Therumancer said:
Relax a bit. Truthfully I suspect CCP is out of line here.
My immediate thoughts are that the player expressing the sucidal thoughts was being a drama queen and annoying people, perhaps even trying to use those tendencies as a way of begging ISK /ships/etc... off of people. There are a few people who play the whole "emo" card for this reason in every MMO and some become quite infamous on their servers, with one server I'm guessing this guy became famous enough to get the attention of the (un)official reps.
So someone might be claiming to be suicidal for personal gain, therefore they should not only be ignored, but outright harassed because of it? Sorry, but that is exactly the wrong way to deal with someone who is potentially suicidal. The fact is, regardless of how many people they may have told (the article indicating it was private communication to another player), handling it this way when none of these people are in a position to know whether they're serious or not is not only idiotic, it's downright negligent. If they believe they're lying or simply don't care if they're serious, the better response would be to ignore them. But outright harassing someone, which in all likelihood could push them to kill themselves if they're serious is utterly moronic and inhuman. There is no justification for it.
Sorry if this sounds cold, but I've seen similar things in MMOs, and not everyone who sounds suicidal actually is, and anyone who plays that game, especially in the long term to become infamous at it, is going to have picked up the right "signs" to drop into the message.
What's your point? Again, without knowing the person personally outside of the game, to treat someone who's expressing suicidal thoughts as though they were faking it is idiotic because you can't know if they're serious. The right thing to do would be to try and get them help (which CCP even mentions having a suicide hotline service for). Lay people in an online game cannot make the determination that someone is simply faking it, and telling people at a convention to harass them until they do it should be fucking criminal.
Claiming to be suicidal or "fragile" in some way is not a get out of jail free card for any behavior
No it's not. Neither is some people using it that way an acceptable justification for laughing at people talking about suicide and suggesting people harass them until they do it. Yeah, someone trying to scam stuff from people by pretending to be suicidal is a dick move. But treating suicidal thoughts as a joke and trying to make them do it is inhuman. Even if the guy was trying to scam people, the ones suggesting he be harassed are the bigger scum bags by far.
CSM council members exist to do things in the community that CCP generally can't, including helping to observe and "regulate" player behavior and trends therein. Deciding to effectively cut the attention being given to an infamous game-wide drama magnet is actually the kind of reason it exists (whether you believe it should exist or not).
Apparently they also exist to be complete assholes with no concept of the value of human life. You know, the sort of thing CCP can't do, and if they have anything resembling a conscience, which seems to be the case, wouldn't want anyone doing for them.
Frankly, and I say this understanding full well that perhaps the person in question was pretending to be suicidal, the CSM member responsible for this presentation should be permanently banned from the game, and the CCP representatives that stood by and let this happen should be sent to the unemployment lines. Because even if you are right and this is someone trying to get attention and free stuff, it does not make the behaviour reported on in this article ok, and these people should be made an example of if CCP wants to take a firm stand against this kind of behaviour.
