Stricter Anti-trolling policy?

Please hear me out on this. I know a lot of staff on here and on the game itself consider me something of a nuisance, but this is an important topic I feel needs to be addressed.

There are a lot of new(er) players who are often mercilessly targeted for trolling because of numerous reasons. A few are listed below.

  1. Lack of in-game experience/knowledge
  2. Apparent lack of skill/luck (they frequently die in dungeons, often due to lack of preparation or a sudden RNG “difficulty spike”)
  3. They enjoy roleplay (a common pastime for younger players, especially tweens and young teenagers), much to the annoyance of some other players. Myself, I don’t mind it so much. But, I don’t usually engage in it (I feel it takes time away from more pressing matters, such as leveling my pokemon up, completing missions, or gaining needed money).

This apparently widespread blatant disregard for others’ emotional wellbeing has to be stopped somehow.

I will admit, I’ve engaged in said trolling, and am not proud of it. In fact, it led to me being muted. I don’t want other players falling into the same trap I did, so some sort of intervention has to occur on their behalf, as otherwise, they’ll simply continue on their downward spiral.

I definitely agree with this, but it’s a bit hard to enforce especially if it’s not apparent on global. The staff only usually get notified with a filter for swearing or self reporting, but there are no other ways to prevent trolling if certain words aren’t triggered. The best thing I can think of so far is that offenders that are caught will receive harsher punishments. It’s also difficult to define “trolling” as well because everyone’s definition of trolling can be seen in different ways ;o;

I agree with you on that, MagicWiz. The exact definition of “trolling” is very difficult to ascertain, as something someone defines as “trolling” may not bother another person in the slightest.

However, there are some general guidelines that I feel should be followed:

  1. Do not insult someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
  2. Do not insult someone’s religious or political beliefs.
  3. Do not insult someone’s disability, whether physical, mental or psychological.
  4. Do not insult someone’s monetary or employment status (if applicable).
  5. Respect others’ opinions on any subject broached, even if they differ greatly from yours.
  6. And finally, please try to keep the language “Disney”.

I hope that covers everything worth covering.

Too bad it’s impossible to enforce those rules, 24/7. However, if everyone DID abide by those guidelines I mentioned above, PMU would be a very enjoyable experience.

While I’m not saying it’s entirely impossible to enforce these rules, it’s much easier said than done. Most trolls I’ve seen are surprisingly careful about getting themselves in trouble by avoiding the harassment of other players. Sure, they’ll give someone else a poke now and then, but as far as I’ve seen, it doesn’t normally end up in flames. I think that the easiest way to avoid trolls is to ignore them, since all they want is a reaction. If you don’t give them what they want, they get bored of you and move on.

There’s a lot of issues with stopping trolling.

Firstly - how is it noticed?

There’s the things MagicWiz describes for one thing, unless it sets off a keyword no staff are notifed in game.

But if you have a player report (which yes, is already here) then proof must be provided so you can’t report someone as a troll yourself, and even then proof must still be taken with a grain of salt.

If you want to report someone and didn’t happen to get screenshots and no staff were there at the time? Too bad nothing can be done…

This can be somewhat helped if people…

  1. know where they can report people, preferbaly in private (i know there’s a forum thread but being public it’s…not preferable. seeing who reported you just enocurages more trolling, imo.).
  2. know “how” to report people - know that they need screenshot proof. (i know pmu doesn’t keep chat logs, but imo, i think there should be a command like /report or whatever, that creates a file that records all of your recent chat history so this can also be provided as proof)

Secondly, there is determining trolling.

The guidelines given in the previous post, i think that most people would agree with nearly all of them.

But there are however some grey areas when it comes to it too…

There’s a TONNE of grey areas when it comes to “bad” language, especially as language cases tend to rely on context to determine whether it was trolling.

E.g. saying a bad word on a map with only two people who’re okay with it
versus saying a bad word on a map with 20 people and maybe 3 find that word offensive and you don’t even know those 3 people and it just happened to slip out and there was no malcious intent
versus saying the word poop in the phrase “my dog pooped all over the house :/”
versus saying the word poop because you are calling someone poop jokingly and all who see this are comfortable and understand and are not offended by the joke
versus saying poop because you are calling someone poop to troll them
versus a typo which happened to be a bad word (yes, it can happen, and i’d explain myself if I wasn’t wary about saying some words.)
…etc etc etc

There’s some words that all of yall reading this can probably think of that are argued constantly whether they’re offensive or not, even.

A LOT of language stuff needs to consider how many people were witness to a bad word, how many people were offended/did not like use of the word, whether the person who said the word intended to be malcious or not…and that’s just too hard to do. It takes time and asking questions to determine the exact circumstance…which makes it tough to deliver proper punishment (especially as not punishing, because of e.g. it was unintentional, sometimes can make people think it’s okay to say a bad word when in reality it is not, making them more likely to say the bad word again.)

And thirdly, there’s punishment.

On language warnings, there are some cases when i basically go “what did i get warned for?!” and i’ve received like, 3 warnings in my entire life for language (the same word in all 3 cases, funnily enough), all 3 of which were in dungeon run local chats (ie a chat only up to 4 people aside staff can read) with close friends who i know are chill with my language. That’s not neccesarily trolling, and trust me I understand why I (and others) need to be warned in these situations, but, I don’t think in that case I should recieve a punishment as harsh as someone who is e.g swearing just to cause trouble. Language warnings can be very individual, and require looking at the specifc context to determine whether it’s trolling (done with malcious intent) or not, and if it is trolling, it needs a harsher punishment yes…But that can take a lot of time to get chat logs together, and understand who was around and if anyone was offended/annoyed etc. as i’ve already said.

There’s also a lot of debate on whether things like perma-mutes should be used at all, or even being completely kicked from the game, how many chances should one person receive before harsh punishment, how many chances should they get to be free of harsh punishments, and are even short lived mutes/jails harsh enough?

Repeat offenders need hasher punishments, i think. But hey, some repeat offenders eventually go “i was a bad person to yall im sorry i hope you can give me another chance and i promise i wont troll”. Look, i know sometimes that’s gonna be a complete lie…but sometimes it isn’t a complete lie, and a person genuinely wants to make a good return and be nice. What then if they were perma-muted for example? They can make a case to get free but this is tough to do, and punishments must be flexible enough to allow that while also being harsh on the actual terrible people…that is very tough, if not impossible, to do.

And i’m putting this in a seperate section because i think it deserves it: drama and bullying.

Drama can sometimes turn into “trolling”/and or bullying…but if it’s say…between just 3 peolple and the whole community isnt affected because the arguements are in private, what should happen then?
If it goes onto bullying, something NEEDS to happen…but what can be done? With no /ignore feature, and it being pretty unfair to mute someone because of bullying against one person (imo), because while yes, a person is uncivil to a specific player, they should still be able to talk to the rest of the community who they may be nice to. What should the staff do in that situation? (im partial to an ignore feature perhaps staff set personally, but theres many threads on this board about how ignore features should or shouldn’t be so i guess find those threads if people wanna open that one up)

What if drama turns into a global chat flame war making people want to not play the game because global flame war is annoying to them? Does that deserve punishment, even if the drama was short-lived and does not turn into bullying? (i personally think yes ;p but i understand that to be unfair, because it didn’t turn into bullying so the punishment shouldn’t be too harsh, but i still think a punishment needs to be there)

i agree with these guildlines, but here are my own two cents:

1, 2, and 5 (maybe 3 at times) are very difficult to uphold due to what certain people view as ‘insults’, as arianda pointed out. from what i’ve seen, fights involving ‘trolls’ usually break out like this -

-a sensitive subject is mentioned, maybe casually insulted by someone, causing someone else to react
-people dont agree with one of the sides concerning the subject, and people on that side are ridiculed
-the people who are being ridiculed become angry
-others see this reaction and try to draw out more similar reactions

i agree there needs to be stricter punishments for those who are caught, and not necessarily stricter rules as a whole. more importantly than creating a stricter anti-trolling policy (which by nature is hard to define), we need stricter moderation/more staff presence (not saying the staff are at fault here) to stop these fights/‘trolls’ before they get too out of hand, so that punishments don’t need to be terribly severe. players usually stop when staff tell them to cut it out anyways.

Food for thought: Hard enforcements (EX: mutes) are not the only way to discourage trolling/altercations. You don’t have to punish a person to get them to stop. Asking politely works wonders. So does comedically derailing the entire chat, which lets people cool down so everyone can re-approach the issue a few minutes later with calmer heads.

However, these are skills that can’t be listed on a rule sheet, only shown/taught by example. Very simple once you get the hang of it though.

Once you let go of “who started it” by simply expecting both parties to react civilly no matter what…and have staff clearly expect players to leave situations that devolved into insults for staff only via reports, a lot of those “grey” situations disappear too.