General Should banned players be given a second chance?

Many of us are on this server because we used to play Maplestory as kids and want to relive that nostalgic feeling. Others may have just stumbled here or been referred to by a friend. We don't have huge playerbases other games have. As of right now each ban permanently takes a player out of the server. I understand game integrity is important, but I also understand people make mistakes. If we look at games such as Runescape or World of Warcraft, which have far bigger playerbases than us, we will find that being banned doesn't permanently remove you from ever playing that game.

If we look at Runescape, accounts even get unbanned after 3 years, now, I'm not talking about unbanning accounts, but I do believe players should be allowed to come back and start a new character. With how many microtransactions there are in games, I can understand why some people might RWT in order to skip the grinding that Mapleroyals has to offer. but once the account is banned you should just be put back to square one. Hackers can stay banned forever for all I care as that is more malicious in my opinion. At the end of the day all accounts suspected of rwt are banned anyways, I don't see harm in letting them start anew, I think its a major benefit to the health of the game.

My suggestions are
A player that is banned can make a new account.
A player that is banned can make a new account after 6 months.
A player that is banned can make a new account, but if he/she gets banned again then he/she must remain banned.

 

Based on my experience, these two options sound like a nightmare to enforce.

 

Yeah I agree I just wanted to give an option for people who might be on the fence so they could ease their way into just letting them create a new account.

 

I thought about making a similar suggestion a while ago about a system where one could request a pardon for their offence(s) so I can see where you're coming from. There are a few things to consider here and I'll try and address them:

This can be true in some cases, but even these games have IP bans as well as hardware id bans. The main difference between our community and theirs is more than just size, these games have fully fledged support systems (though Jagex's is awful lmao) and employees to work on them. Our community has volunteer staff & developers, as far as i'm aware, none of these positions are paid and are supported completely by volunteer efforts. For the most part they do a pretty good job, but there's always room for improvement

I think the problem is how these groups interact with each other. To put it short, they fuel each other and the result is a damaged economy where legit players struggle. Which in return makes players less likely to stick around and contributes to lower player retention.

I think the amount of staff resources (time) it would take to enforce this would be quite high. It would be interesting to see what recidivism looks like in this server, if I had to guess it would be pretty high.

I think the idea is nice and it would be cool if we could get players back who truly changed/learned from their mistakes, but it would come at the cost of all the damage they've inflicted to the server (directly or indirectly). I think it's hard to justify given that we can't feasibly rollback their individual impacts and as a whole it contributes to an extreme problem in the game

 

No.

 

Thanks for the thoughtful insight, appreciated.

 

I feel that we are at a point where players who join the server are clearly aware of the stern stand taken when it comes to meting out punishments that match the severity and impact of the violations. So when these players commit such acts, they knowingly accept the risk of being banned. Hence, I am of the view that there should be no 2nd chance given to them.

 

Maybe I'm thinking about this wrong and player acquisition should be the correct approach instead.

 

As easy it is to instantly think "no", just as I instantly thought the same thing, there should be something to say about the current active playerbase. Its quite low. I think hackers should be zero tolerance because people that hack, will for sure hack again. However, people being banned for things like vote abuse, making a "misstake" should be able to create a new account imo. I don't know how hard it is to catch these vote abusers, but it seems like they get banned quite often, and I feel like letting them never be able to play again, is definitely hurting the playerbase, especially if they actually made a genuine mistake by thinking they could vote more, or didnt whitelist correctly etc.

So IMO, maybe there's a discussion here.

 

I guess it depends on what you do. Hacking is definitely a 100% perma ban for me, but things like RWT could deserve something less than a perma ban. Same thing goes for 'minor offences' like insulting, voting more than once a day or stuff like that. I think it would be beneficial to try to give a chance to redeem to certain people, but I understand that this may be hard to apply as GMs, with all the stuff that they already take care of.

 

Why make a new account? Why not just have the ban be like a 6 month ban and clear their inventory or something? But I think vote abuse is currently only a short ban at the moment. Unless you do it again, or if it's major vote abuse. Making 57 accounts to vote isn't an accident.
I do think some bans need to be a little less severe. Like getting permabanned for sharing a computer is questionable imo.

 

The context of the ban matters a lot, unlike most people here I'd say that RWT is a bigger offense than hacking - but they should both result in perma ban in my book.
Account bans should be considered for things like vote abuse (not those who systematically make lvl 50 accounts to generate APRs) and account sharing.

 

I think a lot of people underestimate just how low the player count is, if you removed the afk people from a day ch1 fm would be a ghost town, it's already very hard to find anything outside of reset time. You think I want cheaters running around? No, but I know there's some percentage of them that won't reoffend again, and that is invaluable.

 

Ya, I work for a game studio and I can tell you it's not just a MS private server thing. We nearly doubled our player count 2 years ago when COVID hit, and it's been going slightly down ever since

 

I respect Becca trying to be diplomatic with her response, but as an ex-Staff member with no stake in the conversation I'll say it like it is. People unapologetically (and quite frankly, pathologically) lie in their ban appeal all the fucking time lmao. Also, Staff have gotten gradually yet extremely lenient in handing out temporary rather than permanent bans for vote abuse. Which I personally think is for the better, but it also certainly speaks to the type of players who are, in fact, permanently banned. At this point, anyone who received a permanent ban--whether it be hacking, vote abusing, account sharing, or real world trading--had malicious intent in my opinion. And as a general note, you shouldn't let someone's one-sided sob story affect your decisions on how this server should be run.

It is true that player count is dwindling, but that is true across all private servers. It is also true that this is simply the unfortunate nature of private servers built around a game that is itself dying. But I don't believe that allowing an opportunity for players who actively ruined the game for others to return to the game is ultimately the best decision for this community.

 

I'm not saying that because I feel bad for them they should get a second chance. What I'm saying is this is a game from the 2000's that is also a private server, should we really be that picky when it comes to who's allowed to play and who isn't?

We don't acquire players as easily as fortnite and wow and runescape and a million other games, we never will, permanently banning the player instead of the account is ridiculous. If you RWT'ed both accounts should be banned and they should be able to move on to a different account, it's that simple. You'd think someone who spent $500 just to lose it would think twice before making the same mistake. My post was mainly aimed at RWT'ers, so I don't really know that they "ruined" the game for others, if anything it made bossing with them easier because they would be so strong. Hackers like I said before, can stay banned for all I care.

Also I'd like to speak on the fact that people can so easily just purchase a perfect weapon, 20+ wa cape, gloves, shoes. Is the staff really going after sellers or just buyers here? The guy who sells all this stuff has had an active account for years. Sure my tinfoil hat is on but I think its odd the guy who sells all this stuff is still in business. What, he's a mastermind at evading the staff? He has 3000 accounts all spread out with perfect weapons and is evading all the systems in place to catch him? Sure I'm going off topic a little but if RWT were truly as disruptive as the staff claims they are then the sellers would be banned. It takes years to make perfect weapons and 20+wa accessories, yet they seem to be everywhere on a sellers page and so easily obtainable.

 

RWTers and Vote abusers can fuck off. I play this game to enjoy the nostalgic feeling of cashing in mesos from my store and merching and those idiots are ruining it for me

 

And you don't think people RWT to afford to buy the things in your store?

 

I doubt rwters would buy 60% scrolled equips like the ones I have in my store.

But on the small chance that rwters buy the 500k sap of ancient tree I placed in there, I hope they get banned too.

My store is at c1rm2 top right if anyone wanna make me rich btw.