Serious Issue

[DarthVader]

Hi guys,

I recently started playing on the server which i think is brilliant! I also think the admin team do a great job running everything. I'm even considering donating to keep everything running but i do have to report the behavior of some players which is not being addressed and i find the content unacceptable.

Under your terms of play i am sure religion is one of the banned subjects but players are spraying religious and in some cases extremist content. There are 3 main people who are involved in this. Two of those where playing this evening, excluding a player called 'Islam'

Server: 151.80.111.130:27045

As you may or may not be aware there have been a number of extremist Islamic Terror attacks in Europe over the past few years and personally i find it horrifying that this type of material is being pushed on your servers and action has not been taken. This is not a one off and has happened on multiple occasions, however i am now reporting the issue. There was even one occasion where someone sprayed an ISIS flag but i failed to capture it before it disappeared.

I would also like to point out there is antisemitism being discussed by these individuals and others which in many countries a criminal offence.

I would like this resolved however you see fit. However if you do not which to resolve it or do not take action i will escalate to Steam as i personally think these religious and extremist sprays are unacceptable.

Thank you.

Regards,

Darth

 

[WolfRam]

Hey,

We are aware of all the religious and political opinions people may have on our server.
Infact we had a discussion inside of the adminteam about this topic some months back.

The thing is, that if people only spray logos and flags we don’t really bother stepping in because it would only escalate a situation and a problem that really didn’t exist in the first place. Because the fact is most players don’t know what all the sprays with flags and symbols mean. And those who do, usually don’t care because they are on the servers to play and get away from politics and everyday life.
So, we decided to let most of these sprays just be and only step in if someone starts to shout about politics and racism in the chat. We do crack down on porn(with visible genitals), racism and other obvious & disturbing images. We also treat all religions and political views the same. Trust me, we do see extremes from all.

If you still are not convinced and think we should start cracking down on flags and logos, then let me give an example;
We got several players who regularly spray the flag of Israel. Now, just think of all the politics and conflicts that are represented in that flag. Does it mean that we, as the adminteam, support all the things that Israel do if we don’t punish the people who spray the flag of Israel? If we do punish for spraying that spray, does that mean that we support the Palestinian cause?

So you see how messy this can get? And the fact that we got to figure out what all the flags and symbols mean and the different types of politics they got.. An impossible job.

So we decided to basically let our players spray whatever they want(flags and politics),
but if they start typing things in the chat to provoke other players we do crack down hard on them.

I hope you see our point of view and understand that we do take this topic seriously.

PS, if you see people say racist things, then please report them to us. We cant be everywhere all the time and that is why we also rely on the community to make ban requests when we have missed something.

 

[DarthVader]

Hi WolfRam,

Thank you for getting back to me.
I certainly appreciate the predicament you are in and it's not something that can easily be resolved. While i appreciate you commitment to tackling these issues i would like to highlight a couple of points if i may..

When an individual sprays an imagine of a fighter with a machine gun behind the flag of Turkey which is an Islamist country i think there is no context where that individual does not know what the spray is. We can not be naive to say they are unaware of their actions. I would also add that ignorance of the law does is not a defensible excuse of breaking the law and nor is this. The fact action has been taken against pornography but not extremist sprays is perplexing.

The flag of Palestine has been sprayed and so has the flag of Israel, the simple way to resolve this is to ban them all....?

Players do play to get away from the reality of everyday life and while doing so to have people spray extremist logos/images and not be taken action is a huge disappointment.

From reading chats they are usually started because someone has sprayed something offense of an extremist nature so just ban all the sprays?

I appreciate everything you and the team do but why cant we just ban all the sprays?

I also think that names that are related to religion such as 'Islam' etc should also be banned.. people can pick from millions of different player names, why are we allowing religion to be used? There's no real need for it, it just creates poor conversation and it a lot of cases abuse.

Many thanks.

Regards,

Darth

 

[Lotus]

I don't quite comprehend how islamophobes like you think. i mean one of the "proofs" you posted is literally just the flag of Turkey and nothing more...

I decided to do a little digging of my own into your chat log and i'd like to share some nice excerpts from there which are far more offensive than a countries flag.

"the only thing muslims are good for is claiming job seekers allowings and state benifits."
"poor ass Arab, never acheived anything ."
"SonyX stop praying pro ISIS. NOT COLL." (Sorry to shatter your bubble but a gunman standing in front of a countries flag ain't ISIS)
"Islam = shit."
"remember Germany doesnt want you."
"freedom from Islam."
"Islam is oppressive."
"what do they need freedom from? Islam?."
"you're not welcome here."
"VOTE TO DEPORT ISLAM? LOL."
"germany will deport most of the muslims.. so will Sweden]#."
"AfD will deport Arabs out of germany."
"AfD will deport muslims."
"`Muslims love the west because their own countires are shit."
"Islam, do you always follow books that are 1500 years old written by an old Arab?."
"Hey Islam, AfD are going to deport you back to Iraq bro."
"is your wife wearing a hijab or burka?."

This is only from 2 pages of your chat log...

From reading chats they are usually started because someone has sprayed something offense of an extremist nature so just ban all the sprays?

What a strange thing to say from the one who seems to instigate these religious talks due to people's sprays or names. Just looking at your chat log makes me disappointed that someone would actually harass another individual simply because their in-game name is "Islam". Quite frankly I'm surprised you've gone this long without a gag on record given your "All Muslims are terrorists" ideology.

It honestly baffles my mind how people can legitimately follow this ideology and be such blatant Islamophobes, and the worst part is, you probably don't even realize how Islamophobic you are.

Than again, what should I expect from someone who uses the IGN Donald J Trump? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh yea, and here's the first thing that I saw when I searched up the contents of your current name... "Many supporters of the AfD have shown racist, Islamophobic, and/or antisemitic tendencies connected to far-right movements such as Neo-Nazism and identilarianism."

 

[WolfRam]

Hey, I’m back from work now.

First, thanks for staying civilized, not all do (update: well, atleast on the forum you are)
As you might expect I personally agree with some of your points, disagree with others and partially agree with the rest.

- Ban all sprays? An interesting idea and I might ask the other SPA/HA about their thoughts on that, but I expect that both players and admins see sprays as sort of part of the game. I also personally enjoy spraying something silly/funny from time to time.

- Turkey? I don’t think Turkey got much to do with anything terror related in EU. Not only that but we got many players(and some admins) from Turkey and if they for example want to have a soldier infront of their flag, I don’t see how that really mean anything. Americans do that all the time and regular gamers have soldiers as avatars and sprays all the time too.
I have no idea what you mean with this:

We can not be naive to say they are unaware of their actions. I would also add that ignorance of the law does is not a defensible excuse of breaking the law and nor is this.

Turkey have not done anything; infact they have experienced terrorist action against their own country. And if I have understood correctly, I think they hate ISIS more than anyone in EU because they are at war with them, because of the border.
Ignorance of the law? What law? Not sure what you mean, but it’s our server so we decide what is allowed and what is not.

- The people who spray political/religious sprays do sometimes try to start fights in the chat, but so do many others. TBH many other people are much worse, tho. Curses, angry accusations, arguments about punishment and “people being assholes” are a much bigger problem.

- Names. I don’t see an issue with names like Islam, Donald trump, long live Palestine, hitler was a poo & Christian fighter(same as Islamic warrior, for example). Trying to police names is an impossible task because players come and go all the time and we can only really enforce it by kicking and banning and we only do that as a very last resort. Im Norwegian and right after the Utøya massacre I found names like Anders Bering Breivik very offensive and punished heavily for that. But how would anyone outside of Norway know how offensive that is? What about players who uses 88 in their name? in one way it’s a cool number and 88 is used in many logos and sportsteams, but 88 is also a symbol for HH(eight letter in the alphabet) and 88 is therefor used as a code for Heil Hitler by neo-Nazis. Policing names is also extremely time-consuming and usually creates an argument with the person with the name.

- We don’t remove political/religious sprays because its alot of work, it always leads to a big argument in the chat with everyone giving their opinion and enforcing it would seriously disturb gameplay.

Good Gameplay is the most important thing we, as admins, try to protect on the server. Banning people if they don’t feel its deserved, fights in the chat, trying to enforce rules that don’t make sense to some people and in general disturbing the players who just want to play is the worst we can do and we try to avoid that. You might have noticed we don’t always accomplish that, but with a bunch of 14 yearolds from all over the world we are generally doing a good job and the servers are in general much more peaceful than other servers.

If we were to start enforcing a namepolicy and a spraypolicy against politics and religion it would lead to a bad environment on the server with constant fights in the chat and people getting banned left and right. Our admins would also have to educate themselves on every conflict and religious symbols in EU. And what about the teens on our servers(most are teens) who just chooses the sprays and names because they think it looks cool and don’t understand the meaning behind it?

After discussing this within the adminteam(some feel the way you do, and some don’t) we all agree that GAMEPLAY must come first. So, the easiest solution for this is to let people spray their sprays, but to stop any kind of troublemakers and arguments in the chat. This is the internet and people are used to seeing(and ignoring) a lot of strange things without starting to shout about it. We have experienced that confronting people about their religious/political sprays/names leads to more trouble than just letting them play. We also experience that what we might see in a picture someone else might mean something completely different by having it as a spray. Our players do come from across the world, after all

Ofcouse we do crack heavily down on people who cross the line.

I hope I’m making it more clear for you.


Wolfram

Update: I've just read Lotus' thread and he confirmed what I already expected.

I will still leave my response here for you and everyone to read. I do try do nice, even to people with your point of view. Last time I didn’t succeed, but this time I remained civilized.
A personal victory and i hope you are proud of me @Nikooo777

 

[DarthVader]

Hi WolfRam,

Thank you for getting back to me. I appreciate you having opening dialog with me and also taking this forward to the rest of the admin team to discuss. I also appreciate an outright ban would an aggressive way to deal with this.

Just to clarify the issue was not only about the two flags i took a screen shot of. Perhaps when extremist sprays such as ISIS flags and pornography is sprayed the player is warned, upon 2nd breach they receive a temp ban for 7 days, upon 3rd breach they receive a life ban? or just have more admins on, although some do interfere with game play and game flow a little too much but that isn't what this is about as generally they're great.

Lotus, clearly you took offense to my post, which is fine but collating a host of evidence to discredit me and take away my point around the sprays i think is a little bit of a poor show, however i'm happy to clear up those points in that chat.
Firstly just be aware, anyone at anytime can take text from a conversation which can be taken out of context (politicians do this all the time) So taking chat text out of game play that's been on going for several hours which got heated doesn't fully reflect whats going on.

Okay so lets get to it:

"the only thing Muslims are good for is claiming job seekers allowance and state benefits."
This is offense but it is backed by some facts posted below. If we just take the UK 2016 UK unemployment 2016 rate 5.4%, among Muslims 12.8%! that's over double.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...social-group-in-the-uk-mps-warn-a7185451.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...ckholm-donald-trump-right-immigration-sweden/
https://www.economist.com/news/fina...o-many-are-working-europe-refugees-sweden-are

"poor ass Arab, never achieved anything ."
Out of the G20 only 3 are Muslim, so yes they are poor compared to the rest of the world and Europe for the context of the comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G20

"SonyX stop praying pro ISIS. NOT COLL." (Sorry to shatter your bubble but a gunman standing in front of a countries flag ain't ISIS)
I'm not familiar with the latest ISIS propaganda, but a 'gunman' in front of a flag of Islam looks Jihadist to me, happy to admit if i'm wrong.

"Islam is oppressive."
"is your wife wearing a hijab or burka?."
A religion the requires women to cover there face is hardly empowering. The Koran calls for both men and women to 'cover and be modest' I don't see men wearing these so their 'covering' is far less than women, therefore i believe that is oppressive. Also until 2 months ago women is Saudi were not allowed to drive! thats extremely Oppressive.

"what do they need freedom from? Islam?."
Where we start getting some context, a response from when someone else said Palestine needed freedom... maybe Israel needs freedom? Maybe Europe needs freedom from Islam? hence the question mark at the end....

"Hey Islam, AfD are going to deport you back to Iraq bro."
"you're not welcome here."
"VOTE TO DEPORT ISLAM? LOL."
"germany will deport most of the muslims.. so will Sweden]#."
"AfD will deport Arabs out of germany."
"AfD will deport muslims."
"freedom from Islam."
"remember Germany doesnt want you."
Well this is true, if AfD get in thats exactly that they'll be doing. AfD grew by a HUGE number at the election as a pro Germany, right winged party who want to deport a lot of immigrants and as immigrants in Germany are mainly Muslim the context is correct.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/n...2017-latest-results-live-merkel-bundestag-afd
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...s-afd-europe-immigration-merkel-radical-right
https://www.ft.com/content/e7c7d918-a17e-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2

"`Muslims love the west because their own countires are shit."
Look at any stats on the ME from an economics point of view. If it wasn't for Oil most would be bankrupt which they slowly are as OPEC is still selling Oil for less and production costs and US Shall is starting to be imported cheaper. Any county that depends on one main income industry is in real trouble.

"Islam, do you always follow books that are 1500 years old written by an old Arab?."
Well it is 1500 years old.. and he was an Arab. Do you follow books as a way to live you're life that was written 1500 years ago? sounds pretty crazy to me.

Oh and just before i go let's clear up one more thing if i may. Islamophobia this is an interesting one. Do you know what a Phobia is? it's defined as an irrational fear of or aversion to something.

This is death count in the name of Islam from just 2017
https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=2017
I haven't counted up the death count, but i don't think it's irrational to fear something that has killed so many people. In fairness i also fear deadly Snakes and Sharks but they kill a lot less people around the world so i'd consider that irrational.

I hope that clears everything up. I'm happy to discuss geopolitics and economics further however this was a post around my concerns during game play. which i think WolfRam will resolve adequately.

Many thanks,

Regards,

Darth

 

[Lotus]

Perhaps when extremist sprays such as ISIS flags and pornography is sprayed the player is warned, upon 2nd breach they receive a temp ban for 7 days, upon 3rd breach they receive a life ban? or just have more admins on, although some do interfere with game play and game flow a little too much but that isn't what this is about as generally they're great.

Sprays are banned through ban spray mate, just a loss of being able to spray. No server ban

And as expected you deny being an Islamophobe, no surprise there.

You know something else I didn't mention which irks me, you have such a hatred against certain religions and yet you don't even appear to know that Islam and Muslim are not two interchangeable words. To quote someone you like... SAD

Thank you for your replies verifying exactly how islamophobic you are,
Have a nice day,
Lotus

Edit: I could argue your points and draw this out longer, but really, what's the point? Words on a site won't change your ideology so I'll leave the rest of this to wolfram.

On a final note, ""poor ass Arab, never achieved anything", Out of the G20 only 3 are Muslim, so yes they are poor compared to the rest of the world and Europe for the context of the comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G20"
LMAO

 

[WolfRam]

@DarthVader
dude.. im not even gonna bother..
i have explained to you why our rules are the way they are. they are meant to include the players on our servers, not create conflict or support 1 worldview.
You however, are only willing to see this from your own point of view. You choose information that support your worldview and uses that as arguments for what you say in chat.
The things you type in the chat are exactly the things you yourself are complaining about, just from the other side.

Some people will always use any excuse to do evil things and they are good at using the tools they are dealt.
You are doing the exact same thing right now

you lost this, bigtime