I’d like to take a step back and remind everyone of the context: we were talking about building bridges, not about the size of the claim or how far out you can build your walls or what’s considered purely decorative or any other of the many grey areas that exist in the rules.

As I’ve said many times elsewhere, I agree that the rules are not good. There are many problems with the rules and the enforcement of those rules, some of which are:

  • It’s not possible for a player to reason about whether their build leads to “loss of performance both on client and server side”, so how do you avoid building something that will break that rule?
  • “Blocking of the content” is too open to interpretation, and Funcom staff have been known to change the policy without clarifying it, such as when they suddenly decided to allow blocking world bosses.
  • The phrase “blocks are placed for no other purpose than to prevent other players’ access to resources and building spots” is easy to misinterpret. People who build bridges will say that their purpose is to let players traverse obstacles in the terrain. Someone who builds a theater will say that its purpose is to look fun and let players role-play.
  • Neither giving warnings nor explanations makes it hard or even impossible to learn how to avoid breaking the rules.

There are other problems, but I don’t want to spend time writing out a detailed critique of the rules. Suffice it to say that I fully agree that there are problems with them.

And, as @Kanza1 already said, I was one of those who asked for server moderation back when there was none, not because I wanted these rules, but rather because I wanted some recourse in extreme situations, such as when some diсkhead on a PVE or PVE-C server decides to wall me in and I can’t do anything about it, or when some asshat (again, on PVE or PVE-C) decides to spam foundations all over the Shattered Springs to remove all the brimstone nodes.

In short, I wanted a way to deal with griefers and trolls, not this dumpster fire we have right now.

That said, I’d like to point back to the context: building bridges and “being careful” with the “wiggle room”.

Look, there has to be some point where we accept a modicum of personal responsibility. Some point beyond which it’s clear that we’re actively looking for a way to wiggle out of the rules. If you repeatedly get the link to the rules shoved in your face when you log in to play, eventually you have to go look at the rules, or you’re the one at fault.

Similarly, if you go look at the rules, and the rules say “check out the documentation about land claim abuse”, and you click on that and see a section about bridges that says “look, we get that you mean this as a benefit to other players, but we strongly recommend not building bridges and we usually consider them an abuse”, then you probably shouldn’t build a damn bridge and if you’ve built one, you should probably dismantle it. That’s what I meant about being careful.

You can quibble about what “being careful” means in this context, but that’s all it is, a quibble. And quibbling about that just makes it harder to make the real message heard, about the real problems with the rules and the enforcement.

I have no problem with people who come here and say “I broke the rules, I got suspended, I disagree with the rules, and I want them changed”. I have no problem with people who say “I was suspended and I don’t know how I broke the rules” and it’s really not clear how they broke the rules.

But I do have a problem when someone says “I was suspended for no reason, I didn’t do anything, I only built these things X, Y, and Z” and it turns out that X, Y, and Z are explicitly referred to as something you’re “strongly encouraged not to build”. Like, seriously? Can we for once stop trying to dodge all responsibility for our own actions and accept that some of this shіt is on us?

If I could change the rules and policies, I would get rid of all of the land claim rules that aren’t directly related to griefing and be done with it. But that doesn’t mean I agree with deliberate rules-lawyering, because that’s one of the things griefers will also try to use to portray themselves as victims.

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