Update #2: New details have emerged regarding the situation.
Update: Cloud Imperium Games has issued an official statement regarding the thread.
Original post follows.
A woman wanting to create a safe space for fellow women gamers in the Star Citizen community has had her account banned, and her thread locked by moderators on the game’s official forums.
Last night, a gamer going by Lauresh, who is a backer of Star Citizen and self-described fan of the space sim genre, created a thread on the official Star Citizen forums to express the possible creation of “a community for female Star Citizen gamers to gather in and talk about topics that they might not be willing to talk about with their male counterparts and just generally have a safe place to get involved with the Star Citizen community.” [source]
According to her, this idea was “immediately and brutally shot down” by vocal members of the Star Citizen community and she claims to have been personally verbally attacked for even making the thread. Proof of these responses can be found on her website.
The extremely innocent and honest thread I started survived for about 4 hours and lived to 7 pages filled with personal attacks, trolling and just general cynicism with no reasonable reason why the idea was bad. There was a few general comments such as the fact that women should be encouraged to be active members of the star citizen community and I wholeheartedly agree however the fact remains that females do not always feel comfortable being part of a community which promotes rape and has threads on sexist topics and sometimes need a place to talk to other members of the community with similar ideas.
Their discussion was immediately curtailed by forum members who sought to compare a women-only gaming group to the Ku Klux Klan.
I and several of my guild mates questioned why there was so much hostility towards the idea and myself over this and this resulted in further attacks.
This entire thread I flagged some of the more serious posts for a moderator to review, the moderators decided to move the thread to a part of the forums where threads get buried very quickly but left all of the posts in tact and went about their way. Around page 3 or 4 I saw that this was very much out of control so I private messaged community managers Will Lewis and Ben Lesnick for assistance and expressed that this was a genuine thread and the community was something I was passionate about, Will came and closed the thread and left leaving me to wonder what the hell was going on. About an hour later (I presume after Will had read the thread) I found myself unable to log into the forums and was greeted to a big red banner stating that I had been banned for excessive use of the forum flagging option (which as far as I know, isn't even a rule) and for creating a bait thread despite the fact that I was not expecting so much hostility towards my quite innocent idea. The rules quoted were #3 No Trolling and #5 No Spam, how the staff came to this conclusion is absolutely beyond me as no explanation has been given.
According to Lauresh, even her guild-mates received bans for supporting her.
So far approximately 25 of my friends have received bans due to questioning the actions of the moderators and I am still left with a 7 day ban despite having tried to reach out to CIG through various methods. It's also important to note that when you get banned you lose all rights to the forum and chat functions which means that you're not allowed to contact moderators or Will and Ben.
Roberts Space Industries has been reached for comment.
