Hello its me. Back again for another round of feedback. So hear me out on this I've been thinking about how we can handle serious vote abuse and open a path towards redemption for serious but not the worst offenders of major vote abuse. On the server I once used to gm on we used a sort of nx debt system that would tax a players account with a negative sum of nx to be repaid until they had voted enough times to repay it. Now we weren't a big server so the idea of perma banning our relatively small player base for something that very much positively impacted us would be silly and counter productive to our growth. So the players would remain unbanned while they repaid the debt which from what I saw they did more often than not. Again with our community being pretty small this didn't exactly overwhelm our devs so we would occasionally check in to see if the person who had an account in debt was paying it back or if they went out and made a new one trying to bypass it and if so we would just move the debt over to the new account. This obviously is not a feasible task here given the significantly larger amount of players and votes and accounts players own and the fact this doesn't actually make the player vote back the debt unless they wanna buy cash shop stuff in the future So my idea is as follows. Players who are found to have vote abused up to a certain amount could be eligible for unbanning if they are found to have voted back enough times to pay back the nx. Obviously this would almost certainly rule out serious vote abusers who voted on 50 accounts every day for a year, as it would take close to 1,092 years to pay back the nx. But players who did it say 2-3 times for a month or so should be given the opportunity. They'll still remain banned for the foreseeable future but hey everyone needs a road to redemption in my opinion (except hackers) and we get votes for free. I haven't figured out the fine details to this system for instances like how do we know the true extent of a players abuse if it was all hidden behind vpns, multiple devices and vms, but tbh if someone is willing to vote everyday for 3 months to pay back the few hundred thousand nx they got idk i don't mind giving them a chance. Ill leave the true finer details to the staff if this were to ever be brought up for serious consideration. I'd like to see what other people have to say. This is by no means a end all be all solution and I would very much prefer to see players play legit from the start but I'm a guy who likes the possibility to redeem someone from their past if they want to honestly try.
I like your idea of redemption but people who vote abuse, as far as the ban appeal shows, dont just do it for like 2-3 times extra per month as you said. I mean, why would they right? Also, it would give players the "do first, repent later" mentality because there is no downside to vote abusing. They would just constantly vote multiple times a day and then if they get caught, just vote to repay it back, which is, if you think about it, like getting paid 1 year in advance and then working for 1 year without pay. In essence, they dont suffer any consequences at all. In fact they are even at an advantage because its like they have the nx up front. There has to be some sort of penalty like maybe having to vote twice as much to repay their debt but even then theres a high chance they would just hop onto another server instead if the debt is too high. What Im afraid of is this "redemption" chance would make potential vote abusers inculcate the notion of "I'll just vote abuse till I get caught and IF I do get caught, voting to repay my debt doesnt mean I dont get nx, it means I already got it before so I dont lose anything" I would like to highlight that this "redemption chance" would heavily blur the lines between major and minor vote abuse because we wouldnt really know what exactly determines the threshold. It would be opening the floodgates of ban appeals using precedent of "this guy got unbanned so I should be unbanned too" when both scenarios are different. My point is it would make the Staff have unnecessary workload (discussing such thresholds and spending longer time at ban appeals explaining to banned players why they are not unbanned etc) Just a thought from me but I am writing this off the top of my head. I havent really thought it through so I could be very wrong in this regard.
Your intent is good here, but I think its ultimately just a bandaid solution to the overall problem. As it currently stands, we have very limited staff resources to work with and something as time intensive as managing players vote debts feels more idealistic than practical There are pros and cons to our current vote system and all of which are up for debate but I think its easy to underestimate how many people are maliciously vote abusing and lying on ban appeals. I think our efforts would be better spent reforming the current system and perhaps trying to encourage NX through in game dailies while still holding some sort of lowered NX faucet through voting (~2k) for players who are taking a break or inactive. I do like the idea of a forgiveness system after some arbitrary amount of time has passed. It would be interesting to see its impact on recidivism, because our current system basically encourages ban evasion
Excess NX from voting to be repaid by NX cards ingame while voting gives no nx, voting on another account will be considered “vote evasion”. Lowbies could farm weaker area bosses.
I think this may spawn another issue - such as Player A vote abused on like 50 accounts and passed all APRs to Player B Player A got negative NX amount, but would Player B be affected as well? Player B: I didn't know what he was doing is illegal, I thought he was being nice, you can't ban me or deduct my NX for getting free APRs
