What Better way to get their point across to a good portion of the very public community. Who Says the gm was trigger happy?
Maybe this entire situation is just a publicity stunt designed by both parties.
We can Speculate to the ends of the earth. Stratics did their thing with advertising...why?
Advanced warning from ea for what was about to occur?
After all is said and done will you advertise in game and risk a banning?
If no, then the Mass Hysteria was very effective.
spoken like a true follower...
i suppose we can tell the children on the streets of colombia that they better not beg for food or money because the soldiers will take them to the mountains and shoot them... maybe use one as an example...
oh, but wait. what if the children don't KNOW that begging for food is against the law or didn't realize that simply asking for a cracker was considered "begging". like, maybe someone on some website just sold advertizing space to some guy in order to fund their site and that guy put up something against the rules? with nobody being the wiser?
who knows? i don't know! if anybody knows, they aren't saying! it's the unknown that is bothering most people in all this.
all i'm saying is there's blatant intent to harm others and then there's an honest mistake.
if you shout "fire" in a crowded building and somebody gets trampled in the rush to escape, you are responsible. however, if you tell somebody that a friend of yours did that and nobody gets hurt as a result of your comment, no harm, no foul.
there are just laws and unjust laws. then, for the just laws, there is just punishment and unjust punishment. (naturally for the unjust laws, all punishment is unjust). maybe the laws put out by EA are just... maybe they aren't... but it is certainly unjust to leave us all in the dark and confused about exactly what transpired in a situation where people are banned.
maybe it's a just law to not have ads that link to questionable sites... but maybe somebody could get a warning first... i dunno, like, "excuse me, did you know that your website breaks our rules?" "oh, no! i didn't know that! i will refrain from giving it out until the situation is taken care of."
simple... fixed...
we talk alot about the UO community. community this and community that and we and us and bla bla bla. but it's not a community. if it were, there would be transparency in these situations. then we could all say indefinitely, "yes, EA did the right thing". without that, we can only assume, as is usually the case and is enforced by perpetually burning buildings all over the place, that someone in a position of power has an agenda that is not in the best interests of the average player.
i don't know what happened here. what i do know is that silence is unsettling and it should be... and it is likely the result of one of two mindsets: 1) we are the power and don't have to justify ourselves, or 2) what we did was probably wrong and now we have to sit it out until they all forget it happened.
either mindset it simply wrong.
and people keep disappearing all over the place. like something out of an alien abduction movie... and that's what the devs and GM's have become to us. aliens. they aren't like us anymore. they are some superior race that can come and take any one of us at any moment and never give a good reason. maybe they have a good reason, but they never give it.
therein lies the problem. these courses of action distance the trust relationship between us and them. whether their action is in our best interests or not makes little difference. perception is reality and they don't care to improve the way they are perceived.
but do i care? no. i'm still in the game. most of the people i know are still in the game... but i have to wonder... will i someday be banned for something that i did not intend for harm? what a slippery slope they have been sliding down - hope they enjoy the ride. i know i am.
and so it goes. say hello to your new leader, same as the old leader and SSDD.
end.
