I was hoping to reach out to the community and bring attention to what I personally feel is a gross overreach in privacy regarding the Voting Whitelist application process. I completely understand that the economy of the server is a very strong foundation for gameplay, and gachapon can be abused in order to hurt player experience, however, the current system requires players to provide photographs of themselves (and household members) holding up signs with their government names, character names, and date. But the catch that's the huge overreach? - the instructions explicitly tell you not to cover your faces. In practice, this makes no difference between a uploading a photo of the lower 3/4 of your body holding up a note, and is simply an overreach to essentially self-dox. At the end of the day, GMs are just volunteers doing moderatoration for free and are in no way legally obligated to keep this information safe - and i'm not sure why we are to trust people with our faces. My questions are: Are there any alternatives like video calls with admins - where you're able to show both household members and shared details of your accounts? - that seems like a FAR more secure and straight forward method. Why is this necessary to leave one's face uncovered? Why is it acceptable to request players to dox themselves just to be able to vote fairly from a shared household - I COMPLETELY understand some people are to abuse this system, but moderation can be implemented without the incredible overreach. I strongly think this policy is outdated and would really appreciate if it was revamped 11 years later. I feel that it discourages honest players from participating, forces unnecessary exposure, and opens the door to doxing. If you agree or have your own concerns, please speak up. I know not everybody is a multi-player household, but I feel that this needs to change. There is no way in hell my wife for instance will be posting her selfie holding her government name and maplestory character names on this forum sadly.
so dont do it. you are not obligated to enter the whitelist if you don't agree with it, there are other ways to vote together - just take turns o.o 1st day u vote, 2nd day she/he votes, 3rd day you vote and so on. it's needed to leave the face uncovered for identification purposes, it's pretty clear. I don't need the whitelist cause i'm the only one playing in my own home, but if i were to need to whitelist, i'd probably submit my request as well. Another note is that because this is sensitive information, only some people are allowed to handle the vote whitelist, and not the entire staff. I think you missunderstand - this is not public. this is not some info everyone can access, only a very small amount of people within staff can see it.
Just don’t do it? That’s not a solution at all. My wife and I are both players. We both vote, we both contribute to the server's population actively and would like to purchase RX - both supporting the server. We shouldn’t be punished/forced into doxxing ourselves just because we share the same household. Again, i'm not against verification one bit. We’re both absolutely willing to do something reasonable - that'd be a brief Discord video call with an admin to confirm we’re separate people, and share screen showing them we're both playing the server - there's really no way to fake that, and it's much more effective than a photo. But uploading our faces to a forum - even if it’s according to you only visible to certain staff - is not very reasonable for being in year 2025. None of us know who those staff members are or how securely that data is handled - I have a much larger community which I will not disclose due to "advertising" and have worked on many large game projects, and not once have I come across a situation like this. And also - "Just take turns voting” is not an answer - because again, we are asked to choose between our privacy and our ability to play the game fairly like all other players are allowed to. Again, I hope somehow 11 years later somebody thinks of an alternative way to go about this.
no one is punishing you lol the rules states that you can vote only once in total per household. the staff gives you an option - you as for you and your wife - to vote together for a short procedure. so lets go with your idea - short video call to prove that you are both playing different accounts and all that. lets say there are 30 people atm applying for the whitelist, you do realize that the staff needs to find a suitable time for both themselves AND the players to perform the said video call? this might delay every single submission by a shitload of time, and also - why would the staff be obligated to video verify every single player that wants to submit themselves into the whitelist? they can handle batches of submissions instead of having to waste their time, and players time, trying to co-ordinate a video call. you're talkin like staff is keeping all of your information in their personal excel file, waiting to maliciously use it against you whenever they want. you don't have to submit yourself in the whitelist if you are so scared of being doxxed, there's a reason why not every staff member have access to the whitelist area, and only select members can - maximize your privacy and also make sure there is enough personnel to handle the submissions. is it clearer now?
Brushing off a privacy concern like this is pretty silly. Not everyone feels like exposing their real identities online, even to a small amount of people, and no amount of "nuh uh they won't do anything" doesn't change that. My younger brothers live in the same house together and had the exact same concerns years ago when they went through the whitelist application and were told to share pics of themselves. They didn't do it. They found a very easy workaround instead. I'm not going to tell you how, though. But they wouldn't have bothered to come up with another method if the whitelist requirements weren't so ridiculous.
If you have a suggestions that would take staff an equal or lower amount of time, and is at least equally robust I am pretty sure they would welcome that with open arms. Have a look at the ban appeals section otherwise, they really do need to have a very accurate method because a lot of people will claim 'their brother' is also voting. I agree that there could be some privacy concerns but as a server with only 2 (I think just Tim and Matt?) admins doing the whitelist along with many other things, this is what they decided. Voting every other day, while not ideal still gives you plenty of nx in the long run to get everything you need but yes, you do make a little bit less mesos compared to others.
