MMO Troll Forced to Write Apology Letter to Avoid Getting Banned

What is a video game troll? Well, depending on the game and I guess your opinion, trolls can come in many different shapes and sizes. To me, a troll is somebody who doesn't take the game seriously, tries to ruin people's experience for their own personal enjoyment as well as just downright abusing the game and its community. While sometimes trolls can be funny and even entertaining, being a victim of a troll can be less enthusiastic. In Black Desert Online, a certain troll named Kimochi has landed himself in hot water with game moderators for abusing and griefing role-players. 

Like most online MMORPG's, there are three types of players/servers for the most part. Player vs environment (PVE), player vs player (PVP) and roleplaying (RP). Like in Sword Art Online, there are some players who focus on PVP and don't really respect the act of roleplaying. Instead of just ignoring roleplayers, Kimochi decided to take a somewhat violent route. 

Kimochi confessed (Via PCGamer) that he was basically just killing everyone he saw, and most players were taken off guard because the penalties for player killing in Black Desert Online are fairly harsh. When you kill players in Black desert Online, you gain karma. If you gain too much bad karma for player killing, you are marked as a target and people will hunt you down and kill you without consequences. To make matters worse, Kimochi decided to shout "Death to Rper's" in the chat while on his killing spree.

The moderators weren't pleased with Kimochi's griefing of innocent roleplayers and decided to take action. Instead of banning him like most games would, moderators decided to send him through rehabilitation instead of directly punishing him without question. Lead gamemaster Rhotaaz wrote a letter to Kimochi stating that his account would be banned in 24 hours unless he participated in the thing he hates the most, roleplaying. Rhotaaz sentenced him to a 500-word backstory on his character, and I have to say, it is some of the most satisfying punishment in a video game I've ever seen. Kimochi was forced to publish this the backstory of his female ranger on the roleplaying server within 24hrs, and post it he did indeed. 

The Black Desert Online moderators are very serious about protecting the community and making sure that it's a safe environment for people to have fun without worrying about abuse. While Kimochi was obviously just having fun, he maybe went a bit too far. Nobody likes griefing, but I think Kimochi escalated it to hate crime level. What's so bad about roleplayers anyway? I like dungeons and dragons so I don't see the problem. Anyway even though Kimochi had to swallow his pride, he said he only did it to avoid an inevitable ban. Think he learned his lesson? Think again.

"Am I going to keep spamming the chat? No," he said. "Am I going to keep killing RPers? Absolutely."

Anyway, it was a good effort on Rhotaaz's part and I know the roleplaying community definitely got a kick out of it. I'd like to see more games take this approach to punishing players for toxic behavior.