Something I Hadn't Heard Before!

[*Artifice]

I appreciate the sentiment. However, it doesn't change the experience that I have had, and that I felt that way at all was brought up in response to that others had felt that way...

... So...

I mean... That might be part of why some people feel the community is hostile? It's only my personal experience that I've shared.

Also in response to the maturity topic specifically; maturity is dealing with these issues in a responsible way, not burying your head in the sand because people really want to make inappropriate comments.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Well discord is a fairly new addition to SCoD and it became popular in a rapid pace, faster than the rules enforcement did really, I'd say it's a gradual process of finding the balance of teaching people to behave and removing those who can't. And I don't think people want to make inappropriate comments or offend others, sure there are some of those and they usually don't last long in any medium. More often it's a case of poor elaboration, hasty responses or untactful jests that are taken more seriously than they were ever intended.

[*Allatum]

I appreciate the sentiment. However, it doesn't change the experience that I have had, and that I felt that way at all was brought up in response to that others had felt that way...

... So...

I mean... That might be part of why some people feel the community is hostile? It's only my personal experience that I've shared.

Also in response to the maturity topic specifically; maturity is dealing with these issues in a responsible way, not burying your head in the sand because people really want to make inappropriate comments.

Some discord moderators themselves have been complicit and active in these inappropriate comments and the like.

[*Artifice]

For what it's worth, yes, in my experience that is the case. That's part of why I've never really tried to challenge it. It seemed pointless.

[*Red the Rogue]

For what it's worth, as one of the Discord mods, please let me know about any sort of questionable behavior going on. It's something I think we need to talk about in the way of etiquette so we can have the chat cleaned up. There's things that get posted there that even I don't like, and for those that are on there, it really helps informing us about these problems. Plus, like any other human being there, we do need to know if we're being too lenient or harsh about the content posted there.

It's doing better I think, but we still need improvement there. If we're to do this, the conversations need to happen. I won't bite, I swear!

[*Grendel]

Speaking as one of the frequent participators on the Discord and almost certainly one of the rabble-rousers responsible for a lot of foul language, my interpretation of the Discord is that it tends towards a very open interpretation of free speech; so long as you aren't needlessly vitriolic or directly offensive towards a specific person or subset of people, a lot of stuff tends to slide by. If someone does take offense to what's been said, they tend to say so, apologies are made and the chat moves on. Very rarely is it necessary for a moderator to step in on a discussion and to date there have been only a handful of bans handed down to repeat trouble-makers or extremely offensive people with unrepentant attitudes.

That being said, we can't help what other people interpret the chat, and as a whole, the server, as. The server and all the products related to that are ultimately the child of the community and if the community speaks and conducts itself in a certain manner, then likeminded people will inevitably tune to that and collaborate. Those that find it runs against their grain will likewise avoid participating in the various topics discussed or avoid the Discord entirely.

From what little my opinion is worth, it's not reasonable to try and convince some 20+ people to entirely change the way they casually talk, nor should we. Barring extremely divergent opinions such as hate speech and personal attacks, it's not really all that constructive to surpress the community in such a way that drives them underground and alienates them. I've seen it before countless times; official chatrooms dedicated to servers that start aggressively policing their participants inevitably either stop engaging at minimum, or worse will form their own chatrooms with an ideal of being much less moderated than the official versions.

Granted it's not a universal truth, but I tend to think that if people don't like what we're putting forth and it constitutes a significant amount of what we are as a community and a server, I don't feel particularly inclined to radically change to satisfy them. Selfish, perhaps, but there's plenty of other communities out there that are a better match perhaps for them; part of what keeps things ticking over is the diversity allowed and different viewpoints presented.

Going back to the core issue of perceived negativity; I'm not seeing it personally, on-server or off. There are individual cases of discontented players to some degree, but that's always going to happen. There's nothing close to the degree of hostility and aggression as seen on other servers that I've played in the past; all things considered SCOD seems fairly well adjusted with an emphasis on player liberty and freedom. Still worth examining once in a while, but nowhere near the boogeyman it's made out to be.

[*rapsam2003]

I'm all for a character being an ***, hell I love a bit of conflict, but come on people ride it out.  If you don't want conflict, then don't have your character be an ass.  And if your character is an ass, deal with the consequences of that.  It's just getting old for me, that's all.

Someone attacks someone, Del goes after them as she should, and they instantly stop playing the character, me as the player gets labeled as not liking the player of whatever character did something dumb or wrong, and now "I won't play with them" gets trickled back.

Honestly, I think this is a huge problem on the server, the idea that we all need to tiptoe around and not try to cause any sort of offense ICly or any sort of IC conflict. Some of the best plots I participated in on servers throughout the years involved IC conflict. The staff needs to stop catering to ideas that conflict and CvC is a bad thing, imho. It's like the server, despite being set in a gritty, brutal, harsh multiverse - does everything it can to avoid IC conflict...

[*Mr_Otyugh]

It's not like conflict is prohibited, although mindless PvP mongering will find itself very quickly unwelcome as some people in the past have found out. Conflict has some inherent problems that generally just makes it not work out particularly well. If you are the cause of troublemaking, you are often in danger of isolating yourself from the rest of the playerbase whom desires to disassociate from you, in order to not face the same. Then there's the whole issue of law/do-gooders, practically they can actively participate in a conflict without any real risk involved, leaving a feeling of unfairness loom in the air which tends to make matters OOC. Then there's the simple issue that even after the conflict has occurred and maybe it has managed to successfully go under the radar, technically the investigation never ends, unless player interest fades, meaning that it can come back to haunt participants several months later easily.

I don't think most are all that well prepared to face those, according to several attempts with empirical evidences in the past, and all of those remains as unsolved issues.

From what I have been able to see, the biggest issue tends to be scopes and goals that make the conflicts already likely to fail from the start. There's no small and neutral targets that don't bear as high consequences, but which could invoke the feeling of conflict. Things like NPC organizations, real estate and political figures. Give them artificially inflated value and they can become sort of "battlegrounds" if they are presented as living entities of Sigil.

[*MimiFearthegn]

If you detect the distant wailing of staff at the suggestion of player conflict, its because there's a 95% chance that we're about to receive complaints. Its not that we actually hate player conflict. It would be really nice to be able to have player conflict. But I've only seen it "work out" once without massive drama.

[*Vehk]

Hello, just putting in my two cents.

There has been a conflict between my character and a certain demon PC lately that has drawn together two big alliances and had several battles. Everyone on both sides has handled it well and are having fun. I am not sure why it fails in other cases, but this sort of thing fuels RP and plotting as nothing else in my opinion.