Discussion: Improving the "Ban First, Ask Questions Next" Policy

this comes back to my initial point, and I 100% agree. Although I don’t have all answers, I’m sure there’s some reasonable solution out there to improve this process.

 

yea that is already their goal (as mentioned by matt in a recent feedback post), but sadly the reason appeals take so long is that there's an information bottleneck created by only admins having access to rwting cases, and the fact that they have a lot more stuff to deal with. Ideally, they should drop more of their responsibilities to the other staff, so that they could focus on the more important things that only they can do (rwting cases, making decisions regarding the game, maintaining the server, handling staff, etc etc..), cause I 100% understand the rational of keeping that sort of info only in the hands of the admins.
The only other solution is adding a new admin, but with the recent leave of so many staff members, that reality seems very far away.

 

No solution is going to please everyone. For instance, some players spend all day afkstory in FM, what is a coupon going to give them? There is also no way for staff to guarantee that in the duration for which someone is banned, they would be selling the same amount of leech if they were not banned. It would make no sense to compensate via directly giving mesos - you can’t decide someone gets 2b while someone else gets 20m based on what they do on a daily basis in the game.

There will similarly always be room for improvement re. Processing ban appeals but some bans will inevitably take longer than others given the need to check logs etc. Flatly asking staff to try harder to reduce this duration is not practical if you don’t suggest ways in which they can make the process faster.

 

This was mentioned already in the "#staff change" thread, provide GMs better tools and training to deal with stuff.

From what I read, some logs can only be accessed by administrators, which as far as I'm aware there are only 2-3 of them, while there are only 8 GMs.

Having a bottleneck in the process of appeals where every appeal the process is like this:
Player makes appeal
Wait ~2 hours for GM to reply asking for the user to list all their characters
Wait ~2~8 hours for player to say their chars / say they dont have others.
Wait ~1~24 hours for GM to say they'll look into it.
1. if it's something simple that doesnt require access to privileged information, the GM will check on their own, and reply within those 24 hours.
2. if its something else that DOES require privileged information, the GM will send a message to an admin, then it will wait in that admin's queue for how ever long it will take them, they might have more important stuff to deal with.

number 2. is the bottle neck.


I've worked in my past in Tech support and in part the reason I could deal with most tickets easily is because I had broad knowledge in most of the things related to my tier and a little bit over and good training (1st tier is supposed to do basic stuff and reroute problems onwards to those with more experience to deal with complicated stuff).

if I had for every single problem of a user, ask my superior to check information for me, it would cause a massive bottle neck, since not only me but my co-workers would also ask them, same as what I'm seeing here, few admins for a lot of gms.

a solution for this would be to go over the existing tools / logs / information access, and re think what can they provide access to that DOESN'T risk important information.

Giving this access and more training on how to use that access to deal with situations, would increase the speed in which they deal with stuff.

GMs (which have passed a certain training and probation period) and have gain that trust, should be given more independence to deal with stuff that are common occurrence, otherwise it will still get stuck in the queue of the 2-3 admins and you get the situation that there is right now.

 

why not? Isn’t that how nearly the entire world functions today irl?
A leecher makes the sacrifice of not bossing with his friends or leveling its character in order to maximise income instead.
A merch makes the sacrifice of spending countless hours in FM instead of enjoying some other content.

Nonetheless, I don’t want to focus on compensation as I do agree it would be much better to solve cases in a more timely manner instead

 

I said that before, how would you differentiate between someone giving someone a loan and someone paying for leech?
Asking the staff to start probing through the chat history (some do through different accounts, i.e if I'm buying leech on my mule, and I see someone smega "B> PETRI" I might pm him on my mule, then just hop on my mage to sell to him, he just pays me without me talking a single word to him on my main.)

And merching, what if someone got extremely lucky to fall on someone who doesn't know a price and made 5b in 1 day? you think that would be consistent 5b per day? no, some days are lucky some days aren't.

 

This is why we can take a relatively long timeframe, calculate the player’s value at point A and point B in time. The difference is the total profit (not even revenue, therefore it’s not perfect, but it’s a start). Divide by the days in the timeframe to get daily income.
longer timeframe will average out for merchers who may get very lucky in some days and less so in others.
It will also average out leechers who may sell more leech in some days than others.

 

I agree with this, this is delegating responsibilities, 1st tier should do 1st tier work, and tiers above should do their relevant work.

The problem is that currently from what I understand from that thread I read, some 1st tier work requires access to 3rd tier tools in order to confirm what certain players say / claim, this is what I'm saying should change.

They should re-asses what access needs to be given and what should remain only for administrators.

This is additional work that admins will have to do as apparently normal gms won't have access to said information, and with the limited amount of admins this will only lengthen the duration of existing appeals, just giving them more work.

 

Yes, but given that a player is unbanned, it means they already did a bunch of digging. Plus, as most people in comments above seem to agree that it does not happen quite often that a player is unfairly banned and subsequently unbanned, I doubt it will require that much additional time from Admins as this shouldn’t affect too many players.

 

It started with compensating people for the duration of a wrongful ban.

It then went to decreasing the duration of a ban appeal in GENERAL (both wrongful and a rightful ban).

In order to do that I suggested delegating authority where possible / relevant, this means taking work AWAY from administrators and giving more powers to GMs to conduct their own investigations / work.

you don't want to put more work on the resouce you have little of (administrators), you want to delegate it to spread it out evenly over your staff to make the most of what you have.

 

I'm very doubtful they could implement such a feature into the game as it is now, unless it was already a thing in future versions and they could rip it and customize it to fit Maple Royal's version.

 

I do agree that some bans may drag for far too long, and imo the problem doesn't lie with the ban process, but rather issues stemming from staff workload distribution, which would be better addressed in the 'Staff changes thread'.

That's what ban appeals are intended for though.

I don't think that's a fair statement to make, since Royals has always been a free-to-play service which you agreed to the T&C when you first signed up.

 

While I agree with the notion, using a statement like that to shut down any discussion is just being plain stupid.

Same with going with the statement "My server my rules", this will make the thread go off topic.

Yes, it's a free to play service, but people still engage with the server and put their time in and care about it, using that as a way to shut off a discussion instead of actively engaging in discussion is just dumb.

If the staff decide to do just that, might as well close it off from the public and make it a private server just for their close circle of friends.

My point is, they have to decide, either engage in discussion with the community and actually take input and give the userbase their "seat" on the decision table.

Or entirely shut it off, do w.e you want with the server and don't delude the userbase into thinking they have a say at all.

 

While that is true when it comes to the general population of the server having a say at the decision table, but in this thread context, which userbase are we actually talking about? The analogy TS has given in which he identifies himself as one of the consumers unsatisfied with a product is unfair as the reason for him making this thread in the first place is because he got banned for suspected RWT. A better analogy to fit his situation would be to compare himself to a suspected perpetrator of a crime being detained, and is unsatisfied with the justice system.

 

I tend to disagree with this in the sense that under such analogy, I’m literally being detained because some policemen saw me walk out of a store with goodies and arrested me without even bothering to ask if I have the receipt.
Under your analogy, this is straight up police brutality lol.

Anyways, yes I’m unsatisfied with the system, as any person would be in a situation in which they know they are being treated unfairly.

Doesn’t matter whether you think I’m guilty or innocent, what I’m trying to work towards is to make the process better for any other players in the future who will be in a similar situation to mine.

 

From what I read, he makes him self to be a user who's been affected by the ban appeal system and wants it to improve.
whether he's actually guilty or not is irrelevant, whether the game that this system is attached to is free or not is irrelevant, if it was a paid game he'd put his money into it, if it's a free game he pays with his time and effort (if he's a legit player that is).
therefore his input in regards to providing suggestions to improve said system are valid and should be taken into consideration (or as I mentioned in my last post, say "f* it, it's my server my rules, leave if you don't like it!" and just don't even try to have a discussion like a civilized person).

If he's trying to make the system worse in order to increase his chances as a perpetrator that is another case.

I enjoy debating topics, and if I'm wrong and it's pointed out to me, I'll admit to that, but so far from what I read on the other threads I just don't think that approach (mentioned in the last post) is in any way contributing to improving the server and how it operates.

That's the thing that you DON'T KNOW if you're literally JUST being detained, the methods in which the staff find and ban players is an unknown to you.

It's possible they have an alert system that gets triggered for trades over 1b in value, and they see your account's age and stats and decide to ban you.

Also possible they've investigated you overtime to come to that decision, you can't know that, unless you were/are staff.

 

If you really didn't break the rules, I empathize with your current situation, i really do, and i hope it all clears out in the end, but you have to understand that staff doesn't just go around banning people based off suspicions, bans have always been issued with evidences to back their bans. Maybe you're one of the rare ones that got falsely banned, but that's the very reason why this server has a ban appeal process in the first place.

the suggestions you're offering are skewed towards your perspective (understandably so) and the minority in your situation and aren't in the best interest of the server, so i can only tell you to try to look at it from a neutral perspective and imagine the repercussions if your suggestion were to be implemented.

A more feasible solution would be to hasten up the ban appeal process, but that's better discussed in https://royals.ms/forum/threads/staff-team-changes.180434/ as that's a problem of workload delegation and not the actual process of ban appeals.

 

Also possible they've investigated you overtime to come to that decision, you can't know that, unless you were/are staff.[/QUOTE]

first of all, thanks for your previous comment, I’m glad you at least find this constructive.
On this quote right here however, I wanna point out that YOU don’t know if I’m just being detained, and that I’m the only one who in facts does know, since I’m the only one who knows whether or not I’ve really been involved in RWT (and I would obviously not waste my time doing this thread if that were the case).
This is why, although you understandably cannot agree & understand my point at the moment, my case is in itself strong evidence that they did NOT in fact investigate me overtime.

This is also incorrect as they rarely show evidence and they seemingly do not know what is going on precisely until an Admin is asked to investigate. Therefore I suggest for some change. And yes, these are strongly skewed towards my perspective, but it is in fact the perspective that any community would want to avoid at all cost. You can’t just go about and ban those that are very dedicated to your community. Arguably it does not happen often and this is why Royals is still a thing, but nonetheless this is a situation that should be avoided at all cost and if it cannot be avoided, it should at least be mitigated.

I can even add that I personally don’t mind for not benefiting for any changes suggested in this thread, I’m just hoping that any other player put in my situation would be able to benefit from an improvement in the future.

 

I’m personally in the ban appeal process right now, and I understand your frustration. I honestly find my case to be pretty silly, but I still agree with the current “ban first ask questions later” policy.

As others have mentioned, what I think needs to be changed is that players who served false bans should be compensated appropriately. Otherwise, all the other players will have gained a large unfair advantage over the falsely banned player, when fairness is the very thing they are trying to protect in the first place.

Besides losing merchant spots, this feels particularly unfair right now because I probably won’t be able to reach the 20 day target for Christmas advent calendar, so having done the quest daily on 7 different characters feels like a pretty big waste of my time. Also, this broke my HP quest streak, which I’ve actually made a point to complete every day since it was released.

Overall, this is definitely a pretty negative experience, but I see the necessity in the current process, so compensation is the only fair solution I think.

(I understand I’m speaking like I will be unbanned, but even if you don’t believe that, my point about compensation still holds because it’s not like a banned player can reap any benefit from it anyways.)