Closed Ban appeal

All Your Character Names: Pilaf, Hwacha, Hellawork
Last thing you did: Destroy the I AM ROBOT population for CWKPQ prequests
Why do you think you got banned?: No idea, I was just grinding before xmas and came back to a ban notice a few weeks later
Ban message when attempting to log in: Blocked for using illegal programs or violating game policy
What GM banned you (optional): idk

 

Hey there! Have you listed all of your characters?

 

All the other characters are jobs that I got bored with and turned into mules. I only use two accounts and on those two accounts, the three that I named are my "main" characters. I don't even remember their names off the top of my head except for 'bank #1, bank #2, Scroll bank, Useless scroll bank, pot bank, NLC gacha char, etc'.

 

It looks like you have been temporarily banned for minor vote abuse. Please take this short break from the game as an opportunity to go over our Voting Rules.

If there is more than one player in your household, please consider applying to our Voting Whitelist.

Spoiler: MapleRoyals TOS Moderate Infractions: Vote Abuse

Punishment: First offense - 14-day ban, Second offense - Permanent ban.

Vote Abuse - The act of attempting to, or successfully, bypassing the restrictions of voting no more than once per 24 hours. Please be aware that, in cases of severe abuse as per the discretion of Staff, we reserve the right to respond with a permanent ban regardless of if it is your first offense. Please be aware that while the voting rules of this server may be complex, they are made available to players every time they access the MapleRoyals voting page. While we understand that players may at times unintentionally engage in vote abuse, ignorance of the rules is not an acceptable justification for breaking them. See Voting Rules for more information.

Your temporary ban will be lifted a week from now. If you are unable to connect once the ban duration ended, please restart your router and make sure your IP changes before logging in.

 

It would be strange to ban me for something I did accidently when I was first starting out in Royals (and stopped) around two years ago but that's fine I guess.

If it's something recent the only thing I can think of is that voting on Opera browser is very buggy and commonly auto-refreshes/doesn't load the page after the captcha is completed which could lead to duplicate vote attempts. This problem also happens sometimes on MS Edge and has nothing to do with me being fraudulent.

Another key point is that your rules are lazy and nobody bothered to change old posts from 2014; your link in the reply says:
"Vote Abuse - The act of attempting to, or successfully, bypassing the restrictions of voting no more than once per 24 hours"

However, on the voting page, it says once every day, every day resets at midnight UTC. Since midnight UTC for me is 7pm EST would I be breaking the rule if I voted at 9pm on a Saturday and 8pm on a Sunday?

 

The staff doesn't issue bans for vote abuse if you have unintentionally bypassed the daily voting limit once.

To avoid the spread of misinformation I would like to clarify that your browser being laggy or refreshing automatically won't result in several successful votes on your account, or allow you to bypass the daily vote limit, not on GTOP100 nor on the MapleRoyals voting page. Once a player has voted and attempts to vote again, he will be greeted with a notice "You have already voted." followed by the cooldown timer. You won't be able to bypass it unless you employ methods that will warrant a ban for vote abuse. No matter how lazy or unattended our voting rules might appear to some, it's quite hard to avoid the red text on the voting page that states: "You may only vote once per day".

Thank you for pointing out the inconsistency. We strive to improve on our guidelines and make them as clear as possible. The staff is taking steps to make the language of TOS more clear as well as ensuring that our game TOS matches our current practices. If you have any other suggestions on how we can improve our guidelines beyond the inconsistency pointed out in your ban appeal, kindly direct your ideas to our Feedback subforum.

I would like to give you the benefit of doubt that you bypassed the daily limit unintentionally, however, the staff made a commitment to apply rules without exception, therefore you will be serving the remaining ban duration as intended.