Thread about harassment deleted?

[AdaJames]

One would think that discussing and bringing into the common arena the kind of se.xual harassment and threats that people face in the game would be a good thing. Instead, it was deleted without so much as a by your leave and no explanation given. Just there 1 second, gone the next. There was no objectionable material there, no one swore or cursed or used bad language. It was just people talking about their experiences being threatened.

What is R2 trying to hide? Are the bullies and menacers R2 staff?

[SkinnyPimp21]

[MemoryLane]

People can talk about their experiences in a ticket with R2 where R2 can deal with it. It is not a topic for Game Discussion.

[R2_Sanguine]

Well, guess I can comment on your frustrations. This is just my experiences dealing with similar issues and some advice for you regarding your other thread that spawned this.

As our FAQs on behavioral violations state, flaming or feeding into the behavior of people that do this kind of stuff doesn't get you anywhere. I play games in my free time and see this so often, as we all do, that people end up getting numb to it. We SHOULD NOT get numb to it at all, but flaming and complaining just doesn't solve the problem just as us ignoring it doesn't. If you read all of the FAQs we have, we note how serious we take issues like this. But that also means that your reactions need to be logical, appropriate, and most importantly CALM.

If someone feeds into bad behavior, we take that just as serious as someone behaving badly. How can we absolve players of gilt or responsibility when they know the other player will have their fire fueled by encouragement or firing back? We can't. But this also brings up another point people make: "R2 doesn't do anything about this happening in-game"

Fair point. However we don't have a team of people sitting behind computers checking chat logs waiting to ban people. I think that is reasonable and would be considering witch hunting if we had that. Which brings us to the point of why your thread was deleted: you need to report this stuff to us. Do we ban people all the time? Nope. Because in the end we don't want to drive players away and we want to give them a chance to correct their behavior. So, we review how bad it is, how often it happens, their server reputation, how rude they are when contacting Customer Service, etc. We take a lot of factors into play here.

Not banning people is not a sign of not doing something. But so many times I see someone complain about bad behavior, give us SS of incomplete details of the situation, only stating one side of the argument, on and on. But when we dig deeper, we find that both sides are usually at fault. WE can't tell who started it, and honestly that's not important. We want to help out our players, make a safe game environment, but when someone waits 2 months to report it and has already fueled the fire, what more can we do? Ban one side but not the other just because they made a report?

We get that we have some rude people on our website. I deal with this constantly and I'm happy to do so. But this stuff needs to be handled calmly, not feeding the fire, not posting screenshots on the forums for the sole purpose of flaming or complaining, and needs to represent the entire story with full details. So my advise to you is to read our FAQs to understand our policies, be the bigger person in-game, and let us handle them. Yes we may be slow to ban them if that's what you want to come out of this, but we need to know that the person truly deserves it and won't change before we can make that step. Because that's the same courtesy we will afford to you if the shoe is on the other foot (hypothetically).