General Should banned players be given a second chance?

Interested to hear or know more about the rules set in place that weren't in favor of the dedicated players / ex-staff, are there any examples?

 

I wholeheartedly see the passion for these suggestions, I truly do. Please don't take any of my feedback negatively I'm just trying to look at it from all angles and keeping an open mind while providing some feedback, and as usual this is my advice as a player, and I don't speak for the entirety of Staff, etc. etc.

I am going to be very candid and as open and transparent as I can be because I do value transparency, I always did, but there's just some things we can't be open about such as autoban progress, alert progress, and content progress.
I do believe that people deserve second chances, however there are some circumstances in which there shouldn't be any second chances given because they've already proved to us that they will just keep doing it time and time again. (RWT, Hacking, and Major Vote Abuse.)

A lot of players here have given pretty detailed responses, and I was a bit on the fence on wanting to write something up or not because I'd say essentially everything was covered for the most part. That and with limited free time to commit here, and shifting time over from GM duties/free time to find the time to write up something... It's taken me awhile to find time to write out some stuff, lets just leave it at that.
Apologizes if responses are non-existent / pretty slow in nature.

Major Vote Abuse:
I don't know what system the Admins are using that warrants Major Vote Abuse as it's not shared with us either, and even if we (the rest of Staff) did know-- we couldn't make that public anyways because the last time we did people would purposely Vote Abuse for whatever the original rule stated was Minor/Major in the Terms and Conditions, just to skirt on through and only get slapped for Minor when they knew damn well what they were doing in the first place.

What I do know is that the Admins have been very lenient on what they deem Major/Minor. I don't know the exact number of days/months/years used to determine the difference, so I won't bother throwing out an arbitrary number in case it gets miscommunicated and suddenly "the new Minor/Major definition is X amount of weeks/months/whatever because a GM said so" but I have noticed a difference lately and I've seen more minor vote abuse bans in the Ban Log instead of just Major Vote Abuse.
Not everybody makes a ban appeal, and I would say 1/10th of the time somebody does make one so to the Community you don't really get to see the Minor Vote Abuse bans as much as the Major ones.

It also says explicitly right under the bar to type in your Account Username:

In order to vote abuse effectively enough to achieve the Major Vote Abuse region; you need to know what you're doing.
The margin for accidental vote abusing is very slim, and it's also why we have Major/Minor indications for it.

Even if your English is limited, there are preventatives put in place to catch accidental Vote Abuse to which I commented on it awhile back right here: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/long-term-ban-instead-of-permanent-ban.193316/page-7#post-1141726

I've said it before in other threads including this one and I will say it again, I genuinely empathize with those who somehow accidentally bypass the voting rules. Especially if they share the same household. It's something I'd like to spend time on to see if we can come up with a way to allow leniency for that specific topic case by case, however in the same breath people will abuse whatever they can, and the Admins are already very lenient in terms of distinguishing between Minor and Major Vote Abuse.

It's accidental if you're out at work and can't remember if you voted this morning, and then type in a different account while you're on the go; it's another if you purposely abuse it with the intention to get as many gains as you can from doing it. Anyone can lie and say they didn't know better, and how exactly would anyone be able to tell? It's all trust-based, and we would have to trust the person who broke the rules in the first place to tell us the truth, and that is unfortunately where the distrust comes into play. Everybody deserves second chances, but if you're lying to everyone time and time again, nobody is going to believe it / take it seriously.

Hacking:
I don't know what else I can say on this matter, it's pretty standard and a universal rule across any gaming platform whether it be a private server or a triple A gaming company. Get caught hacking, get banned. It's that simple.

RWT:
Have you ever wondered why the prices of some very expensive items keep going up? Such as perfect weapons, godly scrolled ROAs, Spec Goggles, and 20+ att gear? Here's part of your answer.
The amount of people who want to buy their way into higher ranks and then get caught doing so locks all of those items acquired behind a permanent ban. It's one less perfect item in the game for the rest of us to buy, it's one less cape, shoe, or glove and thus increases the demand and lowers the supply which in return raises the prices of those items because the supply is low, and the demand is high.

Sometimes (very rarely might I add) there have been false bans surrounding RWT. Sometimes a mistake can happen, and that is why the Ban Appeal process is there: to catch those mistakes and revert the wrongful ban.

I've had friends who got nailed for RWT before I joined Staff, and truth be told they would tell us (the friends) one story, but the logs and ban evidence would say otherwise. Everyone wants to believe their friend(s) side of the story, and I have no problems with that because I am the same way too. But when it comes down to the evidence and being able to access what is shared to us from the Admins, it does paint a very different picture from the original story told by the person in question.
People lie, and they do it quite a lot.

I'll now shift my focus on some of the suggestions that were listed in this thread.

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.
It depends on the context of the evidence against the person. And personally speaking this is purely volunteer work, there is so much that needs to happen behind the scenes daily/weekly and to find any free time to allocate towards monitoring players like that would require way more than a handful of active Staff. Doing that would require literal hours of free time every single day on top of other duties you are expected to do as Staff daily/weekly/whenever you can.

RWT is worse out of the three I listed above, but even then Major Vote Abuse and Hacking come in as a very close second. The reason why RWT is the worst out of the three in my opinion is because the amount of perfect weapons and items that get locked behind a permanent ban, all because you wanted to swipe your bank card instead of putting in the time to work for it. So because of that selfish choice, we now have 1 less perfect weapon in the game, 1 less cape, glove, shoe, ring, account, etc. Prices go up when more and more items get locked away especially if that item's class is gaining traction and popularity.

I've read through this entire thread and I would say a lot of the suggestions here are very Admin-heavy in terms of enforcing these suggestions, when we only have 2 of them. You can argue to promote more Staff to Admin, but at the end of the day what will it really accomplish if you get promoted to Admin and need to dedicate quite literally several hours a day into investigating players, and monitoring new accounts made by people who already abused the rules in the first place? Where's the time for your family / friends? Your irl necessities IE: work to pay for your bills and basic human needs?

I think a lot of it is based on trust in the beginning. Staff trusts you to not break any rules, you get caught breaking rules and now they have to have an Admin spend time into investigating and to deem whether or not what you did is worth a temporary vacation or a permanent one instead.

I think this story relates perfectly to what I'm trying to say:
I live in a Province where we have pretty big touristy locations. One of which, are Lighthouses. Some of them even have memorial plaques dedicated to those who didn't listen to the physical signs scattered around the place, and verbal warnings of the locals, and decided to venture out too far only to get swept away from the ocean waves never to be seen again.

There are many signs in parking lots, on tourist gift shops, warning people of the danger of standing around the black rocks (they are grey naturally, but because of the ocean waves hitting them they turn black because they are wet) and memorials dedicated to those who lost their lives from getting swept away. They are now discussing putting up a giant chain-link fence disrupting the natural view, and probably won't be much of a deterrent because people will most likely climb over them anyways and still go back to stand on those damn rocks.

It's a huge risk for emergency crews to get to them too, and most recently there was a death a few weeks ago. Two brothers ventured out at night and both got swept away. One of them didn't make it because of how long it took the rescuers to reach them. There's a current right below and within seconds you're pulled from the rocks and you're stranded out about 50+ feet or so in the freezing cold ocean.

It's a bit of an extreme case in relation to the topic of a 2004 2D mushroom game, but the message is still the same:
we can only give out so many warnings before we have to add in more preventative measures to ensure nothing bad happens / they don't come back. (IE (unfortunately): permanent bans.)

-NX Debt:
It's a very interesting idea and something that I think in theory sounds reasonable to the issue at hand; however, they don't have to pay back the debt at all. Just like in real-life.
They can also just go make more accounts and continue to vote abuse until we catch them again and dump all of that NX into APRs, or Gachapon, and then what? It just feels like it's easily bypass-able and not really worth the time to implement a debt system on the Dev side especially when there are other things that need addressing first which are currently preoccupying our allocated Dev work at the moment.

-Jury Duty:
While this sounds good in theory, I'm afraid I'd also have bring up the inevitable issues that could arise with this idea.

-More duties on top of Staff than there currently is: Please keep in mind that being on Staff is like working in retail or fast food; except you don't get paid.
Piling more work onto us in terms of having us take the time to go over the report however many times we have to so that way players (and new people joining in) will more than likely just increase burnouts, and pressure on us than there already is. It's easier to just put it in Staff discussion since everybody on Staff knows what it's like to be a part of it and are looking out for extra details that could've been missed, etc. Instead of risking more burnouts, pressure, and the possibility of us not having many people to rely on to carry on with mandatory, daily Staff issues such as banning hackers, collecting evidence / aiding in Report Abuse, testing upcoming content, etc.

-Carefully select people: We've selected Interns in the past and down the road after getting promoted a couple of them GM abused. Not every GM is corrupt, but unfortunately that has been a big issue in the past. Even if we properly look through everything about the players who signed up for this there's no way to know their true motive. They could lie and say they don't know the offender, or say whatever to guarantee them a spot on the voting committee to protect the person in question.

-Chance of leaks: This is a pretty big one. We already trust those on Staff currently to not leak anything, adding more random players into the mix and allowing them to view the material in an uncontrolled manner will just create a larger leak risk.
I haven't been selected for Jury Duty before, so I am assuming there are no phones, cameras, or internet access allowed for Jury Duty, and it's in a controlled environment: in-person, and inside a designated meeting room, no?
If that is correct then there are precautions that need to be taken to reduce leaks, whereas if we select someone online they can do whatever they want because chances are they're accessing it on an unmonitored device and I would assume paying for people's flights to come meet up in an undisclosed corner of the world for an in-person Jury Duty over a ban appeal sounds not only expensive, but time-wasting and just plain ridiculous to me given as to how many ban appeals get made weekly.

-Unbiased reviews are difficult to manage in general: You can have the upmost respect for somebody, and be known to give pretty solid unbiased reviews of certain cases, but given access to the evidence of the actions the person in question committed, a fairly common thought that is undoubtedly familiar with mostly every circumstance where this applies to are: "they wouldn't commit that action," "it's not like them to do that," "there's no way this is true," etc.
It's easier to maintain unbiased views if you don't know the people in question. I've had to ask other Staff to handle Report Abuse posts because it dealt with people I knew, and I'm not the only one, quite a lot of us will ask for another Staff to assist/do the deed because they know the person in question and don't want it to look poorly if taken out of context, or overlook a very serious issue accidentally because they are a friend.

I won't put too much focus on this topic as some of these examples were highlighted by others, but I would like to add that I think Royals is too small of a sample size to select a fair, unbiased group of people who have no ties to the people in question compared to a Country / State / Province that has quite literally over a million people or more to choose from compared to our small pool of ~1500 people or so.

-Scammers:
I think this kind of approach would be do-able, requesting an Admin to retrieve the mesos the scammer took if they refuse to give it back / logout and hide. The amount of evidence Staff needs to land a successful scammer punishment does seem like a bit too much; but it's also understandable because in order to have a good chance at getting the scammer successfully reported, you have to submit evidence of the agreed arrangement before the scamming took place. (IE: chat log of you sending them mesos in the trade window, their Smega S> leech and you PMing them, etc.) which is what I find is mostly missing when it comes to reporting scammers. I can see this kind of evidence would be required to request the retrieval of your mesos from said scammer. Unfortunately that also lies under the Admins which are currently overburdened as it is, but nonetheless a pretty well-rounded suggestion.

-Racism/offensive communications:
Blocking their communications is a very good idea. I was pretty young when GMS came out so I don't recall if there was a way to "mute" players from typing to other players so to speak, but I think having an additional avenue where Staff could type in the IGN and offence committed, provide evidence, and then have other Staff review it just to make sure it's correct/in line, and then click the mute button for however many days, weeks, months, etc. would be a viable solution in terms of Racism and offensive/abusive chat to minimize any other interactions as well as preventing opportunities for said person in question to continue acting like that.

Thanks for reading if you've made it this far, my apologizes for the giant wall of text; this is something I'd been sitting on for a while both mentally and in terms of writing it out.

TLDR:
-I don't speak for the entirety of Staff.
-Vote Abuse is a very grey area in terms of permanent ban vs temporary ban.
-Hacking = nope.
-RWT is one of the main reasons why upgrading gear is expensive.
-Context is needed for most of these suggestions.
-Most people don't pay off their debts in real life so I can't imagine wanting to pay off an in-game debt as well.
-Weighing out the options between spending Dev time to work on something that can be easily bypassed.
-Quite a few issues with Jury Duty with a gaming population of ~1500 people or less.

 

I didn't bother diving into the topic of RWT and the extensive damage it does, which is why I explicitly said "one of the reasons" in regards to RWT since this is originally a post about permanent bans and if they should receive a second chance or not. I didn't think I would have to write out every single reason and summed it up with a simple "one of the reasons" instead.

1) I've answered what I could, specifically in here and brought up how important it is for us to receive these Mod Panel tools to help out with the elephant in the room. A few other Staff had also joined in on this discussion as well, so I highly suggest reading through this thread to look for your answers.
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/giv...-get-more-admin-gm-staff.199259/#post-1177290
https://royals.ms/forum/threads/giv...-get-more-admin-gm-staff.199259/#post-1177374

2) Why should I give my input on account sharing if I explicitly stated I don't speak for all of Staff? I only answered what the original thread was about as well as suggestions mentioned by other users so I don't see a reason to bring up my view on account sharing. (Which is also why I didn't bother doing that.)