In post 258, TheButtonmen wrote:like how do you really think youd react to a page or three of us just fucking laying into your inability to play the game and talking about how to best put you on tilt and keep you there to keep you from scumhunting effectively
Welcome to my life?
It already happens in public.
If a player is shitty, then it's not something that's going to exist behind closed doors (like honestly do you think I don't know how people treat me just because a PT isn't released?)--they'll be known to be shitty in public, too. They'll have people noting it constantly reminding them at every step of the way. What's one more location where it happens?
If you say something which crosses the line, that shouldn't have been said in the first place.
If you say something harsh (this player is shitty, etc.), that's something that the player is likely to already know anyway.
If they don't know you hold that stance and when they read that, their reaction is on them--not on you. They either own up to it and try to improve or they don't own up to it. If they don't own up to it, then you wash your hands of responsibility.
If they think a line has been crossed, then they report it to a moderator--if they fail to do this, if instead of reporting it to a moderator they harass you, then you're in a position where YOU get to report THEM for their harassment.
It's really that simple. Content was either appropriate, or inappropriate. If it was inappropriate, the proper channel to communicate this is through a moderator. If a user decides to harass a player for their content, then that harassment is always inappropriate and thus something that can be communicated to a moderator.
We have the report function for a reason. We have moderators for a reason. They are there specifically for instances like this: to moderate by the definition of that word, be an arbiter, a neutral unbiased third party to resolve the conflict. And moderators have generally laid out the guidelines here pretty well:
It's not okay to call a person a sack of shit. However, you are well within your rights (and it's even expected!) to call that person's PLAY a sack of shit. The number of people who don't seem to understand this simple distinction is mind-boggling. A player in a mafia PT is doing the latter: voicing their opinion on what a player's play is like. They are not doing the former, voicing their opinion on what a person is like. If they did, they crossed the line and that content should be reported.
The guidelines for which are which are also reasonably clear. Perhaps not as clear as they could be, but reasonably clear as well--we don't use 'retarded' even to refer to play, for instance. These rules aren't hard to understand and they aren't hard to follow. 99% of scum players follow these rules. At least 75% of mafiascum users understand these rules.
do you really want to read that so badly
As a matter of fact, yes I do. A mafia PT is a part of the game--so when a game concludes, it will be released because it was a part of that game. It is specific to that game. It is not something which will ever be reused. It is something which was a tool for that game and that game alone. Seeing how the scum were thinking is giving a huge piece of the narrative of the game. I am still at my heart a storyteller...and if you don't have a clue what a third of the characters in your story were doing behind closed doors, you lose the immersion factor. They enrich the game experience, enhancing the story.
If a player doesn't like what's said in the PT, tough. They report it to a moderator (if they feel it crossed a line), or they grow a thick skin, or they avoid the player who said those things to them. If a player harasses the person who said those things, the person being harassed is within their rights to report the player harassing them.
I have zero sympathy for whiners. A game is a game. A single game. What was said in the game stays to that game as far as I'm concerned. It applied to that game. The scum player deemed a person to be a shitty player for that specific game. Or maybe the scum player predicted that a person would be a shitty player for that specific game. (Fuck I do that all the time via my psychological profiling.) It can be harsh, but it is their opinion off of past and present data, relevant to the current game. The scum posting those things are aware of this. They are aware that what they say is relevant to the current game. So the player reading it later should also have that awareness--and if they don't, that's their issue. Not the issue of the scum player.