So a new year often means new years resolutions for many of us, outside of the bootleggers world they are often things like giving up smoking or loosing weight. But one which might be worth some of the community taking this year is to stop giving the staff of bootleggers such a hard time.
We at the Buzz spoke to a lot of the HDOs and moderators about this and wanted to know what they thought about this epidemic of hatred. First of all we asked each of them why they thought people decided to spew hatred in the forums. There were some interesting opinions on this subject for example Sky said that he believed that "it's probably just boredom. These people appear to not particularly enjoy the other aspects of the game, such as crews, busting ect. They tend to be people who rarely leave the forums, especially the off topic forum, and so understandably get very bored. To try and leaven the mundanity of their day they pause spewing bile at one another and instead aim at those with colourful names." However Aldarion thinks that mostly the attacks come from people who see staff members as "saying whatever BSF wants us to say. We're often referred to as people without opinion." YounV9 wanted to say that "People need to keep in mind there is a line between giving feedback and harassing though, if you have a problem with a staff member, you have the right to voice your opinion, but it needs to stay within reason." So perhaps some people just cannot see the line, while others may be, as Accusato says,playing the "class clown who attempts to disrupt a positive environment for their own amusement at the expense of others in it."
Most of the staff members we interviewed had at one point or another been the target of some kind of anger directed at them in the forums for things varying from people disagreeing about why their topic had been moved or deleted, to just generally when complaining about the speed of in game development gets out of hand. To which Accusato said that this can be understandable "players want to enjoy the game and see new features as central to their enjoyment. Delays in promised updates therefore cause frustration and sometimes anger."
So how can this be stopped? The consensus between a lot of the HDOs and Moderators was that we should ignore them in the end they will give up, perhaps replaced by new people who think that they need to spew as RatFaceRay said, colourful metaphors to express their feelings". A couple of ideas were suggested by the Mods and HDOs, ShyGuy suggested that even though it's hard to stop because everyone has the right to post whatever he/she wants (unless it's against the TOS)." An idea would be to increase the lengths of mutes. Aldarion said that "Most of the times it is based on false assumptions or wrong information and in that case I try to counter and show that" could be a way to stop people ranting about the staff, however he also said that "If people are just here to shout and scream I often just ignore them." In the case of extreme harassment YounV9 said "If the flaming gets out of hand, i.e. is just over the top or happens continuously after asking to keep it down we can mute or in extreme cases ban." RatFaceRay suggests that we should "sometimes let them get it all out and then see what the Admin want to do.Sky had an idea which would need as many people to participate as possible "I suspect the best way to put an end to it is to increase the number of active players, who enjoy all parts of the game. If we drown the trolls in a sea of activity they'll get lost amongst the hustle and bustle of the rest of us getting on with our virtual lives."
Final comments from the staff: ShyGuy wanted to say that "The staff are players who care a lot about the game, they really aren't here to ruin the game." Whilst RatFaceRay said "These few players need to grow up. The time of these attention getting troll/forum whores will be over sooner than later."
We at the Buzz wish you all a great new year, hopefully one with less trolls.
