A Message Regarding Toxicity

Lately, I've been noticing a few vocal individuals who have been unnecessarily toxic to others in both Server and/or on Discord. These individuals haven't been banned, and this shows a problem in Harpoon's punishment structure.

As you may or may not know, Harpoon uses a system for how we ban. We typically like to give warnings, then kicks, then bans. Those bans are usually in tiers of a day, 3 days, a week, permanent. Sometimes we'll have other times for those bans.

Internally, we want to revise the system to be more formalized, right now we have a lot of freedom for staff to use their judgment and while we still believe in that, we want to make moderation for players to be a bit more consistent.

But, regardless of our changes, one issue we have is toxicity. Toxicity is a tough one because it's all based on judgement, requiring staff to know whether someone is joking, and whether is someone is offended. More than that, sometimes just acting even if we aren't personally offended but someone is, or if the comment is too far, regardless of whether someone is offended.

Comments that are clearly over the line, ie racism, homophobia, or etc, we don't have issues banning for. The issue is with people who like to play with that line, or cross it and claim they were joking. I'm sure you have some people in mind at this point. The largest problem here is that we may not necessarily ban those individuals for doing this once, but would do it for repeated offenses, but they do so when admins aren't on, or when different admins are on, so we don't all get to see all of these occurrences of toxicity, and so these people sneak by.

To address this problem, we want to do three things:

1. Firstly, we want to encourage you all to report problematic users to the staff via the forums (here: https://forum.harpoongaming.com/reports/ or to a staff member via Discord). I know many of you may feel as though people shouldn't be reported because the staff already knows, but please report someone if you feel they are breaking the rules, it helps us have concrete evidence and also catch people who we may not see.
2. We will be using this post as a warning to individuals that toxic, disrespectful, and insulting comments will be cracked down on. If you believe this will apply to you, please curtail such behavior.
3. We will working on internal systems to better track troublesome players who often fly under the radar, and work towards improving our consistently of enforcing the rules fairly.