i wanted to post this here for referance, because they are real quick to ban you when you say it in-game: the way darknet is moderated is dehumanising and, honestly, damaging the sense of community in an already shrinking playerbase.
recently i ran into a bug where my game froze every time i tried to zone. when i googled it, all i found was 10+ year old posts of people saying they solved it via petitions. we all know ao isnt officially supported anymore, good luck getting a response to your petition in less than 6 months. (or ever) so naturally i turned to the community, asked for solutions on darknet, where multiple people replied genuinely trying to help me solve the issue. sure enough, with their help it took me 5 mins to figure it out (turns out i had lower some settings like view distance etc)
one day later, i got a message from a dnet admin condescendingly telling me: “if google says petition then PETITION IT, this is your first and final warning!" they knew full well the petition system is dead. that kind of response isnt helpful. its dismissive, frustrating, and completely unnecessary.
the main issue is that moderation on darknet seems less about helping the community and more about asserting authority. a handful of admins are essentially power-tripping in a game with maybe 50 concurrent players, talking down to people for asking legitimate questions and trying to engage with the game in a postive and civil manner.
darknet can be a place for players to help each other out, share knowledge, and maintain a playerbase in an unsupported and dying game. when the new moderation took over all they really needed to do was to get rid of toxicity. but instead, their arrogant and ego driven behavior killed the sense of community entirely.