I'm taking an indefinite break from Arelith, though hope to return later this year.
Please no longer PM with me requests, any current contact requests will go unanswered. Any final decisions on design, and appeals and such like will from now on be decided my a majority admin vote. I'll remain on hand for some staff members on questions of area design, but beyond that, will reduce my presence and my work for Arelith to zero.
I've given much of the last 20 years to writing and creating Arelith, often working full-time hours in addition to my 'real' job. For a long time it was extremely rewarding, taking pride not only in my work, but the world itself, and the community we have built. However in the last years there has been a significant uptick in harassment, of the server, it's staff, and myself. I've had to shut down Arelith's online presence to near zero - muting our social media accounts, no longer making videos, and blocking contact requests. I've repeated been targetted personally, and have dealt more often than I would like with reports of players targetting their fellow players with online abuse and general unpleasantness. More broadly, I see a NWN community with servers and communities that rather than come together often snipe at one-another.
I've always told myself that bad actors within our community are a symptom of our success; with thousands of players we are going to attract a few seriously unbalanced and creepy individuals, and maybe that's true? In truth I'm not entirely sure anymore.
As we become an older title I would have thought the community would also have matured, after all, not many of our players can be teenagers (or even in their early 20s anymore), so I would have thought we'd have grown past that stuff. Yet here I am still dealing with reports of online toxicity between players, and running a Fort Knox server with VPN blocking and now a new bot shield. Truth is? A lot of what I've seen from certain people on our server has simply creeped me *** **** out. We ban such players quickly of course, but as my own children approach the age when they would be able to play here, and very much want to, I'm left questioning whether this is really a safe and healthy a place for them to interact with others? Especially if they're relationship to myself would leave them targetted. And if it isn't safe...then what in hell do I even do any of this for?
The Arelith development staff continue to work their socks off on new additions and features, and DMs daily try to make this world a good environment for playing, but I'm not fully convinced their work is appreciated, as a decent portion do seem to still approach Arelith from a position of entitlement, while DMs have been subject to abuse, and even death threats. Of course I report almost all of the serious harassment, threats and abuse to the authorities, but that it happens at all just increasingly isn't worth the effort for me, and so far removed from the culture in PnP RPGs that first got me into this world.
Of course none of what I said above will change anything in regard to these problems, simply put, it is what it is, and this culture in online gaming is it what it is, and it would be a conceit to think we were immune from that. I'm just not sure I can be bothered with it anymore.
