General Ban appeals are a meme and need a clear rework.

Just a thought I have in regards to leniency: I think specific character deletion could serve as a good alternative punishment to permabanning in cases where users have unfairly benefitted from rule-breaking, but are believed to be reformed/capable of such.

If the fundamental issue is that they have unfair benefits over other players, delete the character with which they used said benefits and have them start over fresh, erasing their benefits and the penalty being the time they spend building up their unfairly advantaged characters so far. Perhaps leave a tag on them somewhere that allows Staff to easily recognise and punish them harsher (i.e. the actual permaban) if recidivism occurs.

I'm of course looking from the outside in and can't state whether or not such a stance would at all be practical to implement (maybe it would just increase the bureaucracy?), but I feel it would help greatly in reducing the ambient fear that seems to loom over significant chunks of the community nowadays.

(And I dunno, I just often find myself feeling bad seeing Ban Appeals in which a person admits to having Account Shared once in an occasion months/years ago and gets the harshest possible sentence handed down because that's what the rules are. I know for certain I'm too much of a bleeding heart to ever be a proper Moderator myself.)

 

Well, seems like wer’e becoming a real country.
And as such, some practices as for judicial system should be considered.

I’d like to suggest a solution but well understand this ain’t perfect:
a jury system, assembled with members of the community selected by the community itself within a democratic vote & staff approval of the candidates.

this jury is to go through ban appeals, asking for records and images by the players. This might solve the long waits for responses as non of these jury members need access to logs or codebase / database stuff.

admins can later on come back for a “ready for decision” thread when all the information is already provided there as the jury asked for what the staff taught them to. If any other information provided with logs is needed, it is for the admins alone to act on it.

might need some guidance and training to this jury, but well worth the effort imo.

There might be much better ideas here, i’m just shooting mine.

 

Great idea! I think we need lawyers and expert witnesses too.

Jury can vote by poll. I know a couple of people who could set the polls up as they have lots of experience making forum polls.

Spoiler

\s

 

Anyone asking for leniency on major vote abusers that did it years ago but stopped are disrespecting the longtime players who never vote abused at all in the first place. They got their unfair advantage being able to HP wash their high hp char and/or perfect(or high atk) gear with the vote abuse and been on top for years due to it whereas they would have been an average weak player if they voted once a day.

@Becca You made a good point but you and Matt made their detailed replies and the thread moved to accepted, just lock the thread already. If others still want to argue on a new point, then they can make a new thread.