chase

Tabby loves to read- all sorts of modern genres, that's a given, but she has an absolute fascination with REALLY OLD BOOKS- not just to read, but the wole experience- the binding, the hard leather tomes, the intricate work. Even if it's in a language that she can't read- (she'll try to learn, dammit) she still appreciates the whole book-feel, book smell, and visual experience. More mundane- she's started playing fantasy MMO's- only free accounts and leeching off her neighbor's wifi (budget constraints) . Never plays fantasy races- she's just happy to be portrayed as and accepted as a regular human being and get lost in the more mundane aspects of living a normal life. She gets a bit put off by some of the inevitable portrayls of the felinoid fantasy races on occasion, but tries not to let it ruin her night.

Tabby will tell you her family's dead, curse her father out in a way that makes it clear he's still with the living, then lament how much she misses him. Sometimes all in the same breath. Their relationship is complicated. For as long as she can remember, he was the stay-at-home dad living on a small disability check from a long-closed textile mill. That plus her mom's paycheck were barely enough to let them scrape by in the large-but-increasingly-dilapidated rural farmhouse her mom inherited. Isolated with few kids her age nearby, Tabitha's dad was her favorite playmate and she, his constant companion. They were happy. They hit a new level of poor after her mom passed away. Dad mixed booze with meds to extend the pain relief, then started selling doses he could spare just to provide for the family. As he became increasingly less sober, his friends came by less often and shared fewer hand-me-downs from their kids with him. The young pre-teen Tabby went from being taunted by schoolmates for wearing their cast-offs to being taunted for the ill-fitting, even older cast off mismatches of whatever she could piece together. The humiliation she felt at school became resentment toward her dad at home and for a good half-year before "the incident" there was barely a civil word spoken between them. Then the change and 4 years in juvie for Tabby. Her "home visits" never occurred because Dad was in lockup, then rehab. The journal entries she was required to keep were all addressed to "dad" but were clearly toward the memory of her childhood bestie, not the man that grew to inhabit that body.. Still, things seemed promising enough with his rehab and her coundseling that during her third year in placement, St. Ives arranged a reconciliation meeting. From all accounts what started with promise quickly decayed into a shouting exchange and furniture throwing before they were separated. A "student altercation" in the dorm later that day ended Tabby's chances for a nearly release. They haven't spoken since.. Some nights when Tabby's lying alone on a rooftop in Paragon City she can be heard talking to her dad as if he was there beside her. Friends of her dad say they often find him spending the night on the porch, doing the same.

There's some truth in the old adage that it's hard to let somebody love you if you don't love yourself. Tabby tends to miss the early signs of interest- writing them off as jokes or misunderstandings or just taking them far out of context- ("I mean-- it couldn't actually BE that they LIKE me that way, right? Hilarious." ) When the indicators become impossible to ignore, the nervous energy starts building up with each hint becoming hader to pretend was something else until she faces the now-obvious-to-everyone-else truth the only way she knows how- by blaming the would-be suitor: "What the hell is wrong with them?! " Of course she knows the answer- she's made the mistake of googling "catgirls" without safesearch on before (warning: don't). She just didn't expect that her new friend/confident could have been one of those FREAKS. "I mean- they seemed so NORMAL before... well, normal for someone that wears tights and taps extradimensional energy to zap bad guys wearing what seem to be broken appliances for armor... but normal where it counted, at least. "I'm usually such a good judge of character." She's not. After the initial panic abates (it doesn't) she has a measured and mature conversation about their shared feelings runs for the hills, avoiding said suitor and immersing herself in some new ill-conceived bound-to-fail potentially-self-destructive scheme to cure her current condition. After all, if she was human then someone could like her without automatically being a freak -maybe- and maybe she can forget the whole "hopefully-borderline furry" aspect of their personality. What about her own romantic interests? Well, when anyone asks about her own interests, she'll demur but with a hint of loneliness in her voice. saying she hasn't given it much thought. That might even be accurate- she's actively opposing so much of her own identity that maybe she's just not ready to face yet another aspect of it, let alone question how much of what she feels is real and how much is part of her condition. Then again, it might he that she gives it too much thought- the twisted anxiety that anyone she lets herself be romantically interested in might (gasp) express interest back and therefore be a FREAK that must be banished from her presence... and she can't have that since she likes being around them... but if she has them around and they maybe reciprocate... and she maybe... and then they.... and oh-that's SO wrong... dammit gottaFindACureFAST. Probably a little of column a, a little of column b. The issue's become harder... or easier... or just a damn lot more confusing since she discovered her fanbase's very active fanfic forum. She's been shipped with virtually every hero or heroine (or villain) that she's ever been caught on camera with and many more she's never met. Yes, 90% of them are total trash that just reinforce her belief that all catgirl-fetishists are absolute FREAKS in need of therapy, but that doesn't stop her from spending a lot of downtime sifting through them for the good stuff for "opposition research" (gotta stay one step ahead of the freaks, after all). Yes, they keep downvoting her anonymous suggestion for a story contest themed, "Tabby finds a cure and true love" but surely eventually someone will cover that topic- (...an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards...) . Sometimes it's just nice to not to feel so isolated- to imagine that something she's missing is really present- without so much freakiness (if she ignores a few paragraphs/pages/chapters/doesn't-click-past-the-title). That is, of course, until the next time she encounters those fanfic matches IRL...

I have met some people that stay 'in character' as we run missions, but the RP does tend to take a back-seat to the gameplay. The game mecahnics here are too swift to do more than act in-character in brief moments between missions- something that can be frustrating for the RP'er seeking more substance while the interludes frustrate the gamer hoping to level, but feeling slowed by the RP. It's a difficult balance to reach for the whole team of strangers- far easier when you're in a supergroup with known people and set expectations, but still a challenge to manage. I play a lot of folk still in the midst of figuring out hero-ing, but I tend to burn leveling into the late teens or 20's just so I "flesh out" the powersets a bit and really define the characters. Once there, I try to RP out and level as the character grows, but I have to get better at turning off XP. I've had a few characters concepts that no longer mesh the character's "feel" in battle when they level too far. That's one factor that affects roleplaying during battle. For some of us, the more gameplay drives the narrative, the less the character feels like yours. I may play the game on +4 x8 to make a challenge to my SR scrapper, but I envision her as more intelligent than leaping into a fray like that. I've always preferred the hero stories where it's not so much the hero's powers that let them brute-force the enemy, but a degree of cleverness, desperation, good fortune, and sometimes-very-un-super decisions that win the day. That's not going to match how the "gameplay" suggests the event pans out, and sometimes the more distance between that gameplay event and the rp, the easier it can be to handwave away the differences into a narrative that better fits your feel. I have met people in-game that really use character level and powers to define what that character should be capable of, kinda like how you'd limit yourself to a character sheet in a pen and paper game. If you're a level 10 with TO's, don't even imagine facing off against a level 50 in RP-PVP. I can see this being reasonably used to curb others' potential gode-mode behavior, but some use it to justify their own godmode as well. Many RP'ers do want to focus on roleplaying without spending hours on gameplay or Mids min-maxing BEFOREHAND to justify their concept. Just because I haven't spent as much time leveling and investinging in every +psi option in my invul tanker doesn't mean I want to be a meat puppet for your maxed out incarnate mind-controller. Ultimately, if I had a choice, I'd go with narrative over gameplay, but I do enjoy playing through the game and would always respond IC-ly if encountering it in a mission and respond favorably to invites for such encounters. I just may not be adding those events to my caracter's own "meta-story" in the long run if the way the gameplay pans out doesn't mesh with my character. I really enjoyed the balance that City of Roleplay's Community Story Arcs allowed- even if my availability didn't allow for full participation through a whole arc. While the offline forum-RP was more accessible to me, I did get to hop on to team with others in the custom AE arcs, some of the exploration-based missions, and even a community social event that all stitched togeter into a much larger narrative. I haven't seen one running recently- understandable since they obviously take a LOT of work, but I'd strongly endorse trying those when they come up again.

You are each others' "content." If you aren't trying to make good experiences for others, don't expect others to try to make good experiences for you. If you seek to antagonize others, don't be surprised when there are no others to interact with. Same rule applies to PvP'ers

That's a good position to have. The term can be ambiguous or overused, (like "mary-sue") and adopted to mean anything that's beyond your tastes in a particular direction. I have to admit I looked up urban dictionary when the question came up, as I had my own understanding based on how I'd seen it used online, but wasn't sure it was being used correctly, and you can even see there that various posters draw slightly different extremes. Someone very much into the "powerpuff girls" type of superheroing might very well draw the limit of what they see as "edgelord" differently than what someone who's a fan of... say... "Invincible." For what its worth, I wouldn't take what you describe there as "edgelord" at all, but I don't pretend to be the norm. I consider "edgelord" to be a negative player attribute, not a negative player-character attribute. I have no issues RP'ing encounters with a character that's dark and edgy and provoking to the point of dysfunction with my character, but I have little patience for a PLAYER who seems hellbent on doing the same to other players and just shields his behavior from criticism saying he's "roleplaying."

Been there. I prefer playing characters just starting out in hero'ing, but several of these are incarnate-level in-game, so folk that DO take the "level" seriously in their RP have called me out on that, expecting me to be playing a more seasoned veteran at that level. I usually reply with some callout to absurd gameplay like, "She was partying at pocket D, only level 1 and some fire tanker invited her to check out Architect Entertainment. Sounded fun, but she passed out near the door and woke with a killer hangover and 30 missed calls from a 'Mender Ramiel'. WTF, right? She tried to explain that it was all just a mistake and he just said, "I get that a lot" and then sent her off on some mission...." I'd seen so many complaints about godmodding in emote-battle and collaborative stories that when I tried my hand at it, I toned it down a bit too far maybe. I'd still have skillful characters clearly capable of going toe-to-toe with another, but I avoided any finishing moves, left clear openngs in case my counterpart was not ready for this to end, and tried to telegraph the direction I was taking things in case it was truly counter to their hopes. The fighting style Klutz-fu can get painfully absurd if you are unknowingly battling another master of klutz-fu, and it can be abused if you have a godmodder that somehow imagines "winning" an emote fight shows OOC prowess, but I still prefer it over being overpowered.

Intermittent reader here- usually when your sig reminds me to check if Kai's had any diary entries (nudge, nudge :P) Maybe it's just me, but the forum structure and my infrequent visits mean I miss when things are updated. For FBSA, I convinced myself I'd sart with just what I wanted in the character bio, but had to edit down to make it fit- kinda a non-abridged version. Then I figured I'd amend it with the types of rumors or possible hooks that players might pick up without talking to me--we rarely meet someone "blank" - hearing about them at work or social media or a friend of a friend- so I figured this might let people that found it use it to "fast forward" through typical introduction chatter to points of common interest. Then... well, yeah, a rabbit hole, but I'd never imagined updating it with constantly-unfolding character biographies like I see in VirtueVerse. My God, that is a full time job! I'm very interested in your carrd pages. Back when I was a liberty-ite that felt out of place with VirtueVerse, I'd used an old blogger site to store character profiles and the old comic guides, then when the game was down I'd go and tinker on them in a nostalgia haze, not really caring if it was seen Carrd would have been far simpler.

I see a lot of lists of character lists and supergroup listings on the forums, discords, and wiki's out there, and I do notice some overlap, but not a lot. I'm wondering why you prefer to post where you prefer, What makes one more useful than the other to you? Do you cross-post for visibility? Is one just easier or generates more response? Is there a dealbreaker for one? My mains were mostly on Liberty back in the day so I never felt part of the VirtueVerse community- only ever got an account there last year, but felt like I was intruding, in a way. I'd look at the change history and see very little new activity, so maybe this was meant to be reflection of the live game, like paragonwiki? Then I find the "Everlasting" category with over 400 charaters listed and realize I may have thought wrong. I gravitated to the unofficial Homecoming 'verse alternative FBSA when Michiyo put it up less than a year ago. It's got a decent bit of activity in the 30-day history and 240+ articles is good for an unadvertised site, but it's also far less than the one VirtueVerse category. I also like seeing the "recruiting" category (for Supergroups) and "looking for contact" category (for players) but the few folk using it does underscore whether there's enough critical mass using those features to make it sustainable. Is there a similar field in VV? ) My work schedule's made my gaming time unreliable, so I haven't made much use of offline "looking for contact" lists in forums or discords, but I know they exist and am curious in how people have used them, and what their results were. I even see people post characters to various Facebook groups. Part of this is for my own interest- I've had very little time to participate lately, and when I have a chance TO participate, I'd like to understand the community and where different parts of it connect. Part of this is my interest is as a developer on what drives people to adopt one thing over another.

No, actually, my approach and expectation was somewhat similar to yours. I joke that it's the "comic book method" -- so many of those characters had a role and identity from a very specific point in their life, and that part of their young-adulthood (usually) lasted for decades in the comics. There may be tales of them when they're older or younger, but there's often a stage of life that really *defines* them and their role, and that's where my heroes tend to stay. There's room for growth, but not much transformational change. Part of that is my alt-itis and lack of gameplay time, but I can't say I would have progressed them at a life pace that matched reality. I do like to track my encounters with other characters and subtly introduce some character growth attributed to my interactions with them. I've never specifically brought up time, but I've been effectively called out and corrected- either by sideways RP statements or directly in OOC who did not seem condescending, but just intent to get me using "proper" RP etiquette here ( "the timeline of the "official releases" established that time progressed in line with reality" has been mentioned to me more than once before I effectively relegated my favorite (and most lore-tied) characters to a Non-RP server ) . I think that if I'd not tried so hard to tie my characters into game lore events and just left with themes, they'd seem less "stuck in time" than they currently do in these encounters

Playing devil's advocate: Would people know that there was an edit? You may be on page 2 of the thread and edit it to show you're still interested. I may assume that the first page is all old stuff, so I never scroll through to notice the change. On the other hand- re-posting in the forum, while showing that you're active, would create a lot of duplication over time and make it more difficult for a browser to sift through what's there.... That's why I was wondering if some curating or a periodically archived-and-cleaned thread might make it more useful. I don't know. I've struggled as a user with some of these befroe, but never as a planner.

So, there seems to be some contention on what the problem is that we're trying to solve for here, so I'll give it a go. We're a small community spread across many timezones, often playing this game in addition to other games, so our common online time is pretty low, and our interests vary greatly. The in-game options have limitations that may work well for larger communities or a certain critical mass of participants. Yes, we can pop online, hop through common areas and look for people with the RP flag. They may be already engaged in conversation with someone else, they may be doing something other than RP, or they just might not be interested in the type of RP you're into. All these filter down the odds of a successful encounter, and our time online is limited. We have an RP and OOC global. We have a "looking for roleplay" global. These don't seem to have much traffic when I'm on and seem to be used by a VERY small set of the overall RP population. Most of the common "social RP" locations are in spaces that cater to the nightclub/partier that may not reflect the character you want to portray or the environment you'd want to be i Some of us have social anxiety challenges that makes it particularly hard to frequently reach out, only to have to deal with rejection, ignoring, or just the discovery that we're not going to fit in. A sort of offline want-ads MIGHT help with that, as it lets you reach people who weren't online when you were and establish up front what your preferences and interests are, and lets you. It broadens your pool of potential candidates, extends the time that you're visible to other people, and allows filters to common interest groups. However This cannot be "build it and they will come." If it just appears without curating and active participation by a core group of people, it will wither and die. The first-posters will find that they posted, got no response, and never EVER check back. Why would they keep trying? I think that's one reason why GraspingVileTerror tagged so many here- if there isn't a consensus that this makes sense, is wanted, and is used, it's not going to be worth the investment. Community tools, like communities, need some curating as they develop. We should have people ready to engage and build confidence in the tool. This may just split the community. if it's already being done effectively elsewhere, are we just splitting the effort? The platform is important. Different online technologies have different community thresholds for success. if you're running a chat service and I post "hello", it doesn't matter much to me if I don't get a response in minutes, but in a forum, I could come back days later to have a conversation. The same goes for other things in perhaps more subtle ways. Two forums- one with a good search and tagging capability and one with none- will require different levels of participation to make a real community. Using an official forum probably gets us access to the largest audience, but is that the biggest need? There needs to be some structure. This is particularly true of you're repurposing something like a forum, rather than making something designed for this purpose. I've browsed "seeking connections" forums before just to find out that someone that posted HAD found someone and isn't seeking that anymore. I've heard complaints that threads get too large and people back on page 6 of a 12 page thread just never get noticed. Do you re-post? Should you edit old posts? Do you suggest using one of the "like" emotes to denote it's been acknowledged and you're no longer seeking or do you edit it away. Do you plan this as a quarterly thread that gets archived? Monthly? So, the topics I see as relevant to that discussion. do we have sufficient interest in pursuing this? Is it better for us to reinforce something that's already there? Is this the best way to meet most of our expressed concerns? If we are going to do this, where do we do this and what do we use? who will help curate it into a self-sustaining community resource?

Some have mentioned the City of Roleplay's discord channel. I like DIscord for serveral thing, but channels there seemed lesss effective than a full forum. It's hard to search, things quickly flow back into the timeline never to be seen again. If you're trying to find a specific kind of connection, you want a posting method that's more browse-able, search-able, and has more of a persistence. There's also a certain critical mass needed- you need enough people SEEING it and POSTING in it and GETTING RESULTS in it that it feeds itself and encourages reuse. Different technologies have different critical masses. I'm not 100% sure the discord (or the forums here) have enough critical mass to keep it flowing without a very concerted effort by the community to shepherd it along in the early days. Personally, I've been a fan of virtueverse and our FBSA equivalent for a long time. Yes, it's mostly used for character profiles of sorts, but a little bit of tagging would make it a great community finder- looking for a supergroup? An archnemesis? A Romantic Interest? A romantic RIVAL? Looking for a random interaction, but your character has a bunch of potential 'hooks' in their story? That method gets past the problem of a post disappearing into history or in page 3 of a 400 page thread or having people find a months-old thread. Pick the category, see the results. No longer interested in finding a character's rival, remove the category. Unfortunately, the wiki has far fewer people using it than the forums, so reaching a useful critical mass and recruiting more participants would be an even bigger challenge. The wiki-editing process tends to be a love-hate system, its lack of structure can be daunting, and the anxiety of trying something new and not looking foolish can be rather high.

I've always liked this concept, but I've never seen is summed up so nicely as "The Mandela Effect is a real thing.", so I do hope you don't mind me stealing it.

Thanks, In this context, I'd met a few other players who were RP'ing freshmen at the university. They were chance encounters, but we remembered one another. In my absence, they'd both moved on to their next year, and there was interest (not pressure) to "catch up" my character story to meet them. Since I'd had absolutely no chance to play out that character since our last meet, I'd have preferred kinda retconning my character to an underclassman of theirs, but went along with it with some fast improvisation. If this is a common practice, I'd prep with a bit more forethought for the alts I've RP'd.

How do you handle time differentials between characters whose players have different schedules? Take, for example, a supergroup where some people appear 2-3 times a week, some only 2-3 times a month. I tend to take the "timey wimey wibbly-wobbly" approach of "don't think too hard about it, just nudge or keep vague any perceived difference in the progression of time to let everyones' user story flow" but I've also encountered some that tie the progression of time and seasons with the real-world, such that if you've been offline for a few weeks, you should be thinking about the experiences of that character had "while you were offline." I can see that need when an SG is going through a common story that may have advanced in your absence, but I've encountered it among other players through more general encounters with my characters after a nearly-year absence. Was curious what the general preference might be.

I've seen that topic come up as a point of contention among different groups. I'm a big fan of "creating scenes" (and experiencing them). Any MMO's a rather dead place, no matter how animated the NPC's may be, but roleplayers can bring variety and sponinaety and new experiences to a world that isn't otherwise changing much. Public local interactions add so much flavor, so I do prefer them over private chat, but know they can cause problems for others.

Honestly, that kind of edgelord interaction that I LIKE. (1st degree was criminology/prelaw with a focus on deviant psychology* before I went into the comp sci field). THAT would be an interesting take and engaging for a me as a player, even if my characters aren't taking that dark path themselves. It creates some fascinating interpersonal moments. The fatigue sets in when it it becomes clear that the PLAYER behind the character is ...maybe a bit too much of a method actor? ( *I don't necessarily play edgelords, but there's a reason why so many of my characters have been shaped by encounters in juvenile justice, really messed up home lives, or places where the justice system's "rough edges" left pretty sizable scars. Maybe I don't go full 'edge' with them because I'm hoping that there's a way back from the trauma that I've seen inflicted in those folks and I manifest that hope via RP. )

Dark and edgy by itself I wouldn't necessarily call "edgelord"- just like I wouldn't consider every strong female character a 'mary sue' (for the record, I hate that term). the names, to me, convey things taken to an (often harmful) extreme. Take a gent that was a latent telepath/empath/pain dom type. His powers were discovered after a terrorist attack that left him badly burned and scarred. He was left in a constant state of pain from his injuries and as he recovered in the hospital, he realized that he subconsciously broadcast that pain to patients nearby. It pained him to hurt others, so he worked hard trying to hold that agony back into himself (or channeled out on those deserving). He's learned that he's only partially successful- that other peoples' own empathic bond to him allows the suffering to link through, so he's put up more walls, acts more nihlistic, more unapproachable... driving people away. Slowly going mad, desperately wanting a connection with another human being, only to destroy any that comes for fear of harming them. Now, roleplaying a damaged soul like that may be an interesting challenge for some. I work with tragic fine, but not full despair. Encountering such a person would be interesting for me story-wise-- it has a twist of being a true empathic person that's behaving this way to protect others from their own bond to them, while desperately hoping for such a bond to relieve the pain he's under. It could be a welcome encounter. Roleplaying a RELATIONSHIP WITH such a character, however, could be borderline emotional abuse without a great deal of OOC coordination. if the person behind the scenes is equally edgelord, then there's no hope.

I wish to apply for your next D&D campaign and am willing to commute large distances to make that happen. 😄 My favorite part of the original Ravenloft was the tongue-in-cheek tombstones scattered throughout the cemetery, so I find such an approach very much aligned with the original developers' intent. ("here lies Admiral von [ITotallyForget]. Confused though he was, he built the greatest navy ever fielded by a landlocked country.")

"Edgelords" as a term are a relatively new term for me, and I'd just been following the definition I looked up, so I may not be fully understanding its use in the RP community. An edgelord is someone on an internet forum who deliberately talks about controversial, offensive, taboo, or nihilistic subjects in order to shock other users in an effort to appear cool, or edgy. Although dark, dark, darkity dark is certainly the dominant visual cue, I never considered it a requirement. (in fact, I challenge the magnificent character imaginators in this game to make the edgiest rainbow edgelord possible! Any correctly-played Clown Edgelord that predates this post gets my official nod of respect. Mime-edgelord: make it happen. Catgirl edgelords- come on, in the infinite number of catgirls online, statistics say they have to exist. keep them away from me. No challenge there. Costume contest for the edgiest edglordiest puns incoming.) In all seriousness, engaging an edgelord character can be a welcome contrast and to characters seeking more harmonious relationship-building but that constant "edginess for attention-grabbing" can be fatiguing to engage with for a long time. That's especially true when it's an "edgelord player controlling an edgelord character" because there's no chance for OOC relief. At least when a non-edgelorder is trying on the persona (or parodying it) they're open to input in OOC to keep the play enjoyable for everyone. A PLAYER with an edgelord personality just justifying his character's edgelordiness... that person just revels in the controversy OOC and IC. I have no time for that and quickly /ignore them into irrelevance.

As a male that plays a lot of female characters, text chat's been my experience too. As someone who also used to play with a community of deaf players, I kinda have a bias against voice from there. Early in MMO lives, deaf players felt uniquely enabled by online games' text chat, and I watched them go through a great deal of anxiety when guilds moved to TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or other early services. Many of them played up to that point without ever being "outed" as having a hearing impairment and they reveled in not needing any special treatment. The advent of online voice chat really shook many of them, and I kinda inherited that aversion by proxy. That said, I have joinedvoice chat in a few RP communities. It was... odd. Perhaps it was because many of us DID have voices that different from appearance/species in game, but we rarely spoke in-character. It tended to replace tells and OOC text (unless we were privately conspiring against another player), and if there was any guildie present in the channel but not in the game area, they could ask those people to send tells to different people if they were too busy typing dialigue to respond rapidly. It was a place to get quick answers, ("'what's the emote for x again?") not serious RP. I'm sure there are RP groups with more capable voice actors trying to speak all IC, but I (thankfully) haven't found em.

Yep. Strangely, although the club scene isn't for me at all, base building is something I love, so I'd love showing support for those people making their own nightclubs and events. When time permits (it often doesn't) I try to show just to see the production they put together and show some support. It's an incredible undertaking to host such things and while I don't fit the social setting, I'm often in awe of what the hosts accomplish.

There's a good deal of consumer protection law that makes these kinds of policies difficult to publicize without risking suit (not about the ban, but about the intentional infliction of harm by publicizing the private action. The GW2 issue you mention was possible because the player himself volunteered that they were under disciplinary action but gave a false narrative for the reason. That (false) voluntary discolsure of facts gave GW2 reasonable justification to correct the public record. Had GW2 posted what they did publicly at the start, they could have fun afoul of those protections (COULD HAVE- they may not lose such a suit, but they'd certainly have to pay lawyers to argue it). I don't play Siege, but its approach has been to use the term "ban" widely ( I'm told that the common "ban" is said to be "temporary ban" for consecutive reverse friendly fire incidents) and make every one public through the message text (not the details of the ban, just whether someone has been banned). Their argument, should anyone try to sue, is to equate the ban as integral to the core mechanic of the game, ranking, and pairing system, equitable to suspensions/penalties applied in major sports. In general, though, most businesses still do treat bans as administrative action between the business and the consumer- even if the consumer's actions affected other consumers- and don't make public the results of that interaction, so I can understand taking that policy to heart, even though I'd love for a spotlight to be put on some of that bad behavior.

Frustrating, but I do remind myself that It can be anxious for the Don Giovanni's too. I'm OOC friendly and avoid Tabby's more natural brusqueness. Getting shot down, even in character, isn't fun and can lead to some to take offense, no matter how gently you approach it, and that unexpected jolt can lead to... well... people being assholes. <Venting> Apparently "no ERP" in a catgirl's bio is just meant to be a joke. The stories of the "social activities" of feliform females extends across so many genres that it must be a universal constant. If you're at all concerned about your prospects to hook up and you see a catgirl in the room... you're now just concerned whether there will be a line. Getting turned down by a girl with critter ears and a tail isn't possible in their worldview. I've had people wonder why I bothered rolling her up if I wasn't into RP nookie. Or accuse me of baiting them on (purely by playing a catgirl?) just to humiliate them. </Venting> (inhale) (exhale) and- to be clear- that's just from a polite decline and a friendly OOC follow-up. Social anxiety can run that high. If I was being true to character- or at least her character history, that anxiety could really hit a breaking point. Strangely, I made Tabby aware of (and repulsed by) the "public perception of catgirls" in part due to my own anxiety. I couldn't bring myself to roleplay her due to the stigma attached to felinoids. A friend challenged me with, "if it bothers YOU, imagine how SHE feels." and I gave it a shot. Of course, since I shared my anxiety with my friends, I knew they'd be sure to steer clear of things I'd find uncomfortable and play nice and.... absolutely not. (I'm a terrible judge of character :P) They made a game about creating awkward situations for me/her and I'd retaliate in the dumbest way possible- by twisting it into some kind of cringeworthy rom-com failure. This only encouraged escalation- a kind of nuclear proliferation until you've reached rom-com awkwarness that even Ben Stiller would walk away from. That's all fine and dandy among friends, but with the anxiety encountered just mustering up an RP approach, it could be absolutely destructive. It's one thing to laugh at a cringeworthy rom-com moment you're watching; it's another to unexpectedly find yourself part of one. Heck, a terrible pick-up line might really REALLY deserve to be called out IC-ly, but I can't even bring myself to risk upsetting someone, no matter how much I feel Tabby would critique it. (( Besides, they're using that line on a catgirl, so how hard do they have to try, right? :"Wait. 'I'm a pony. Ride me. ' THAT's what you're going with. You flag me down all the way from redside D just to say that? Seriously? And how, exactly did you imagine that going down? How did you... no... nevermind, just... go.... ... go... see that catgirl? No, the one by the carnie. The other carnie. Closest to the carnie. Maybe try her. *watches him leave* ..... Hot damn. It worked? Seriously? Goddamn, I need to find a way out of this body. I can't even... HEY! GET A ROOM YOU TW... THREE..")) (That, and I'm rusty and jaded in my old age. It's hard to come up with new material. Everything's just a retread of a long-past gem, and you can't recapture the old magic. Kinda like rom-com's nowadays.)