The Dark Question of the Day throws out all the pretences of a wonderful community and exposes the possibly not ethical morality of the hobby. Questions are many times open ended and up to interpretation. Feel free to post your thoughts in as much or as little detail as you’d like.
Helpful Considerations may or may not help some people focus their answer, these are blurred to not bother those who have their own ideas.
Today’s Question: Dark QotD: Whats it going to take to permanently get shunned from the Pokemon tcg community?
Helpful Considerations: People were outright scammed thousands but its ok with a refund? Shill bydding is not just standard but the entire focus of the platform but as long as they have rare cards you look the other way? They are straight up a terrible person and make every aspect of the hobby worse but its ok because they bring more eyes to the hobby through their drama?
I hate to say it, but I don’t think anything will get you permanently shunned. There will always be pockets of supports, no matter how depraved you become. If you don’t believe me, look at the state of the world right now.
If word gets around that you contaminate the things you sell with thallium. You’re of course very likely to face prison time, have your wares impounded and be “removed” from the communitee in that sense. But much more importantly, flipping your wares would be so impractical as to be impossible.
I don’t think it’s likely at all to get permanently shunned in the Pokemon community. People have so little attention span and memory these days, and most simply don’t care since there are money and opportunities involved.
Not that I prefer other communities where virtue signaling and being cancelled are a thing, absolutely not. Still, it would be cool if there were some consequences for bad behavior.
With so many scams, crypto shenanigans, and such (not only in Pokemon), we definitely got desensitized and everything feels more like the drama of the week/month, not something that seriously hinders someone’s career.
Cheating in a tournament or stealing cards comes to mind. This doesn’t mean a person won’t try to be in public. generally. So I won’t cross my wires there. Remember, nobody likes DSP, but DSP persists. There are DSPs all over the world in all sorts of places doing all sorts of things.
I’ve seen people absolutely cheat in live streamed tournaments like regionals for Pokemon and not really get called out unfortunately. Happens in other TCGs too. Some people are even blatantly known as cheaters and yet they are allowed to play still. Drives me nuts.
For me the community that would matter is probably E4. I was thinking, what if I ended up scamming another E4 member, besides the ban, will I be shunned as well from being friends with other forum members? Do I have enough goodwill to overcome a few shady stuff if it was against a fellow collector on the forum or if something like that came to light outside of the forum?
