[visage]

Originally Posted by Uthgaard [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I suppose that at this point I can confess that the tactless scaremonger is just an act. There's actually a lot of thought behind controlling the psychology of the player base, but it's mostly ineffective without any support from the upper management.

Playing the bad guy that everyone is afraid of is an important role when there's an avenue of recourse for the legitimate complaints. But that breaks down when the avenue of recourse gets abused and manipulated by people who know what to say and how to leverage it (more credibility from being known irl, posting negative propaganda on some offsite forum).

If it had been up to me, on the surface you would have seen flat out bans. No questions about it. But realistically, there are always extenuating circumstances, and anyone who has dealt with me knows that the biggest factor with me in determining the outcome of a ban is your attitude, and that isn't without merit. A person's attitude has shown to inversely proportional to the number of rules they're breaking.

So behind the scenes there would have been a composite of attitude + truthfulness + severity, determining the punishment or absolution individually. Basically, exactly as bans have always been handled by me. It's incredibly effective social selection. The greatest threats to the server expose themselves quickly by threatening to harm it, and can be removed from the server permanently. The people with disregard for the server and its policies usually have a lie that's easy to spot in a sycophantic or indifferent post. The people who failed in some less severe fashion but were honest, cooperative, and polite I have no problem extending lenience to, and have never regretted it when I've made that decision.

So there is a little bit of the thought process that goes behind the persona. There is a process and a psychology to it, and it's proven itself to be effective in more places than just here on p99. But, like I said, it's ineffective at this point because people know how to socially engineer right around it.

I loled so hard. It's fuckin sad you had to explain the elicit obvious to the average moron. The funny thing is the morons will still have trouble understanding no matter what you say.