community standards amended, hacking added as bannable offense

As you can see by the timestamp, the Ehmry Community Standards were put in place on August 24, 2012.

Over the past two and a half years those standards stood the test of time, through Ehmry's ups and downs, and were generally loosely enforced by Rill and myself.  Prior to today 47 accounts were in the Banned group.  Many of which were spammers from the early days of the forum, many more were accounts of banned individuals who just kept creating additional accounts till they ran out of resolve.  Overall less than a dozen active forum members were actually permanently banned from the forum.

The largely self-moderated forum community is not perfect.  However, considering that we are 30 months into it and the forum has survived and often thrived without the need for heavy handed moderation is an accomplishment that you made happen.

Because of this self-moderated approach things get sometimes out of hand and then Rill or I need to step in and make a decision as to whether or not to permanently remove someone from the forum.  Because different people have different levels of tolerance some may feel that we ban too soon while others may feel that we ban too late.

Overall we strive to be consistent in our decision-making.

Today, after a long period of consideration, I amended the Community Standards and included rule #11 which explicitly states that those who use hacks in game are no longer welcome on Ehmry.com.

Anet created a game that makes hacking possible and also consistently fails to remedy this technical shortcoming.  However, while Anet provides opportunity, players still need to supply the means and the motive.  This assigns the responsibility for hacking to the player and not to Anet.

Since GW2 WvW is a team sport and hacking provides an unintended advantage it is against the spirit of competition and thus those who engage in hacking are no longer welcome here.

Life is not fair, life is rough and ugly, but I will not fault anyone who comes into a game for wanting to get away from real life for a few moments and as gamers we ought to collectively respect our desire to escape real life and not have to face the same issues in-game.