Here is a response from someone more senior than the GM who pleaded with the Goons to play nice. According to the Funcom customer service lead, that GM "made the honest mistake of giving out his personal opinion that maybe keeping a lower profile might be handy in avoiding a negative reputation."

Like SA ever gone out of its way to avoid a negative rep.

Anyway, here's the clarified position on what is and ain't OK.

PvP is acceptable in all shapes or forms. We have built-in mechanics that allow the player being killed to find a way out of it.. When those mechanics fail or do not function as intended we will step in. Until then we will be as hands off as possible.

Now, we have a lot of players, a lot of servers, and a lot of petitions, as you may know. We do get a lot of petitions on Deathwhisper about "griefing". When do we take action? When it crosses the line. You can camp someone until the next day if you want. More power to you.

What you cannot do is verbally threaten them or use inappropriate language. You cannot use exploits or bugs to kill other players, or for any reason, for that matter. The game is rated M, but that does not mean you can use racial slurs or issue personal attacks.

In this case, the GM was seeing a lot of reports of griefing with regards to SA's guild. He didn't say you couldn't pvp. He made the honest mistake of giving out his personal opinion that maybe keeping a lower profile might be handy in avoiding a negative reputation. Obviously, it was a mistake. If you feel like it, bring all 300 of your friends, enemies, or whatever and beat each other senseless.

It seems that our policies are not clear cut enough, and we will make every effort to clarify them so that there is absolutely no question as to what is appropriate and what is not.

Wow, that's such an after-school special denouement. I feel like we all learned something today. Knowing is half the battle, and that's one to grow on.

Funcom Responds to PvP Issue on AoC [Age of Conan Forums, via reader Allison]

The GM more or less asks them to not engage in Player-versus-Player in groups of more 5, and no more than three groups, but "if you guys are planning a mass event, we support it ..." Well, then, make every event is a mass event. Plus the pleading tone of this just makes it sound like an absolute joke. That, and "There are Anonymous among our ranks."

I have yet to play AoC, this is more Fahey's territory, but I can spot a lot that's laughably wrong with this, and not just a request to ask SA to comply with anything. One of Age of Conan's major touts was its large scale PvP — unless you get griefally profiled by a GM, in which case you're asked to take it down to reg'lar size.

And while it's a bitch to get repeatedly attacked in unwanted PvP encounters, sure, the game also has mechanisms through which players can avoid them. But when someone complains, they're not advised to switch instances or move to another server. Instead the guild, playing on a PvP server, gets warned and threatened.

So let's assume all this applies to y'all too. Do not attack in groups of more than 5, or with more than 3 groups. You might get a talking-to. Or something.

No More PvP on this Server, Guys. GMs Said So [Age of Conan Forums, thanks reader Allison]