I've only been with CLOK for a little over three months, but I think I can contribute to this conversation. I pay a lot more attention than people seem to think, and I don't doubt my perceptions -- despite attempts to convince me the sky is green while seeing myself that it's blue -- so I've been able to make a few observations...
The first one is probably the most obvious: if you want to know how CLOK got to this point, the simple fact of the matter is that Rias was far, far too lenient. I'm not going to name any specific players in this post, but there are players out there who, seen with my own two eyes, have committed offenses against the spirit of playing a game in good faith -- i.e., outright cheating -- and against other players -- i.e., harassment -- so blatantly that I continuously marvelled at the fact that they hadn't been banned -- or, at least, it was still surprising to me for the first month. So, yes, Rias was far, far too lenient -- especially when other games would have long ago banned some of you.
Secondly, since these malicious people weren't being told to take a hike, they naturally collected in CLOK and drove most everyone decent away -- and it makes me angry that the OOC problems are so bad that there have been times when I literally stopped in the middle of roleplaying in order to talk to someone about a problem caused by OOC drama. My time in CLOK has been some of the most fun I've had with a game in years, and I'm one of those people who tries pretty hard to keep everything in-character -- I've had in-game chat off for months, even -- but it's hard to ignore it when it starts showing up on the BBS, in my tells, and on my Skype. What are some examples of toxic behaviors that I have witnessed myself? People blame the GMs for things they didn't cause, they maliciously spread untrue rumors, and they OOCly harass other players. Jirato is absolutely right
when he describes these as poison, and it's clear to me that they're killing the game.
Thirdly, one of the problems, but this is only a minor one, that I see is that some of the "bad guys" are played by players. Any veteran tabletop GM will tell you that it's almost always a bad idea to have an evil PC in the party, especially if the player isn't used to handling it; in fact, most GMs forbid evil characters outright simply because nothing causes a campaign to self-destruct as quickly as PCs murdering one another in their sleep. Good GMing practice is to have the players united against a common threat, not at one another's throats. Likewise, in CLOK, I think that some (but not all) of the people playing "evil" or "bad guy" characters can't handle it entirely in-character, which is one additional (albeit minor) reason I perceive the playerbase is so fragmented and rife with OOC infighting. People get along best when they're united against a common foe: that's social psychology 101.
So what? Well, I can't offer any suggestions about the third point since doing away with "evil" guilds altogether would be too radical a change, perhaps. But I do have some suggestions about the other problem...
From my time being a GM for another game, I came to believe that people who behaved badly in especially egregious ways should be held publicly accountable by other players and shamed for their behavior, and that bullies or other irrefutably toxic people should be told to take a hike by the GMs.
I developed this idea from my own experiences as a GM and player, from reading about manipulation tactics, and from reading about toxic people and personality disorders. Time and time again, in this other game, I would see griefing or manipulation work like this: the perpetrator would isolate people or find already-isolated groups and exploit this fragmentation in order to operate in secrecy or tell each side different stories -- and, because none of these sides had the full story, none of them could put the pieces together to realize that they had been lied to or manipulated. (Sound familiar yet?) I was no longer a GM by this point, but I saw someone use this technique to kill an entire village's worth of player characters (in a permadeath game!), and, in another incident, I saw someone get punished and her character killed for having done ... nothing. It was all made up just because someone didn't like her.
In CLOK, these techniques are doubly effective since people are encouraged to keep what happens in-character a secret due to a culture of players not trusting one another. Secrecy is what allows manipulators, bullies, and toxic people to flourish. When people cooperate and share information, it makes a manipulator's job exponentially harder. I think that we need to start trusting each other as players to act in good faith, to be transparent about our characters, and to hold each other accountable when we fail to act in good faith. By "act in good faith," I mean treating other players with dignity and at least begrudging acceptance -- i.e., even if Vaylon the character is the most backbiting manipulative bastard who ever bastarded, I, Vaylon the player, am not -- keeping what happens in-character and out-of-character separate -- i.e., I am playing a character in this world, and I should not act on OOC information -- and just generally being kind to one another and not heaping malice or derision on each other.
To that end, in order to foster goodwill and a spirit of collaborative narrative-crafting with each other -- because that's what we're doing here, in my opinion; we're here to collectively tell a story, and there's no reason for any of us, as players of characters, to be as secretive and distrustful as we are -- I propose that we make our characters transparent to one another in order to show that we hold ourselves accountable as good-spirited contributors to this story.
I'm more than happy to publicly talk about and explain my character's thoughts and motives for anything he did or does, and I encourage -- indeed, challenge -- the rest of you to try that, too.
Sounds radical? Yes, it undoubtedly is, compared to what we've been doing. But I'm willing to trust all of you to act in good faith because the reward is that CLOK becomes a place where we trust each other to collaboratively tell a story about our stoic warriors, our hedonistic shady guys, our dirty farmers, our philosophical assassins, and our mad sorcerers. I think you'll find that when we trust each other and honestly share information, and when we hold each other accountable for being conscientious roleplayers, it will leave little room for out-of-character lies, manipulation, toxicity, or bullying, and we can all get back to enjoying the game.