Best Of

Players are not Admin, they should not act like them. If there is a IRE rule being broken, talk to an Admin. Period. 

You all talk about things that would push newbies away. This forum thread would make someone not want to play. OOC drama is not something that should be here. 

These games are about creating and exploring a fictional character (not a self insert) and developing their story in a way that is fun for you, and those you interact with. 

If rules are being broken, inform an Admin. They will do something about it. 

It's 2019. I think it goes without saying that Rape Rp should not be, and is not tolerated by people. We should all be smarter by now. 

I think this thread has gone on long enough.

The way this was handled was in poor taste; utterly disgraceful. Snowballed as egos got bruised and led to a scramble of self righteous acts and forum posts in order to recover popular view.

Hi. 

I'm going to say this one more time because the point is being missed in all this rambling. 

There is 100% -zero- reason why anyone outside of the person being harassed, the person accused of harassment, and the admin need to be dealing with it. 

Keep it off the faction/org channels, keep it out of the news. Otherwise, you are risking impacting survivors of real trauma that did not have a QQ and issue option. 

A) If someone is legitimately harassing people in-game, I can personally vouch that the admin -will- handle it. If it's a matter of poor signal reading, they'll get a talking to and if they don't learn, they'll be gone. I speak from experience here. 
If someone is legitimately harassing people in-game, PLEASE issue about it. There are circumstances in which you might be stuck in a room with someone (I have been in that situation, even if I qq'd I couldn't escape the room they had taken me too). If this happens and you don't feel comfortable logging in, email the admin about it or poke them on Discord or on the forums or -somewhere-. As critical as I can be of the IRE admin, this is something they take deadly serious and they WILL handle it. 
C) Bringing allegations of harassment up as a political tool serves zero productive purposes and actively hurts victims. Please stop. Don't justify it. Don't make excuses for it. Don't tell me about the women leaving the game for it (because see the above two points), just don't. 

I've been playing IRE games for over a decade and MUDs/MUSHs/MUXs for far, far longer than that. I'm a survivor fo multiple rounds of sexual abuse and assault. I've been an org leader for longer than a lot of people have played text games. There is -absolutely no scenario- in which this needs to be discussed IC. Full stop. Handle it with the admin. Doing anything else puts people at risk of rehashing real trauma. I'm almost 40 and I've been playing text-games since before AOL was a thing, back when it was a telnet connection. Please don't lecture me about the harassment women who play online games receive. 

With regard to 'newbies' engaging in sexual behavior - frankly, this is and always will be a stupid complaint on its own. PLENTY of newbies are alts. Most, honestly. The number of truly new new players is low. Even new to IRE players have likely played a MUD. Automatically assuming that someone interacting with newbies means they are engaging in predatory behavior is willful ignorance of this fact. That being said, if there are repeated and ongoing complaints about a player, TELL THE ADMIN. Issue them. Let them review the logs. They can and will. 

With regard to non-consensual play, meh. It's really common, as long as people KEEP IT OUT OF PUBLIC SPACES, let people do as they want to do as long as everyone involved is of legal age and consenting. 


Whisper campaigns and secret lists and all of that rot are dangerous for the community. They are far too easily prone to vindictive disgruntled ex-RP partners. I'm FIRMLY in the believe victims category when it comes to real-life assault, but when it comes to these text game environments, the amount of false accusations for dramatic effect seems to skyrocket. I've personally had to deal with it entirely too often and every time it's like taking a cheese grater to the eyeball. 

All that said, the primary message that I really, really want to get across here is:

Harassment should be handled OOC by the admin and not in-game. Harassment/rape/sexual assault/anything related should NOT be a point of public RP. Full stop. There is no argument that overrides the potential impact of emotional trauma that kind of nonsense can have on victims of assault. 

Edit - Also, do not compare sexual assault/harassment in the real world with someone hitting too frequently on a new character. Cuz...wow, I can't even begin to explain how offensive that is.

@Kestrel You see ghosts where there are none. Every player who interacted with my character or RPed any meaningful amount of time can see there is nothing sexist about the character itself. But I truly do not know if you poison people or not with your OOC blacklists and whatnot. That is called as metagaming. 

And now you insinuate insulting things about my OOC person as well despite knowing nothing at all. That is a line no player should cross. 

Take your senseless, bitter crusade elsewhere. 

@Kestrel I would truly appreciate that you do not propagate IC lies about my character to an OOC medium. That makes it a double-lie. Furthermore risks unnecessary forum RP.

You have no right to put people under duress with your way of mishandling such cases by yourself instead of delegating them to the proper authorities. I am truly pissed at you, because you made something fun for me a truly hellhole and drag. 

Sometimes think about players behind characters while you dish out your drama and OOC perception upon them. 

Kestrel said:

@TextWench,


You have my sincerest apologies for my part (Zah) in these affairs.



— Kestrel / Player of Zah

I find apologies like this to be suspect. If you were really interested in doing the right thing, this would have stopped after the first sentence. 

This is an 'I'm sorry, but.' Those never count. 

I am really, deeply annoyed that I feel like I have to correct the record here because your apology was a last attempt to slam dirt on someone you've spent the last week attacking incessantly and it includes straight up lies in it. So!

The person at the heart of this has vouches from a number of people I trust. He acknowledges that he made people uncomfortable but didn't realize it was happening until this accusation was brought to him. I don't know a single man who has never once overstepped in an approach to flirting. It's, unfortunately, a part of how men are taught to interact with women from our culture. When it was brought to his attention that he made people uncomfortable, he course corrected. He was presented with options for punishment, he voluntarily took both. Whatever your IC goal was, he's at least learned to do better.  

He also interacted with my newbie alt after these events took place and was absolutely aware that he had made others uncomfortable in the past and took real pains to make sure nothing he said or did was mistranslated as being problematic. When I saw his name pop up in the posts, I was genuinely baffled because he had been incredibly careful in his interactions with me. Regular check-ins, clarifications, clear communication. As far as I can see, he took the lesson to heart. Meanwhile, you and Viola used discomfort and someone's apparent genuine mistake to make a MASSIVE and unnecessary and ongoing scene that drug a lot of people under with it. 

I'm assuming you are not a woman (I could be wrong) because I rarely hear women refer to each other as 'females', so let me just remind you that I asked that you NOT lecture me about the prevalence of sexual harassment in games or elsewhere. That's my lived experience.

Character is about evolving when you trip up. Show some. 

Edit -
 @Viola - Thank you, that was exactly what a sincere apology looks like. 

Harassment is a serious offense and should be dealt by admin. any other IG way to try and resolve it is probably adding fuel to the fire. 

If you feel harassed, issue. Knowing the gravity of the situation is a good deterrent to both the harasser and the harassee

I think it's best if you all just stopped responding to each other...

Kirin said:

Harassment is a serious offense and should be dealt by admin.

This is how it -should- have been handled, but it wasn't and a smear campaign was launched and somehow this person is being drug through the mud again by the very same person claiming to advocate victims. It's fucking insane. People cope differently to trauma however this is unacceptable, and this is too far, it screams man hater club. 

To the point I even went and talked to this person oocly and apologized to them because of it. NO ONE deserves that, regardless if they are a creepy pervert or not. I really hope that they can leave this certain player alone from here on out. If I hear anymore on it I will start taking action and I encourage others to as well because imagine this being you and someone repeatedly kicking you just because they have "the dirt". Yes, people get uncomfortable, but that also doesn't give you the right to bully anyone. There has been WAY too much of this going on and it has passed beyond the threshold into meta-gaming territory.