General Ban appeals are a meme and need a clear rework.

Hence why I suggested [Community Blacklist]

I can only recommend you guys to post the facts with relevant info such as screenshots and refrain from personal insults that would derail the actual purpose of the post

Have you guys submitted a report about the said "private reports" or the situation about weaponizing reports?

If no, have you guys spoken with any Staff about your concerns about the situation?
Did the Staff just simply reject and not take the claims seriously?

If nothing was done to reach out to the Staff, I don't think it's fair for us (players) to simply throw out allegations against Tim

 

This thread did not provide any supporting screenshots of the said allegations though

How are you guys reaching out to the Staff about the gravity of the situation while excluding the details?

Anyway, do submit a report with the relevant info

 

I honestly don't get this reply, you guys are claiming Tim is making bad judgments but did not report it to other Staff
It feels like you guys are just painting a picture of the entire Staff being corrupted

This really confuses me cause, supposed if Tim or any other GMs have the right to silence/disappear you, they can just permanently forum ban you the moment you made this thread (along with anyone else that supports your case)

As an ex-Staff, I am sure the rest of the active Staff feels disappointed that you just simply lump them as "government in a 3rd world country" when they are doing their best to help out the server

 

It's really up to you if you feel acting this way would be able to reach Matt or any other Staff

End of the day, Matt and the rest of the Staff still won't know the details of the situation you are trying to report and you guys can only keep claiming Tim is not doing his job (constant loop)

It's fine, you can treat me as delusional

 

I have been viewing this thread off and on for a while and I had wanted to write something up for a while so I apologize if it seems a bit scattered, or if some points were already addressed before I could get around to posting.

This had been a work in progress for the past few days and I tried to touch it up as much as I could and remove some repeating topics.

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I understand everyone’s frustrations, truly. I don’t even know what I can say here that would make it sound less scripted and robotic at this point because honestly, I’m a bit tired of it too. I don’t like seeing ban appeals taking a very long time to finish up, and I don’t believe it’s right to make players wait a month or two for a response and there shouldn’t be any excuse for it; but in the same vein we only have 2 Admins trying to cover everything that they can with their tools on their own because we (the rest of Staff who aren’t Admins) don’t have the same tools they do to handle certain situations. Which is perfectly fine, I wouldn’t want every single Staff member to have access to the database and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that either because that means anyone on Staff could edit it and do nefarious things with access like that if they desired to.

You need somebody who is 100% trustworthy and figuring that out unfortunately takes years on this Server because of our vast history of Staff abuse over the last 10 years alone so I understand why we only have 2 Admins and I don’t have any hard feelings about it either. It’s impossible to figure out a person’s true motive especially if your only interactions with these people are online. Big companies have NDAs, or strict/monitored access dealing with sensitive materials to ensure nothing is getting leaked and even then companies like Nintendo still have issues with people leaking new Pokemon stuff days before games release.
The only difference is Nintendo can afford big scary lawyers to chase those people down, we're just a private Server of an 18 year old game lol

We have had our tools upgraded in the past and it’s moderately much better than what they used to be when I first joined back in 2020, but we’re still unable to assist with RWT cases. We still need to request an Admin’s help to look into certain cases that we can’t see for ourselves and with our main Dev busy with IRL duties, we've been stuck waiting for these newer upgrades to help us assist with RWT cases and some Admin backlog.

Everybody knows by now that our bottleneck is unfortunately with the Admin role. They are both extremely busy but they are trying to do their Admin duties whenever they can find some extra time to do so. I don’t know what else I can say about it; there’s too much that needs to be done and only 2 people who can do it.

I know it’s tiring hearing the same speech over and over again, but that’s unfortunately where we are at this point in time, and have been for quite a while.
It's just as frustrating to us, as it is to you guys.

All we can realistically do (all of us on Staff at one point or another had done/still does this) is bump appeals, bump requests, and ping their role every once in a while requesting for a follow-up on whatever it is we are bumping at the current time.

It’s a 'stuck between a rock and a hard place' kind of situation. On one hand we know the backlog is huge but we can’t really do much to help until we get a slightly better tool upgrade to help us tackle the RWT appeals, on the other hand we’re all watching some appeals take weeks/months to get resolved and it just sucks being stuck in the middle and being unable to help besides bumping the report in Staff chat because we can't verify anything. There’s just so much work that also needs to be done besides ban appeals as well, and it’s not really fair to everyone involved; especially to the players that are forced to wait absurd times just to get a response whether it be ban appeals, rp issues, name changes, character issues, etc.

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There seems to be a miscommunication between the community and Staff in regards to the 'you’ve been banned for suspicious activity' responses. We are not picking someone at random and slapping them with a suspicious activity ban contrary to popular belief, there are checks happening behind the scenes and sometimes those checks can unearth an entirely different situation, or multiple rules being broken at once, hence the 'suspicious activity'.

Unfortunately that’s all I can really say on that matter without revealing too much to those lurking in this thread, but please understand that we are not simply reaching into a hat and throwing lawn darts at random IGNs written down on a piece of paper to determine who gets banned next for suspicious activity. There are checks being done, if you are playing the game the correct way don’t worry we will know because the logs will reflect that.

Your report doesn't determine if someone gets banned, if you provide evidence that doesn't mean we're gonna go ahead and issue the ban without checking it out first lol-- we need to gather evidence too, via Admins searching through logs, a GM/Intern online tracking people down to record them, etc.

There's a lot more to it than just writing up a report and having us take your word for it and issuing the ban without looking into it. We always look into everything first and foremost before we issue a ban. We never take anybody's word for it and issue the ban anyways, all of the claims get verified before anything happens.

When someone gets reported and they provide substantial evidence the Admins check every nook and cranny. They also do routine checks when they have enough time to, so it’s not just because someone got reported– they could’ve done a routine check and found someone that way as well, but everybody automatically assumes they must’ve gotten reported when in reality the Admin could’ve found them via routine checks as well.

Keep in mind you guys would never know that because we don’t reveal who got banned via report, or who got banned by an Admin doing their routine checks.

We do pass every report over to the Admins if we are unable to see the full picture with our tools ourselves, but if there’s just a report made with zero evidence attached obviously that's going to be difficult to deal with because on one hand we can’t really refuse a report or else that person could just never report again because 'why bother they denied my last one' and that’s not something we want either. We have asked players before who made reports without evidence (RWT ones especially) to provide any evidence to their claims before looking into it.

We don't necessarily require evidence for a suspected vote abuser, (some of them are very obvious and our tools can get them, some of them are not. The ones that are not obvious will require an Admin to doublecheck/verify) hacker/botter, etc. just give us the IGN and we will look into it, but for claims like RWT, Scamming, and Objectionable Behavior we do need something to prove it's not just a random, shot in the dark blind ban the reporter could be trying to achieve.

If the reporter doesn't provide any evidence to back up the claims, it doesn't get looked into until they do.

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I’m sorry this might be a hot take, but there shouldn’t be any kind of 'deadline' for serious abuse, unless it’s one of the lenient rules via our current Terms and Conditions IE: the Moderate and Minor Infractions section. All abuse affects the Server, the economy, and the community. We shouldn't put a limit on when someone's abuse is considered invalid because it happened 'a long time ago' especially if it is detrimental to the Server and the players.

It might seem unfair to others looking in (viewing public ban appeals) but we have to handle each ban appeal on a case by case basis. I can’t speak for why one case got a different outcome over another if it requires an Admin for a further investigation because most of the time it’s the Admin’s decision(s) and not ours, so we are not a part of that decision process. Sometimes we will be asked for a second opinion by one of them in some cases if they need one.

I would say in my opinion the top three detrimental types of abuse to the game are RWT, Major vote abuse, and hacking/botting.

hacking/botting and RWT are 100% out of the question of ever seeing a leniency clause, so I will shift my focus over to vote abuse because it already has a leniency clause– two of them, actually. There’s a Minor version, and depending on the severity of your vote abuse if you admit to it via Report Abuse we will consider leniency. It’s not 100% guaranteed though because it depends on how long you’ve done it for, how many accounts you’ve used, etc. but I have seen firsthand some players get a leniency in Report Abuse after admitting to what they have done.

Major vote abuse in my opinion is just as damaging as RWT. How do you think they get the items to sell in the first place?

You can play the game and earn more NX than voting daily right around when Ellin Forest was initially added to the game and the addition of the 1k nx card, so I can’t really speak about any cases that happened before then, or before my time on Staff.

Spoiler: Example of NX gains I earned during this Event

This is just an example of some NX gains I’ve earned since this Event started: I make about roughly ~50k every couple/few days on one attacker just from doing Zak, Chao, Ephenia, Pap, Rose Garden, and Shao sometimes more or sometimes less but that doesn’t even include voting NX, or my other attackers that I have. We have numerous ways to earn NX besides voting now, and we have definitely come a long way in that regard.

If you are going to be a legit player you don’t need to vote abuse to 'catch up' just play the game and do the daily bosses and you will get there at your own pace, because it's not a matter of if you get caught-- it's when you get caught.

It could be days, weeks, months, years from now, but the longer you get away with it the harder it'll hit you because you would've lost so much progress whether it was legit or not, all because you were damaging the Server's economy by pumping it with unfair gains that helped you advance further into your end-game goals.

If someone vote abused enough for it to be deemed Major a couple of years ago and they claim they are clean now, they still had an unfair advantage gained back then which helped them get to where they are now and that’s where the issue is.

They used those gains to fund themselves and to propel themselves forward into progression and how exactly can we take that away, or be more lenient in that regard? Not only is it written everywhere to not vote abuse, and we have so many rules and popups stating this-- but we have two leniency clauses for vote abuse already and if you did it enough to get deemed as Major then you've already blown past the leniency clauses at that point-- what's adding more going to do? We'd just be moving the goal post further and further back for vote abuse in general.

I understand people can change, and I fully believe that myself but we already trusted them to not break the rules in the first place. That's why we have Minor and Major vote abuse clauses, and that’s also why we have a leniency policy if they admit what they did to us. Obviously there are limits for the leniency admission, but if it’s not something outrageous it most likely can/will be forgiven.

There shouldn’t be any kind of time duration on serious abuse offenses, aside from the already in place leniency clauses we have.

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A few times on accident is a mistake, but if you have a ton of accounts doing it everyday for a long time obviously it’s not a mistake anymore; it’s intentional.

We know how to differentiate between a mistake and something that is intentional that is why we have Minor and Major vote abuse. We do issue a lot of Minor vote abuse bans too– you guys just don’t see them because they don’t end up making ban appeals because it’s not a permanent ban.

I’m not going to get into the specifics, but I will say there is extreme leniency already between Minor and Major vote abuse. I will not be giving out an arbitrary number for the sake of an example because I don’t want others to go 'LoOk ThE Gm sAiD iT wAs X aMoUnT Of DaYs So I CaN AbUsE iT JuSt EnOuGh To GeT AwAy wiTh iT' so I apologize in advance if this is a bit vague, but it has to be.

Just keep in mind there is a difference between Minor and Major vote abuse and just know some people will lie about it to garner sympathy from the community.

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It was mentioned in here before but I’ll say it again as well: I’d like to reiterate that I am not accusing anyone here of pretending to be innocent when I say this, but we do unfortunately have some users who know they were caught but they still feign innocence anyways, and demand an Admin to doublecheck, triplecheck, howevermanytimes check the evidence gathered and purposely create problems by wasting the Admin’s time.

Time that would’ve been spent addressing the numerous other things they have on their never-ending laundry list of things to check and do, mind you.
Time that would’ve been spent on actually assisting those who could be falsely banned and are waiting for answers.
Time being taken away by people who are purposely submitting ban appeals either for the sake of drama, attention, or for whatever reason they want.

Everybody wants to believe their friends, or people in the ban appeals and give them the benefit of the doubt and I get that, but if we were allowed to reveal the evidence and you guys were able to see what we see– I think some of you would understand where we are coming from a bit better.

I do have sympathy for those who get caught up in false bans and the time it takes to untangle the mess, but what I don’t have sympathy for is people who lie about it.
I wish we could be more transparent about everything, but the reality of it is that we can’t because the risk of us doing that outweighs a lot of things, unfortunately.

I do hope some of you will understand why we have to do things the way we do right now until some change(s) can happen higher up the chain.

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Spoiler

If you read this entire 6 page essay holy shit I’m so sorry lol it’s been on my mind for a while, but I could never find the right words to use so I just chipped away at it over the last few days and it ended up being ~6 pages long in Google Docs. I tried to avoid repeating topics and things that were already answered, but every time I kept coming back to try to post this more posts were being made and then I’d have to go back and re-word stuff to try to cover what was brought up and it was just never-ending at that point so I apologize if there is a bit of repetitiveness, or topics that got left out.

Thank you for taking the time to read all of it.