Was extremely tired and accidentally wrote erotic instead of exotic fish

Once upon a time sticky dingbats were bugged.

Then they were fixed.

The end.

(It also should have been pretty clear that was a bug, since you can't use bound credits to buy gifts for people either. Bound credits / sticky dingbats are for your own use only)

I just want to express my disapproval at folks who try to plagiarize in the Bardics/Artisanals. Everytime I read about someone doing it, it makes me mad. For one thing people work hard on their stuff and someone trying to sneak in a poem or drawing they copied is worse than cheating. For another, what if Estarra says, "Alright, if people are just gonna keep cheating, we'll drop the contests altogether."

Then it's ruined for everyone just cause some bozo decided he or she would try to get something for nothing.

Stop trying to ruin it for everyone, bozos! The monthly Bardic/Artistanal contest is one of the coolest things about Lusternia.

Plus, it's dumb! Folks always get caught! I guess some folks think they're special and it won't happen to them, but they're not and it will. So, knock it off!

Plagiarists get perma-shrubbed, right?

Yep.

That doesn't lessen my own, personal, ire though.

I definitely agree! I despise plagiarism.

In a sense, though, they're performing a service for everyone else by getting themselves caught and shrubbed.

Unless they ruin it for everyone.

I don't get why it's done even. It needs to be Lusternian anyway so most things wouldn't win anything anyway. So it needs to be rewritten, and then you might as well just rewrite everything to make it not a copy of a previous work.

I agree, extremely disheartening to hear people have stolen others' work to try and win a contest. Or for any reason, for that matter!

I didn't know you were capable of being angry!

I do, however, agree that plagiarism in these contests is stupid

Gleip: I'd imagine that it's "easier" to plagiarize/art-steal in the Artisanals than in Bardics, because you can trace something or recolor it in GIMP/Photoshop/whatever and claim that it's a portrait of a random Lusternian character. Which has been done.

I mostly wish they'd name and shame people that are punished, I doubt we'd get as many people breaking any sort of rules if it were made public, if we had a news board that announce 'Lawliet has been shrubbed for twenty days for sexual harrassment', people wouldn't be quite so willing to step a toe out of line.

A lot of companies won't do that sort of thing due to privacy laws and such. I can understand it to an extent, but I agree that it might help curb that sort of behavior to have a "wall of shame."

Plus, it would let me know who I never want to associate with again.

Wouldn't even have to say what they were shrubbed FOR, just have a list of people who are permashrubbed and let people guess what they did. Make it a fun game for everyone else >.>

It might serve as a deterrent, but a "wall of shame" (at least, for those not permanently shrubbed) takes at least part of the punishment out of the hands of the administration, where it rightly belongs.

The admin decide how they want to punish people for breaking the rules. If names and offenses were made accessible, public knowledge, we could easily wind up with a lynch mob/witch hunt effect. It isn't the jurisdiction of the player base to level punishment on people who break administrative rules, and if we did start doing this, it would be very difficult for the admin to control. Not to mention that, in the case of temporary punishments, the hope would be that the player can come back and be a solid member of our little community here- having them feel ostracized beyond what the admin can control doesn't lend itself to that.

So, while I freely admit to being guilty of:

(Gossip Clan): You say, "Oooh, who got shrubbed?"

That probably right there gives support to it being a good thing we don't all know in a public manner.

For permashrubbings, obviously, this doesn't matter in a lot of practical ways, but the spirit of the rule is maintained.

I can't really see how privacy laws would engage.

I agree with everything Rainydays has said.

Besides which, OOC sanctions for OOC rulebreaking are a private matter to be discussed between the game's customer services and the player. Publicly naming and shaming sets entirely the wrong tone: we are not your gods; we are providing a serivce for which many of you pay. It would be entirely inappropriate to name and shame individuals both because of the importance of a continued good relationship with any customer* and because it sets the wrong tone - it gives the impression that the administration considers itself to have the character of a sort of higher tribunal and in customer service matters that makes us look like a bit of a banana republic.

*I would argue that once you start discriminating between 'good' customers and 'bad' customers you open an enormous can of subjective worms.

Edit: If you follow that. I'm never at my most articulate at half five on a friday afternoon.

I agree with this.

But I used to do customer service on a game that will not be mentioned. But they had a wall of shame for the people who got banned as sort of an example, I thought it was a cool feature until one of the players killed himself over it.

Oh sure. Everyone can trace Pikachu and claim it's a furrikin, but the poem is a bit more iffy. Sure, you can take an old folk tale, like the one from "tie a yellow ribbon" and adapt it to Lusternia. But once you're already adapting, it is easy to make it so that the only connection between the two is that they're stories about someone worried if family still want them after all these years. To outright plagiarize... I have a hard time seeing how you can successfully plagiarize anything (written) that'll stand a chance in the Lusternian world anyway.

Edit: Come to think of it...wrong place.

Boo on the credit market crash! Credits are almost a thousand gold cheaper today than yesterday!