Official Policy Stance on Support of Player Run Events

This past week we’ve seen an uproar from the music and roleplaying community about the lack of GM support against griefers during musical events. During a recent concert, event-goers were upset when tickets against a griefer did not yield the intended results. There’s been quite a lot of backlash against this on the forums, Twitter, and elsewhere.

Today +Dust posted to the forums their new official stance on supporting player run events:

LOTRO has a rich history of fun, interesting and exciting community-run events. We think this is fantastic and would like to better support these activities! To that end, we are making a concerted effort to look into ways for us to support and further encourage participation.

One of the things that we’ve seen detract from these events is the negative behavior and actions of other players. Specifically, we know that players moving throughout the performance area on mounts can be particularly frustrating and distracting. To combat this problem we’re looking into what options are available to help combat this behavior in designated performance (stage) areas. We’ll also be removing players who are mounted from the stage area manually in the meantime. Typically, we’ll take this action upon receiving a help request. We will also take this action if we happen to see it occurring while monitoring events. If this behavior is repeated after we issue a warning we will be taking further action including banning the trolling players. Please keep in mind that this policy is for events that use designated stages. We cannot provide support if the events are held in areas with quest givers, standard gameplay, etc.

If a GM does witness blatant and intentional disruptive behavior other than being mounted in the performance areas we will take action against that disruptive behavior as well. We want to take a common sense approach of fostering these events and removing anyone displaying harassing or “troll” behavior.

If you have any ideas to make events more accommodating for your groups, please post and discuss in this thread. We are always happy to run feedback by the product development team and review our own support and moderation policies to create a better experience for all participants.

It’s definitely a good sign that they are now planning to take action against these event griefers. It’s good that questing areas will not be effected and that the new plan targets areas that see the most concert use. This policy does raise some questions too, though: Can more areas be made ‘designated stages’ in the future, besides just the stage near the Pony and the Methel Stage? It seems that the goal is to move toward an automated system, so what about musicians on horseback?

Throughout the thread, +Dust and other community management team members have been commenting and interacting with the community. If you have questions or suggestions about this new stance, I recommend you let them know there since it is clear they are keeping track of that thread.