks towards others. (Highlighted in case any of you were unaware.)



* This includes dragging your fellow players whether or not it’s done to their faces.

* This includes unsubstantiated claims of wrongdoing in an attempt to get a fellow player in trouble.

* This includes spreading misinformation/false narratives about your fellow players in multiple semi-public spaces to ostracize them from their peers and increase the divide you created in the first place.

* This also includes hiding under objects to monitor what your fellow players are doing.

* And of course, DMing people to incite them because you didn’t like something they did/said ICly or otherwise.

As you know, in the past we’ve had to ban several prior offenders for posting inflammatory statements in SL2-related discords. The consequences of which were often not felt until months after their initial attempts to ostracize others.

We were lucky this time to catch things as early as we did.

OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly

It’s more or less been stated above, but multiple players were excluded from important discussions and things they should have been made aware of on an OOC level.

This makes it all too easy to say things OOCly and ICly to fit the narrative you’re trying to peddle, like:

“So and so doesn’t do anything, they’re unfit for their role”.

If you make it nigh impossible for others to be included in what your side of things does, it does make it hard for them to do anything. Meetings, prisoner transfers, almost anything short of directly ignoring them ICly.

But then, you wouldn’t have to go as far as Blade did if you simply didn’t allow them to exist in the same IC spaces as you, by keeping them in the dark.

Needless to say, it’s not something we can ignore.

Honestly, I'd rather have 'em banned all together but for the sake of the odd exception can we just make all child looking playbys have to get approval first? Legit it is weird how some technically adult characters can look like straight up kids and I am just not okay with that on a visceral level.

So I've been thinking. I know RP and mechanics are supposed to be separate, and some of us even follow this, but there is an undeniable fact that the game systems and mechanics are the main ways we interact with the world and as such are what implicitly encourage various behaviors both in combat and out of combat. I get the idea of keeping these two realms separate but at the end of the day it's always been unreasonable to expect players to intentionally kneecap themselves and play sub-optimally for the sake of immersion rather than making the systems they're using immersive in the first place.

In the end, the Meta is a concept that no game no matter how RP focused will ever escape. Even Neverwinter Nights 2 servers are beholden to the meta when it comes to combat. However, there methods to encourage optimal play in areas that are not combat and as such able to support a more diverse builds and play-styles that can cater to different kinds of players.


The first thing on the Agenda in my opinion would be FIXING THE ECONOMY:

The economy of SL2 is frankly... fucked. Everything is too plentiful and there are not enough places to spend money and resources in an effective way to curtail this. Cooperation or conflict based on scarcity might be a concept in the roleplay world at large but in present it is not at all represented in a tangible way and as such there is this dissonance between the plentiful of certain resources that regions ought to have versus the near endless mounds of stuff that players actually possess. This might also be alleviated if the regions as a whole experienced certain resource based struggles that require player intervention to solve but that currently requires an increase of GM staff intervention and a development cycle for updating map features that, based on current personnel, seems unsustainable. Other games manage this but they also have many more people to pull this off.

My suggestion would be to implement the concept of a resource pit.

Many MMOs already implement these systems to curtail economic inflation. We have a few of them in vendors but it's nowhere near enough to keep up with current money/resource generation techniques.

Bind on pickup items is a way of doing this but given that item trading is a core part of the economic activity of SL2 I don't think this would work either.

So, to steal from other existing games, there is the idea of maintenance costs for cities

In other words, make it so that cities require a certain amount of money and resources to be donated to them for them to continue functioning effectively. It's a tax, in essence, but given that the resource pit is a communal one it would be up to the player base to decide who contributes what to this pit. There are interesting opportunities for interaction that are made via this system and it also means that through expansion the costs for maintaining the newly achieved standard of the city would rise in conjunction with it.

There are two ways of implementing this. Either, you have a single NPC Tax Collector that takes in resources from the players to contribute to a total required amount every month or two weeks, the timings can be adjusted. This method, whilst a bit less immersive, is overall more convenient, but does put the system in a sort of ALL OR NOTHING mode which does not offer flexibility.

Or, you can have these costs spread out across the cities and tied to specific structures. This is less convenient but is a bit more immersive. It also allows the opportunity to budget and determine which structures are worth keeping maintained and which ones you can do without for a little while. Maybe the walls are a bit more worth it than the inn, for instance.

A means of incentivize to keep this mechanic compelling aside from a change in NPC interactions and visuals would also be (And this would be a long term mechanical goal as are all of these proposed changes) to make it so if maintenance costs are not met continuously eventually the city goes down a maintenance level, with the bottom level being mobs being able to spawn within city borders. In addition, it would also be required so that to regain a level after losing one you would have to continue to maintain the city consecutively for the next few checks.

Regardless, whether this exact method is used or not the general idea remains the same. We need things to make people give away their stuff into the void willingly.  With a more effective economy non-combat interactions have more a place in the game and whilst this idea is one of the solutions the most important fact is that we need a solution.


The next thing on the agenda... is ENCOURAGING SPECIALIZATION:

This isn't about combat. You know what, combatants can be allowed to do everything. Why not? I mean obviously I'm not advocating for that kind of game balance but what I'm saying is that... right now you can have a god tier build but also be a crafter and a gatherer without any sort of sacrifice. Combat, Crafting, and Gathering, are the three pillars of interaction that this game and a lot of other games like it are built upon. Being able to be good at all three at the same time is excusable in an MMO because MMOs have inherently different goals than RP games but for an RP based environment, specialization encourages interaction.

If you have to choose between being the BEST at combat, crafting, or gathering, you'll have to start working with other people to get everything you need to get done accomplished. But how do you do this? Well, like it not... the problem lies in the Talent System as well as the current state of the crafting system.

Talent points are a completely separate resource that are used on various things that, in my opinion, maybe should be more stat driven. We have an existing framework with the stat system to decide how good someone should be at various activities. Sure Talents could provide a boost but I don't think they should be the sole driver of skill.

For example, lock picking. You can invest into the talents to be the best at it whilst still maintaining an effective build. However... I would suggest that it would be better to tie down one's ability to lockpick to your Luck and Guile instead. And... if you want to be the best at lock picking, you need to invest into those stats well past diminishing returns. This is a tax. A skill point tax. But it's a tax that brings new value to the action of lock-picking by making it require sacrifice to fully invest into. Ideally this would be balanced so it wouldn't completely kneecap someone's PVE abilities but it would be enough to highly discourage soloing and make lockpickers and the like actively search for armed escorts.

Similarly speaking, crafting, which does have a bit of limitation in regarding investment but is only really locked behind time and a legend extension... should also be stat driven. A different stat for each different craft and one that follows a similar philosophy to the gathering skills. Now, admittedly, the stats required for some crafts could and maybe should overlap with some of the stats required for some gathering activities, but this is getting into a much longer balancing discussion that should only happen if this course is truly invested in to begin with.

Truthfully, it is honestly a shame how underutilized the state system is in regards for interacting with the world of the game. Having special interactions or even integrated skill checks with bonuses derived from stats would also make running events or encouraging build diversity a hell of a lot easier since it would mean that maybe the best build for a detective is not the same thing as the best build for a sword wielding anime protagonist.

THE CONCLUSION:
None of these changes are easy. It's gonna be hard. Really fucking hard and take a really long ass time to implement even one of these. And honestly, maybe it even isn't gonna be enough at the end of the day. It's probably not gonna be popular either. Giving up power is hard, and we've had this much power for so long that I can understand some people aren't going to be keen on losing it. But at the end of the day, I'd like to think that not everyone that goes into this game does it for the combat and I think some key restrictions on the power budget of combat oriented characters towards non-combat oriented tasks would make the overall environment more welcoming to those players whilst also making them more inherently valued parts of the community.

• Game you were banned from: Sigrogana Legends 2
  
  
• In-game name (key): Whalord
  
  
• Reason you were banned: "For repeatedly gatekeeping, metagaming, harassment, and OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly."
  
  
• The length of the ban, if you know: One Week
  
  
• Who banned you, if you know: Not even a notice from whoever it was.
  
  
• Why we should unban you:
  
  Given that there are other people who got banned for the same reason all of a sudden without any notice before hand, I'll get straight to the point on each of the reasons given considering how hard it is to defend myself with the way this ban was executed.
  
  
  -For Repeatedly Gatekeeping-
  
  I have not done any of the sort, or remember anything that even had that kind of feel to other players myself. There's only so much I can do with my Role as one of the Enforcers of Meiaquar, and barring other players to do their thing isn't one of it.
  
  
  -Metagaming-
  
  This straight up does not make any sense. All of the RP I've done are basically IC-Driven, and I would never do anything without the proper interaction in-game. this is the kind of behaviour I despise alot, because it kills the fun of fresh interaction in the RP setting.
  
  
  -Harassment-
  
  Certainly not true. Aside from chatting with friends in the Korvara VC and channels, I barely talk to any of the players myself unless there's something needed to be talked about. The Majority of the people in the community are basically strangers for me, and I already struggle to interact with anyone else, plus the fact that I live during the time where everyone else is mostly dead-asleep.
  
  I do infact, complain alot because I'm also a human being that can get upset with a few things. but instead of trying to harass anyone like a kid whining in the middle of the grocery store for not getting their candy, I try to reach out and talk it out, or just move forward and carry on the things I want to do.
  
  
  -OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly-
  
  I've already stated above on Gatekeeping, Metagaming and Harassment parts that proves this reason isn't true at all.
  
  
  I would like to also point out that I do not hold any sort of grudge to whoever executed this decision, but the feeling of disappointment as one of the players still lingers with how poorly this was done. I try to be understanding of people's positions myself, but I do hope that there would be some form of communication reaching out to get to the bottom of things before reaching for the hammer itself. 
  

I'mma get shot for this one:

• The return of Dynamic tome though with the condition of the attached spell seeing a some balancing. Given the fact there are far too many ways to spell edge, these won't exactly be the end all go to weapons anymore.
  

• The return of Familiar since those weren't exactly crazy from the start.
  

• Game you were banned from: Sigrogana Legends 2
  
  
• In-game name (key): CoconuttyDog
  
  
• Reason you were banned: "For repeatedly gatekeeping, metagaming, harassment, and OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly."
  
  
• The length of the ban, if you know: One Week
  
  
• Who banned you, if you know: No Idea, never was approached before or after the sudden lengthy ban
  
  
• Why we should unban you:
  

I'm not sure what the issue is but I'm just doing what the game told me to do.

The message triggered when I was putting the Kiss Farewell seen in the screenshot into my bank.

• Game you were banned from: Sigrogana Legends 2
• In-game name (key): Ilulu
  
  
• Reason you were banned: System: You were banned for 10080 minute(s) for the following reason: For repeatedly gatekeeping, metagaming, harassment, and OOCly preventing others from being able to exercise their roles fairly were the reasons given.
  
  
• The length of the ban, if you know: One week.
  
  
• Who banned you, if you know: No clue, gms never give info.
  
  
• Why we should unban you:
  

The Korvara Jammer Caverns in Geladyne do not have an "edge" of the map in their battle maps, meaning you are unable to flee a battle at all, and must just eat a death (and the item/murai loss that come with it) just to leave if you get in over your head.

Let it be used as a Spell-edge weapon for exclusively Mercalan Spells.