I was gonna try to get this up yesterday but then we had our site meltdown. However, I know all of you are interested in the online civil rights of Something Awful MMO guild members, and Funcom has stepped in to assure they will not be griefally profiled now or in the future on Age of Conan.
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]