I agree with that ruling completely, and am actually glad for the clarification on the player list issue.
However, there was a line in the announcement that... concerns and worries me. The line in question is the following:
To me, wording it like this... sets a dangerous and inherently vague standard that leaves a lot of room to be open to confusion and misinterpretation.A good rule of thumb for this sort of thing is asking yourself whether or not the meta you are doing is going to make the other player upset (outing them, scrying to gank them, etc) or if it is a neutral, even beneficent for the player (scrying to find them so you can meet and share tea and cakes!). The latter does not carry so much consequence (depending on the cake), the former certainly can.
It suggests that you're doing wrong if the other person is upset, and that is your fault. But that's not always the case...
Sometimes it's natural for us to become upset over an ic event that negatively impacts our pc due to ic consequences or actions... and that isn't necessarily always the fault of the opposing player on an ooc level, nor is it ooc fueled.
This line in the announcement suggests to me that conflict ic should be discouraged to avoid OOC hurt feelings. Frankly, that is going to happen when there are a lot of people who are too emotionally (perhaps unhealthily) invested in their own character.
Some of you may remember that Arelith has a sister server called Amia.
Amia specifically had a player base problem where you essentially couldn't play evil characters because evil ic actions would upset people oocly in that their good aligned pc was not always 'winning'. In some cases, players would become upset oocly just because ic conflict was made or happened to upset the status quo. Players would become upset because they see their character as this good aligned idealized hero that always wins, and when they wouldn't win... well, the dms would punish the players of the evil characters despite those players playing the evil characters not doing anything wrong from an ooc perspective. And it wasn't like these evil pcs were always 'winning' over good in pvp or roleplay. It just became so unfun for anyone to play evil pcs at all. This eventually lead to Amia becoming a ghostly wasteland of nothing but Benwick-style players who sit in castles all day and Amia dms who enabled that sort of behavior.
I am not saying that this is what Arelith is turning into. However, I am saying that we as a community should do our best to avoid the mistakes of Amia. I think we can all agree that a good number of us do become emotionally invested in our own pcs sometimes. It's hard not to, they are our pcs. I think it's good to keep in mind and remind that conflict is healthy for a roleplay server. And that our characters will suffer hardship or conflict due to ic opposition of some kind.
I agree that people shouldn't be scrying other characters just to go gank them. However, there's a big difference between ooc harassment and say for example:
+ A Drow PC icly scrying an Elf PC they know has been hunting them, in order to go confront them, first.
+ A Harper Pc stalking a Sharran PC over a period of time and then later revealing the Sharran PC's true nature to the ic settlements after ic investigation and roleplay. Or not even that, maybe just tipping off a settlement leader about the Sharran pc's sharran activities.
That's not ooc harassment or bullying, that's just ic roleplay and ic consequences for those pc's actions. That is healthy for a roleplay server. It isn't because a player is purposely trying to bully another person with their character.
I do acknowledge that ooc harassments can and does happen. I'm not saying it doesn't.. but I am saying that there should be a better well defined standard between what exactly counts as ooc bullying/harassment for ic actions and ic consequences of ic actions.
Otherwise, I am worried that in the future we will simply have players reporting each other because the ic conflict that is not fueled by ooc is taken out of character by opposing players because they don't believe it's 'fun' for their character to go through consequences of their character's actions.
I think a better clarification should be set for this. Because it's a very fine line to walk that has the potential to enable people who become too over emotional about their own pcs.
That's pretty much what I wanted to talk about. I would love to hear other perspectives and thoughts on this matter, as I know that it does happen more than we'd like it to as a community.
Edit: I highlighted keypoints in case you rather skim than read my paragraph.