Why I stopped playing ARM

yea. This. Exactly.

I liked Tuluk...

Mind you, I had only two characters there.. Both merchants. It was just like taking a break from ARM.. Politics? Pfft. Who does politics in Tuluk? If a templar gets pissed at you, you throw two larges their way and they suddenly like you. Because they were supposed to be luxurious but their stipends didn't cover everything. They had to collect money and open bribes like they do in Allanak was frowned upon.

My merchants would simply roam around, crafting with alabaster and wood so close to the city, have picnics in the Poet's Circle, drink expensive wine in taverns. I could literally make a large without trying. It wasn't Armageddon, it was the fluffy sunshine land.

I quit playing once because I was banned when I was suspected to be some other player. It was quite obvious that staff was wrong, and after asking for them to un-ban me they did with no hesitation or questioning.

I quit playing the second time after it was brought to light that various posters on the jcarter board were posting pixel trackers in their signature, and one of them had sent me a PM "welcoming me to the shadowboard". While this happened before I was banned, it shows how low some folks will go to profile their playerbase.

I'm actually curious about this too. For using pixel trackers, who ever did the bannings kept missing the mark pretty far.

I figure this stuff ended with Nergal and the epoch of clique infiltration.

Two accounts used pixel tracking. One was shik and the other was angrygortok. shik had been around for years and had the tracker in their signature for at least a year before the code dump. They would PM members of the board with weird overly friendly 'hello fellow kids' type messages. Keep in mind that the pixel tracker allows you to see the URL that the person is viewing the link at; so if you send a PM to someone it has a unique URL ID and you can therefore match a PM to a person with an IP address.

angrygortok included it in the body of the message, which was a dumb way to do it because anyone quoting them would see the image code for it. I think it was probably two different people that used the technique, but given how specific it was and the fact they used the same host it's likely that they communicated about it to one another at some point.

I can't confirm based on hard evidence that it was staff that used it, but it's naive to assume that it wasn't them. They have a past history of trying to track down members of this forum to ban them, it's their code that's 'at stake', and the only people that could actually do anything with the IP addresses is staff. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to shift the fault elsewhere and try to pretend it wasn't them.

We don't really know, but there are certainly players who have been told in no uncertain terms to "stop posting over there." Staff will certainly confront you if they find out you do it, and while I don't think they outright ban upon finding out, I'd say it probably puts you in the black book and could get you banned if you don't stop when they tell you to. Identifying shadowboarders is very much a thing that they go out of their way to do, and while there's no real proof that they're behind the IP tracker thing, like jcarter says, what's a player gonna do with some anonymous IP addresses? At the very least, it was someone acting on staff's behalf and sending them the information. This was done in a deliberate, systematic manner, and there's no other explanation than that the IPs were meant for staff purposes.

A while back during the Nyr era, people started complaining about the high frequency of bans. So many players got banned by Nyr after running afoul of him that there was a kind of mini-revolt. Staff decided to tone down the bannings, but instead they shifted to a new practice of essentially running players off the game by targeting them with all kinds of scrutiny and disproportional punishments. Perceived pariahs would find that NPCs got animated to try and kill them, denial of any requests more significant than joining a clan forum, karma dock/lock, removal of guild options, etc. That way, Nyr could get rid of players he didn't like without technically banning them. These things still happen, just not quite as abundantly as it did under Nyr.

I know a few people who have been contacted by staff and told how disappointed they were to discover that the player had been posting here. Those players were typically treated like shit afterwards. These aren't always players who have outed themselves here, so staff at least try to identify shadowboarders based on something. Whether that's writing styles or IP trackers or whatever, there's most definitely an effort to find shadowboarders and punish them. They've said they don't have rules against posting here, but you can be certain that you'll become persona non grata if they find out.