I guarantee I could find logs of players being unnecessarily abusive, including to me.

Yup. This is why I have a fairly quick trigger with pulling people off of that channel, and why I encourage other staff with the ability to do the same.

This is probably less obvious from a player perspective, though, since I don't publically admonish the offender. (It tends to create confrontation, and give desired attention to attention whores.) I'm also fairly vigilant about reminding staff to answer the questions being asked quickly, and not leaving it to players to do so. (This is often because misinformation gets handed out, but it has advantages in first impressions also.)

It's not clear what else we can do with a public channel that is necessarily on by default at creation. I may start pulling people aside for blatant abuses of it, and throwing down a little deterrent value. Doubly so since a lot of the offenders are (as you suspect) veterans. I'm sure they'll post logs about how they were oppressed by the Man just for having a little 'fun' with new players, and how the staff is 'ruining their fun', but I've heard them whine that song before, and it doesn't bother me.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com