I've noticed that GMs rely heavily on evidence (e.g. screenshots, video) to judge players on bannable offenses . But, how do the GMs prove that screenshots or videos are authentic? Cannot situations easily be fabricated by an amateur using another private server or program? For example, it would be easy for one to create a character on royals, and than create the same exact character on a private server. Then, on the unlimited private server, one creates a character with the same IGN of a royal player. They then incriminate the royals player by harassing themselves through a pm chat and taking a snap shot and reporting an abuse on royals. If one is especially dedicated to destroying another player, they'll create a "self"-incriminating scenario (e.g. hacking) on another server that looks exactly as if it happened on mapleroyals. How do GMs address this?
Show me an example of screenshot that could be fabricated. Faking chats/smegas/FM shops/~mapowner would be insane. Maybe if it's coming from character on a blank map with no royaltips or smegas...but this has never happened.
You are totally overthinking this. You wouldn't even need to recreate anything on another server to fake a screenshot, all you need is Photoshop. In any case if someone made fake screenshots and got you banned, you would obviously be very upset and call them out on it. And so far I haven't seen anyone who got banned based on screenshots dispute the authenticity of the screenshot. Basically you are worrying about tiger attacks in your city when tigers haven't been seen in the area in a long time. I suppose if it ever happens the GMs will deal with it. They have pretty extensive logs and there may be other witnesses and so on.
Tin foil hats off. I'm sure the deliberation between a bans goes more in depth than just screenshots. I doubt that people would be petty enough to go out of their way and make a fabricated scenario on another private server without their personal grudges/attitudes towards a certain person well known.
There has been a case where a certain player was particularity upset with the players Illuminate and Dexterity for some reason where he forged three accounts on a different server to make a false report with screenshots of vote abuse 'evidence'. We were able to ban him for that forged report instead because the slightest things didn't match. (e.g. There was part of a MapleTV in free market on the screenshot which we didn't have in Royals, The yellow scrolling text server message didn't match with a message we had at the time the screenshot was made and the character stats that the screenshot was taken on didn't match those of the character in Royals, in particular the HP) It's not that easy to forge screenshots, and like mentioned above big brother is watching you. If we're in doubt we could start digging through our logs to match evidence on the case.
Honestly, you can't prove if a SS is authentic or un-authentic unless the editor really does a bad job and doesn't notice that they made a mistake. I got myself involved once in a thread where in the ban appeal, the player said the person who reported him edited the screenshot. Well I went deep inside and I actually found evidence that it was edited. I tried to inform the team of this, but my proof was denied. So honestly, it's not hard at all to forge screenshots then get them past the GM's. You make a great point @west sc and I really hope the team does something about it. To anyone from the team, I no longer wanted to argue for this player, but I did not see him admit anywhere that he made the claim up, and he did not say that he made the claim up to me when I conversed with him. Please do show proof of him saying this if you wish to go against again. But that Screenshot was edited! Compression would not shift pixels in this scenario at least. If anyone would like to see my proofs of that screenshot being edited, I might post them here if I feel it will not cause issues. Remember: Looking at "Modified/edited" timestamps is trivial. This data does not survive format changes, and can be edited if wanted. -Oldie
Not sure if you guys are old enough to remember this but back in 2007 I forged a screenshot of a 21 attack BWG, as well as the associated chat sessions. It took less than ten minutes with Photoshop. The troll attempt succeeded and set off a storm on Basilmarket and other sites (this was before the time of private servers). Anybody can forge a screenshot. But the server keeps records of logs, so things should be easily verifiable.
Was this about a dispute at WS? If not, I remember a similar scenario where the offender tried to nestle his way out of the sentence with an edited screenshot. It was very obvious to tell apart the two screenshots, and in particular the chat section edited in it.
There's also been a case not too long ago where someone tried to claim items for a refund. They cropped the screenshot to only show the item- but with another pair of eyes and a close look at it, one could see artifacts that were clearly from a photoshopped picture. (Grass was going through the FM platform, etc). As well as the fact they happened to take a screenshot with their keybindings below it- and we saw that it had the Family keybind and medals, which we don't have in here. The player was actually banned for it. We take things more than just at face value, and if you ever suspect a screenshot might be edited and you have clear proof (not just "This whisper line is two pixels too far and so it MUST be edited!"), then you're more than welcome to tell us. We take all sides into consideration with bans- and if you were to be falsely banned from a fake claim with an edited screenshot, you could ban appeal and explain.
It was this thread here. http://royals.ms/forum/threads/offensive-language.20310/#post-117272 http://royals.ms/forum/threads/banned-for-profane-language.20370/#post-117542 I found two major pieces of evidence of editing in the SS. Here are the messages quoted from my conversation with our Staff. Let me know if you have anything to say against those evidences I found. Spoiler
One to two pixel difference is not 'major' evidence, Oldie. Let's keep this thread more on topic if we can.
People have hard to believe in screenshots? Record the evidence on your computer. Your computer cannot handle it and/or the quality is too pixelated? (hard to believe as it is about MapleStory..) Shoot the evidence with your camera/phone/tablet etc. Even then people will complain about it, that this doesn't contain enough for it to be called evidence. There's this called non-ending circle that's been looping around in centuries. The best way to solve the problem is not to commit in these crimes, yet again we have these asshole that love being a complete arse to the community.
Faking pictures is really easy. In fact, this picture is fake - (http://royals.ms/forum/threads/noobs.9020/) And yes, one to two pixel difference is 'major' evidence, Sila.
