Protecting spaces

Hopefully a shorter one today, maybe not as positive as the previous post. I had a screenshot pinged to me with a Meltdown attendee telling someone to ‘KYS’ after what looked like an online tournament loss, essentially asking us if we’d take any action on the person. 

If you’re looking for an immediate answer to what’s happened; the player’s been banned until the end of the year. They’ll be able to attend again from 2025. Any repeat behaviour like this and they’ll be permanently banned. 

There will be a lot of questions about how we come to a decision like this, so I want to give everyone a bit of a glimpse into the process.

Why was it not permanent from the get-go? Well it’s complex. Should someone be excluded from a community forever because of a salty comment after a loss? I personally think permanent is a step too far. Don’t get me wrong, it’s inappropriate and not something anyone should be saying to another person, but I believe in giving people the chance to grow from these situations and four months should be adequate time to reflect. 

If the ban was permanent, there would be no incentive for them to improve themselves and act more courteously in the future. I don’t believe we should cast people aside without giving them at least an opportunity to do better, or I suppose the opportunity to prove us wrong.

Luckily we have the caveat that if this happens again, we now have full justification for the permanent banning of the person. This is a crossroads where the player has to decide if they want to commit to the community and the values we want to promote at Meltdown, or exclude themselves. The stakes are laid out, and ultimately this becomes their choice. Some degree of agency is given and they decide for themselves how they want to proceed. What are these values anyway? I’ll copy paste from the 1st Rule of the Fight Lab discord (yes there is one). 

“1. Please treat everyone with respect. Personal attacks, hate speech, harassment, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic remarks,  etc. whether made here or elsewhere will not be tolerated and will result in a ban from the server and our events with no warning.”

I don’t think anything here is too unexpected. I like to think that Meltdown has always done well during my tenure here in being an accessible and welcoming venue and this is built on the back of our staff and people in our communities. We’re lucky that somehow the gaming/alt culture nature of the bar filters out a lot of troublemakers and we rarely have problematic people come through. Typically your lobby trolls will stick to playing games at home and not come out to somewhere like Meltdown.

Toxicity is one of the things that does rear its head now and then, but usually it doesn’t take more than a ‘excuse me, but you can’t act like that here’ to get people in check. Once people see that behavior being allowed, it’s a signal to everyone else they can behave the same way, which makes it much more important to stop it early.

Some other examples of this are when customers feel the need to raise their voice to get service at the bar; if we don’t tackle that attitude there and then, every customer in ear-shot has been signaled that it’s okay to do that when it’s time to order a drink. If we don’t keep these things under control the culture of the bar can shift entirely. 

Coming back around to the ban; if we allow comments like this to go unregulated, we’ll see people turn away from the venue as a constructive friendly venue where everyone is welcome. I’m not sure how much truth there was to it, but some parts of the FGC were supposedly more elitist and closed off ‘back in the day’ and this isn’t something I want to see happen to MD. We’re in a lucky position where every community is really welcoming and everyone is here not out of ego but instead passion for the games we play and passion for the social aspect of our events. I’m sure there’s still more we can do to improve this, but we’re on the right path and I want to stay on it.

Another note too here; while I do believe everyone deserves a second chance, if there’s hatespeech / harassment / racism / homophobia / transphobia / threats of violence then yes, it’s a permanent ban from the get-go. Under no circumstances are we giving people who hold values that are the complete antithesis of what we stand for a second chance.

Thank you for reading, and if you’ve got any questions feel free to reach out on our socials or the contact form. Cheers!