I started using discord regularly a couple of weeks ago but forgot RV had one. I'm in.

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Guild Wars 2

~ Kudzu, Dreamer, Frostfang, Eternity, Flameseeker Prophecies ~
~ Nevermore, H.O.P.E, Moot, Incinerator, Meteorlogicus, Howler ~
~ WvW Rank 964, sPvP Rank 75, 25,437 AP ~

Yesss! Join us, one and all! Come for the fellowship and RV Discord quote database, stay for the experience points and co-op battles against shadow monsters.

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.Legendary themed months are back! Maybe.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The RuneVillage Discord Channel cordially invites you to help us destroy Peregate the Arachnidusk once and for all.

The raid party to the middle of the desert will commence at 7pm PST (10pm EST) this Friday, January 27th. High-tier items, root beer, and fellowship to follow. All you need to do is show up then type !join when prompted.

Thanks and we hope to see you all there!

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.Legendary themed months are back! Maybe.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So we're gonna restart the pettiness of the old rv again?
The link to get back into it doesn't work if that's what you're assuming I could do to get back into it.

I didn't do anything wrong to deserve a ban

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"The good warrior knows when to fight, and when to withdraw."
- Sun Tzu

I'll smith anything up to 93 smithing if you have the material for me to make it with
My Story, Horrors of Myron County
RV's Drawing archive topic, post yours or comment on others

As the villager who arguably got the closest to you, befriended you the furthest, for the longest time, with the most insight to your personal life and habits, the most experience with your style of humor and socialization, and the most patience on record for your antics, I can safely say you had it coming for quite some time.
You've admitted numerous times in your history of being here, particularly while in chat, that you have your own flavor of wanting to get at others' goats by feigning ignorance over issues and trying to inject your humor into arguments created from it. Back when such humor of randomness, stubbornness, references, and memes was more common and popular than it is now, it was funny enough for most people to tolerate. Nowadays, we're different. We're grown. Yet everyone on the server recognized that your behavior hadn't changed one bit. It was still tolerable, to a point. You didn't outright attack anyone with a serious, raging intent on outright hurting feelings. But you might remember on October 10 of last year, you managed to piss me (the villager who arguably got closest to you, befriended you the furthest...) off enough to show you I was fed up with it.
Common sense: How many others with less attachment to you were also fed up with it? Too many. There's a quote somewhere out there about what it means when one, two, or three people call you a name. It got far beyond three a long, long time ago.

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Goten is dead!

The ban wasn't a result of a singular action, it was multiple, smaller actions culminating in that ban. It has nothing to do with pettiness, as you put it.

For starters, the shtick where you pretend to misread something, and then continue to act as if that's what was actually said, is really old. It's not funny, and it's quite frankly, annoying. People are trying to have a conversation, and you pull off a branch that wasn't even there, so to speak. I honestly can't tell if you're trying to be 'playful', or your reading comprehension is really that bad?

Then there's the egging people on part. You've egged on multiple people, and you knew exactly what you were doing. Why do that? We're all in discord because it actually provides a place to hang out for villagers, seeing as not a lot of people post on the forums anymore. We all come to Discord to shoot the , not shoot at each other.

There are lesser issues, like your abuse of the image command, and other little things which probably don't really matter much. You need to really re-assess how you approach people, how you treat people, and what you actually post in the channel. Everyone cares about quality, and unfortunately, you just don't bring it.

One other thing I've noticed about you. You call people petty all the time, but I think it's the same old story. If everyone's petty, maybe it's not them, but you. Kikori's right, everyone has changed and grown up, but you. You're still exactly the same, and that's not a good thing.

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Of course YOU are going to say that.

You've been against me since literally day one.

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"The good warrior knows when to fight, and when to withdraw."
- Sun Tzu

I'll smith anything up to 93 smithing if you have the material for me to make it with
My Story, Horrors of Myron County
RV's Drawing archive topic, post yours or comment on others

Experiencing personal criticism, especially when delivered with something actionable, oftentimes represents a juncture, regardless of how difficult it is to experience. In this case, you can perhaps take time to understand your own behaviour and why people respond the way they do to the way you choose to socialise with them.

I'm not here to espouse platitudes or order you around; you're an adult. I'm just elucidating that there is an option in situations like this other than immediately deciding those who criticise you are completely wrong and retreating to a convenient bubble away from one more piece of humanity.

As for everyone else, the discord server is privately operated, and how the community is managed is up to the discretion of the owner. My participation is an act of voluntary cooperation, and if conditions ever become unacceptable to me, I'll simply leave. That being said, if we want to be assured of how grown up we are, we might want to ask how tossing someone just because we find them annoying without being actively harmful fits into that. Znath might have an abrasive personality and be a blasted pain in the ass every other time I hear him talk, but frankly I would have expected a deliberate act of malice before a ban is justified. I'm more obscene on a weekly basis than he's ever been. At the risk of sounding like an airheaded centrist, part of being an adult is tolerating people we don't necessarily like.

Right, I've said my piece, and now I'm going to stop the currently imminent threat of my own sobriety from overtaking me...

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Imagine a perfect beach
Without a mermaid
Imagine a perfect hideaway
Without a time
Imagine a perfect Eden
Without a friend, without a serpent
"Feeling lonely and content at the same time,
I believe, is a rare kind of happiness"

I'm with Ead on this. There were times that Znath was funny, there were times i completely ignored him and there were times that I played along (and too hard, I guess? I once got a stern talking to along the lines of "Don't make quotes about Znath").

I do think a PM along the lines of "Hey, stop doing a. & b. or c. your way out." would have been a good first step. A "Boom. Banned." even with the evidence that was piling up, was probably a bit hasty.

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Hidden: 

#JusticeForFortenberry

James will not divide us.

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It's tough, but I still play. I keep losing, but I still play! - Taichi
Digital Complex is officially launched!

Top I've recommended to you once or twice before that you ought to use your privileges with responsibility and tact.

Your discord channel has become the de-facto RV Chat - but, take into consideration that you were never promoted to a position of moderator in the "classical" way; you obtained it by virtue of creating a discord channel, on my recommendation one night in Skypechat. You may find yourself going down the same path as Ex Rex if you moderate your channel based on your own whims with the defense that it's "my house, bud." Many of us who take part in your channel were promoted to chat moderator or admin in the classical way. It rubs me the wrong way that a non-moderator gets to call the shots in the most active area of RV with only his own whims in mind.

One thing I particularly did not like was when I heard you banned Pyro's wife, DesertDamsel, because she wasn't a "real" villager. I'm glad to see it was overturned, but these are the sort of characteristics that make me feel uneasy about you being in-charge of what is basically RV Chat.

I was a chat admin back when we still had an official chatroom. If I had the ability, I would overturn your ban. I don't know how much my word counts anymore, but for whatever it's worth, I'm against banning someone just because you don't like their personality, or because you don't think they "belong". It's why Ex Rex banned Pyro from skypechat, and look how well that was received. It's a weak and emotionally-driven reason to ban someone. If you don't like Znath, right-click his name and ignore him. If he abuses the bots, design the bots so that they can ignore commands from particular users.

The discord channel has essentially become the last meaningful and active branch of the RV community for most of us who are still active on a day-to-day basis, and you've effectively denied Znath access to a community that he's been a part of for over a decade, because you don't like him.

In all honesty, Top, if it were up to me you wouldn't have moderating powers, because frankly you don't strike me as someone who has the characteristics of being an objective moderator. Don't take it personally - I consider you a friend, and I do like you as a person - just not as a moderator. Yeah you made the channel, but so what? Anyone could've done that. Just like with Ex Rex, hosting a chatroom isn't correlated with being a good moderator; he proved that himself, and I consider the judgement you used in this ban to be more proof that there does not exist a correlation. Thyker wanted to be granted with moderating powers when he became involved in the technical aspects of our chatroom, but it wasn't given to him because staff members are selected for more nuanced reasons than the ability to poop out a chatroom. In fact, I can think of many examples of when a person's technical ability did not correlate with their decision-making ability.

For the record, I "get" what you guys mean about Znath. Znath, it couldn't hurt to do some introspection into how you come off to people. Sometimes I feel like you have a chip on your shoulder and you just want to argue for the sake of arguing, like you have something to prove to yourself or the people around you. That said, he never bothered me enough to block him, and I think banning him is a very unfair punishment and highly emotionally-driven.

I think you should unban him, and in the future consult your decisions first with Jaron, or Pyro or myself if Jaron is not available, since the three of us have more experience in this sort of thing than you. Really though, in a perfect world, Jaron would be the sole moderator of our discord, and decisions like this would be driven more objectively and thoughtfully. If you keep using justifications like "my house, bud" then your channel is not one that I want to be a part of. That sort of is disrespectful to the nuanced and objective processes that many of us strived to abide by, within our thousands of discussions and debates, during our time as moderators and administrators. If you played that card when I was in charge, you would be on the chopping block.

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I'll add my two cents to this since it's essentially my responsibility as site owner and because at least one person (not Znath FYI) requested it.

• First off, I don't agree with the ban. Yes, I know Znath antagonizes everyone and I'll get to that later, but as Jackstick said, that's a right-click -> Ignore situation. I absolutely don't understand what people mean by "abusing the !image command", since on two occasions Pyro and others have run out the daily quota searching for random pictures of women.
• Spirographed wrote:
  I do think a PM along the lines of "Hey, stop doing a. & b. or c. your way out." would have been a good first step. A "Boom. Banned." even with the evidence that was piling up, was probably a bit hasty.
  This. The warning given was too vague. "make better posts" is not a "Stop being disrespectful to others or I'm going to kick you", it's "hey hey you you I don't like your content". That being said, Znath's reply of "find a safe zone, jerk" was equally bad. But there should have been a stricter and clearer warning, if that failed he should have been temporarily muted, and if that failed there should have been a kick. Even Kikori asked why he was banned, and he was the first post here trying to justify it. If no one in the channel realized Znath was about to be banned, how was he supposed to know?
• Spirographed wrote:
  I once got a stern talking to along the lines of "Don't make quotes about Znath").
  That was by me and it wasn't stern, unless you meant a different discussion. Anyone can make quotes about anyone, that's the beauty of the system. People have added quotes about me I don't like, but tough , I'm an adult so I can take it. The quote in question was closer to "the galaxy would be better off without Znath", and that's not the direction I want quotes taken in.
• I'm not overturning the ban, because I consider the channel to be Topsummoner's, not mine. I'm only an admin because I make JimmyBot. Jackstick brings up good points, though: 1) Although the Discord channel is not officially tied to RV, it is the most active branch of RuneVillage remaining. 2) This is exactly what happened with Ex Rex's Skype channel, except that Znath pissed more people off than Pyro did. If it were up to me, it would only be a temporary ban to prove a point and would be over already.

Now, directed at Znath:

• Rory and Pyro (not in this thread) are also right: this Discord channel is where we get together as a group of friends. If, as Kikori said, you're trying to make people angry on purpose, then we have a big problem.
• My personal opinion is when people start disrespecting other people, then things need to change. You have disrespected pretty much everyone in the channel, enough even to make some people leave the channel entirely because of you.
• I don't like how you inject yourself into random discussions to incessantly tell people their facts are wrong.
• I don't like how you call people drunk when they don't agree with you.
• I don't like how you have told my brother, time after time after time, that his disease does not exist and therefore he must be lying.

You are an adult, yet you purposefully anger people over and over and over again. That is the only reason this ban has even the slightest shred of backing. If Topsummoner allows you back into the channel, you need to change your ways and start being more respectful to others.

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.Legendary themed months are back! Maybe.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jack, your entire post is aimed at isolating Znath vs. Top. As a mod and staff member, you should know the feelings of community as a whole are just as important as the feelings of the two people involved when the decision is handed down. I've said it to Top a couple times since the ban went down that how it was handled was questionable. But what was done, and why it was done, are far, far less debatable. When numerous people have to ignore a single user who everyone (to this point) has agreed was more menace than friend, there's little debate.
And if you want to treat this as an issue of being a perfect mod as opposed to keeping the peace in a group of friends, telling the host of a website, chat, or channel to ignore a trouble user is the absolute opposite of handling it correctly. Discord is special in that an ignored user's content is collapsed, keeping its content available to see, but it still would force the position of "I can't see anything coming until after I've been alerted, or the damage has been done". Pretty one to be in.

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Goten is dead!

Show me where in my post I'm talking about the relationship between Znath and Top. My post is about Top's decision-making skills as a moderator and the precedent it sets.

Everything is debatable. I can't recall a single scenario in which we as moderators were stonewalled with that sort of claim. What kind of thing is that to say?

I am concerned about the community as a whole, because it should concern the community that the only area of RV that is active on a day-to-day basis can be taken away from you if Top and the people he cherry-picks to communicate with don't like you. And I get that it's not just Top, I get that Znath has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, but Top is the one making the call on the basis that it's his channel. Good for him for having his channel, but it's worth considering that "his channel" and the "rv community" are heavily overlapped for better or worse, and when his - what I consider to be, subjective decisions - begin impact a user's access to the community then, well, you start to see why Ex Rex had the rug pulled out from under him. And, judging from the posts in here, Top made the wrong call and made it on a whim. Some of you may have even expected me to side with his decision since Znath has rubbed me the wrong way many times, but this sort of ban sets a bad precedent, and I know a silly ban when I see one.

I think the final decision on matters like this should be made by Jaron, and/or discussed with people who actually are chat moderators of the community. It takes a bit of mental gymnastics to justify that the desires of Topsummoner outweigh those of the community leader and the staff. If the only logic behind it is "it's his channel" then I refer you again to Ex Rex, and what a shitstorm that sort of reasoning can result in.

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I didn't really want this to turn into a whole thing on the forums, but I guess I have to make some sort of statement now.

First off, I know I did not handle this in the moment very well at all. The circumstances under which I banned Znath definitely came across as very petty or heat of the moment, and to some degree this is true. But this is really the culmination of months of frustration, not just from me, but from a number of the most active members of the chat.

Some unique circumstances caused this to be a very difficult problem for me to tackle. I intended this Discord channel as a successor to the Skype group more so than RV Chat; the final product once things settled ended up being somewhere between the two. From the start, the only rule has been, and this has been a silent rule borne of and enforced through a mutual understanding, 'no nsfw'. And for the most part, this is upheld with no incident.

So my idea was for this to be a congregation of friends and old acquaintances, not a moderated chatroom. But this led to a problem... what do you do when one person's presence is impacting the enjoyment of the server for others?

I didn't really feel like it was my place to tell Znath what he could and could not post, and with that in mind I totally understand how he, and some others, may think that he had 'done nothing wrong'. But what I was observing was his posting was a regular irritant for no less than Rory, Sparky, Quan, Ead, Kikori, and myself, perhaps to different degrees for some than others. When it came to the point where Rory felt he needed to take a hiatus from the server largely due to being fed up with Znath, I knew something had to give.

I don't really know what I should have done. Multiple people were getting fed up, and it finally hit a tipping point with me. But telling him specifically how he could not post starts the server down that moderation and rules direction I didn't want to go. The only solution that seemed to me like it would work is removing him outright.

I'll take more direct questions if any of you have them. The last thing I want is for this action to lead to a schism like what happened with Rex's Skype chat.

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Feel free to add me on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/Topsummoner

Join us at the RV Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/DgtPWPM

I wasn't purposefully trying to make people mad.
Honestly, I thought we were knowingly joking about the gluten thing (if that's what you're referring to) it wasn't something to make him mad I was trying to just make light of it. I do the same with my brother and his peanut allergy. It's not out of spite, but just kind of make him laugh out of it instead of it being a burden on him all the time. Otherwise he's just dwelling on missing out.

It's a fine line between laughing at differences and making our differences something to just laugh about. I'm not saying everything is a joke, but everything isn't a funeral either.

We tolerated far worse from far consistently worse people in the old chat. But the difference is I don't act the way I do out of malice, it was meant to be out of some kind of brotherly feeling. I'm not from an abusive family, really, but we're all a little rough probably from the feedback I'm apparently getting. I was basically treating people in the chat how I would my brothers and I guess I was too comfortable. I learned a lot about people. Some I thought I knew, and others I apparently judged to have had more against me than I thought.

I had thought about saying it. Uprooting everything I'd done, and erase myself from a community I'd been with for years maybe off and on but been through some fairly gut wrenching times. And maybe that's why I felt comfortable enough to make some jabs I thought people could take but apparently I broke skin when I wasn't trying to.

And it's no secret. I like a good debate. I like being able to meet with people with different ideas. We can all call each other wrong and present our facts and opinions and figures and come up with different conclusions. It's like piling legos and gears and looking at the creativity and intricacies in people's minds as they come up with something unique. We might be sore about the other side at the end, but I'd like that people can come back from that and say it was a good debate. I don't bear ill against people who disagree with me. I don't think Fant is stupid for one debate we had about the impact of a cellphone charger on a car's power supply or hate top for his taste in music. I've given it a listen and decided "I'm clearly not the target for this"
Hell I've even given the honest try to watch some of your guy's .. really weird taste in anime. I wasn't even disappointed to my surprise.

And that's why I like debate. It brings up new opinions and ideas for me to see if maybe my belief is as strong as I thought or maybe if they have good reasons for their side maybe to find common ground.


We got some people back, some didn't stay, and I doubt you can blame me for all of em. Some of the ones that left weren't that active to begin with. I've tried to be active and suggest things for the chat and many of them people like. It was like rebuilding things from the ashes.

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"The good warrior knows when to fight, and when to withdraw."
- Sun Tzu

I'll smith anything up to 93 smithing if you have the material for me to make it with
My Story, Horrors of Myron County
RV's Drawing archive topic, post yours or comment on others

This snippet in specific puts the blame solely on Top's feelings towards Znath, instead of entertaining the idea that it was done for more than Top's sake.

Little debate isn't no debate. Don't try to twist my words.


Translation: Cherry-pick who you communicate with about the issue. And if you know about who he talked to, you should know he's already got 2/3 of who you suggested. The only difference is instead of you, he talked to a former mod who has probably the most experience with Znath. So don't even try to say your list is only about moderation experience, because it already was; your suggestion is solely to get yourself added to the list. Didn't know who he talked to before? Then you assumed, poorly, and made an ass of you and him.

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Goten is dead!

No, it's about how Top forms the decisions he makes, being subjective instead of objective. Znath happened to be the one on the receiving end, so yes he was mentioned in my post. I would've made the same argument if a decision like that were made for anyone else. Replace "Znath" with "a user", my point still stands. It's about a moderator's relationship with the community.




Fair enough, but either way it doesn't sit well with me when you start to imply that some things are intrinsically less debatable than other things. Maybe to you there are less shades of grey, but in my experience it's best to encourage a wide open field for all forms of discussion and opinion instead of keeping it narrow from the start. You learn a thing or two from that and, many times in the past, strongly-held opinions can be influenced with discussion and debate.


Yes, I do think that my opinion matters in community-related issues, I'm not at all trying to hide that. I was a moderator and admin of multiple areas for a long time, so you can chalk it up to old habits, but you don't need the aggressive tone to go with it. I have a voice here and I fully intend on using it.

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I disagree strongly with you here, Kik. This "former mod who has probably the most experience with Znath" is a former mod because they went on a banning spree. You can probably see how "yeah ban him" doesn't come across as impartial at all.

For the record, Jackstick, I did talk about it with Top; several times in fact. But I also disagreed with him about it and stated every time that there needed to be strong, clear warnings about what was about to happen and give him a chance to shape up, or else it would just be a repeat of Rexchat.

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.Legendary themed months are back! Maybe.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You're still isolating a single user with power's feelings for a single user that way. The decision was made based on a single user with power's perspective of a community's feelings for a single user.
Your opinion can and does matter. But your opinion paints a picture of not being well informed (see: cherry picking [former] mods to talk to about the issue) and of dealing only with the sides of the matter that suit your stance (see: community perspective vs. single user's feelings). That will irritate me every time.

Can't argue that, as far as RV moderation policies go. The grey area that needs to be answered is if the Discord channel falls under the same policies.

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Goten is dead!