Reid wrote: GMs are not cops, they represent the link between developers and the community.
I would dare to challenge this particular statement and not exactly happy about it
Reason: upon connection attempt, TMW forum "welcomes" me:
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Access Denied
As an anti-abuse measure we disallow connections from TOR, VPNs, proxies, and most hosting companies.
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It looks much like police state. It exceeds most games I know and even China. So it seems TMW GMs and admins actually turned into cops. If someone looks like a cop and behave like a cop, he/she is a cop, right?
After looking on users list I can see about 20 players. Like half of these are bots. I wonder who are these heartless bastards doing horrible crimes worth of these draconian countermeasures. These are easily most restrictive measures within whole TMW history, at least since 2009, as far as I could remember. It seems it far surpases e.g. any Platyna measures I'm aware of and anything else I've ever met.
Disclaimer: I could be unaware of some events behind the scene or something. Yet, when facebook could run tor hidden service despite tremendous amounts of users (and resulting abuse) and small project posts such claims in error message, I sense there is some bug or so. Are you sure its heading good direction and GMs/admins haven't actually turned into cops? For me it actually looks like if GMs and admins are full-fledged cops at this points and have established police state.
What I really do not get is: is it really okay to take drastic countermeasures to get rid of players at ALL costs, even if it gets rid of other players? (I'm aware of at least one player who left the game thanks to this approach). Most games I've seen were investing efforts in getting players to behave in first place and their GMs did their best to resolve situation peacefully, only resorting to bans when everything else has failed. Unfortunately, TMW is nowhere like this. Then, since RPGs take a plenty of time to develop a character, just suspending it, even temporarily usually works like a fairly good measure. I wonder how it came to this. Am I fundamentally wrong with this view of the world and wildly missing something? (I know access to server is a privilege, not right, but still fail to understand such a strong determination to get rid of players)