If you're brand new to the game and you see a Grove and a bunch of people standing around and either playing with catching bugs or maybe running around and whacking the trees once, most people will generally stop and observe first before going in head first and just chopping down the trees that they can.

You can also at any point in time. Just server hop and get off the server you're on and you no longer have to put up with any weirdness or harassment from any people who are acting differently from the normal Palia player.

I'm not blaming the person who got harassed, and however that is generally what newbies will tend to do. Gets them into trouble, and for the most part the vast majority of them learn their lesson and they become great palia players and are fantastic Grove tenders the next time around.

I'm sorry they had a really bad experience. I would really like to see both sides of the chat log.

You do know that no one has to stick around and tolerate berating or harassment right?

Like people can just change servers instantly to get away from toxic players. I have literally server hopped after reporting a player who kept shooting arrows at another player simply because they were a female and they were being a total jerk in chat.

And please explain how it is gatekeeping to try and allow all of the players who want to cut wood at the Grove?

Yes, let's let everybody who wants to get here in time cut wood and not like waste everybody else's time. So let's set an arbitrary time limit, okay 3:00 a.m.

What needs to happen, and this is something we have requested over and over again, is the Grove trees not to be tiny little trees that one person can cut down all by themselves. They need to be trees large enough that require a group. And then, the group that is there can choose not to cut trees until they decide to.

It's not obscure etiquette though.

It's common etiquette in the game.

In fact, most of the time 90% of the people who find the Grove will announce "we'll be chopping at 3:00 a.m." and still have some random newbie coming in and blowing up trees and we have to rein them in.

It is a bit of culture shock, this game, because you don't have to fight for resources and people work together and it's not toxic. Which can, in itself encounter problems when you have people coming in hot out of toxic environments and they just don't know how to apply their brakes.