Hello, I bring you the following suggestion; Request GM assistance in flushing out repeat offenders of any form of toxic scamming. This includes, but it not limited to; selling leech, AP resets in a bundle or any other kind where there is a form of trust being broken. This does not include shop bundle scamming (that's all on you, dummy!). I'm hoping this will be a well received proposition, both from the Community and Staff, and it could be a nice middle ground between requesting a ban for these players, and instead let the community outcast them on their own. All the GM would have to do is work their magic with !iplookup (or whatever the command is) and post the alternative IGN's of notorious scammers of the server (preferably in the community black list-thread). If GM's feel they have the time, they could do so without a community based request, but I'd personally assign @lilaznpnk to be the the player requesting alternate IGN's behind some of the reputable offenders. I believe he's the most unbiased member of the community. This is to keep it somewhat civil, so not every spoiled brat feels the need to request a flush just because zir (I know you guys love gender neutral denominations) feelings are hurt, and I also believe lilaznpnk would make a good judgement call on when a flush is necessary. This could potentially scare off people from scamming altogether, if they knew their man characters would be revealed, or at least narrow it down. I know I don't play any more but I can still contribute with top notch suggestions. Feel free to comment and improve/hate on my suggestion, or just declare your unconditional love for cats. PS. No poll cuz meh. Also I won't monitor/moderate this thread. xoxo Manslut
Here's my concern with this proposal: what if this person is exposed and it turns out they weren't a scammer? What if they lost their internet and the torches and pitchforks come out prematurely? Now this person has all of their IGNs posted on the forums and while the staff won't be passing judgement either way, we in a sense are passing judgement by believing for ourselves there's reason to suspect this person is a scammer. If we didn't hold that belief, we wouldn't be posting all the IGNs of a person on the forums. I just really don't like how the possibility of premature conclusions can be drawn and the staff could be an accessory to the false defamation of a person.
That's why I'd only suggest someone reputable enough to request a player to be exposed. I thought of this scenario too, and it wouldn't affect people who runs out of luck (or electricity/network connection). If the community (or in my particular proposal, lilaznpnk) believes there's sufficient ground for claiming a flush, they would request one. It's solely for repeat offenders, who've been reported numerous times, and while it's not always black and white, it doesn't take a scientist to tell that some players have a bad influence on the server. Of course, there could naturally be up to Staff's final discretion to make the call of exposing a player or not, based on the evidence at hand. Most, if not all, premature reports where someone's internet has died or computer crashed, the issue has been handled later between the parties involved, and charges dropped. I don't think it would affect unfortunate incidents like that.
As of now, there is 1 player who recently returned and whose sole purpose seems to be scamming to the point where he has given up denying or fighting claims, although I believe I already have all his primary accounts listed. In addition, there are 2 other players who are abusing the system by repeatedly scamming, have attempted to report players who have "harassed" them as they tried to either warn other players or work the problem out themselves, and seem to have now moved on to using the Community Blacklist as a list of all the scams which are available to them to commit. They have been tagged in the thread, and have viewed it but rather than defending themselves, have only built stronger cases against themselves since then. Cases like these seem to be clear-cut no matter how you look at it.
I think in this sense that there needs to be a certain wait time before this can be requested and how many times the player has been reported. I.e if player A purchases leech for 2 hours and the leecher (player B) disconnects due to internet or power outage, then player A can report. However, until another scam report, player B cannot be exposed. After 2 reports, player B is given 1 week to either explain the situation, (i.e power outage, let me refund you or give you your deserved leech time), or if s/he doesn't, then the process of determining whether or not the player gets exposed comes to fruition. I think that's a fairly balanced procedure to expose scammers as most scammers are repeat offenders (at least based on the reports I've viewed).
The other issue I want to bring up (and no, this is not a reason for me to nix the whole proposal so please don't say I'm being nitpicky, I just want to know what you would propose), if we rely on one player (as it is being proposed, lilaznpink) what happens if they leave/quit? What happens if they go on vacation and aren't around? Really I guess my question is, why can't it just be an existing member of staff who plays often and knows the community anyway? I can think of many of our current GMs who are well known and active within the community.
I think the reason why he suggested @lilaznpnk is because it seems that GM's are already pretty busy and he's also in charge of the blacklist thread anyway.
I think the reason he suggested another player was to not continue to throw additional duties onto current staff. The other reason might be the players yelling "I thought GMs didn't get involved" but they're most often the kind of people that will complain no matter what if it doesn't directly benefit them. Spoiler Also pnk not pink :[
Right, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is, at the point where we're trusting one member of the community so much that we're going on their word to expose a player's identity (not IRL stuff, but other IGNs) and basically deem them a scammer, wouldn't it just make sense to make that person a staff member since staff members are held to a high level of trust? It really just sounds like we're adding an extra layer of hierarchy between players and administrators. OT: Apple autocorrect, sorry about that!
In the scenario of the assigned player requesting the alternative ingame character names of repeat offenders, a GM still has to check those names for the assigned player and thus is involved. So either way staff would have to be involved in cases of repeat offenders.
I don't believe there are a a significant amount of people against the staff being in charge of this. Twas just a matter of trying to help distribute work away from them so that the request would be less tedious, and had a higher chance of being considered.
I think proven and consistent scammers should be exposed and it should be a member of staff to do it. If you're going to scam the community you should have to face some form of negative repercussions. There are some complications here, though. What constitutes cases where scammers should be exposed? Does the person have to scam leech X amount of times? Would once be enough times? Twice? When I was a GM I exposed two different scammers. Those were extreme cases where I took it upon myself to expose them. Out of all the scammers I've seen in the game in the 2 ish years those were the only cases where I felt it was necessary for the greater good of the community to expose the scammers. Pretty much what I'm saying is this, let the GMs have the discretion to decide when to expose someone, for it could lead to witch hunting.
Well, the context of the 3 players I mentioned in my first post is one which has admitted to his scamming and has continued, and two others which clearly are aware of the reports against them, and seem to have picked up the Community Blacklist as their personal list of ideas to use. The problem right now is that there is nothing formal in place as a guideline or means to expose these players. When you chose to expose those two players, it had gotten even more out of hand then the three cases above. As I see it, they are quickly headed to that point. Right now, I don't believe exposing a player's full character and forum info is considered as a course of action, and is therefore rarely if ever taken.
John I think you're being overly worried about trust issues. Scammers that get reported on the community blacklist for example are often times repeat offenders, that's why you constantly see the same names being brought up over and over. Also, nobody here frames others for no reason for the sake of wanting them blacklisted, at least I hope not. The recent scandal with jacto is a great example, some people were a bit skeptical at first whether he did loot the helms from a zak run because of the lack of evidence and he was persistent on not admitting, but in the end it was clear as day that he did loot all the helms. People like him, as well as the many other ap reset or leech scammers are the ones that this suggestion is targeted towards; the repeat offenders that have convincing evidence to back them up. While I dislike the idea of a community blacklist, it does provide a good benchmark for people and could be used as an aid in flushing out scammers. An idea that I have in dealing with these repeat offenders is not to ban them, but give them a soft ban. What a soft ban is is basically banning them from a certain part of the game. Scammers wouldn't be allowed to trade or set up hired merchants, boss looters wouldnt be allowed to participate in any boss runs, toxic offenders wouldn't be allowed to all chat or smega. This idea came from a game called Dark Souls 2, where if the system caught you cheating, they made you face against other cheaters in PvP only. It's a cruel, fun but surprisingly effective method.
I think, if possible, a better method may be to restrict their bossing and merchant activity to Ch 10. This way, those that do still trust them, or those who are willing to take the risk are still able to play the game with them. As long as it is a known fact that Ch 10 is the only place left for them, this can be done with a notice that pops up whenever you enter ch 10, I think this could work. If this is even possible. It's a lot of work just because of a few terrible people in the community :[ EDIT: The reason for this is that since they're not banned from the game, they should still have access to all areas of the game in some way. If we make it impossible for them to earn money or gain boss items, then we might as well have banned them. (Although that is what I'd personally prefer but that's irrelevant) But the more I think about this, the more it feels like it's going overboard. I think everyone would much rather the resources be invested in finishing and maintaining the new source rather than give scammers the pleasure of taking up even more staff time and resources.
Banishing people to a certain channel for certain parts of the game just because the community doesn't like them and get along with them or vice versa? That's really an example of segregation and not something I would feel comfortable supporting. Sorry
I can understand that. I'm probably still too vengeful for my own good. But in regard to the original request, it would be nice if there were some measures in place which would allow for a player's characters to be revealed. This way, scamming is no longer inconsequential, and the community has the information to do as it sees fit.
It's not about making scammers social outcasts, it's about raising awareness against players with questionable reliability, and share that information. I can still be friends with a scammer if he's fun to hang out with, but I wouldn't lend him my 16 atk pgc...
I dont see how this is a problem. If the person was scamming intentfully or not and they get all their igns exposed and chose to pay/give back what ever they scammed the player would get removed from the blacklist and he would most likely never try something like this again.
