Let's discuss: do you think this deserves an unban?

Regardless of anything else, something is very wrong when an admin threatens to quit if he doesn't get his way. wtf

 

I’m sure everyone is waiting for my explanation however I did want to get consent from the people involved in being able to use my Discord DM conversation with them. I would like to apologize for causing a misunderstanding that has lead to quite an outrage due to my lack of communication. I was dead set on handling it on the day I proposed the changes to take effect as the issue of petty reports has been a sore to me in the past weeks making me dislike working on MapleRoyals related things. Managing MapleRoyals is just a hobby to me and like anyone else I wouldn’t like to spend my time and energy on a hobby I don’t enjoy. I want to put my effort into making the game a better place by focusing on anti cheating and real world trade, not reports on people that change their mind based on their level of friendship with a certain person x amount of time later.

Before I get into the issue at hand I want to provide context of recent events of toxicity that highlighted a weak point in our rules regarding harassment and how it has lead to weaponizing guilds with the power to ban individuals they no longer like.
The scenario timeline:
Raony (Stuffworks/Broky/ knowledge) is friends with various people through bossing and FM idling relations from both Fendi, Oblivion and Rogue guilds and their friends.
Shin (Loopy/ioopy) is a high profile player and member of Fendi guild.
Sharon (NoFrauds) is Shin’s partner / relationship
Maggie (Fentyy) is a member of Fendi guild / friend group.

October 17th
All these players are on good terms. Maggie calls Raony a loser, he responds with calling her a bitch and later teases her about wanting attention. She decides to shake it off as banter and doesnt collect evidence nor make a report at the time. She does decide that she doesn’t want to be friends with him anymore which is fine of course.

November 8th
Players in guild and alliance chat are talking about figures in real life, Sharon contributes that she feels like she’s flat. Raony decides to whisper her regarding that remark she made about herself with the intention to lift up her spirits and make her feel better about herself, body positivity. His first language is Portuguese and he’s pretty blunt about it. While she says: ‘stop raony, wtf’ we can see that she didn’t want to talk about tits, butt or her body.
The whispers from Raony indicate that he had no ill intent allegedly. He felt like she misunderstood because of the way he communicated it to her and tried to give additional information of what the reasoning behind his whispers were with workout advice (Raony is a licensed nutrition coach and does personal training).
Since she didn’t reply in whispers he stopped messaging her about it.
While Raony’s intentions may have been innocent or part of friendly chat in his opinion, Sharon still has the right to feel harassed about it and make a report if she wishes to do so as a case can be made for the screenshot being harassment.

Spoiler

November 11th
A few days have passed, my conversation with Sharon starts regarding what occured as can be seen on the following pages. She approaches me as Raony’s guild leader, not me as a staff member so I talk with her about the situation as this is my first time learning of whats happening. She wants to file a report but decides against it twice. Later on she asks me about her own (requested) ban and I let her know when that runs out.

Shin whispers Raony about what happened and they start bickering about how Shin thinks Raony wants to get with sharon while Raony says no why would I, I got my own girlfriend and I’m doing fine in life. Their conversation gets heated and they talk about where they are from, that each of their lives is better than the other and ends with a racial remark towards Raony saying he’s from a third world country (Brazil), the jungle and that he is a baboon and a monkey. Raony says to him that he won in making him feel bad with his xenofobic remarks.

Raony shared a picture of Sharon that he got from her public facebook profile in the guild discord to say that she shouldn’t be so full of herself in his defense and that she’s not that attractive to him. He regrets it and deletes the image (or some discord admin removed it) and apologizes to Sharon.

Raony tries to distance himself from everything but isn’t able to hold himself strong and he shared what happened with me in a call while he cried about the toxicity that Shin and his friends were subjecting Raony to. This is where I learn that in the context of the whispers that Shin did being called monkey can be really hurtful to people from Brazil, akin to calling people the N-word.

All 3 parties have messaged me regarding this incident and the story of what happened is starting to take shape. Since I don’t do reports or ban appeals by Discord I let Shin and Raony know that if either of them were to report this on the forums they both would get banned. Raony would be banned for the harassment that instigated all of this follow up and Shin would be banned for his racism.
Later they both agree it shouldn’t have went that way and they wouldn’t make a report at the time, it seems like they made up.

Spoiler

November 20th
Drama starts stirring up unrelated to Raony, between Fendi & friends (specifically Shin on Loopy) and other guilds like Rogue & friends. Some players are quick to report any sort of offensive language of people they dont agree with. They have been accused of idling in FM channels on characters just to potentially capture evidence for reports. Shin gets his first 3 day ban for the use of the N-word in all chat.

In the meantime Fendi people from Shin’s friend group are antagonizing anyone related to Rogue and Raony is showing support for Rogue. Shin already dislikes Raony for their previous encounter. He doesn’t have anything else to do so they start getting Raony on the defensive in their discord chats by not dropping the monkey remarks. He is aware this made Raony cry at some point and that it’s racist towards him.

November 23rd
Shin spend two hours back in the game just to get banned again for his second offensive language offense where he foolishly went to the people that reported him and called them c-words in all chat.
This is also where he decides to ban evade on his bishop who wasn’t banned properly this time around and he made a new character named ‘khunt‘ to play on, poking fun at the word he got banned for.

Sharon buys a pet monkey on her character, names it Raony and messages me out of the blue on Discord trying to provoke me. I ask her to change the pet name and she since deleted the screenshot she sent me of her and the pet. This is where I learn that Sharon is joining in on the toxicity and racism towards Raony and how unlikable of a person she is because of that.

Spoiler

November 24th
Raony still gets harassed about him feeling bad about the racist remarks towards them calling him a monkey and decides to make the report towards Shin while knowing it would also give him a temporary ban for harassment as I explained to both of them before.

- Raony serves his 3 day harassment ban from nov 24th to nov 27th
- Meanwhile Shin has been ban evading ever since, knowingly and gets his chance to appeal his ban revoked for it as you can see by my chat history with him as an addition to the ban appeal he made regarding it.
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/loopy-ban-appeal.179160/

Spoiler

November 28th
A report comes in from a Fendi member wanting to report Raony regarding how they used to be friends and then had a falling out where she initiated calling him a loser and he called her a bitch in response.
This is something that took place on October 17th, a month and a half ago. The player didn’t report it at the time as she obviously wasn’t heavily offended regarding this case and it’s crazy for me to expect to go through their chat logs to search for any kind of harassment over ‘loser‘ and ‘bitch‘ as they didn’t take screenshots of it occurring themselves, the report is basically invalid because of the requirement to add your own evidence.

December 5th
27 days after their dispute happened that she decided not to report, Sharon makes a report on Raony for harassment, stalking and doxxing. Raony has already served a 3 day ban for the harassment part and the evidence of stalking and doxxing doesn’t hold up in my opinion as they were friends.
In the report she wants the evidence to hold up for the three aforementioned things however:
- in the context of the screenshot she provided you could make a case for harassment. With full context like I provided in this post I wouldn’t consider it reportable harassment though and neither did Sharon the reporter as she made up with Raony at the time.
- Raony has tried to distance himself from them so he hasn’t been stalking.
- posting a picture of the reporters’ public facebook profile (which was taken down and apologized for to her) while the reporter has a picture of herself as her profile picture on discord and multiple pictures of herself on the mapleroyals forums posted by herself and her friends that she met up with in real life isn't considered doxxing.

Current date
I hope you guys can see the toxic pattern that's forming here:
- A high profile Fendi member (Shin) got banned with bans stacking against him for toxicity and racism. He also wasn’t able to appeal it because of his ban evasion.
- Raony accepted a ban for harassment while making one of the reports against Shin as they were harassing which lead to the bickering towards each other.
- The permanently banned Shin seems to want revenge on Raony and conspires with his friends to get Raony banned in a similar fashion as he did, however they are having a hard time finding more recent evidence against Raony.
- They reach out to their friends for any kind of dirt on Raony to try to make reports on him.
- They get a report without screenshot evidence, grasping at straws, where the reported instigated an argument by calling him a loser and Raony called her a bitch in response a month and a half ago.
- They make a report of an occurrence 27 days ago that the involved person decided not to report at first because it wasn’t affecting her bad enough at that point. In between the initial harassment and this report date Sharon even joined in on the racism against Raony.

In my opinion the involved parties of Maggie and Sharon weren’t offended to the extend of making a report immediately. They were just brought to making reports by mob mentality of their guild and friends as they are looking to get revenge for Shin’s ban, as Raony was one of the people that reported Shin.
I believe that this #metoo movement towards Raony is a setup to get revenge based on all the evidence that I have collected and been a part of in recent times and I don’t support banning Raony a second time for the same occurrence of harassment, he already served a 3 day ban for that.

What it comes down to:
Guilds and friend groups are currently weaponizing the game rule for harassment to get people they dislike banned for anything they can think of or remember that's remotely in the direction of harassment.
We as staff recently discussed on Dec 2nd that the harassment rule needs changing and I’m aware the rework for all rules is in the works, however I want the proposed change we have for this harassment rule proposal to take effect IMMEDIATELY and I will use any sort of veto power I may have to do so:
- we want harassment reports to be made within 48 hours of the offense occurring so that they can’t be ‘saved for later‘ by petty reporters.

Spoiler

I don’t support the bans for ‘harassment‘ from ex-friends that happened 27 and 45 days ago and I will overturn Raony’s current (2nd) ban for this as well just because they changed their opinion of the person they reported this many days later or got pressured into making reports by their friends for vengeful purposes.
Raony has already served a ban for this reported harassment incident from nov 24th to nov 27th.

If we don’t take away these ban-weapons from organized player groups MapleRoyals will be full of injustice, and I will no longer be able to stand proud as a staff member supporting their behavior with the game rules. If this rule doesn’t change now or the staff is against my stance on this topic I will unfortunately have to resign from being a staff member.

I’ve been MapleRoyals staff for nearly 6 years now and I enjoy helping players out playing a fair and fun game with friendly competition between guilds and friends in the shape of speed runs, GPQ ranking, Pie ranking etc. I don’t want to quit helping players.
This report meta that has formed has to end today and I will make it happen. I’ve been asked to look for players calling each other loser or bitch 45 days ago in a recent admin-request message to answer a report and this is simply not something any staff member should waste their time on with the shape MapleRoyals is currently in and I don’t plan on doing so either. We have many more important tasks to do that have a healthy impact on all the players instead of allowing these guilds and friend groups to target individuals for bans.

Does staff support sexual harassment?
- no, and as such Raony has served a ban for his involvement in that already from nov 24th to nov 27th
Does staff support racism?
- no, and people will continue to get banned for that
What went wrong?
- I was troubled with this case and the future of toxic behavior in MapleRoyals for weeks on end now and I decided to resolve it then and there by spending some time laying everything out and letting staff know how I feel about it, hoping for their support and taking action. While I had it all in my mind, it seems like I failed to properly explain to everyone why I would overturn Raony’s 2nd ban for the same harassment offense though and it made June and other staff members question if I just wanted to get my friend unbanned. In addition to that I hadn’t commented this on his ban appeal yet but I told him on discord instead while I should’ve went the more official route first. I didn’t get the opportunity to revisit my explanation and make it more clear to June as she went rogue on her GM because of the injustice she witnessed and I don’t blame her as it could be interpreted the way she did, that I would cover for my friend’s harassment while in reality I simply wanted to avoid him getting banned for the same offense he had already served a ban for and end petty reports for harassment once and for all with the new rule change.

If people have additional questions about this you can let me know and I'll try to answer them, thanks for reading my side of the story too