I've been less active on the forums (and in-game) lately, and some of that is just my usual flighty attention span, but some of it is real concerns about Rift's current state, and what it means for the future of the game.For me, MMOs are primarily about community. The fact is, if I just want an RPG, I can play an RPG for a lot less than it costs me to play an MMO. The thing the MMO brings to the table is the community. And community is subject to a lot of influences. There's the way the developers interact with the player base. There's how the GMs handle abusive behavior, or disruptive behavior like botting, in the game. There's the community reps; both how active they are, and how they interact with the players.In general, I am happiest when I see evidence that the company is thinking about the long term of the game -- that means, for instance, being willing to ban one player rather than lose five or ten or twenty players over the next year because that player is disrupting the game experience for them. I am happiest when I see the company being active and engaged, and that reflects both developer involvement and community rep involvement. It also shows up in decisions like whether to hire people or lay them off.Historically, Rift has been exceptional in several of these categories. The developers are among the most actively involved in the community I've ever seen, both in their formal and professional capacities and just as folks who chat sometimes on the forums. The community reps have been consistently excellent.In-game community, well. Not so much a strong point. Early on it seemed to be pretty good, and at least one Trion employee has commented (here or elsewhere) on the joy to be had reading botter forums after a mass ban. But over time, it's sort of fallen down a bit. Now, I've seen players get away with long-term, continuing, ongoing stalking or harassment, or other ToS violations. Not for days, or weeks, but for months. And the fishing bot situation is... well, it's frankly ridiculous.That's not a good long-term view. Banning botters might look bad economically in the very short term, but in the long term, botters continuing without penalty or deterrence is a sign that the developer isn't taking the community aspect of the game, such as "enforcing rules against cheating", seriously. And what that means is that people leave, because the game is less fun for them, and they have less confidence that the devs will be protecting the integrity of the game experience. And when logging in means watching people flagrantly violate the ToS, both by botting and by harassing other players openly in public channels, that sort of suggests that the game experience and community are not being protected or cared for.That's a problem. It's the broken windows problem, specifically. When 10 people obviously bot, and nothing happens to them, after a while you have 100 people botting. And if nothing happens to them, that number will keep increasing. At some point, it gets large enough that you really will have a problem if you ban them all, because you've clearly communicated to your user base that botting is an acceptable part of gameplay. And worse, the people who don't like botting will tend to leave, making the botters an even larger part of the user base.Same thing with harassment. At this point, trying to convince people that there is some reason not to openly cuss out other players in public channels is doomed to failure. There is no such reason. You won't get banned. Nothing will happen. So people do it, and other people see them doing it, note the lack of response, and start doing it too. So we end up with the public channels rapidly declining in quality. They're not as bad as, say, what chat was like when I played WoW, but they are noticably worse than the channels in any other MMO I've played that wasn't WoW. And they weren't that bad in 2011, or even in early 2012.Add in that Zann and Walsingham are gone, and the community team's rate of running special events and such has noticably declined. It's not that the community folks are bad people; I would back Elrar against the community reps for basically anything I've ever played (although I might hedge my bets if he were up against Zwillinger). It's that there are nowhere near enough of them.And the net result of all this is: I have a lot less confidence that Rift will be a fun and engaging place to hang out in the future than I used to. I have no worries about the game as such; if I just wanted to play an MMO-like thing with all my channels turned off, Rift would remain undoubtedly the most awesome MMO on the market for me. But I don't want to have channels turned off. I want to be able to read 1-29 so I can answer newbie questions, and I don't want 1-29 to be full of harassment and spam. I don't want 50 chat to be dominated a few nights a week by some guy who has a permanent license to cuss people out in public channels.And no, ignore lists don't solve the problem, because the problem isn't that I see the messages from one person, it's that I see all the responses to that person, and that I know that all the newbies coming into the game are getting a really negative impression of what our community is like.And no, the profanity filter doesn't solve the problem, because the problem isn't that I object to those words (I don't), it's that I object to the hostile use of them to create insults and harassment.Back when Rift launched, one of the things Trion folks pointed out was that they were not doing the "normal" industry thing of laying off a ton of devs; they were keeping their staff on board so they could maintain what has been an exceptional rate of content delivery. That they have now done significant layoffs, including content and development staff, and have apparently not replaced some of the general attrition that everyone faces over time, is a very worrying sign, because that looks like a shift away from one of the policies that has made this game great.Between that, and the obvious and unambiguous lack of action against blatant botting, and the complete lack of enforcement I've seen of the harassment-related parts of the ToS, I am genuinely worried about the health of the Rift community. Sure, there'll always be nice people somewhere around; even when I left WoW, I knew a couple dozen really cool people who were still playing the game, carefully blocking all the public channels so they could still have fun. But the days when the public channels were generally fairly friendly seem to be mostly over, and nothing is being done to correct this.FWIW, if it were up to me, my answers would be:1. Smack Trion's corporate folks upside the head and explain that the way investments work is not that you cripple your best team to try to "save money". (No offense meant to the other teams; I know they have some excellent people, but the Rift team has been just plain exceptional.)2. Large-scale, totally unambiguous, penalties for botters. It would be genuinely unfair to ban them right now, given how clearly Trion has communicated that their behavior is not ban-worthy, but at the very least, yank most-to-all of their ill-gotten gains, and make it very clear that there WILL be bans in the future. Then start banning anyone who keeps botting.3. Ban at least a handful of the particularly obviously abusive players.4. Add GM tools to allow players to be prevented from using public channels for a number of days at a time. Use them liberally when people start spamming and harassing.5. Hire more community reps, especially if you can get Walsingham and Zann back. They were amazing.6. Talk about what's been going on and how things were allowed to get this bad, because something has clearly gone very, very, wrong.