Should High-Level Ban Appeal Processes Be Revamped?

you seem to conveniently forget I did a month of 4 Horntail runs after the 7th anniversary event, while nonstop playing and farming, but please continue to paraphrase extremely poorly. It's too bad you couldn't scroll a 23 SCG with 6b, but I did and the server saw me do it, and that's how the game went for me. It's actually somewhat hilarious to me you couldn't read through it and see that what I wrote was airtight, but that's your problem.

 

I'd love to hear where you think things are fundamentally wrong. Lord knows I won't get this opportunity in that "ban appeal."

 

In terms of transparency I believe they shouldn't reveal evidence. As many pointed above me, revealing evidence gives the abusers either a way to make up a believable story out of thin air, or to just ban evade and know for their next abuse what not to do so that they can avoid detection their next time.
But, there's one thing i want to see the staff do more in rwting appeals, and that is detailing the infringement itself instead of saying the umbrella term of what they did.
So instead of "you are suspected of RWTing". Write a more detailed post like "we suspect that you were involved in real world trading in the past few months. You joined to this server 3 months ago on chara X, yet you somehow managed to get: perfect DPS, 50 white scrolls, and 20 att cape. Which are roughly equal XX bil meso. Please explain yourself".

While we do see this kind of response most of the times, usually the appeal just starts with them knowing just the general jist of why they got banned and nothing more, which just doesn't paint well on the staff, and doesn't help an innocent player start the appeal properly.

So i'm not saying "be more transparent", im just asking that the staff will be more upfront with the appealer, and instead of withholding stuff that they can already say until the middle of the appeal, just start with saying it all.
You might be trying to suss out more info from the appealers before the appeal begins (classic detective trick kek), but tbh this tactic mostly hurt the occasional innocent appealer by causing them to say something that would make them sound suspicion even tho they were banned worngfully.

 

well, something in my bones really wants to reply to you and argue with your points but it is not my place to do so, I will say even more than that, this thread is completely out of place in the sense that the community for some reason thinks that we should have a say on how the process works while we have no clue about the efforts, about the process, about anything at all.
also, anyone that replayed here and shared their opinion about your ban appeal is kinda out of place, I understand your will to defend yourself but replaying here and defending yourself does not belong, and will make this thread feel more about you, more like a second ban appeal, rather than about the topic.
and to be even more honest the reason I am making this comment is that this is the second time you do this,
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/auf-haven-helmet-scroll-rework.177563/
in that previous thread, I wanted to share my opinion about the subject, and share in many details why I think that it is very surprising that no one has gotten a perfect auf helm yet, but I didn't, simply because it would have looked like I'm indirectly defending you or having an opinion about your ban, in other words in my eyes your comment there pretty much destroyed the discussion and made it about you.

to the subject, my opinion in general is, if not sharing evidence helps the staff, so be it, it is that simple and flat, for you that do read enough ban appeals you will notice that some times they do release some logs when it is appropriate, it just get the sense that OP like some others feels like staff don't give any evidence just cause they have ego and don't really care, this is exactly the opposite, they care, that's why they can't share anything, don't get me wrong the system is not perfect, but to come and judge it based on basically no knowledge of what's really going on behind the scenes is simply arrogant.

 

I think I might have actually lost some brain cells reading this thread.

 

This is a feedback thread, and behind every feedback, there is always a different opinion/viewpoint that ranges on a huge scale, but mainly consolidates into two sides. In this case, on one hand you have @AdventFlash 's view point who says that there should be more transparency when it comes to ban appeals and how the GMs and Administrators should handle the reports. Addressing this side, I have to say that, yes, I do understand where you're coming from and this is a section to further improve the quality of the nostalgic and memorable game that many of us loved to play growing up. But something to take into consideration, and I want to word this fairly loosely because there are many cases in which players "did not understand/read the rules", (Which I find to be a "hard to believe" excuse considering everything in the world has set standards/rules regardless of how strictly or loosely they are enforced, however,); is to try to see past what is being presented to you as the public audience. Take everything that you see with a grain of salt, but nothing more. One could say, "The GMs/Admins aren't doing their jobs properly because look at all this evidence that this person is showing". I personally don't find this to be a fair or justifiable thing to say if none of us understand what they may be doing behind the scenes. I get it, its honestly insane that in order to stay as a complete and legitimate player; you basically need to screen shot everything that you farm, scroll, buy, sell, etc. But in the eyes of the GMs and administrators, maybe there is something so compelling that brings them to deny an appeal. (And believe me, I strongly doubt the GMs/Admins are out to get certain players out of bias and/or immoral intentions). On the other hand, we have individuals who see these appealers as "Ha, I knew they were illegitimate!" (or something along the lines of "They got banned for a reason"). Addressing this side, there are multiple instances in which the appealer was found to be innocent and GMs/Admins were proven wrong. GM's and Admins are human and make mistakes (which is why ban appeals are a thing, to prove your innocence). Assuming someone's story is illegitimate without taking logic/reality into consideration is just being narrow minded. (https://royals.ms/forum/threads/ban-appeal.162409/ Refer to this as an instance in which GM Gert was mistaken and the player was proven innocent). All in all, I do believe that the GMs and Administrators do their due diligence in terms of taking into account any reports or seemingly "untampered" evidence when dealing with a ban appeal. All we can do is try to shift our focus to think from both sides rather than just firmly grasping to one ideal. (Note that this is not to attack anyone's views/opinions but just more of an informative post! )

 

Back in 2017~2018, the hot rwt era, RWTers were very naive and simple-minded. They'd brag and show off their assets which made reporting extremely convenient. Over the years, as more hints were released in the ban appeals, the forever ban evading rwters learned their lesson and evolved to adapt to the system. They found out how to evade the major suspicions and constructed alibis before they entered the end game scene with a full set of armor. For those who tried reporting RWT suspects, you'd know how difficult it is to get someone banned, especially with staff demanding 99% concrete evidence. Sometimes the cases are blatantly obvious but bans aren't issued because they lack definite proof (cough Tim). Based on my observation, Staff don't just issue a ban after seeing high att gear on a fairly new account. They usually dig deeper until they find enough evidence to justify their move.

That's what hackers want because they usually leave their bots to run while they afk. When they come back to find the account banned, they are often puzzled as they cannot tell which of their dozen hacks got detected or got them caught. There's a reason why staff usually don't provide any info in hackers' ban appeals.

 

I feel like this ban appeal is a good example - https://royals.ms/forum/threads/ban-appeal.173402/

Again I have no idea what bator did, but if the staff has enough evidence, just ban him and move on.
Keeping the thread open and writing a single line every 2 weeks is just a waste of time, both the staff's and the ban appealer.

It literally takes you around 20 minutes to read the logs and even doublecheck everything, I feel like in that scenraio you would be able to tell if his story doesn't match up, rather than dragging it for 2 months.
Then either close the appeal without letting him reply like most hacker appeals, or unban if his story does match up.


Regardless, let me use this opportunity to thank @Tim for single handedly carrying the server on that department. Not sure what motivates you to keep doing it, but thank you.

 

I'm very much convinced that you're not truly skeptical. You can't just go around saying that you're doubting the Ban Appeal process when you don't even question the players who are appealing, the people who are reading these appeals, and your own self.

Even though you say you're not defending Incinerated, this thread was motivated by and directly benefits Incinerated (as well as any other RWT offender). But lets go with what you're saying that you're not defending him and just trying to focus on the ban appeal process.

You say you're having issues with the transparency of evidence and methodology of presenting it. In your OP, you want the Staff to provide the logs of the evidence for the ban appeal. You even suggest that inspiration should be taken from the court system in which "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".

Ask yourself this:

• Who exactly benefits from this?
• Why does the Staff try to avoid showing logs?

If the Staff could just show evidence, the appealer and the observers of the appeal have more to gain than the Staff members. In the situation of the person appealing already knows they're guilty of the ban, but appealing anyways, the logs shown by the Staff helps the appealer, the people involved with him, and other Hacker/RWTer groups who are viewing the appeal too. Why? Because it helps them to change up methods and avoid detection and/or form new strategies. There's money to be gained. Also, there's a chance the person who reported them could get found and harassed/hacked later on.

You need to also ask: are these people like the new GMs or ex-GMs like Josh lying to your face (and everyone else) when they say that there's a lot of effort investigating these RWT cases? Or are they telling the truth? If so or if not, what does that suggest?

In Incinerated's ban appeal, his explanation doesn't even make any sense at all from a realistic point of view. But let's say Incinerated's explanation is sound. Tim responds with "your explanation doesn't match up with our logs and you're also ban evading". This is where context clues come into play. Let's break it down:

[-] "your explanation doesn't match up with our logs"
- Why does Tim say this? You could say Tim stonewalled him and denied any chance of defense when clearly Incinerated had enough time to explain his defense again what was listed against him starting with GM June. He could have also re-enforced his explanation after Tim's comment (but clearly didn't). Or you could look at things the other way, that Incinerated wrote-up a fictional story around how he got his equips/achievements in comparison to the logs that say a different story.

What if Tim just showed the logs that proved a different story? Incinerated would still be banned and his appeal denied but now Incinerated and other people he's involved with (and other groups observing this) can take the logs/evidence shown and then craft up different methods and avoid detection and/or form new strategies. Now Tim just helped *them* rather than banning guilty individual.

[-] "you're also ban evading"
- What does this mean? We could assume that Incinerated still had a client with one of his characters still up when he got banned and has been still active for the past 15 days without the GMs disconnecting his client. Or it's possible that Incinerated intentionally ban evaded when he's currently banned and knows what that entails.

Incinerated's last response to Tim already makes no sense from an appealing position. If you cut out the fluff, the retort to the person who has the final say and has the most experience banning RWTers, Hackers, and more is:

• I wrote up 10,000 words and you responded with a sentence
• You refuse to show me logs so I can't disprove
• You choose to believe some random person

Why does Incinerated not even refute that he ban evaded? What does he mean by "believing a random person" when GM June cleared specified that multiple people looked into Incinerated's character histories: "We've investigated your characters"? And what does writing 10,000 words have to do with anything? Does that deserve a reward? And it's questionable for him to belittle the community members in his second paragraph instead of trying rally them, no?

 

That thread is so interesting, let's name that ban appeal "The Bator case". Sounds legit.

And yes, please close that appeal because it is going nowhere lol.

 

This is why the process has to stay the way it is.

https://royals.ms/forum/threads/oh-boii.127670/

 

My 2 cents: I think it's all about trusting the GMs and them doing their jobs. The fact that Royals been standing for almost a decade is solid proof of that.
In regards to the bans of RWT:
I agree that little to no info should be showed especially publicly
-keeps their detective work secret and not letting the opposition learn and to better improve their methods
These public ban appeals should be read with skepticism on the banned persons' (again back to trust on the GMs doing their job)
-this is online, who knows how people hide their face and lies
-even if crafted with eloquent words, and "proofs" if they aren't answering the question that GM ask then its automatic SUSS
It takes a long ass time and way more than couple of months (on average without proof ) to get perfect items and reach the 1% wealth...especially when you starting from scratch.
Overall, I'm going to side with the GMs in all those ban appeals cause ultimately I don't know the whole story and the only thing I can count on is the trust on GM doing their job (goes back to the first line). Ofc not all institutions and companies are perfect and they can make mistake and it lies with improving their policies and training.
But remember...this is an online world.

 

More context here:

https://royals.ms/forum/threads/back-for-seconds.135990/#post-787123

 

Sir please take this to the DMs, it took about half way through the first page for my point to be actually discussed LOL; I don't really think your personal ban appeal should be discussed here unless it's to be used contextually to the point originally made.

I completely agree although I'd say myself that "be more upfront with the appealer (and everything you said after)" is the transparency I speak of. I think @databoy said it best when he mentioned that it's apparent that ~95% of the cases in the ban appeals are from solid evidence instead of random whistleblowing; but this point is targeted to the ~5% who were at thhe wrong place at the wrong time (suspect hackers) or those who got lucked into high rolling or some other scenario where they made their money quickly, or whatever method that got them to the hot seat to begin with ( suspect RWT-ers).

Thank you for this post, despite your forum name it's not very controversial itself, hahaha.
I completely agree with you, both sides can be seem to be misconstrued into an extremity. There's a mild tug-of-war between giving too much evidence and giving the appealers too much power to defend themselves, but there's also too little to defend to begin with. As you said, GMs make human mistakes, which is fine to be honest. It's partially why I made this thread to begin with, mistakes can be made, but if mistakes are made and information isn't provided then how would we ever know? This thread originally wasn't to dismiss Staff effort in working these cases (although it was completely derailed as such in the beginning LOL), but moreso all that effort they put in and and it could be possibly wrong but we'd never know because it's only mildly alluded appeals.
The example you brought up is a really good one, actually, in terms of transparency! Staff was able to go out their way and re-create the process described by the appealer and determined their judgement form there, which is fine; thankfully because of that the appealer was able to counter with a statement which ultimately lead to his unban. Of course this example is extremely specific and only applies to some scenarios but it's the kind of format/attitude(?) that I feel should be performed on most of these appeals.

I question both sides, which is why I've referred/alluded to ban appeals where there have been information provided by the appealer giving information, but met with almost nothing. There are appeals that are on the opposite spectrum of this (GMs give evidence and the appealer has fuck-all), which automatically puts them in a tough spot; again, because not everyone documents every step, or they simply don't reply because they know they got done in. This thread was, once again, made with the assumption of the former where evidence is provided but Staff does not reveal anything else. You're appealing everything you have to a void in hopes something sticks.

I feel like we're mildly agreeing but are seeing it from different perspective. I understanding showing even a bit of their hand might contribute to a person being benefitted in a ban appeal (which is the point of an appeal anyway though) and that accidental leniency might benefit actual offenders. But I made this post in consideration for those who are not guilty. Ban appeals should be done in a cross-examination-esque format, where both sides are able to present what they can/should and give appealers a fighting chance. I'm not saying (exaggerated example) that a GM goes "Hey but @AdventFlash sent us this document from discord that has you saying you did xyz" and boom there goes drama. I'm talking about empirical evidence that can be presented objectively without incriminating anyone.
Examples of this are scattered through the ban appeals, someone would be suspect of selling botter items and then they're hit with "Our side shows you've sold 900 10% earring ints as opposed to buying 5 in your life." This kind of information presented should be extended to trade/loot logs for RWTers and whatever else applicable for suspect-vaccers.

There's something to be said about the "guilty until proven innocent" perspective versus the "innocent until proven guilty perspective" and how that philosophy comes into play when handling these appeals and how evidence is presented, which I think we are on the opposite side of, haha.

I don't think it's a secret that there's methods to dodging and ducking under the system, especially with how often it's alluded. But everyone has a pretty strong idea on what the logs tell Staff on the backend of the server. This ties in with the FAQ "Why can't we drop CS/WS?" the answer in of itself is probably why. Of course I understand we may be helping future guilty individuals, but why is it not enough that we may be helping innocent individuals? You bring up plenty of good points from your end that should be considered along with mine, ultimately I proposed this thread as a concept for discussion, not necessarily to converge onto a single solution, I'm very much aware of how short handed Staff may be in handling big cases which may or may not be why it takes them a hot minute to reply to some "High-Level" ban appeals on their replies .

Truthfully, until we find out what happens I suppose we won't know why he was just randomly accused of ban evading (seemingly) out of nowhere. Again, we don't know what basis that was from (you even said we can assume because we don't know), we're not obligated to know, but the appealer does (at least imo and the point of this thread); so they can at least have a comment or say in it; because, naturally, why shouldn't you be able to have a say/defense in what you're being accused of? Of course, might be tricky gray area since from the sounds of it that the evidence was proposed on a personal level and the emperical data would just show a different IP/MAC Address etc etc.

I'm not saying he should be automatically be rewarded for his effort to type his essay, I'm just saying he presented his side; as shoddy/good some may or may not take it; that he should at least be presented something from Staff's side. June's answer to the "We've investigated your characters" was initially in reference to his items and character, we (as the public) only found out he was (maybe?) ban evading after his essay. I digress though, I'm really just here to discuss methodology and transparency, not specifically Incinerated's ban appeal; which might as well be a circus of its own at this point.

 

I feel like a lot of people tunnel-vision'd on OP's references instead of building on the points he made. After reading the replies, I don't think OP is trying to attack or question Staff, nor is he sympathizing with the users brought up in his references.

At the end of the day, I think it'd be fair to say that some of the Staff's responses in the ban appeals do raise suspicion because we don't have the added context that they do. If we're to trust the Staff to completely take care of these issues with the information provided to them, what's the point of making ban appeals public?

Sure you could argue that ban appeals serve to provide the community with examples of the GM's authority; but from the responses I've read on this thread it sounds like that should already be a given. I guess some people might believe ban appeals are the way that people learn about the rules; if this is the case shouldn't we shift the focus to promoting the ToC instead?

Is there any harm to making ban appeals private outside of losing some "entertainment" for the various members (myself included) that lurk that section of the forums?

 

... If the ban appeals were private for the past several years, could you (or we) trust the Staff to completely take care of these issues with the information provided to them? What would be the strengths or weaknesses of a private ban appeal that the public hasn't seen for years vs what we have now? What would happen if people were constantly making feedback threads that they were judged unfairly in these private appeals in comparison to the rare feedback threads we have now on public appeals?

How would you react if private ban appeals were going on for years and Staff was using the same process as they do now with public appeals where they're weren't privy to showing logs/evidence to avoid Hackers/RWTers from learning from them? Could you trust them better except you can't see the full conversation between the appealer and Staff member?

What does your (or anyone else's) own "entertainment" from reading ban appeal have to do with the assessment of making ban appeals private?

 

What about my ban appeal when tim just outright refuse to believe my story and my fault was that i didnt screenshot/video whatever success i had with scrolling? Fyi we're 3 siblings and we've played over 2 years and that was during the 2016-2017 era when rwt bans were not rampant so we didnt know what we had to do to protect ourselves.

 

My trust in staff would not change whether ban appeals are public or private. At the end of the day, the staff have access to information the public is not privy to, and use this information to make their decision. Having public appeals but (justifiably) not publicizing the evidence they have against the accused does not help me trust the staff's judgment more.

So therefore, what purpose do public appeals serve? All we can see is:
1. Who got banned, which may be useful for the purposes of identifying people you know that won't be logging in anymore
2. Why they were banned, which besides to satisfy the community's curiousity, doesn't help staff nor appealer to make public

There could simply be a rule that if your private ban appeal is closed, any consequent feedback threads about your appeal will be closed. If there was any information you could provide to reverse the verdict, you would have done so at the ban appeal level. Therefore the purpose of any public feedback threads about your closed ban appeal is to disparage staff or to appeal to the community, who have no say in overturning a ban.

Public ban appeals falsely creates the impression that the community has any say in the ban appeal process, which we know is completely untrue. In some appeals, the appealer makes a well thought out case for their innocence, only to be met with "that doesn't match our logs" or "we have conclusive evidence that you did x y z". Since it is not possible to provide these logs or evidence, all the community can see is a false sense of apathy from the staff handling the case, when realistically there is a lot of investigation that happens behind the scenes. It is not fair to the staff to continue having public ban appeals since it can only undermine their credibility.

 

https://royals.ms/forum/threads/ban-appeal.174590/
Shane originally replied ganging up on the poor fella too