Anets naming policy

I think consistency is massively underrated by your support department.

This problem has existed for as long as I can remember. There has always been a number of players who considered it their duty to report any name that could be interpreted as offensive. I don't think this is the correct way for support to determine which to take action on.

I think there comes a point where you have to realize that this policy is infringing on too much of the freedom in the game. I know people who have been unable to use their real names as character names due to the filter. There is the classic 'Cleric of the Damned' who's name is (or at least used to be) censored.

A clear line is needed for Guild and Character naming policy. Names that are obviously offensive, and names that aren't. Character naming is less of a problem, as you have the ability to force a rename. Guilds with considerable activity should absolutely under no circumstance be banned unless their name is obviously offensive. As Kaon said, you are effecting dozens of players directly, with a secondary effect on hundreds more.

Secondly, your support department needs to get a clearer idea of how to enforce policy. If the problem is the the tag of a guild, then don't make the mistake of saying it's not possible to change the tag when a) It is, and has happened before in high profile cases, and b) it would save the guild members the difficulty of reforming, inviting and climbing back up the ladder.

Thirdly, and this is a tricky one, taking action on a guild that has already been high profile for months or years really doesn't look good. If you are aware of a guild name that is possibly offensive then you should immediately make a decision about it, instead of waiting for someone to complain. Eventually when someone does, you simply say 'We've looked into that guild, and decided the name was within acceptable bounds'. I find it hard to believe that Kaon's guild, [Vibe] before that and a number of others were not already known about. [Vibe] had been featured on the GuildWars.com website a number of times already, and I'm fairly sure it even had a Guild of the Week entry, which now seems to have been removed.

So, suggestions:

1) Create clear and definite rules with as little room for interpretation as possible, as to what and what is unacceptable. Enforce as much of this as possible through filtering at creation, to avoid unacceptable names in the first place. You can google lists of curse-words or offensive slang in virtually any language, so go through the languages that the game officially supports and add them to the filter.

2) If the issue is simply with the tag of a guild, and it has been designated unacceptable, then change it. If possible have a GM contact the Guild Leader in game to explain why, bringing me on to my third point...

3) Communication. I think Kaon's example proves well enough that communication is an issue, and I'm sure there have been countless similar cases. I'm not sure how many guilds you ban or rename in a day, but asking a GM to pass on a message to the Guild Leader explaining why would be a big help.

4) Don't wait for someone to complain. If a guild or character name is a problem, deal with it immediately. Ask staff to pass on any names they notice that might be a problem. The support staff may not look at the Guild Ladder, but I'm sure others noticed [vibe] (as an example) long before action was taken.

5) You don't have to act on every complaint, because right now it seems you do. There have been some reeaaally obscurely offensive names banned or flagged in the past. Again this all comes down to defining a clearer policy.

6) If you decide you have to ban a Guild, then it would be nice if you could contact the Guild Leader 48 hours in advance to let him know. This gives him an easy way to put other guild members in the picture, keep track of everyone, and make plans. What's an extra two days when it takes you months to find these guilds anyway?

(I realize contacting guilds can be time consuming for GMs, waiting around for the leader to log on. As a suggestion for GW2 it would be great to have an optional field for Guild Leaders to fill out, giving community/support a contact email. This would cover more than just naming infractions, but also accusations of ladder manipulation, exploiting, or anything else.)

All in all I think Guild Wars has run on the overly simplified 'take any complaint seriously' model of Gaile Gray's implementation fair too long. Easy to understand, unquestionable and comprehensive policy and filtering is what is needed. Personally I don't think something is an issue unless it is unquestionably and definitely offensive. The example of 'Beaver' being an unacceptable part of a guild name just boggles my mind.

Indeed. This has been a problem since way back when PvP players were campaigning for UAX/unlock packs. You get the few who make the effort to put forward valid arguments and metrics, but they are almost always drowned out by the majority who simply want to whine and expect everything to go their way.

Signal/noise ratio has always been a problem. Izzy's super-not-secret forum was an attempt to deal with this, but that was not managed terribly well. That's at no fault of Izzy either, it shouldn't be his job to create methods of gathering feedback, that is the community departments specialty.

There are a lot of games, including a few recent titles, following the traditional 'player council' models for focus feedback. Some player elected, some chosen by the developer. I think that would be a great idea for ArenaNet to look into for GW2. It isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it would fill a much needed gap in the feedback process.

Balance issues, for instance. Up to now this has been a complete farce. I honestly think I would struggle to find someone who would disagree with that.

1) The skill balancer needs to play the game. Really. We realize that Izzy has always been busy with work, but playing the game competitively should have been in his job description from the beginning.

2) Community Management has to channel balance feedback to design. It should not be up to Izzy to collect and analyze forum posts and general chatter. (this was a precedent set before Regina's arrival, and I'm sure things have improved)

3) No designer should be involved in skill balance unless he is intimately involved in both the game and the community. Theorycrafting is assumption, and we all know assumption is the mother of all...

Anyway, that's kinda deviating from the point of the thread.

ArenaNet in Guild banning/DQ'ing lack of competence shocker?!

Glad to know the GM's are putting their fair share of this rubbish in now as well.

Either way, the banning policy on names and Guilds has always been shady. What's worse is that there's this bandwagon culture people seem to go on, whereby they report things they think others would find offensive.

Can people honestly say that something like Shat or Suka is offensive to them? Do we need to check tags for how they might be offensive based on history or in other languages?

I remember an awful lot of this kind of thing when Sambo's character got deleted. Then there was a whole thing with Kuntz. Seriously.

My god yes! Have you seen the movie Teeth? crap movie, but nightmare inducing for every guy I know thats watched it

I'm all for Anet and their naming policy and I'm doing my part every day to send in as many names that are a violation of the naming policy as I can find. Normally it's about 10 or so a day. Sure are a lot of violators out there. And then the funny part is they run to a forum to QQ about it like they are so innocent and all and look for every other position to try to prove they are/were innocent. Nobody is ever quilty of the crime, sounds just like regular criminals in the world to me.

It's impossible to know the intention, unless it's obvious. Smart people will hide the pun/violation in the guildtag, using the guildname to justify that it wasn't intentional. Like in law, if you start fighting about intentions, you're going to loose.

(case-study: try to determine red sonya's intention in reporting, s/he's been very vocal about it on Guru...)

On these 2 points, isn't the problem simply that GMs are NCsoft employees, most of which have no knowledge of the game? (so Shat, Vibe, or the QQ forum doesn't sound familiar)

Fair point. Intention doesn't really matter at all; it's either offensive or it isn't.

My issue was more that Anet staff have certainly been aware of these guilds for a long time, and probably should have mentioned them to support already. It seems like the problem is that NCSoft support dictates its own policy on dealing with names, and communication between the two bodies hasn't been fantastic.

If you cannot judge intention, then offensiveness should not be a contributing factor. Everything will offend SOMEONE, especially with the ridiculous policy that you have to worry about other languages! A household name in the US (a game company with a certain hyperactive blue erinaceina as a mascot) could be offensive in Italy as a word that means Masturbation.

My own guild could offend a young-earth creationist because we have the word "Primeval" in our name.

They need to stop being ridiculously PC and tell these outliers to STFU, since all they are doing is opening the door to this kind of abuse, and alienating their players.

Easy - its about feeling powerful and shaping the world in its own image, even if they say its to protect the innocent or the weak.

The world at present is filled with this cases - for example in uk they tried to change the color of the trash bags from black to something else because its offensive to people (or so the ones petitioning it say) that are black (or maybe I should say darker color or even of African origins or something to avoid being seen as a racist).

Look for something called transnational progressivism.

Anet still needs to explain to me IN WRITING why I had to delete my character called "P U G".

I want to know in what country,language, religion is the cutest dog in the world offensive.

Theres a guy in the game called "Martin Kerstein". But since the release of the new naming policy names which "Reference major religious figures" are forbidden. So please ban him from the game, because his name always reminds me to Saint Martin.

- Removed inappropriate content.
- Sun Fired Blank

The letter "G" is blocked. You can't use it in stuff like that.

I really enjoy JR's posts. He doesn't post often, but when he does, it's the voice of reason in an issue that has become absurd. I wish he could be some sort of policy advisor for them, because too often they need an obundsman-type person to straighten out the messes they have created for themselves.

That last one cracked me up.

Well, everyone who knows me personally can confirm that I am definitely not a saint .

I appreciate that you want to bring some humour to this thing, but there is a difference between actually addressing an issue (and I have seen some good arguments in this thread as well) and just being polemic for the sake of it

As pointed out by JR, this is sadly enough the reason why a lot of decent feedback never realy gets any proper attention: the "noise" surrounding it all is just too much.

For every decent, constructive reply, you have to weed through a whole page of generic replies & stupid answers. I know it is quite harsh to go and call replies stupid, but it's basically the only word i can think of to properly describe it.

A dutch technology website has a moderator-system that works quite well to filter replies. You can chose between 4 levels:
- bad
° neutral
+ added value
++ must read

The replies of a certain topic can than be filtered to only display certain levels (and up), standard setting is neutral & up (so °, + and ++ are displayed). CR-personnel could then chose to only read + and ++ or even only ++ when short on time.

reply scores are also linked to the account of the person that replied. So it's possible to see how many useful posts someone made, rather than just the total amount.

Everyone can moderate by simply giving replies a score, but those scores are weighted depending on which users give them, ranging from x1 (normal users) to x5 (supermods).

This helps a lot to filter out garbage like "QQ less", "this sucks", ... and also personal flames/general hostility.

Might be a nice idea to implent in some sort of "feedback"-forum for GW2. I'm not that optimistic to believe major efforts will be done to fix this entire isue for GW1. However, I'm pretty convinced at least an effort should be done to patch this thing up as good as possible, within the CR team/support limits.

PS: Thanks for unbanning us Martin.

It doesn't work unless you have a subtle moderation model. You can manipulate it, rating badly the people you dislike and well your friends (or partners in crime). And most importantly the subjectivity of the rating needs to be countered in some way, which may be the "narrow" topic of discussion in the case you mention ("narrow" can seem "wide", but technology is in fact a quite "focused" and information-based/factual side of the site, see the following example).

The renowned technology site slashdot.org implemented a nice system (but still imperfect):
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

IIRC vBulletin has a limited functionality of "karma", which are reputation points, but it can be easily abused. Guru's human moderation would be the solution.

That sounds pretty damn interesting noob, like an inherent QC for forums. Very needed I might add.
While easily abusable, QC seems to be so hated it really isn't doable since people are offended that opinions can be wrong and that time spent writing things that are utterly retarded was well spent and justifies stupid or misleading posts.

Glad we were unbanned, that was a good feeling.
What I really dislike is the fact that people went on and attacked other guilds like Shat, that makes me pissed when none of us wanted this to hit anyone besides a specific person and other than that, be a waking call.

I think this case, and possibly the first one has succesfully put this issue far enough into the light that it's being taken seriously.

Also, there's no word comparing to "retard".
Even though it's probably offending to mentally handicapped people, nothing like it describes immense stupidity and utter failure within a persons brain as well.

Sorry this never works and only causes problems in the long run because you have cults, groups and guilds coming into those forums DICTATING who can reply and only if it suits their agenda. I would hope Guru would NEVER goto something as stupid as this for moderating a forum.

Also @Martain keep up the good work dude. I'm doin my part ingame sending you nice folks all those abusive and enuendo type names and guild tags. This is more fun than playing the game actually.

Believe it or not, but with a few smart rules and enough non-trollers (hmmm hmmm), it actually works quite well. Slashdot.org used to be infested by partisan talk, stupid flamewars and absurd trolls (Guru would be much nicer without them!). But after implementing their system, they saw a huge increase. Actually what's nice is that you can still choose to display posts based on this "accumulated rating" OR NOT, and see everything. In practice you use it because it prunes the troll-esque stuff and trolls sort of left /. because it wasn't funny anymore.

Only he isn't joking. Anyone can get anyone and anything banned if he just puts in the right words. If Martin Kerstein wasn't a moderator and someone reported him for representing St Martin i'm convinced he would get banned. I could claim Regina was a keyfigure in some kind of racistic movement in some country, and that all people in that country now get offended by anyone called Regina. This would get you banned 100% certainly.

The same could be applied to my real name "Pim," not only does this name resemble the word pimp, there also was a dutch radical politician murdered a few years ago. Someone could claim that he therefore finds my name offensive. If I would have a character called Pim the First i would be banned. The banning of suka is proof of that, but here are two other examples:

There was the case of the guy who was called Sambjo in real life. He named his characters Sambjo the first, second, etc. He then got all his characters blocked cause apparantly in a slang noone speaks Sambjo means nagger. Here's the thread: http://guild-hall.net/forum/showthre...ighlight=sambo

One guild played GvG with all their players named after the Reservoir Dogs agent names. Mr Orange, Mr Pink, Mr White etc. Only apparantly Mr Black wasn't allowed (how in GODSNAME can a color be offensive, seriously sack the GM whoever did this) so he banned him. Only because guild wars support don't give a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO about their players and probably don't even know what a MAT is (actually Gaile Gray doesn't even know what a MAT is, so yeah...) they banned the guy midmonthly. How can you possibly think of banning people mid tournament? That's like pulling out Ronaldinho in the middle of a Champions League final because he's being charged with drug use, only there's no trial.

Please ban this person.
It is clearly abusing the system which has been shown to be extremely flawed, and even for personal gain as stated in the quoted post.
Not to know what the poster has of personal vendettas against so many people it seems unlikely to know, but it's rather ridiculous and serves only to make the game an unpleasant place where people are constantly threatened for no apparant reason.

Something important to take into account: there's been a few cases on Guru of people lying about their bans, or the reason they were banned. I remember a case where Regina came back on the thread to bust the guy.

Why ban the guild?

Players get forced to change their 'offensive' name (multiple times if required) - how hard can it be for them to have the same level of ruling for 'offensive' guild names/tags?

Yes - the report offensive names/guilds process is flawed - but the banning outright of a guild is so way over the top - especially when we know that there is a way to change a name without closing down the account(s).

Why are you attacking the example? Really... Why? Is your point that Anet does NOT ban randomly because of reports? If so then just say it and back it up, otherwise don't post. You clog up the thread.

This post itsself is a reply to a spampost and therefore spam, remove both please.

Two topics with multiple pages. The easiest and best decision is to NOT have a policy outside the filter.

Yes yes we all know everyone is a troll who doesn't agree with the majority opinion. Been there seen that all my life pal. Only thing that happens with that type of moderation is cults, groups and guilds become the TROLLS and wash out any other opinions that don't appeal to them or THEIR Opinions. Hardly freedom of expression or opinions with that type of group controlled forum moderations. And who the hell is slashdot.org? Some unknown forum of course can do silly stuff like that because as we all know those types of forums are gestapo ruled in the first place and silly kids and children come up with stupid ideas like that to control. No wonder people left, they didn't leave because it wasn't funny anymore, they left because they weren't allowed their opinion.

he wasn't attacking the example, he was just saying it's something to take into account. So it wasn't a spam post although I would say yours and possible this one could be considered a spam post.

Now we have to look for a language where "ban" is a rude word.

I've thought a lot about that method of auto-moderating, and part of me does feel it is the future for some websites. For example on technology or global news sites where the audience is generally more mature it tends to work very well. I think it would see far too much exploitation on Guru, when you could have problems like uber-guilds voting people up or down to push their own causes etc.

The best alternative that I can think of is having a toughly moderated feedback forum. The rules would have to be well written and strongly enforced. A lot of it would be subjective too, like why is balance idea x removed but balance idea y stays? (because balance idea x was ridiculous, but the OP obviously doesn't agree.)

You would need moderators with an exceptional understanding of the game, common sense, and a clue about game design. You would also need to make it very clear that absolutely no trash talk or derailing would be tolerated. You would also need someone overseeing those moderators to make sure there was no bias or opinion being involved in their decisions.

That forum would cover the more technical subjects like skill balance and game mechanics.

I would consider the up/down voting 'karma' system for a separate feature request forum. This forum would cover vaguer ideas like new class suggestions, mission ideas, any kind of content that would be described as 'fun' rather than 'technical'. This could also be a good place for the developers to pitch ideas and gauge reactions.

slashdot has this and it works. mostly because users get limited amount of votes and they can not vote most of the time,. thus pushing cause is nearly impossible.

Or there is "mageo" model, popular here in czechia:

OP of post has moderator rights over all replies (he can delete posts / assign other thread mods / ban people from it / etc.). It leads to well policed community as there is reciprocity of action; be douche and you are not getting replies (because they know you will abuse op rights; be troll and your comments won't stay on even minute.). Be well behaved and your replies stick and people will reply, even if people disagree because you are letting their posts on in your threads too. If idiot makes interesting thread, someone saner can repost.

I am mod on such board. I only had to solve trolling problems and thread-mod abuse about three times in past 4 years. Bulk of my work is to star good threads to appear on frontpage of server. way to mod

This entire thing is silly.

I do understand that a lot of immature kids are playing this game, but that is exactly the state of mind in which you need to be in order to get insulted by seeing the word "bitch" or "bite" or the like in any form.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitch

Grow up. Is GW trying to get holier than the Pope??? Are we going back to the middle ages with regards to the freedom and maturity of speech?

I literally laughed out loud at that. Silly unknown forum indeed .

I have a sensible question. I've seen it stated that accounts that get temp bans get a 'mark' on their account. Is there also a facility that logs the number of reports a user makes? IMO a user that logs 20+ reports a day should be taken less seriously than someone who makes an occasional report, at the least the data would be useful if a report goes to an appeal. Would be interesting to know.

I don't think I have enough faith in the maturity of the Guild Wars community to believe either of those systems would work accross a whole forum.

Too many times have I seen someone making a good point get shouted down by a majority due to lack of understanding or vision.

What is needed in these matters is a panel view, a number of people review the report, decide if it justifies action, contact the reported person/guild and advise of the action to be taken... this is know as rationalised consequence.

Allowing 1 person to be judge and jury without any impartial discussion, indeed without any thought process behind what they are doing is the worst draconian practice I have seen.

Unfortunately support is run on the ideals of the latter rather than the former, hence the reason why this game is up shit-creek in regard to it's company to player relations.
(I expect the stock answer of we cannot afford to use that level of support as we are developing GW2 yadda yadda yadda)

anyway, I think that the banning of the guilds mentioned in this thread is appalling, then to re-tag them (essentially taking away their identity) is ludicrous, a-net need to wake up and realise they are losing the playerbase more surely of recent times than previously and they need to examine their business practices.

As one poster stated earlier the game is rated TEEN thus should be treated this way, unfortunately it appears that the teen rating also applies to the average IQ of the support staff.

I still find these policies too overrated. Anyone can find anything offensive as they see it. Here's some examples:

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/General_Bayel His name sounds like General "Bowel"

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Selvetarm "Tarm" means "Guts" in Danish

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Undead_Lich The word "Lich" comes awfully close to "Lick"

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Miniature_Pig The word "Pig" is pronounced as "Pik" which in Danish means "Dick", so in Danish it's a miniature dick following you.

My point: Anything is offensive. It should seriously be taken into consideration how far that kind of censure should be taken! I understand that a lot of swear words as "RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO" or "Shit" and so on can be taken out to prevent the game for causing that kind of "Naughty language" and of course Racial slang such as "RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO" or "Gooks" is extremely offensive as well as names such as "Hitler" (Even though there actually still are people called that who are in no way associated with the madman). But put up a limit! Banishing "SuKa" because it was offensive to a single player because it meant something in an entirely different language than the ones the rest of that guild and the majority of GW know of is, how should I say it, too extreme.

GW seems to suddenly have this notion that it must protect all its players from the evil language nazis who would corrupt our innocent young ears with horrid, horrid names! In trying to be as politically correct and linguistically sensitive as possible, it has become that which it seeks to prevent.

The word "bite" is not allowed in a name. Husband is in the process of forced changing all his characters from the Badas (NOT asS) family to something else because after nearly four years, someone can't read and differentiate between As and Ass. Four YEARS it's been fine and now it's OMG bad, evil and unacceptable.

Where do you stop? If you cannot reference major religious figures, better ban all men's names beginning with "Lord" because that clearly references Jehovah or G-d, a religious figure most would agree is major. Never mind that Lord is also an honorary title of landed or knighted gentry. All the Saint and St whatevers had better be banned, too. And on that note, husband has to also rename his characters with the name Budha even though it is NOT the religious figure figure named Buddha. Budha (with one d) means "one who is seeking enlightenment" while Buddha is "The Enlightened One".

Player ability to report is a good thing but vastly prone to abuse as has been shown. All it takes is an immature person or an ultra conservative person or someone having a really pissy day, and you, too, can be banned without warning and without recourse (since you're not given a reason, just told you can't play).

Do I expect Anet to know how to read and know the difference? No, because they have already proven themselves to be proven unwilling or unable to use common sense or logic.

I think this new, improved, policy might not be as bad as many people seem to think (yes, i'm an optimist. no, not a boat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimist_dinghy)

It might be a "backdoor".
lets assume, the devs registered a desire to be able to change character names, but couldn't, for whatever reasons, implement such a feature telquel.
(or lets assume they just didn't look at it that way or, worse, they know it won't work)

as far as I know, you can get characternames banned if you either manage to link the name in question to some obscure offensiveness, or get enough people to report you with the /report function.
getting people to do that should be possible by either offering ingamegold or assure them they won't get banned because enough other players report too.

this would enable people to change their characternames for the mere downside of a temp-ban.

It's quite amazing that almost all the time there's a thread like this, someone will come up with this notion. As if there exists a higher "logic" or a "common" sense that would supersede everyone, everywhere. We, human beings, are in constant search of what it means to offend or insult, looking to understand the intentions of others. It's no different for NCsoft support people, but they know even better than we do how difficult this is. This is why there can't be a perfect solution. But human nature is such that allowing "total freedom" is sure to lead Anet to loose a lot of customers, because irresponsibility is a "common phenomenon", which people will name "fun", "didn't mean harm", "didn't know", etc.

Just imagine for one second you're this guy at NCsoft support, moderating some stuff for another game (CoH/CoV or Aion) and a name shows up on the radar. How are you going to know the intention of the guy who created it? And what do you think your company would feel if you suddenly decided that because you can't know you won't do anything, thus ignoring all reports?

Some people don't mean any harm when creating their name, but they should also realise that to be able to live in a virtual world without borders you have to accept sacrificing a little bit for the "common cause". Of course it can and will be abused, but if it wasn't there, these virtual worlds would only be empty of people with sensibility or young adults. It's legitimate to question the general policy and its enforcement, but not IMHO the very principle of regulating what's allowed or not. I'm even sure that as virtual worlds grow, the RL law will catch up.

Interestingly, WoW has a long list of "offending" reasons (with a funny "pure gibberish" ):
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/namingp1.html
The more people you have, the more of these problems you encounter, the more important it is to solve them.

Fril, it is not expecting too much, I don't think, for NC Support, Anet or whomever it is who runs the game these days to engage a little intelligence. Expecting everyone to somehow know that their guild ACRONYM means something off-color or possibly offensive in a totally different language is not only not intelligent, it is nonsense. Even though I am familiar (not fluid, however) in a couple languages besides English, I cannot know what names or words might mean something "bad" in, for example, Outer Mongolia or Timbuktu. Names that were deemed acceptable a year or three or four years ago are now forbidden. Now, I'm not talking if someone's acronym is c**t or other glaringly obvious examples of likely offensive terms/names. And I'm not talking about names in similar situations such as Motherf*cker (which, yes, I have seen halfway through the game in NF).

So no, I don't think it too much to expect a bit of common sense or logic in the ban sequence. Sure, stupid people will be stupid no matter what. But it should not follow that a support team must also suspend their own intelligence just because it's a "virtual world".

I'm not asking you not to, I was merely pointing at the fact that the same "common sense or logic" argument can be used by ANYONE to justify their point of view. AND something must be done, because allowing any names open not acceptable doors (the game may well be blabla-rated, we all know there are kids).

Of course, banning Shat was a quite obvious mistake, they should check that it's not the four initial letters from the guild name (and even that can be used by players to "visually assault" other players, I know, the "visually assault" seems strange, but somewhat this is what all this fuss is about) AND that they're not reputable (being here for 4 years doesn't mean that there's no problem).

I agree that Anet and NCsoft need to get their act together, allow a much more flexible mechanism (I bet it's too late for GW1, and I bet that modifying guildtags was exceptionnal because it involved going directly into bits of the server and one of the databases to change the name manually...). But you'll ALWAYS have greay areas, both because you can't foresee all cases and people will try to get around the rules (rules are static, people can judge dynamically).

Kudos to Martin for rectifying that. He proves that Anet is not stupid and they're listening.