An article titled Trolls and Tribulations on GamesIndustry International talks with Linda Carlson, Director of Global Community Relations at Sony Online Entertainment about the difficulties inherent in managing online communities, where the nights are long and the tempers are short. She explains their approach to griefers includes the possibility of banning someone from playing their games if they can determine he or she is being excessively abusive even when this is external to a game, using Twitter abuse as an example:

"Not only will we ban your forum account, but if it's serious enough we'll call up customer service and have you banned from all of our games. We do not need those individuals as customers," Carlson says of the most offensive and anti-social players. "A very influential player, high up in a huge guild - we'll still ban them... In our games, if you are an exploiter we don't care who you are, how big your guild is, how many people you threaten to take with you when you go.

"We can control anybody who's playing our games...[but] if we know who you are and you're abusing somebody on Twitter, we will ban your game account and we will not accept you as a customer ever again. It's not always possible to identify people [in that way], but we take that seriously."