TempBan for Players Who Sign Up and Refuse To Play

[Kagami]

If a mod removed a player for being flagrantly unhelpful, even if by the request of the players, I would consider it evidence that the player is town.

I agree with FG on this one.

EDIT: I could see an argument for modkilling them outright if they're town, but that also has undesirable consequences.

[Kagami]

oh yeah gaiden

I forgot about him... As usual

Gaiden is one of the not-so-many players whose name in the playerlist makes me more likely to /in.

[Kagami]

I honestly don't see how I haven't been WotC'd out of a game yet.

Maybe crowds are wiser than you might think~

[Kagami]

My opinion is that this problem is rare enough that a special solution isn't really necessary.

[Kagami]

Except that the action that is proposed to be banned is a valid strategy both for scum and potentially for strong town PRs.

The play described is certainly suboptimal in most cases, but that alone doesn't make it any more ban-worthy than, say, faking guilties as town or self-hammering as scum. Furthermore, immediate enforcement is likely alignment indicative.

If the skittles find this kind of behavior sufficiently prevalent and repugnant, I would think the best solution is to have a "problem scummer" forum in which mods can posit specific people as flakes/trolls/whatever together with links to the offensive behavior. Other mods could use the forum to more effectively WotM the problem players.

[Kagami]

I get pretty involved in my games, and could easily fail at #2.

[Kagami]

My opinion remains that the problem as described is exceptionally rare, to the extent that WotC seems like a fine solution.

If the problem statement is extended to low content posters, as some people have brought up, there already exist in-game mechanisms of handling them.

[Kagami]

There are a great many degenerate behaviors that hurt the sanctity of games far more than the uber-lurker.

In a perfect world the fix is to kill meta, which is the root of pretty much all intentionally anti-town behavior. Since we can't do that, we have to abide by certain degenerate playstyles.

I suppose another viable method would be for something like the BaM movement to re-emerge, with even stricter play erquirements (probably requiring a player whitelist instead of blacklist)