Last night I once again had cause to reflect on the issue of out-of-character verbal abuse.

In my little time here, I have seen four players engage in a kind of verbal abuse that clearly expanded beyond player-to-player competition or role-play into the territory of angry-person-at-their-keyboard profanity and verbal abuse.

Last night was unique in that I was the object of it. Ironically, the person so enraged that they had to call me "faggot" and a number of another names is a player twice my size or perhaps more, whom I cannot kill, and who had actually shipped me multiple times and brought me down four levels in health. Clearly, the one who had suffered damage was me - but no, not me, my character in the game. *I* sat at my keyboard with a glass of wine having a merry time with my hobby.

This player had himself been shipped several times by another player, so I suppose there was some transference of frustration going on. I had feebled him and made him drop a couple of potions in the course of his killing me multiple times. He picked his potion back up and proceeded to kill me, show me his ability to strip me while keeping me unconscious, and then proceed with some pretty creepy tells that revealed a rather dark personality. I tried to sidestep the rage and just remind the player that this is a game.

When I remarked about this to Diomedes, he said it used to be more widespread and more disturbing, and he told me one story that made my hair stand on end.

This is why I do not reveal my details about my real life in the game, and discourage others from doing so. There are some sick people out in internet-land, and some of them, it seems, like to play Avalon, too.

Let's just say that a female player chose to reveal something very personal and painful about herself, it spread around Avalon, and some players teamed her and used emotes to invoke the horrible painful RL experience. They found this funny.

Aye, I am aware of that story also. There are some really sick people out there alright and I try when I can to remind people to play in character so that something like that can never happen again. In the past we had a lot of powerful people in the land who knew they could do what they want to you in game an most would resort to any tatic to make your life a living hell while playing the "game". It is up to each one of us to remind people to stay in character when we can as this makes the place a whole lot better for us all but also prevents people learning personnal stuff which they can use.