So today we were camping Capricious Cassie. We had our usual competition of Wayfarer (JP LS), our recently semi-usual competition of Fatality & whatever amalgamation of random 75 NAs he got to go with him, and some Korean LS that formerly monopolized Amemet. Canibus was one of the people with Fatality, and he was being rather obnoxious in /say. After a while he asked in say what time it was in Japan and why the Japanese people hadn't gone to sleep, to which I replied, "it's time to STFU." Now, I admit that I could have been less offensive, but I wasn't outright verbally attacking him. He replied in a rather more offensive way, something about "why don't u suck my dick bitch." I called a GM, there were about 36 calls before mine.
About a half hour or so later, Cassie popped, and for the second time (that I've seen) Fatality out-voked the nearby Japanese players. Although I won't accuse him of removing the .dat files in that room, that's up to your imagination. However, what happened next doesn't take any imagining to see why it's wrong. The ninja with Fatality voked it off him, engaged, and proceeded to turn around and face away from Cassie. They were holding it, Canibus was apparently afk and they had no other mage. I told them that I had called a GM, which was true, and I thought it was lucky that I called the GM previously about Canibus because he would be replying any time now. They asked why I had called a GM, I explained that holding a monster without fighting it was considered a "grief tactic," they said "our mage is afk" or whatever, and I said "well we'll see what the GM has to say." The ninja was turning around and hitting Cassie once with each katana about every 2 minutes, apparently that was going to be their excuse to the GM.
About 10 minutes go by, I had talked to the leader of the JP LS letting him know that I had already called a GM. The GM replied, saying he was looking into the player Canibus (my GM call was about Canibus being abusive, etc). I immediately replied to the GM that the group Canibus was with was currently using a grief tactic, holding Cassie without fighting it. The GM is replying really slowly, still talking about Canibus and so on. Now, the ninja with Fatality turns around and starts hitting it again, but this time he doesn't stop. I look over and there's Canibus, back from afk. They start fighting it, the GM shows up at exactly that time.
The GM stands there for a minute, I send him tells saying that they just started fighting it, and that they had been holding it for about 10-15 minutes. The GM then says in say, "I had better see some damage or I'm going to take some people to jail." This was after he had stood there watching them fighting it for a minute. It was frustrating how slow the GM was reacting to everything. Anyway, as you can guess the GM did nothing. I was going to ask him a question, but he said "farewell adventurer" and made it so I was unable to reply to him. So I called another GM to ask my question. Here's some screen shots (sorry for the blacked out conversations with other people, they had nothing to do with the GM convo.)
The first one was when he was taking forever to reply after I had told him about the grief tactic.
That was pretty much it, he hit his "good luck adventurer" macro at that point. I called another GM because I still had questions. About 40 minutes later, they finally killed Cassie (Canibus randomly /laugh'ing at me at his having got away without punishment from the GM), and the second GM finally replies:
So there you have it. As long as you don't say incriminating things in chat, which is logged, you can get away with anything until a GM actually shows up. Which, as you know, usually takes a good amount of time. Square may as well have never changed their policy to include "grief tactics" such as holding monsters as punishable offenses, because nobody is ever going to be punished for it.
As a side note, the other day FantasticImpronptu LS held Fafnir with a very small amount of people while waiting for the rest of their members to get to Dragon's Aery. We called a GM, and of course by the time a GM responded they had enough people to fight it.
Now that you know this, you have a choice. You can do nothing, or you can take action in one of two ways:
1) You can be like Fatality and Canibus and alleviate your sexual repression by getting off on breaking the rules in an internet video game
2) Or you can do what the GM said and use the email form in POL to send a complaint about this. It will only get worse, that I can guarantee. People have started calling GMs while camping NMs before the NM pops, just in case something happens when it does. This is going to need to be addressed. That's why I'm posting this. Yes, it does let anyone reading it know that they can get away with "grief tactics," but it's also hopefully going to speed up the process of getting it addressed.
Addendum: For the curious, here's the shout you see me refer to at one point during my conversation with the second GM: