Smorgasboarding: Pros and Cons

A few of the previous posts demonstrate my point that the term "bullying" is now being thrown around so much that it is meaningless. Bullying is something that happens to real people in real life. Bullying cannot happen to imaginary characters in a fantasy game. If anyone take things that happen in a game like this seriously then I strongly suggest that they seek help from a mental health professional.

ajqtrz wrote: But really what we are experiencing here is not about the game, but about whether one has the right to use force to make another person shut up.

The use of force? Are you for real? Somebody stole a few pixels from you in a video game, and you are equating that to real life assault and cyber-bullying? Loosen the grip, buddy. This is ultimately just a game.

ajqtrz wrote: The more we allow players to attack smaller players for what those smaller players say (within reason of course)...

See, there's your problem. You've gone way over the line of what's reasonable. If you had calmly made a sensible case, people might support your expectation of safety. But you've spent the last week trash talking bitterly about this video game, and now suddenly you're shocked that somebody stepped up?

Are you really proposing that you should get to trash talk however you like, and nobody responds within the confines of the video game? That's just silly. An in-game action is far more reasonable than a lot of your trash talking.

Also, let's not ignore the spectacular irony of your complaints. I was recently hit by thieves, and I tracked them right back to the sender. Unlike you, I have screen captures and time stamps that demonstrate airtight proof. I chose not to complain or retaliate because the attacking alliance is considerably larger than eCrow and has some big, aggressive players. eCrow has been hit with other thief attacks in that region, many correlated to jumps in that same particular player's diplo score. So before you resume banging the drum about bullying, maybe you'd like to address your raging hypocrisy over the fact that your own allies have been quietly attacking a peaceful alliance half their size.

I am not complaining, by the way. Thief attacks are a minor annoyance. It really wasn't worth a strategic response. But I have zero inclination to sit here and listen to you label thief attacks as bullying, when it's a tool that your own allies have recently used against eCrow. Or do you intend to claim that such actions are only harassment when done against you, and not by you?

I struggle to comprehend the mental gymnastics required that would allow anyone to think that this is an issue worth talking about.

Veneke wrote: I struggle to comprehend the mental gymnastics required that would allow anyone to think that this is an issue worth talking about. There's a perfectly good topic of debate that should have been going on in the other thread regarding land claims and what they mean for Illyriad, and specifically the Broken Lands. Instead, some of the folk who have had a knee-jerk reaction to land claims have decided that what we actually should be discussing is the precise meaning and use of the word bullying, and how we can mould and adjust it to cover something which is quite obviously not bullying. Even more spectacularly, this debate really seems to have kicked off after Rikoo clarified that land claims were not bullying. This turn of events has highlighted, for me at any rate, exactly why there is not more active forum use. People who have half a mind to debate the issues of the day in the game are not going to come back every day to stop and wrangle with someone over some issue that is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and which has already been decided upon by the people who make the decision as to what constitutes what in the context of the game.

Could we adjourn the bullying discussion to another thread?  The purpose of this thread is to discuss "smorgasboarding," which is the use of in-game mechanics to intimidate, dissuade or otherwise influence (coerce?) players into not expressing viewpoints with which one may disagree.