She did ask a valid question, but as you said, context matters. We’re not idly speculating on generic topics here, we’re talking about Funcom’s new rules. Those rules are currently being criticized by people who will use every rhetorical trick in the book to spread FUD about them.
For example, the whole thing about “bad language” is a colossal red herring. There is literally no mention of “bad language” in the rules. This is the part that’s under attack and I’m starting to wonder if people are actually reading it:
It’s chock-full of very specific adjectives: “offensive and defamatory” in conjunction with “racial, sexual, hateful, illicit”.
The thing that I keep vehemently objecting to is the notion that Funcom should drop this part of rules – a part that was clearly established to protect people from serious verbal harassment – because it’s somehow “not good for the game”.
What’s not good for the game is allowing all of its metaphorical broken windows to stay like that. I’ve seen plenty of toxic behavior on official servers and it happens because there are no consequences. Yes, exploiting and hacking are the most egregious forms, but verbal harassment can grow to be serious and very damaging for the community.
And this is especially true for PVE(-C) servers, where the community is paramount. That’s part of this discussion, too:
Gameplay in technical sense? No. Gameplay in the sense of what your in-game experience is? Very much. Ask anyone who doesn’t play exclusively PVP.
So yeah, everything you said in your post is true and I agree with it, but it’s pretty tangential, just like @StacieMeier’s question.
It’s not like Funcom said “you can’t use bad language or we’ll come ban you”. They established specific rules against serious verbal harassment and further specified that all reports of rule-breaking – for any of the rules, which I imagine includes verbal harassment – are to have “irrefutable, veridic proof and evidence to back up your report”.
Considering that the FUD about this part of the rules started in the message 7 of this thread and we’re up to almost a 100 now, I think you can see why my patience for anything that seems to support this demagoguery is wearing thin.