Ray Patean said:
I'm not shocked that Bob admitted to doing this..but I am shocked at some of the responses here.
If someone came here and made a thread about wanting to download an item pack (like the warehouse pack when 1.10 first came out) or said that he duped items to plan characters for b.net, you guys would rip him a new one and scream and shout until they were banned.
I'm sorry, you may have been a memebr longer, but I've been here 2 hours everyday minimum recently and no, this is not the case. In the last 2 weeks we had a person join just to ask "can you give me a 99 char with all the stats undistruted? I want to try something out." and they were nither banned nor all that flamed. They were told "we don't do that" "go to google" "those aren't legit, we would be glad to have you as all legit and tell you about any build you can think of". VERY minor flames, and a willing accptance of them if they would be so kind as to not download the 99s.
This has been the method of the forum for sometime now. We say, "go to google, but please go legit instead." We say, "welcome! Here are you shin gurards" to people who say "I just found this place, when I first started, I cheated, but then my computer did a full wipe and I stopped by here for advice on starting from scratch."
This is a more recent occurance, after all just a few months ago we flamed Chubby Hubby into leaving over misunderstood comments which were cleared up in his favor. Do I think this is more in line with rule #1? YES. To see a compairison of then and now just look at the "MP w/ NXdreamer mean's finding a Zod" thread and compare the tone of Serdash's Zod find with the Zod find linked in the first mentioned Zod thread. Dashy's was welcomed with spoofs and congrats, the first's legitness and reality was called into question by AE amongest others.
As for following the letter of the laws of RPGforums/SPF, I've seen posts where people say "bump. 10 charters". Vargas sings in Japenese in the bar, and the entire EMB is basicly spam. All violation of the rules. By what several people in this thread have said, we should all be banned. You could even argue that intro threads are spam, but they're strongly encouraged in the SPF FAQs themselves. To follow the rules without looking at the specific case means that the FAQs encourage violation the law of the land.
Do I think fb's actions fall into the same category? not quite. Am I upset? you better belive it. I feel betrayed and worried about Corax's Zod (and scared that I almost got it). But I remember Solo going on a flame spree to get banned to get pulled back into the RW. I remember reading in the daily just a few days ago that fb wasn't going to play D2 much anymore, and I remember hearing about his gf and thinking to myself that he was going to have a hard time explaining the MF tourney to said gf. I know I try to belive the best about a person, thus don't trade or MP because I don't want that trust shattered; but what if fb was trying to get banned? Trying to get kicked back into RL. Goodness knows some of us live a little too much D2 and SPF.
When I was younger I heard of a study that found the smarter you are the more you lie b/c the more you cover your tracks and the smarter you make your story. When I was little I'd lie to stay/get out of trouble and I've never been caught for some of them, but I also know that the only way to not be caught in them is to live it, and when caught, you try to talk your way out. I can't help but think that someone who was able to hide their actions through 2 years and 7K posts would have gone in and changed the level with a flick of the fingers. Just as someone trying to get pushed on in life might change it to be "caught" and kicked out in a blaze.
I've thought several times about what excuse I could give to leave that wouldn't sound like it so that I could comeback if I wanted to, and worried that I may not be able to leave if I tried. While I don't agree with fb's method, it certianly was effective.
