Abusing players by stalking – is it even possible?

September 26th, 2008

Last week, an important debate erupted across major poker forums relating to the fact that within the Ongame Network there have been a few players who’ve been blocked from playing against a limited number of other players. The capacity to do so exists largely for anti-collusion reasons but, on the request of a partner of Ongame Network, the system has also been used to prevent what can only be described as potential player abuse through stalking.
The gaming environment we operate is a dynamic and very vibrant one and sometimes new player behaviour appear that we, and our partners, may not have foreseen or be properly prepared to handle. This appears to be such a case.
The idea that a player can abuse another player simply by doing everything in his or her power to ruin the playing experience of the first one seemed absurd at first. But it may not necessarily be absurd considering the current rules, policies and feature regulations that apply across our network. We, so to speak, see the point being made about players following other players around and blocking them from enjoying games they actively choose to play in. And faced with this new scenario it appears that we have, on at least one occasion, bought such a story of abuse handed to us by a partner site and activated blocks to prevent it. Doing this, without making the rules clear to everyone, was wrong. Flat out. And for that we apologize.

We are now in the process of weighing the pros and cons and hope to deliver a clear policy on the matter that our partner sites can adapt to and easily follow.

Our next challenge is to figure out how to prevent these potential player abuse scenarios from even occurring in the first place. Clearly the heart of the problem seems to be the widespread (ab)use of the private table functionality offered by all our partners. Should they allow one private table per player per level? Just one table per player period or should the current free-for-all situation continue?
We’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on the matter. Please use the commentary functionality below.

Thirdly we’d also like to point out that any investigations into players breaching our, and our partners, policies are handled separately. And any such investigations linked to this debate are still ongoing. Once any outcome is known to us, this post will be updated according to our privacy and security protection policies.

Sincerely,
Ombudsman