The one (only) good thing about threads like these is that they do at least prompt us all to think about the standards this community should have.
Frankly, it speaks volumes to the admins' general tolerance and forebearance that these threads don't get locked as soon as they appear. I believe that in many other gaming communities, commentaries on admin policing decisions would be shut down immediately.
I fully support
hokomoko's decision to word his rebuke a little more robustly than he might have done for someone else (or even to comment at all). snoke is a legitimately very good player. I'm happy to see him on my team because I know that whatever role he elects to fill, he will fill well. If I can do something that will support whatever he's up to, I'll try to do it. I'm also satisfied that if he's doing something that looks anti-team like rushing nuke, he's done it making a reasonable consideration of the risks and benefits.
This doesn't stop him being a bit of a prat on occasion however.
Take
B713348 18 on TitanDuel 2.2. In the pre-battle stage he remarks (publicly):
"Hellaciouss plz rename to Hellaciouss[vegan]"
Sounds pretty innocuous - except that I know full well they seem to rather dislike each other. I also know that snoke also profoundly dislikes rooks[vegan] since they've also had forum thread spats in the past, so the only way to read that is as an insult. I comment a little while later (in ally chat, not publicly):
"Spare the baiting please, I'd like to win from time to time."
Nothing further happens (though we lose anyway, somewhat ironically). I spoke then, making a minor intervention in an effort to forestall something worse that my prior experience of the participants suggested was likely. I play this game to have a mentally demanding kind of fun. I don't play it to see people bitching at each other.
In real life, I work quite a lot with police officers. A police officer, like a game admin (though of course to a much greater degree) has a certain level of visible authority and the right to carry out actions that are generally not available to the rest of the community. In the UK, there are certain expectations about how police officers exercise their powers. There are all manner of mission statements, vision statements and codes of ethics, but the starting point was the
Peelian Principals. One can be cynical about any code of conduct applied to a government body with coercive powers over the citizenry of course, but as a statement of principals, I find them pretty eloquent.
Amongst them are the following:
1) To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
6) To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
Something I learned about was the "continuum of force" a concept that governs every single interaction police officers have with the public. Why? Because it doesn't start with physical contact. It starts simply with the officer's presence, proceeds through every kind of verbal and non verbal communication before reaching the point of physical contact.
I said what I said to prevent the disorder of a team bitching at each other instead of playing the game, judging this the minimum intervention necessary to achieve the objective of a fun and pleasant team game. Hoko did the same with the situation he saw.
