If these SDC members were taking advantage of a bug in the code to do something they would otherwise not have done, doesn't that mean they were exploiting?
Yeah, I made sly mention of that further up the thread but with the full understanding that the argument has little meat on its bones. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the meta knows that this "event" was timed to coincide with that already published flaw, and in that regard it was brilliantly executed by SDC. But all it takes is a flat denial and/or a claim of pure coincidence, and that aspect becomes moot. So no, it wasn't exploiting game mechanics. It was exploiting Mobius' inability to quickly kick people from his group which isn't really the same thing.
Something like this was inevitable given the recent difficulties Mobius has had using woefully inadequate tools to maintain the increasingly large member list for the group. And unless the technical issues have been fully resolved I'd expect something similar to happen again before too long. Maybe around Easter, when Mobius and his forum admins might be spending more time away from the game and most Frontier staff will be enjoying the four day UK holiday weekend...
I think you're missing the point where the offender was banned from Mobius.
Eventually, but by Frontier not Mobius. That's significant here.
FD think that saying this sort of 'griefing' is not breaking the rules... It is giving 'free incentives' to go noob bashing, free incentives to camp at stations ramming speeders, free incentives to join any private groups that will have you and just totally ignore what the group playing together is about and just do whatever you like to disrupt the group because there are no 'consequences'...
The thing is, that's always been the case with Mobius and other private groups and people have accepted that small but significant risk. They accepted it because for a well-administered group the cycle was very quick: rule breached, reported, acknowledged, verified, kicked out. Sometimes within minutes. You could be a jerk but only once per CMDR name and only briefly. That was enough for most people. In effect, it was an out-of-game implementation of the in-game Crime and Punishment system FD have thus far failed to provide.
One reason it was different this time is because the administrator was unable to carry out the "kick" part because of a previously published problem with large group member lists. Instead it had to be done by Frontier themselves, while the perpetrators took advantage of the delay this caused.
This is the crux for many here. Unlike other private group "infiltrations" which were handled by the group owners, Frontier themselves were forced to act to resolve this one. Which means they were also forced to make a statement. And the statement they chose to go with was weak at best, certainly inflammatory judging by the reaction, and possibly even a tacit endorsement of griefing. A quite incredibly naive response given the schisms that already exist in the player base.
Still, if there's one positive to be taken from this it's that we can finally put the "define griefing" argument to bed. If any more posts pop up asking, "What is griefing in
ED?" we can just tell people to Google that Reddit post and say, "That. That is griefing, as described and apparently accepted by Frontier's Head of Community Management."
