Hi all.
I had the experience of helping another player on the HC realm on a quest and got reported for it. Before anyone jumps in with “that’s against the rules!”, I want to give the rules as provided on the website:
“Boosting a character that is participating in any Challenge (Hardcore, Slow & Steady, Boaring Adventure, Traveling Craftmaster, Vagrant's Endeavor, Path of the Brewmaster, Trial of Heroism) by players outside that character's group, even for free. This does not forbid one-off “natural” encounters, rather it bans a continual and intentional alleviation of the challenge.”
In the instance I was involved in, I helped someone I could not group with since I was a good number of levels ahead of them (24 vs 11) to complete a “kill XX of these mobs” quest. So a single quest. I got reported for it and received a warning. I presume the report came from a Karen in the area who really hated seeing people help people, but that’s a bit aside. As for the actual rules, I did not provide “continual and intentional alleviation of the challenge.” I helped on a single quest. I was in the area, the person asked for help, and I helped. I believe that fulfills the “natural” aspect of the rules; I did not seek this person out to help them. Nor did they seek me.
To be clear and consistent, if what I did was a violation, then there should certainly be warnings going out to every higher level that kills Hogger and the like for lower level players they cannot group with. A reminder: the rules say this is a *bannable* offense. And said higher levels actually are going out of their way since there’s no real reason for them to be in the area.
As for priorities of the GMs and players, I’m personally not opposed to getting help from others in such instances. And indeed, such is often the only realistic way to proceed since a lot of rares are overcharged. Apparently, this is incriminating *helping myself with my own higher level character *, but I was at sludge Feb and used my higher level character to kill the rares of the Foreman Grills and the Sludge Beast (who seem to kill players daily) so that I could complete the area safely on my lower level character.
Continuing with priorities, there are meanwhile characters with names like, I kid you not “diddleskids” who talk in world chat as one might expect with that name. And it’s not an outright ban. Their offense is apparently the equivalent of helping out someone lower leveled with a quest, which is to say a warning. Personally, I find that disheartening for the server and it does make me question if I want to stay. I really can’t defend that kind of management from the team in charge to anyone when they ask why I play Octo.
I can say that this sort of prioritization of offenses (if helping lowbies in a one off is even an offense, which the rules say isn’t the case but some GMs seem to think is) isn’t unique to Octo. I saw it on Turtle too and other servers. It’s never a good indicator though. As such, I hope that the dev and GM teams seriously look at their own rules and what to focus on.
This might have seemed like two separate issues to some readers, but I’ll remind these people that, as said in the topic, the subject is rule prioritization as mentioned in the subject.