devtrackers.gg
Evening all, we want to give an update on this. Since we first saw it, we've been speaking with our Support team to better understand the situation. The majority of what we're going to be talking about here is from the perspective of what we can see, which is in-game behaviours (versus a lot of the content in the videos). We'll talk about that distinction a bit later on.
The RuneScape accounts in question have now been permanently banned. Firstly, a bit about the accounts and the processes we use to ban. The accounts had previously received a handful of offences for breaking a number of different rules, recently among them was Inappropriate Language/Behaviour. If the accounts in question carried on the way they were, and that's very likely, they would have have been permanently banned at some point. However, we've decided to action these permanent bans now.
Our current processes are largely set up for allowing players to have second chances, hence the original temporary offences. That said, there's clearly no number of chances that'll work for these players, which brings us to tonight's permanent bans.
Going forward we're going to be reviewing the internal processes we just mentioned. Second chances are important, but not at the expense of behaviour like this. We need to do better to strike a better balance between second chance and zero tolerance.
It isn't lost on us that in recent years we've made in-game content changes for the purpose of D&I, we've resurrected the Pride event, and we know that allowing behaviour like this to continue just undermines those efforts and makes us look toothless. We will do better.
That's the RuneScape account side of things.
Like we said, this is all using context we can see from in-game. The videos contained a lot of horrific content, and whilst we don't doubt that most - if not all - is true, we need to reiterate that it's important to report this stuff to the platforms on which it occurs. Whilst there's some rare precedent for us taking action against RuneScape accounts for out-of-game behaviour, it is extremely hard to verify these screenshots and videos from other platforms, so please do report them to the platform on which it happens.
Lastly, and, in a general sense, most importantly, if crimes are committed they need to be reported to the police. We will, and have previously, gladly assist law enforcement (or other platforms, like Discord) with their investigations.
A TL:DR of sorts:
- We've permanently banned the RuneScape accounts for in-game behaviours.
- We're going to review the strength of penalties for this type of behaviour so that in future bans will trigger much sooner.
- We can't police out of game actions, especially crimes. We will gladly assist where possible, but the evidence we are limited to is RuneScape accounts and what they do in-game.
We'll pick this up again tomorrow. We hope you all have a good evening, 'Scapers.