You were not rude.
You pointed something that can help me (and probably many GMs) in the future, as well as expressed a rather common misunderstanding on the players side.
So let's move this to a more general tought adressed to anyone who takes time to read this forums:
- When a GM contacts you, it's not always that you did something really bad and are about to be banned from PS and the internet for the comming next 10 years
- When any player asks for you to change something in the way you act ingame, it's not always an attack nor a reason to fight. It can simply be a request or an information about something you did not notice.
GMs can also give advices to prevent an error to spread and become a "rule" de facto.
Let's consider the use of OOC brackets or parenthesis in PS:
From the beginning, it was admited that ingame chat was for RP only. And when needed, to clarify a technical aspect or the way its consequences are interpreted IC, the use of [], (), (()), ... is required. So, for a long time, nobody said anything about what was said OOC as long as quoted. But this tolerance, was misunderstood and people imagined that they could have a fully OOC conversation. That's why many GMs had to remind players that commenting the OOC reason for an IC action did not mean to talk about random real life gossips. It was a reminder, not a threat. But this made a great noise in the forums. But in facts, almost nobody had to be warned, muted, kicked nor banned.
GMs are too often seen as law enforcement only. This is not the primary goal. Of course, we have tools to punish when we needed. But we will always prefer to prevent troubles than to act when it's too late.
At the same time I would be happy if remarks, advices, comments, ... made by other players would not be seen as a will to attack you, but more an attempt to share a point of view.
If a player (or his character when it's done IC as it should be done when possible) tells you to stop doing something that annoys him, too often, it's the begining of a conflict. It could at least be the begining of a dialog or a change of way on your side. An exemple: "PlayerA says: [please, use [] when talking OOC]", "PlayerB says: I do what I want. Are you a GM?". If you were playerB, next time try "PlayerB says: [My mistake, thank you for reminding me]". Better no?
In this exemples, I refer to something that is writen in the players' policies. But it's also true for other behaviours that are not explicitely mentioned in the guidelines. Like steping inside people as if they were not existing nor important, KSing, ...
It's not easy in writen chat to percieve the differences between an advice, a warning and a threat. But simple words like "Please", using conditional instead of imperative forms could help everyone. It's simply not that easy when we are not so fluent in english than we wish. This applying to writing and to reading, it can be good to keep it in mind, whenever we tell or read something ingame.
Have fun (<- this is not an order even if when saying it I am a GM
)
