Reventus Koth wrote:Glen-Rhodes wrote:Regions suffer the same issues as any other defined community, including have in- and out-groups, fighting, and sometimes devolving into terribleness. That's kind of my point. The reason Gameplay as a whole has become this bad is because it's now a single community, rather than a forum that's utilized by a bunch of disparate regions and R/D groups to act out the game. But Gameplay as a community is leaderless and anarchic, at least in the sense that there isn't a forum administration or a court or a cabinet that can kick people out. But the reason Gameplay became a single community is because of IRC and then Discord, and Discord certainly does have administrators.
When regions find their community is growing toxic, they get together and kick the problematic ones out, and don't let them back in. (Whether the punished players find that fair is immaterial, and there has been and always will be ongoing fights about who should be kicked out. So whatever.) That didn't used to be possible in Gameplay, because there wasn't a single Gameplay. But now there is, except the community still behaves as if there isn't and everything is still anarchy. There's definitely a higher level of responsibility that the community leaders can take, even if it's not possible to permanently exile someone from the whole Gameplay community, unless they get DOS'd by mods.
You clearly have an axe to grind about the NSGP Discord, and apparently with me, but you're being oddly evasive about the specifics. Would you prefer that I instruct my admin team to treat Gameplay as if it was a region, and cut out the "toxic elements" by our subjective opinion? Because I imagine that that would do more harm than good, on a platform that I actually agree is already suboptimal. Fuck, you think I like the fact that the NSGP Discord server exists at all? If I shut it down today, it would pop up tomorrow under new leadership that has a chance of being worse off than it is now, because it's an established institution at this point and people in this game naturally try to fill power vacuums, most often with themselves.
If you would like to have a civil conversation about how I run my server, you can absolutely feel free to do so there. However, I suspect from the way you're posturing that you only wish to target me and my team and vaguely imply that we foster toxicity. Figure out which avenue you're taking and stick to it.
I'm not sure what part of my posts haven't been civil, but I think it's certainly possible to have a calm discussion about all this. I'm not scoring any political points here-- I'd be better off keeping my mouth shut, and I don't exactly have anybody to score points for about this issue. I had a chat about this on Discord, and I'm just going to post that to expand on what I said above:
Yeah I know it’s hard. Because of what I said— people don’t think GP is a single community when it actually is. So there’s a lot of belief that it can’t or shouldn’t be moderated like one.
The hard truth is that if we’re going to have a “Gameplay community” then we have to actually treat it as such, instead of thinking that something like the GP Discord is just a venue and not a community in itself.
Like there are people more active in GP then they are in their actual regions. So GP is basically like a region itself.
Koth thinks I’m trying to score political points (somehow? I don’t know how). But if his preferred way of moderating a community is to be more hands off than he would be in, say, Osiris then that’s the community that we’ll get. And it’s the one we have. He doesn’t have to take on the mantle of leadership, but he did. I certainly wouldn’t want it. But if the GP community continues on doing things the same way, then we’re just going to keep having the same fruitless discussions about toxicity.
I wasn’t singling him out. He could be literally anybody. The point of my posts is that GP = a community like a region. GP has its own natives at this point. And if we blame the leadership of TNP or TEP or Osiris or TSP when their communities go downhill, then the leadership of the GP community has some responsibility as well.
And about the difficulties of what I'm suggesting:
I mean, I get where they're coming from. Because if the GP admins do start exercising power, they'll basically get to decide who does and doesn't get to be part of the GP community (given that the server is like 90% of the definition of it at this point). And the admins are unelected and unaccountable, and nobody ever signed on to let them exercise that power when they implicitly agreed to let them be the leaders.