Mutual Interaction

As an oceanmaster, I deal with quite a few complaints every shift.  Aside from the valid swearing and theft complaints, I get a lot of complaints in which it's very obvious that the complainer just wants the complainee to be punished by a higher authority.

Reasons for complaints range from "she wuz meen" to "he did something and stopped when I threatened to complain" to "threating to report me for no reson."

We all live in very pacifistic societies.  I remember being told over and over in school to not respond to teasing or attempts to pick fights, but to ignore them and walk away.  While I can see the logic of this policy (if you come across two children fighting, you have to punish both of them. you cannot determine who started what or who said what on the kids' say-so.) it obviously doesn't address the human desire for vindication and action.  So quite logically, children tell authority figures and want those figures to do something that they can feel happy about.

That's not the lesson I want children or our players especially to learn.

The problem is of course that you cannot always control what happens to you.  Terrible things can happen to you, especially when you are a child and relatively helpless.  What you always have control of is how you react to a situation and what you do.  Somebody out to provoke you?  You have better things to do with your leisure time.  You can't control of somebody decides to be an jerk on the interwebs, but you can decide whether you're going to waste your game time shouting pixels and getting frustrated or use your game time to go do something fun.  (I plan to come up with a programmatic way to teach this to computer game players and get very wealthy while benefiting society.)

And hey, if arguing with people is your way of having fun in Puzzle Pirates, that's fine.  Don't spam the complaint queue expecting some higher authority to help you with that, though.  Honestly, the higher authority has bigger things to deal with, like that manager who took off with 200 items of black/gold/Atlantean clothing that didn't belong to him from the tailor rack.

Furthermore, there are game tools that take care of problems like these with unbelievable efficiency. Often are the times that I have wished for a /mute function in real life.  I have encountered persons on the bus so personally offensive that I wished for nothing more than a white-hot meteor to come raining down from the sky to incinerate these persons to nothing more than mineral powder from their bones, leaving no trace of organic material so that their accursed DNA was wiped clean from the face of this earth.  By fire. CLEANSING FIRE.

Love the mute command.  The mute command is your friend.  You know that question "What if there was a war and nobody showed up?"  What if there was an idiot in Puzzle Pirates and everybody on the server muted him?

Bliss.