Toxic Players

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Kinaed
Posts: 1984
Joined: Wed Jan 05, 2011 8:54 pm
Discord Handle: ParaVox3#7579

Sat May 28, 2016 8:24 pm

There's been a recent trend regarding people talking "toxic players" ruining the game. This seriously concerned staff, so we had a meeting to discuss "What is a Toxic Player? Do we have them, how do we identify them, and what is our approach?" After a long debate...

Staff Stance on "Toxic Players"

We do not believe such a thing exists as a "toxic player". Rather, we believe certain behaviors are toxic for the environment, and that all players are capable or inclined to indulge in them upon occasion. This can be because of their viewpoint, because they're upset about something, or because they're feeling defensive about something. However, it is always a choice whether or not players are going to indulge in toxic behavior, so we should all self-monitor our status.

Secondly, staff do not believe that occasional toxic behaviors are a problem or about how "good" or "bad" a player is. The problem is when 1) a toxic behavior is actually a policy issue, 2) when the level of toxicity in the environment exceeds comfortable thresholds for the pbase at large, or 3) when a game event is divisive enough to the pbase on the whole that many people conflict and a lot of people engage in the behaviors at once.

Finally, we do not believe that staff need to be monitoring players for toxic behaviors barring those that are clearly policy concerns. We believe this will set us up to be biased against players, and want to provide the same service to players regardless of their histories.

Identified Toxic Behaviors
- Approaching disagreements and conflict with a blame focus
- Inability to forgive or let go of disagreements when a decision has been made
- Taking one's conflicts/disagreements with others to the court of public opinion rather than resolving them directly
- Casually disregarding others in the community
- Using inappropriate channels to battle out one's idealology
- Labeling or characterizing other people (including calling people toxic)
- OOCly pressuring or manipulating others (metagaming)
- OOCly talking about the character of other people or making accusations against them in a forum they cannot respond to (blackballing)
- OOCly targeting players with unnecessary policy cases (blackballing)

How Staff Approach Toxic Behavior

This is circumstantial, but generally we have agreed:
- In times of crisis, such as when a publicly open, hugely divisive event occurs, staff will remind people "Things are starting to sound a bit toxic, let's please check our communications to focus on solutions and avoid accusations/blame."
- If individuals are in conflict, staff will remind players to solve their disagreements with other players directly or seek staff mediation rather than going to their friends.
- If an individual seems to have a lot of this behavior as a default state, staff will discuss the matter privately with them and attempt to encourage a change.

We believe the current bout of toxicity is due to a recent, pbase-wide divisive event. This event brought out natural conflicts that arise of players expressing their ideology in disagreemnt with one another. We believe this will die down, provided people don't make long term enemies of one another due to their approach in expressing and handling disagreement.

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