Dear Whistler,
I know VO website/forums is not a democracy. It's a GS private website and Inc sets the rules of what is or is not allowed and gave volunteer admins the tools to deal with the content they deem inappropriate - thread/post deletes & edits, thread & forum mutes, etc.

I also know that GS is a small team that cannot possibly deal with all the daily transgressions players commit in-game.
Majority of times I just give up on sending a support ticket to not distract them from their daily business and... , usually, when I or for that matter - anyone else, send a support ticket documenting transgressions - nothing actually happens.

I know that Inc frowns upon mentioning favoritism but, sadly, we do have some "holy cows" in VO that seem untouchable no matter how severe transgressions they commit. It also gives them a feeling of superpower because - they can get away with anything.

This situation creates a bit of a frustration that is bound to spill into forums from time to time.
Does talking about that breach the 'Be Nice' policy? Probably yes but as support tickets have proven worthless and are deemed the only regular way to deal with transgressions, talking about that stuff in public helps vent some frustration out.

You, however, have every right to execute your administrative powers and administer punishment for anyone that vents his frustration here.

This will not help much as you probably know very well because the core problem still exists and someone will always say "what the hell, I am going to post this in RP forum, they can mute or ban me if they want".

So... we are back to a kind of a chicken & egg situation.
RP forums will not be able to change back to what they were in the good old times unless the core problem gets fixed. or you just ban everyone who ever spills some frustration in them.

Does spamming a forum with a new topic every 2 minutes about the same matter not constitute forum abuse. Or was mi5 just helping the team test out new anti-spam measures that obviously didn't work?

Bojansplash: I appreciate your response and thoughts on this matter. I have shared it with Inc in case he has not had a chance to see it yet.

Thank you Whistler.

In addition, I can propose an intermediate solution used in some other games that very successfully helps tone down players frustration and make the "transgressions" punishments a bit more transparent. And it also helps tone down overall transgressions in-game quite a bit.

We may call it a "Wall of Shame" list - a web page documenting players who got punished for their transgressions with the description of what they were punished for, what punishment measure was used and the duration of it.

Wouldn't you be on it for your smear campaign against VOID and TGFT (cuz der da same ting!), claiming were "cheaters and de-fraudsters"

I say we make a Wall of Shame for players that don't play anymore but post on the forums everyday. I took about a year hiatus, and you wouldn't have caught me dead on these forums

Yes, a wall of shame is exactly what this community needs.

/me facepalms

If you are displeased with the way the developers handle certain "transgressions" of any "rules", then you should just stop playing the game if it starts "frustrating" you.

If you - however - decide to continue playing the game and are often so overburdened with your "frustration" that you get from people supposedly commiting "transgressions" so that you have to go to these forums to talk about it and thus commit a "trangsgression" by yourself to "vent" your "frustration"... then that is not a problem that GS has. It is a private problem of yours.

Needless to say, I have never heard of any successful game that has a "wall of shame". All it would do is create drama, lead to more "transgressions" that would have to go on that list and so on. The developers would have to put aside all development work to keep that list updated to add every forum ban/whatnot on it to please the hyprocritical sense of justice of a minor group in a MMO.
What a waste of time.

Nobody is in B-8...

"Needless to say, I have never heard of any successful game that has a "wall of shame". All it would do is create drama, lead to more "transgressions" that would have to go on that list and so on. The developers would have to put aside all development work to keep that list updated to add every forum ban/whatnot on it to please the hyprocritical sense of justice of a minor group in a MMO.
What a waste of time."

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

The Wall of Shame would not deter bad behavior at all. In fact it would provide a valuable new aspect to VO gameplay where players compete to have the most outrageous offenses posted, or the highest ban / mute counts.

+1 to The Wall of Shame.

Edit: This post was meant as sarcasm and not to be taken seriously. A wall of shame is a bad idea for the reasons listed in other comments nad more. It would imo do little to curtail bad behavior. This is just a game and has little in the way of real consequences to the real lives of the players. It would also serve as a catalyst to perpetuate the current drama. I think the devs, via Whistler and Phaser as well as support tickets are handling this in the right way by keeping infractions and player consequences more or less private where possible. I do not envy them their task. I see this kind of thing flare up in real life often enough where one group / individual takes offense at another group / individual while engaging in the same or different violations. Then want to explode because they get called out for their digression and start screaming about how bad the other group or individual is. Some people are just wired to worry about what other people are doing rather than just getting on with their lives / game.

I would think for so many people claiming to care about this game and wanting the devs to spend their time adding content when they are able and not doing other things to keep the game going, that they would try to handle their concerns in the fashion requested by the devs and keep the conflict to ships and weapons and these forums to an environment that makes new players excited about the community rather than put off. Just my $0.02

My experience has been that public shaming results in an exacerbation of the unwanted behavior. This is particularly notable in-game. Generally when I have to deal with someone in-game, I preface by saying "This is a private message." using the white text /msg command. This greatly decreases the amount of bluster, posturing and argument because the user then knows that they don't have to play to the peanut gallery.

I suppose that what Fluffy suggests is also possible.

It's really up to Inc. My mission is always to keep the devs devving, so I regret that this recent issue may pull their time away from the cool stuff.

This whole debate is useless, Whistler. A friendly reminder never hurts. But by now, everyone - especially the longterm players - really know the Be-Nice policies.

So instead of editing posts all the time and remnding the same people over and over... do not break loose a lengthy discussion. It's not like they "forgot" the Be-Nice rules all of a sudden. Just execute a ban if you see fit. If somebody feels unfairly treated, they can always bring it up in private. What I believe is that a discussion where the people who feel addressed attempt to justify their actions is pointless.

Eventually when VO gets on Steam, GS will probably have to adhere to their rules.
All bans/unbans and account deletes are public on Steam.

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6899-IOSK-9514

http://www.vacbanned.com/listing/banned

Sieger: Noted. We actually do a bit more than people are aware of, but I agree that lengthy discussions on my part are probably not helpful.

That said, I will do what I probably should have done right after my first post here:

[locked]

A significant number of support tickets we get about community issues are driven, not so much by the issues themselves, but by a desire to cloak some other motivation into a request for administrative action against a perceived adversary.

Basically, people using the admin system as another level of a "game", used to attacking rivals, guilds and others that some community member(s) may dislike.

Even in cases where action is genuinely warranted, after the fact we frequently have the reporting-individual(s) feeding back around to the people against-whom the action has been taken, in-game, to mock them about the outcome or their administrative situation. This then makes things worse.

Publicly relating the outcome of our administrative actions only serves to feed this "competitive drama" meta-warfare between groups and individuals. It also makes corrective changes in individual behaviour less likely, and elevates an escalation in anger that either leads to people quitting, or behaving so badly and angrily that I just end up having to ban them from the community entirely.

So, no, we will not be doing a "wall of shame".

There is merit to more advanced ways of handling this, and even just improving the tools available to Whistler. For the moment, we're rolling with an escalation process, by which he actively handles a lot of issues and then escalates repeat problems to me. I've been taking action with direct emails and longer-term forum mutes (up to a few weeks). This has been happening quite recently, despite the perception that the "devs never do anything" and "no one takes any action".

I'm acutely aware of the need for better management of these issues, and better options for reducing community toxicity in general.

But, I can't do much right now. We are already crunching, myself and my people are all sleep-deprived from 20-hour days of trying to make some of these holiday deadlines, and projects are still going awry in various ways (in fact, even since I started writing this post). I have zero resources for making new administrative tools.

I do want to address more of these issues before launching on Steam, and I'm currently targeting January to see what we can do. I have several pages of related design notes. But in the meantime, perhaps cut Whistler some slack for doing the best he can with a less-than-ideal set of tools?

And, for the love of god, stop sending us tickets every time someone mildly upsets you on the forum. Wait at least a day or two, let Whistler handle it. Someone cursing is not cause for a ticket.

If it's something like Korean gambling spammers, or some kind of explosive death-threat-scale drama, fine, feel free to report it. But not every time someone uses a curse word, ok? Whistler will see it in due course, and action will happen.

Administrative action is happening, and has been happening, all along. If you believe it hasn't (in the case of some specific "holy cow" individual), perhaps you should challenge that belief in yourself, and what real data you have to reach that conclusion.. because you're probably wrong.

But I'm not going to start shouting about every action from the rooftops, I don't think that's in our best interests with the current system.

Eventually when VO gets on Steam, GS will probably have to adhere to their rules.
All bans/unbans and account deletes are public on Steam.

No, we won't. We have our own policies, just like CCP and every other online game company. If we want to support Steam's ban system, we will, but it is not required. It's a nice tool, an additional level of banning we can do, but our account system will remain fully independent. Obviously, since we're cross-platform.