Local parent stumbles into pedophile-infested game

The staff created a sockpuppet account with a tracker pixel in its signature and banned people for posting here. They advertised their campaign of suppression, just without including their methods. That's in addition to regularly banning or stripping karma from people they thought they could identify. We once inherited an Arm player who never posted here prior to getting banned because the staff confused him/her with someone who did post here. It's a real mystery why most of our members started posting after they were done with Arm.

To your point, however, I never encountered it so I didn't know it was there. I wrongly assumed the staff would crack down on it if it happened. Given how many other things I've complained about in the game, I think I should have some cred when I say I'd have condemned it sooner if I was aware of it earlier than now.

The bullshit she posted is fierce. You covered most of what she did wrong so I'll just fill in the gaps.

Oh, to any defenders of Arm: I do not claim to know how large this underground group is. I'm just criticizing the moronic defense of the game I was forced to read.

That's not playing Devil's Advocate. That's deflecting from the point there are pedophiles bonding with each other while co-authoring child porn. Playing a 13 year old who gets mixed up in drugs, alcohol, and violence doesn't make you a troubled 13 year old in real life. Explicitly acting out banging a 13 year old may make you into a pedophile in real life.

Yes, ShaLeah, a player writing child porn can be judged for that. The thing that should disturb you is the group of people writing child porn while couching it as role playing. You shouldn't be arguing this is somehow worrisome behavior due to some absurd implication that having a consensual child porn co-author somehow makes the whole affair moral.

Your defense of players simulating sex acts with children is the rules say "it's not taboo in-character". Congratulations on defeating the argument he didn't make about how other characters should react. I bet the fictional version of him. whose non-existent argument you just crushed, will need to go on a suicide watch from that epic defeat.  However, back in the real world, this is a shameless dodging of the point.

If someone draws porn involving a character that looks like a 6 year old girl and says she's 18, she's a child and everyone fucking knows it. You used the imagery of a child; you're depicting a child.  That's how the image is going to be interpreted.  This isn't rocket science. Defending it by saying the adult character involved in the sex isn't a pedo misses the point that the artist, writer, and readers are the pedos being criticized.

Making 13 the age someone is considered an adult is not the same as saying humans reach physical and emotional maturity at 13. As for the lack of rules against pedophilia... the term for that is "tacit endorsement".

"Perverse" is the kindest word to describe seeking sexual stimulation involving children, simulated or otherwise. "Evil" would be more accurate.

It's not that I know what their stated motives for wanting to role play that are. It's that there's really only a handful of motives (edge lording, being a pedo, and being a pedo edgelord) and none of them make writing child porn into a morally-defensible activity.

They should have raised it to 18 specifically to curtail that behavior. Instead they left enough wiggle room to keep the players they'd lose if they did that.

Staff don't apparently have a plan to deal with characters that are currently in the 13-15 year range for their race, so they're going to be a hot commodity until they reach the age of consent.

The moral of the story in the end is that staff don't like having conversations they can't control. Voice your concerns about the game on the biggest soapbox you can, and things will change.

Like I said, staff don't like having conversations they can't control. It forces them to change a game they don't want to change, in order to meet certain legal requirements. In your case it was related to IP, in this case it was related to child erotica. Armageddon is the game it always was: defiant in the face of legality and ethics until there's too much attention on that defiance.

They aren't changing it because of legality they are changing it because they don't know any better. How many other MUDs allow pre-teen PCs? I am almost certain that "sex muds" already exist and this goes on to a much more extreme extent, if it was illegal these muds would be shut down.

You make a fair point regarding legality, but I brought up legality in reference to the intellectual property claim WotC had. I brought up ethics to refer to this particular matter.

That being said:
- child porn is illegal and erotica with children in it is on very shaky ground. It is at best ethically dubious.
- there's no more evidence that suggests pedophiles that get to roleplay pedophila won't be pedophiles in real life as there is evidence that pedophiles who get to roleplay pedophilia decide to try it out in real life, insofar that I'm aware (it's an interesting enough subject that I'd be willing to research it sometime, though)
- "As long as you're not hurting other people I'm okay with it" is generally a good rule to live by, but at the same time staff have a moral duty to ensure that people aren't actually being harmed, rather than ignore the issue entirely and assume no harm is done as long as no harm is being reported.

While I personally don't truly care. Keep it at 16, raise it to 18. I seriously doubt many people here care either. They just want Arm to burrrn. But is Nobokov banned in North America? There is a lot of literature about underage girls … well, having sex.




PS: Hey hey, Bitter. Glad you're still around. You should participate more. When making Qwerty account, I was looking forward to your walls of text arguments. But you're not around as much anymore. 

Aren't Zalanthan years and ages a little more complex than 1:1? It seems weird that wasn't discussed once in the entirety of this shitstorm.