Rules are way too strict

[TetsuoBW]

Hello all.
I am 39 years old and I have been playing online video games since a long long long time and been part of many online gaming communities.
It is the first time in my life I am getting my profile reported and getting a lot of Karma reduced on my profile.
I was at 100% for a long time and from one report i got -30 karma because I only said my partner was playing bad and ruined the fun of my game because I mostly play Tichu and it's a team game.
I feel moderation rules should be revamped and maybe reduce the amount of karma u reduce when someone is breaking the rules.
It is one of these reasons that I am thinking of quitting playing here. Everyone is always reporting from the tiniest thing. It is like everyone is so easily getting hurt by someone else telling them something they don't like.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope this post doesn't put me in trouble.

[brh2113]

Every time you successfully complete a game, your karma goes up by 1. So losses aren't really permanent. I wouldn't sweat it.

[asd123321]

Don't type negative comments.

[TetsuoBW]

Every time you successfully complete a game, your karma goes up by 1. So losses aren't really permanent. I wouldn't sweat it.

I know. I was at 100% and from one report I dropped down to 70% . imagine grinding one by one the karma pts by 1 as you say and u lose -30 from 1 guy. I don't even think his report was fair. I only commented on the way he played because he ruined my experience of the game. Oh well..... as for the guy saying don't write negative comments. When you go to a restaurant and you don't like the food don't you write negative comments? we are humans and we have feelings, good or bad, we express them. That is the whole purpose of my post, we are not robots to just write the good stuff. emotions play a role.

[Phoxtrot]

Saying that someone is ruining the game is needlessly aggressive, toxic and counterproductive and goes against the interest of the site.
It makes people flee and not just the people you are accusing of playing badly and makes parents wary of allowing their teenager kids to play in such a toxic environment.

People are allowed to be bad at games.
If you don't want to play with bad players, restrict your table to people with a high enough ranking.

[ChiefPointThief]

Saying that someone is ruining the game is needlessly aggressive, toxic and counterproductive and goes against the interest of the site.
It makes people flee and not just the people you are accusing of playing badly and makes parents wary of allowing their teenager kids to play in such a toxic environment.

People are allowed to be bad at games.
If you don't want to play with bad players, restrict your table to people with a high enough ranking.

It depends on context and what op actually said but I disagree with your first paragraph. As a spades player I could give several examples as to why someone would be justified to comment about how a player is acting (playing) at the table.

About restricting tables that isn’t as easy for team games. Also some team games are still using the old team elo which makes it extremely difficult to separate the good players from the bad.

[Phoxtrot]

It depends on context and what op actually said but I disagree with your first paragraph. As a spades player I could give several examples as to why someone would be justified to comment about how a player is acting (playing) at the table.

Well, there is a difference between playing badly and throwing the game.
Throwing the game in a team game should not be allowed.
Problem is that humans are often bad at distinguishing between the two and, from experience, the most vocal players are often the least apt to actually make the distinction.

[Ceaseless]

Frankly, BGA's chat policy is one of its most toxic features. It makes the site more offensive and annoying. The site would be better off focusing less on irrelevant chat nonsense and more on issues like cheating, etc. Fortunately, Karma is largely worthless, and if you care about it there are many ways of getting it back quickly, so you can pretty much ignore that.

[Silene]

Well, there is a difference between playing badly and throwing the game.
Throwing the game in a team game should not be allowed.
Problem is that humans are often bad at distinguishing between the two and, from experience, the most vocal players are often the least apt to actually make the distinction.

It is true, that throwing a team game is an ugly thing to do. But it cannot be judged by moderators. Sometimes people look like they're throwing the game while in fact they just didn't know any better. Also moderators can't know every game anyway. And also it would take endless ressources if moderators had to analyze a game even if they knew it.

So for mods, it's impossible to act upon this kind of bad-playing-behaviour because it's impossible to judge and they don't even try because they know it's impossible. Only possible way to act on it is giving red thumbs and not play them again.

Because of this fact, the mods cannot take playing-behaviour into consideration when judging about chatting behaviour. So from moderator's pov, you're throwing out accusations (that can't be proven) in a very unfriendly way and by that you're ruining that possibly innocent player's experience. They judge the chat with the assumption that nothing was wrong with the gameplay. Because they have to do that (as it's impossible for moderators to judge gameplay).

Maybe keep that in mind when deciding what to write in chat