So just to summarize this last paragraph so I can make sure we are on the same page. You are suggesting that a report system be set up so players can report bullying and suspected cheating. This suspected cheating could be anything from sharing accounts, bug abuse..or a new player that is steadily dominating Trial Park? In that case, I would like to report Pete Vella for cheating and always finding the better AJ horses when we were noobies! He had an unfair advantage because it was a normal human time when AJ opened up and It was 3am for me. I was slow from exhaustion and did not click faster than he.Kelly L Haggerty wrote: ↑3 years ago Look here's the deal. Plenty of players that are not me have talked about what the forum and chat are like. And we are constantly warned as new players to stay away from both. And then advised to be in both a lot. Then warned to stay away. But the forum and chat are not and were not where my frustration comes from. It's the gameplay, and the stuff that goes on there.
It's the new player (not me) that still can't get anything they try to get at an auction, in any division, without being outbid by the same person. It's the "flush and crush" of making sure that "Trent" has enough horses to drive new players out of TP and then entering enough way better horses last-minute in ANY other tb race they enter, even an obscure low-level state bred claiming race, to make sure that they aren't earning any purse money because you know that without first-class shipping they can't make a switch. It's a dozen other tactics just to torment and be an a** and restrict access to horses and purse money.
I am GLAD most people don't know what the hell I am talking about. That means most people aren't pulling this nonsense. But I have had so many emails about stuff like this where "omg he's doing that to me too" or "that happended to me 6 years ago when I was new". Clearly some people know exactly what I mean. And it goes on and on and on for multiple RL years, not SIM years. The forum comes in when you try to ask for help with something because this is going on and the exact same people (not Louise, to be very clear I never saw anything to suggest Louise was involved) come in over the top and make sure to discredit your post or turn it into a flame war or post a bunch of bs gifs or whatever. So that you can't get help.
I think we need to maybe be a little realistic about the new customer experience. And yes, I said customer. When you come into the game and find out that stuff like this has been going on forever it is not the best experience. And it sucks, both for the player and because it isn't a fair representation of what a lot of the people here are like. The ones that always feel sad and a little offended when they read this stuff, because they are behaving exactly the opposite and being helpful. I joined when a blatant cheat was going on at TP not for the first time, not for the second time, but at least for the third time. And it was pretty clear to me that something wasn't right about it. I joined with $100k, too. I had been monitoring the sales page and the claiming races for what was available, and with 30+ years in real racing I had some advantages in understanding what that meant to help me along. I remember paying $10k for my first "expensive" horse and being freaked out because it was so much of my budget. But Trent gets almost a thousand allowance and stakes level horses and earns about $9m in just a few months and not one flag on the play? Then I learn that this has been happening over and over? Meanwhile, some of the bs-pullers are making snarky forum posts about how Trent is "owning me" at TP? Why would someone that has been here 9 years and has that many horses be paying the slightest bit of attention to which newb is winning what at TP, especially when one of those isn't really a newb at all, but a cheat?
New customers don't want to spend their time policing this stuff. Or trying to go through the user interface one page at a time to gather the data required to build a case. And it isn't our job to keep dealing with it to so that the bullies don't win. People that do this stuff well into adulthood aren't going to learn anything except who will take repeated punches and who will be their enablers. This is a 100% contained envronment subject to management. There are answers if there is truly a zero tolerance policy on cheating and bullying. Some of these people claim to be Em's friends. I own 2 companies now, and I can tell you if someone treated my customers like this I wouldn't be calling them a friend. Good grief!
In the interest of trying to be constructive, here are some things that could help. Set up a "reports@simhorseracing.com" email where players can report these issues. Use a contracting service- there are several VERY affordable ones that I use for my businesses- to do a site audit/investigation of claims like this periodically, maybe twice per calendar year. I would have been willing to pay for it via purchase of game points just to stay and have a hope of a level playing field, but, whether the business or the customers fund it, contractors with access to the data tables should be able to find the anomolies and patterns pretty quickly. And then deal with the people that are causing the problems so that the better people can move forward without these jerks running customers off.
Frankly, I think this idea of a contracting service is ludicrous and not-needed. We already have a support system in place to report various things, bugs, cheaters, bullying through Contact Us. I'd also like to remind people, and slap me Em if I'm speaking out of place..to actually just use this link. I imagine a lot of players contact her personally over sim issues that are not urgent and I can understand from personal experience how overwhelming and exhausting that can be. The forum community has also been kind of a tough environment, not to say that it is always morally correct because it is not. I have made the mistakes of assuming other people are on the same page as me in terms of sarcasm etc and I apologize for that. Yet I will not continue moping on about my mistakes because that would simply be beating a dead horse, which I think this situation regarding Trent Mcevoy situation has turned into. We (the sim as a whole) are responsible to notice these things, bullying, cheating, and report them in a way that can benefit the admin and the steward in a way that can be dealt with. I believe the community did that as it should, perhaps later than it should have but we are humans. The Admin team have families, they have lives, they have work, they have days where they say * the sim I want to step away for a second. That is human. We are human
It is also human to want to help new players. You want to see the people around you succeed. You are going to tell your friend in need of a job about job openings you saw. Is that unfair to the person who doesn't have a friend to be a second set of eyes? Life is about connections, and so is the sim. Yes, it sucks for some people that its like that. I am very introverted myself and so making random forum posts or just chatting up new people is hard and scary. I get that. Talking to people IRL and making connections for graduate school is scary, going to formal business dinners is scary, but I do it because that is the importance of success in the world as we know it. More people are gonna vouch for player A than player B and sure, its going to make it impossible but you (generalized statement) cannot let that stop you from what you want in life, or in the sim. There are many different ways to play this game, and some of those ways it will take you 10 real life years to get there or maybe 2 if you get lucky. Yes, luck is a concept of the sim. Look at the freak slides present in some of our newer players, look at the amount of blue-blooded mares in my barn that have given me donkeys and other older stables that are much more successful than mine.
We all love this game, and we all can do better but I am tired of seeing threads like this turning in "riot starting" threads. It's exhausting. The sim is meant to be my place away from my stressful "real-life." I don't want to need to avoid the forums or even consider fully dispersing because its just become another stresser in my life. "Oh what is it now?" has become a normal thought in my head.
