Star Vault has shared some new community guidelines over at Mortal Online 2. While acknowledging that MO2 is a competitive game, they’re updating guidelines as needed after harassment against both players and developers reached unacceptable levels.
The dev team knows that sometimes you blow off a little steam or you trash talk your opponents, after a hard loss, and even victory sometimes. Yet, there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and remembering that the person on the other end is, in fact, a person sometimes seems to be ignored. The new guidelines and team response also covers feedback over what have been called gaps in enforcement of existing rules and failure to keep the environment a safe one for participation by players or developers.
These two groups are different in their roles and expectations for them, of course, but there have been some pretty toxic responses towards both and that’s why they’re acting now.
“At Star Vault we have always tried to ensure that our players feel safe and that bad behavior is punished when appropriate, however we understand that at times some players may have not felt this effort, and so we are striving to be better and make changes to reflect that.”
They also noted that the development team has been the subject of some scary harassment attacks and even threats of violence:
“We have a few other accounts we are investigating for the same kind of campaigns, some of the actions of these people were but are not limited to; spreading personal photos of friends and family members of SV staff, spreading private and public personal accounts of SV employees, attempts to spread IP information of SV staff, advocating for the death of employees of SV, consistent harassment, abuse and slander of both players and employees. This kind of behaviour will not be tolerated.”
This has led to many devs leaving Discord to get away from publicly-accessible channels. Though there is a potential note of hope, “In the future we hope to recreate a healthier space where our staff would be more willing to interact publicly with the community and give their insights on the great game they’re working on".
You can read the full statement and details over at Mortal Online 2.
