People seem to think that we ban for doing a few emotes that people might find offensive. It also seems to be thought of as a new thing. Neither of these are true. Doing /rude, /laugh, /taunt etc is not in itelf offensive, it's part of the game and anyone who is offended at having their little digital man laughed at by someone elses little digital man should probably be out in the fresh air more and not playing this game.
What people are being slapped for is for breach of this part of the CoC:
/laughing at someone once or twice is fine and part of the game interplay. Repeating the emote 72 times is excessive. It's important to note that this policy does not only apply to emotes. Continually doing /y or /say for example with the intention of flooding chat buffers is forbidden as it's deeply annoying, very childish and totally unecessary.Code of Conduct wrote: "Flooding" (the rapid systematic repetition of one phrase, which interferes with communication between users) is forbidden, as is all abuse of the means of communication that can be accessed on the site.
The reason you're hearing about it more these days is because a certain well known Alb/Excal player was reported for getting very happy with /emote macros. We considered that his over-use of this constituted flooding and slapped him for it. Since then he's taken it upon himself to report every single person who emotes at him. Some of these reports are justified and so we took action. Those people then did the same and the issue spiralled. Now it seems to have settled back to a more sane level.
