Self ban clarity needs to be improved

Hi Royals.

I would like to discuss the topic of self bans, and I think their clarity could be improved.


The status quo for self bans:
There is no official procedure or instruction for requesting self bans, but commonly, everyone requests self bans using the Ban Appeal forum. Additionally, people use the ban appeal format in place of any official self ban format.

This format consists of listing the character names on the accounts they want banned and a brief description. People request self bans for all kinds of reasons: account security, studying for finals, etc.

Where the problem is:
Because the ban appeal/self ban format asks you to list the characters you want banned, it seems it'd be common sense that you'd be asking for those characters' accounts to get banned and no more, no less. However, the truth is you get banned as a person, even though you as a person are not a rule breaker. Your IP, Mac Address, etc., and you could even be punished for "ban evading" at that point. At this point, you are getting punished for simply requesting a service that the terms of which are very unclear and even counterintuitive to the process itself. That is not a fair situation for the players to be in and feels like a trap.

How we can improve it:
As you can see, self bans are a very heavy thing to request, and therefore if this service is offered to players, it is irresponsible not to inform them the full consequences of it.

But, how can they know the full details, when there is absolutely no official information about this sort of thing made available to them? Whats more, the process seems like you are simply asking for your accounts to be banned, and there is no warning that you are being banned further?

Simply put, here are some options that could improve the process:

1. Include information about Self Bans in the Terms and Conditions. https://royals.ms/forum/threads/mapleroyals-game-terms-conditions.86769/

2. Confirm with the players that you are banned as a "person", cannot make a new account, and could be further punished in the ban appeal thread before applying the ban.
​

If you are going to offer a service with such high stakes as self ban requests, it's irresponsible to punish players to the fullest extent without making them fully aware of it or publishing the info anywhere.


Summary:
The process for self banning should be made more clear to prevent ambiguities.

These changes could be made and would help players a lot:

• Write a stickied post on the Ban Appeal subforum explaining the details of Self Ban requests including the magnitude of the ban, potential consequences for ban evading, maximum duration, and request format (if different from the ban appeal format)
• Or, confirm with the player that they know they are being banned as a player rather than just their accounts.
• Or, write a provision in the T&C about self bans
• Take an official stance going forward on how players ban evading their own self bans will be punished or not

 

But T&C says any action taken against any account applies to all your accounts registered though.

Section 2. Registration
When registering for a game account with MapleRoyals, you are subject to the following restrictions:

1. Acceptance of Agreement
   By registering a game account with MapleRoyals, you agree that you willingly accept responsibility for any and all characters on said account, and, in the case of multiple registered accounts, that any actions taken against one account registered to you apply to all registered accounts.

There's also a clause explaining ban evasions too:

Infractions by Extension:
2. Ban Evasion - The act of circumventing a ban that exists on a player through the use of any means with the intent to, or accomplishing, access of the game on any account. Punishment: Identical to the consequence of which the player attempts to, or already has, circumvented.

 

Unpopular opinion, this is an abhorrent waste of staffs already limited time. If you have obligations in real life, stop playing the game and finish them, this requires a very small amount of self control and if its still hard, just delete the game until resolved. I can't believe we even acknowledge these requests.

 

I don't think it's really a question of being permanently banned or not, at least for the first case of ban evading. It says in the T&C:

Ban Evasion - The act of circumventing a ban that exists on a player through the use of any means with the intent to, or accomplishing, access of the game on any account. Punishment: Identical to the consequence of which the player attempts to, or already has, circumvented.

This is a bit weird in the case of self banning, but I would interpret this as either:
1. Initially your new account gets banned but no ban duration is extended.
Or
2. Your ban is doubled effective immediately. Not sure if double is applied from end ban date or from date caught (in the latter case has the potential to be slightly more forgiving since the two ban duration overlap slightly).

It bothers me too that I said that because it simply wasn't true. I put it in a spoiler and was just being dramatic with my entire post, as you can probably tell from how the entire post reads. Quitting games is really kind of a personal thing and I said that stuff idealistically more for myself than anyone.

I knew the max duration was 6 months as I've seen tons of people request to be permabanned before and be met with the same response.

Supporting evidence of this is that I was the kind of player who used to be super active on the forums and was hyper aware of the rules. I've even suggested the T&C be updated before for clarity issues and changes I suggested got implemented. If you know of me or look at my profile maybe that will be more convincing, and it's the truth. I've been on this server through over 2 years including new source shoutbox days and drama, old source, report abuse threads, etc. etc.

On the outside I know it looks like this. I don't want to dive into the details too much, but I have been getting my life sorted out. But what it comes down to is.. just finding happiness. For me, if I am happy, suddenly everything is better and I feel more motivated to improve all aspects of my life? Logically you are right but from my learned experience, idk. I guess it's too personal.

 

Idealistically, I agree with you about players having self control. But from a personal level, imagine this scenario. You love playing Royals and for you it's a big part of your social circle and recreation outside of work/school/etc. Then, you come up to a major deadline for your job or something like finals in university. Knowing yourself, you decide it's easier just to avoid the temptation entirely by requesting a ban so you can perform your best. It's just going one step further than uninstalling. Idealistically this is kind of bad on a personal level, but it could be worse. At the end of the day, if it helps you in your job or school then do it right? You can argue both sides.

As far as self bans being a waste of staff time, idk if I agree. It is a weird thing to offer to players. However, it doesn't take long and the idea is just to be an additional service to offer to players.

 

Because a self ban is a service, not a punishment or external action taken against your account, there is a serious ambiguity if that rule applies here without seeing precedent for how staff deals with it. Also, because the ban appeal format allows you to specify which characters you want banned, there's sort of a built in trap there. If I ask for 7 accounts to be banned, versus asking 2 accounts being banned, doesn't it seem like there would be a difference?

Finally, it seems unrealistic for Admins to track ALL someones' accounts for a self ban as that would be a waste of their time. If you just ask for one character to be banned, is an Admin going to search for every single one of your accounts by tracing IPs/MACs to ban them all? That seems like a waste of time and doesn't really fit with the idea. Also, GMs are usually the ones who deal with self bans and don't have access to all that info. I've asked for self bans once or twice before and only asked for my main two accounts to be banned for short times around the time of finals and I figured my other accounts went unbanned.

In this case by asking for all 7 accounts to be banned, I really just wanted to ban all my accounts for security reasons and also because I thought it was the right move at the time in my life. I'm not asking to be unbanned from those accounts, but I find it really unfair to be banned as a person due to a clarity issue here. In the end, self bans seem unclear and arbitrarily harsh.

I am tired a bit. I see your points if you read the T&C with a certain perspective, but there is still a clarity issue and the whole self ban service could be updated to be made more clear.

 

A self ban is entirely a waste of staffs time. We have limited resources from volunteers and we shouldn't be wasting them on these pointless requests. If you are seriously having issues with stopping, perhaps seek guidance from an addiction clinic, gaming addiction is a real thing.

Creating a thread and requesting a ban requires the staff member to review the report, verify the account is yours, ask you if you are sure, issue the ban, reply back to the thread (Assuming there is no issues down the line, which as you've demonstrated, there can be).

You can trivialize these steps all you want, but when theres 3-4 pages of reports (including deleted reports that aren't visible, post reports, and i'm sure moderated sub forums from spam: https://i.imgur.com/9U1nLlZ.png). You begin to see that the workload becomes quite a bit, adding needless requests like this only slows down assistance to users who actually need it.

I don't really want to derail this thread as I kind of already did, but figured I should explain it more as i'm from a different forum where this feature has been removed for exactly this reason.

 

1. Evading a self ban will not extend the ban duration, as I have explained in our pages long pm. If you evade, you would just be banned until the original ban date
2. If you do not know the ban process and security access among staff, please refrain from spreading false information. I won’t reveal such information here but everything you said is false.
3. This was already discussed to great lengths in our pm, I believe that it is fair for players who request self ban to not be punished for ban evading. However, you will also be banned till the requested date no matter the situation.
4. I think we’re done here

 

https://royals.ms/forum/threads/self-ban-request.114824/

 

Understand the good intent behind this but leniency when a player actively changes his hardware information and ip to evade... isn't that act of evading in itself bannable? Not to mention cases where the player has to assume a new identity on his evaded account and hence considered as account sharing once the ban period is lifted

 

I slightly regret bringing my personal situation into this thread because it has shifted the focus a bit away from being genuine feedback for the server, which, read in a better light, is what it strives to be.

Anyway, does the idea of improving the clarity of self bans sit well with people? The replies in this thread such as @nany625's and others' demonstrate the variation in enforcement and genuine confusion around self bans. All that could be done is adding a stickied post to the ban appeal section or adding something to the T&C, and all potential future confusion could be avoided.

Alternatively, I also like the idea of removing self bans entirely for the reasons mentioned by @bhezy, but that deserves its own feedback thread.

 

I'm with Bhezy all the way. I honestly didn't think much of it prior, but now that he brings it up, it really is a waste of the staff members time. At the very least those requests need to be taken to the very bottom of the totem pole in terms of time prioritization. Maybe a separate sub-forum specifically for those requests just to completely differentiate them from the real ban appeals.

 

I edited this feedback post to cut out my personal stuff. Personally, I need to take a break from thinking about Royals for a while. :L

However, my idea still stand to help prevent players from getting in a bad situation from this service and for them to fully understand their options. Transparency for something like this is a good thing.