Should High-Level Ban Appeal Processes Be Revamped?

Hi all,

I've been on this server maybe nearly 1 year now so maybe I know fuck-all about the history or whatever legacy built up over the near-decade that this server has been operating but I feel like RWT-esque ban appeals are handled very poorly on this server.

And yeah due to timing, you can assume it's mildly related to this ban appeal and this. I'm not talking about the "oh i found a perfect kanzir in kerning cwazy" bans either, but moreso the ones that have been heavily documented in the appeals, yet more often than not go unheard or nowhere.

I don't know these guys personally, haven't even ran a boss with them enough to remember anything so it's not like I have a personal stake in this, but I digress. My problem is inherently with the process itself, not the results of these bans.

Why is it in these ban appeals you are forced to make your defense into the void? You're accused in a single sentence and are told to supply evidence or go fuck yourself and take the ban.
The accused would then throw countless screenshots, write anecdotes, near step-by-step procedures on how they obtained their weapons just to be told "nah that isn't right." by whatever Admin/GM is overseeing that ban appeal.

Without knowing specifically what you're being accused of, without even an ounce of shown evidence from Staff, you're basically supplying them more ammo to poke holes into your own story or just to be completely dismissed. Of course there's always the possibility of ratting out whoever made the report with the evidence, but even then; cropping/censoring/paraphrasing even would be helpful than keeping the accused completely in the dark. This goes for the "logs" as well. If the accused is to stay permanently banned for suspected RWTing anyway, then why not just provide the logs? GMs can use the logs to question transactions and context rather than merely provide a long list of gear and say "why do you own these?" which provides nearly nothing for anyone.

Literally in court you're presented with evidence from the opposing side after presenting your case and have a chance to cross-examine each other and the evidence itself. You can't just defend yourself not knowing where the hits are coming from, what kind of system is that?

I realize this is basically a game made by Non-Nexon employees and probably has a vetting process as tight as my grip with arthritis, and there is probably no point in comparing it to the real life judicial system, but I feel like some "inspiration" should be drawn from it just to prevent people from being completely fucked over by allegations that might be fake/doctored/out of context.

Most casual players don't even have the kind of hindsight to record/ss/log every single transaction they've made so that on the off chance they get lucky that they don't find themselves on the ban appeal. Is that really the kind of paranoia and caution that every player should adopt in fear so that they don't find themselves on the ban appeals?

 

a lot of effort and investigation goes into these “high-level” RWT bans; moreso than you know and much more than it appears

with regards to the two appeals you linked specifically,
for the former: if you’re an experienced enough player, you’d easily find numerous points in his story that are fundamentally wrong. this proves that it’s a story and not an explanation
for the latter: again if you go through his posts, he still has not answered the underlying question (at least imo) despite spamming his posts with screenshots etc.

you seem to also assume that Staff actually have the time and energy to snoop around everything and every single player, just to come up with some smoked out ban that targets someone they probably do not even know exists. this is definitely not the case and you, like many others, are thinking way too highly of yourselves

funnily enough, the Staff member who gets the final say in RWT bans probably has the most compassion and highest tendency to give appealers the benefit of the doubt, as compared to those who were helping him out with this aspect of the game

as is already quite obvious, part of the reason why evidence is not shared is to protect the identities of the reporter(s), and i personally think this is justified

naturally, if you think you can do a better job, you’re always welcome to submit an application, but i’d strongly suggest you at least try to get your facts right first

 

I don't know about you, but if i ask someone how he funded his perfect dragon weapon and he shows me a screenshot of him merching Adamntium plates, something ain't right...

(Or maybe they are super valuable and im an ignroant)

 

I'm aware only a fraction of staff actually gets to look into the logs and read through all the cluster fuck game data (which understandably contributes to the long lead time in responses) my point is that some of these efforts and investigations must have become fruitful enough to provide a ban, but why isn't that evidence isn't more concretely presented for the accused?

I'm not saying the bans are targetted or even personal; however, ban reports are submitted with required evidence though, I'm not saying things are simply made up. I'm saying the process should be more evened out and that the submitted evidence at least be presented somehow to the accused so that they at least know what to say for themselves. A lot of follow-up questions in RWT ban appeals are lead-ons/mildly "gotcha" questions but not necessarily providing any further context to the evidence staff has on hand to even come to that judgement to begin with.

But in-game transaction logs are empirical and don't have any tie-in to the people who reported them, how come they're so sparsely provided? Lead time and manpower sure, but I assume that a RWT ban would warrant the effort and investigation into the empirical evidence enough to have it at least readily available on hand, unless you really are just comparing their gear with the date of character creation and whatever else is user-submitted anonymously through the Report forum.
Granted, there HAVE been instances where I've seen photos or raw text of logs dropped in ban appeals but why isn't that presented more frequently so people know what they're defending themselves over?

Snide comment aside, I'm 100% sure there's more going on behind the scenes with these appeals; but how it's handled during the actual appeals is done poorly. Like previously said, most people don't even get a chance to defend themselves against what's pressed against them.

 

Incinerated's ban appeal is really the worst example you could use while the wall of text is initially impressive if you bother doing the math it becomes hillarious to see him trying to justify 200b worth of items over a period of 180 days with daily zak and bigfoots

 

I feel like it's natural for legitimate players to assume that everyone around them shares the same level of integrity.

It's not the Staff's job to entertain us or those who persist to lie to save what little reputation they had on the server and drag the appeal on by presenting logs, chats, and whatever evidence you consider to be deeming enough to justify the ban hammer. Just based on my gaming experience alone, long hours of leech and bossing it's quite easy to tell that at least the first appeal linked is fabricated. For what purpose? I'm not quite sure. But perhaps his reply was intended for legitimate players like yourself to question the staff integrity.

While it's great that you are compassionate and you mean well, You might be trying to empathize with the wrong people who eventually hurt the same economy you participate in

 

9 out of 10 times the person who tries to get out by saying they made the majority of their 100b+ funds as a new player through bossing or merching, I think they're lying. I've been here for 4 years and I've seen hundreds of people try to come up with that explanation but it just never adds up. Bossing is mostly for fun, sometimes you run hot and get some good drops but when that happens, the selling threads document that stuff, but people never run hot for a whole year. Supplies (pots, apples, plates, rocks, etc) eat a lot into your profits and the price of boss drops have dropped due to how accessible end game content is now compared to when I joined (a lot more bosses to raise your level and range faster, entry level attack gear costing a lot less...I mean 15 glove is 1b now, people even gear their mules now with entry level gear).

As for merching, the big margin items require to already be well established since you need meso to make more meso in this case. Scrolling things is just not a profitable strategy in general, there's a cost to the enjoyment people get from gambling, and again you're not guaranteed anything from scrolling.

I find it hard to believe people who are so dedicated to the game and getting ahead are not just going with the more time efficient grind of doing 2-4 mage grinding instead of running every single boss every day on multiple characters. Mage grinding is always solid profit, you can grind as little or as much as you want whenever you want.

 

I mean it's not the perfect example, honestly. I had the concept of this topic in my head before he even got banned. What got me to make the thread to begin with was the response "your explanation doesn't match up with our logs and you're also ban evading. Needless to say your appeal has been denied and you will remain permanently banned."

Like... Yeah his explanation might be dog shit but is that really all they can say against it? There's been other examples of this in RWT bans. Assuming they are innocent, what could you even say to this?

Emphasize is probably the wrong word for what I'm feeling LOL. I just wish the process was mildly more transparent, guilty or not; I don't think any judiciary process is "Defend yourself against what we <secretly> have and hope you get all the points right."
I'm aware that some/most of these ban appeals for RWT is more than likely them actually RWTing and getting caught (like many of you so kindly pointed out); but again, my beef is with the process and how the evidence is presented.

 

At the end of the day, the admins have the item logs and login time logs(probably even more metadata) that can be cross-referenced with the ban appeal alibi. Whether or not the integrity of the admins should be trusted, is up to each individual person that decides to play the server.

More transparency from the admins can't hurt though.

 

Honestly, regardless of the innocence of these people who are appealing, all it makes me feel is that I don’t ever want to invest so much into this game to try and craft perfect things because I might get banned. Idk about y’all but instilling that kind of fear in people is kind of unhealthy.

 

OP, maybe you should consider giving TimK a benefit of the doubt in thoroughly looking into these players. But let's focus on Incinerated. This guy had so many perfect items and even made +14 auf helmet while only playing for a few months. From a perspective of a regular player who has played for almost 2 years, that is downright crazy. The amount of time and effort required to grind/make perfect (or high damage equips) is astronomical and isn't as simple as just "getting lucky" as you and other (gullible) players would like to believe.

My Nightlord, which I leveled from lv1~200 without starting over and attained only 10k hp by washing out as much as I could while getting Legendary Collector medal+HP equips, I only managed to get a Perfect RC after 2 months of grinding, having to put a slow stop on leveling, by literally spending a lot of the days farming Ulu1, Leprechauns, selling Scar helms/Krex Rings, Cwk, gaching at CBD, and etc. I reached level 200 with a 15atk SCG, 8atk BFC, 6atk FS and a perfect RC. One of the people on my BL list who had reached lv200 before me and stopped playing told me in a discord DM that I was the only guy he knew who got to lv200 without resorting to RWT

Spoiler

My Paladin, I decided I would go 1H+Shield after a buddy convinced me to use a Flame Sword. I also decided that I would White Scroll a Perfect weapon instead of outright buying one like I did with my RC. I'm not a huge fan of leeching so I mostly bossed/gach'd my way to fund the weapon and WS. I bought a 100atk 7str/5dex clean Flame Sword for 1.5b (same buddy sold it to me for cheap since I told him I'd perfect it), and I went onto the task of scrolling it to +7. This is the time where I started doing double Cwks on my Paladin and Nightlord and I'll tell you right now that it was exhausting to do them. It took me ~3 months and 79 white scrolls to get the Flame Sword from clean to +7.... I got to level 200 on my Paladin with a Perfect Flame Sword, 21atk shield, 15atk SCG, 11atk BFC, 8atk FS.

Spoiler

I did try to CS / Scroll equips and I'll tell you that a lot of it went south... Only the people who have accumulated a lot of wealth over a long (not short) period of time can make the return on investment of CS/WS'ing gear or scrolling & merching certain items/equips. Incinerated has also questionably outbeat Muuu, a guy who was empowered by Odin himself to 30% anything & everything and managed to only make a perfect Doroness Robe using 30+ws that took nearly forever to scroll and was item smega'd so much over several months that people smega'd begging someone to buy it so they could stop seeing it.

Don't believe that some guy who barely played for a few months without selling leech got insanely godly equips and questionable scrolling progress by virtue of "Hard work and harder luck". Learn to be skeptical

 

If you're worrying about the transparency, there are far more platforms (eg Steam, Twitch) with a more ruthless banhammer, not just talking about MS private servers. In an ideal world, we'd be able to see all the supporting evidence, but that's not possible for reasons others have mentioned here. also for the extra juice for drama.

If you're worrying about perfecting items and causing others to be suspicious of you, check out xDarkomantis' comment right below yours and compare it to those in ban appeals.

 

I am skeptical, that's why I even made this thread . I'm not defending Incinerated or anything, I don't believe him either (or really care about him as a person tbh). His thread was just used as an example of how the process is handled. I primarily pointed out RWT appeals because there are so many hacker ban appeals far in between to sift through for examples.

I suppose my parallel for hackers is the times someone would be banned for vaccing mobs, we find out some time later that the single screenshot or quick video of them killing pre-vacced mobs (that they didn't hack) was taken out of context, and that there was a hacker in the map prior to them and that they were clearing the platform/map. There's been cases where the ban gets reversed because an oopsie and GMs realize that they weren't the ones vaccing the mobs. This case multiplied by the other possible-innocent people who get caught up and (may) get permanently banned just for clearing mobs because they weren't presented with the evidence that was used on them.

Obviously this is a niche example, most often times they're probably straight up hacking/god-moding but that's why my initial thread was primarily pointed at RWTers, which provides a more concrete basis for what I'm trying to convey.

My beef is just transparency of evidence and methodology of presenting it.

 

It warms the cockles of my heart to see that a private game server has such devoted players and has developed so far. From the days where SDP cost 500m , Blizzard 20 cost 800m and APR cost 22.5m - if you know these numbers, you know when I joined - but truth be told, everything needs continual improvement. I would like to take this opportunity to say that many seasoned players are probably right in their own aspect where they addressed certain issues that has plagued any online game in here and elsewhere (and rightfully so).

However, looking down this thread, we might need to re-look to the question at hand - which queries if the system might need some improvement or none at all - and see how we, as a community - can face it head on or just brush it aside as we have 0 stocks invested into this marketplace.

As @Dave Deviluke mentioned "I rather Admins do not reveal too much that the rule-breakers can find ways to make the story sounds more logical", and this is 100% true as people get more creative as the years goes on. But Dave, i would like you to consider, the country we originate from has pride ourselves in being one of the better/best legal system this world have to offer, where even other sovereign nations envy our legal system, you well know that there are always improvements to be made and processes to be re-looked at E.g. K Shanmugam on Voyeurism, this becomes a talking point on how we should improve rather than why we should improve.

I believe that when admins make their move, its not because of a hunch or some random whistleblower, but rather a solid evidence that is apparent in almost 95%+ of cases seen in the Ban Appeal section. But this brings up the remainder 0-5%. Just because a vaccine works 95% of the time (Sputnik), does not means it is perfect. Does that mean we abandon the system? Obviously not. However, improvements can be made and i believe this is a good time to bring such conversations to the table. NOT focused on why/what he did, but rather how.

@AdventFlash mentioned a great point which i think was overlooked, which is "Most casual players don't even have the kind of hindsight to record/ss/log every single transaction they've made so that on the off chance they get lucky that they don't find themselves on the ban appeal." As many of you have pointed - implicitly or explicitly - that this is just a game and if you don't like it, leave. But if you found yourself reading this far, you aren't one of them.

As such how could we possibly do it? Well for starters, asking the same question over and over again and expecting a different result is insanity. Therefore, may I propose including 1 or 2 points within your trade, or chat history/log to show some evidence of proof that the claim - RWT - is legitimate. There is probably a good reason why GMs aren't doing so in particular cases and totally fine in revealing them in other cases - harassments/KSing - But since these are high level trades/cases, mentioned 1 or 2 points, yes it MIGHT hurt your informant but give the person a chance, not many chances but A chance to defend him/herself. If they are unable to do so, sure, do what needs to be done for the betterment of the other 5000+ people who vote everyday, but until then, keep it open and steer away from the assumption that all are guilty until proven innocent mindset (Matt is from UK and this law does originate from UK but the rest of the world has since moved on - UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11 - with the exception of certain countries/states).

With this i rest my case and thank you all for reading. Would like to thank @GMs for doing their best too! (You know who you are! )
P.S - Hire more GMs so we can have more Ola Ola/TruthOrDare/RR <3

 

Having transparency of evidence, methodology to present it is great. Transparency of evidence will definitely allow players to trust GM even more.

However, we can’t deny the fact that there are people (hackers) are constantly finding loopholes, doing programming and god knows what they do to abuse the game, to benefit themselves. For example, having some programs to let them gaining free mesos, and selling those mesos for real USD. And this is a fact, because you can simply just YouTube or google it. These people know that by posting these kind of stuff, they will definitely get banned. But, that’s not their intention. Their intention is to attract players who wanna “RWT” to contact them and buy from them, so that they can profit.

So, to profit from it, they have to constantly look for loopholes or bug in the game to abuse them. I believe if they know “How exactly GM is handling this, How the developer is programming and more info”, they will know “How exactly to avoid it, find the loopholes and profit”. So, if GM were to share, to be very very transparent, it will end up benefiting the hackers.

I have played MapleRoyals for a few years. And I have seen Dramas, Abuses, Hackers etc. that screw up the gameplay experience. Of course, sharing those evidence is easy, because it will increase the trust of players to GM.

But I believe that, sometimes is not that GMs don’t want to openly share “transparent evidence”, because it will allow Hackers to have information that allow them to abuse the game.

So, between FULL Transparency and FULL secretive, they have to balance between both. Which I believe is very very hard. But, that’s what it takes to keep the server enjoyable for us as long as it can be.

 

There needs to be some care taken when we criticise the banning process. The reality is that the ban appeals are a source of entertainment to a large proportion of players and almost everyone knows it. When someone makes an appeal even when they know they were in the wrong, they aren't just speaking to GMs but to the server as a whole, and they are consciously trying to undermine the system that is in place, and the authority/judgement of the admins who make the decisions.

If you ask me, there is sufficient transparency when the admins list the gear/things that the banned player needs to explain. The reality is that there is no such thing as truly consistent good luck in this game. Anyone who has done enough scrolling knows that it always comes round to haunt you, and there's a reason why the richest players in the server still find a need to go to the effort of doing things like 4 client ulu1 farming. When I stopped selling leech and doing apq to focus on bossing, I constantly found myself short of apples and mesos for apples even though I was doing 2 ht runs and cwk almost daily. HT isn't the source of income it once was anymore.

To those worried about perfecting weapons, I've found that the trail of evidence writes itself when you do things legitimately. Don't worry and just play. No one ever accused me of anything even when I passed 3 slots in 12 ws.

 

can confirm timk is very nice uwu