What else would we do? We can't just instaban people.

 

I've thought of this our system a lot like this. Even bans are meaningless unless they are because of scams (because you'll have to pay them back). If you were to look through the complaints now about half of them are because someone broke a rule that really isn't that hard to follow. What can we do though? Banning them wouldn't work because we'd be losing players (or they just make an effortless appeal and come back on). It's hard to actually give effective punishments on a minecraft server without hurting the server. One idea I have is repeat offenders getting fined based on their rank/s when they do something worthy of a warning.

 

That is a logical fallacy and you know it kuke

 

I think it's fine as is

 

Best answer: fines
Negative balances
Forfeiture of property, goods
Second possibility: Silencing them for a certain period of time from the offending channel.
Third: short term removal of supporter features

Our system of punishment is a complete joke, just ask the myriad of repeat offenders when they make light of the rules they broke

 

Servers that don't have punishments being laughed at are the ones who lose users left and right, and often do not have long-time, serious players. If we make our punishments "stricter" or "scarier," we will simply lose users and/or start looking like one of the "bad servers" that is power hungry, gets enjoyment from punishing others, losing members, etc.

Although I partially agree that our punishments don't seem "scary" or "harsh" enough sometimes, it would be very hard to "fix" anything without a lot and/or large issues.

Smallest step I would personally take is minimum of day-long bans, if not three-day bans for most (but not all) things... I know that is enough to "lose" a user, but I think we've seen time and time again now that a few days can straighten up the average user and make an impact, without losing them. I've seen many users get banned and unbanned within a couple of hours or within the same day (i.e ~14 hours), and they rarely learn anything.

Things like negative balance are interesting, but I don't think they would work for most punishments/rules broken. Maybe far, far more major ones (not as major as the ones where Andrew clears and wipes entire accounts, of course), but nothing less than that. Problem is, however, that only Andrew can do those things, and he is busy enough as it is. It would be a lot of power to trust to any Staff, and even I wouldn't want it if I was a rank high enough for it.

 

Andrew said for the longest time that he would never do an automatic payment system for donations/supporters.
But yet now we have it.
I strongly urge reconsideration of giving at least server admin the ability to fine account balances. I know that negative balances are a programming issue, but that's what developers are for right? :-D

 

I agree and disagree, having strict rules may let other users be scared and not willing to join our community but seriously, if people do READ the rules, I'm pretty sure they will try 90%+ to avoid breaking them so they do not get such punishment.

 

I agree with you kuke and understand how much trouble that could be for the server. I do not understand why (say after 3 warnings) these users can't be kicked. Then after 3 kicks give them a 15 minute or so ban. I would think this would slow down some of the constant "rule skaters" as I like to think of them.
Is it not true that these users do this to get attention? If they are kicked and even short term banned maybe they could learn to settle down a little.
As a side note but I feel related - does the forum warning system not work correctly? Over and over again the same users seem to comment even when warned several times. It usually starts out as "I know I shouldn't comment here... but...
I believe it is a situation where several different mods have been involved so it could be that the warning system just does not function as thought.
With all that being said (sorry for my rant) I believe that our staff does the finest job around and the very best they can! Look at the amount of bans/complaints and realize that it would be overwhelming on some days to even think about dealing with that workload.
Maybe we could all help out by having a ban/complaint free day each week (it could be a rotating day) in order to give our wonderful staff a little break to do more important things like process applications, evaluate and sign contracts, and process our lwc removal requests which I think we can all appreciate and agree are much more important.
Hey, we might even give our staff some time to actually play and work on their projects instead of ours. Remember, every single staff member volunteers their time to help all of us have a great place to play minecraft but they are players also and would like to have fun as well.
Wishing everyone Success!

 

Before I go into why our current system should stay, I'm going to say why the other systems proposed should not be implemented.

Fines/Property Loss - Firstly, this would take way too much time. Like Moofink said, if we were going to fine players it would have to be severely limited to high tier offenses, right below PermaBans. It would simply be too much of a drain on Andrew (and possibly Revan's) time. In addition, what are the highest offenses usually? Why, scamming usually. Donation scamming, loan scamming, or what have you, the longest bans will usually be for large scamming cases. But what do these players have to do when they return to the server? They have to pay other players back the money the scammed, meaning they're in serious debt already. So now add a negative balance to this, how the heck do you expect them to pay back their debts in addition to their negative balance? By being required to pay back the scammed players, they practically have a negative balance anyway, so this would be illogical, and most likely make the returning player give up on trying to pay off his debts.

Muting - Possibly one of the most frustrating punishments for a chat based game. When I played (and I admit to having done so) on other servers, muting systems were often a big part of their warning system. What causes players to be muted? Spamming or cursing usually, so let's say after 3 warnings for chat spam/vulgar language, a player gets a 5 minute chat mute. Does he learn anything while he can't chat for 5 minutes? Possibly, but likely he won't, I sure didn't when I was muted. Now, take our current system. After 3 warnings, the player is kicked. Now, if you were forcibly kicked out of a server, that sends you a clear message; knock it off, or worse will come. That is enough to stop most spammers/language, muting would not work nearly as effectively. In addition, you're cut off from chatting with other players for a period of time when you're muted. What kind of image does this portray to new players? They have now been cut off from chatting, and instead of waiting out their punishment, they may just flat out quit. If even 25% of new Builders that are muted quit, it would still have a dramatic long-term impact on the playerbase.

Removal of Supporter Features - Again, this would have to be reserved for some of the highest forms of punishment. And, again, only Andrew could do this, as he's the only one who handles donations. Andrew's a busy man, if he had to set a temporary amount of time supporter features were removed every time a player scammed, used vulgar language, etc., how would that work? It simply wouldn't, Andrew does not have that much time in the day. So now it's just with the highest offenses, which is most likely scamming. Just like negative balances, it will now take the offender much longer to pay off his debts because he no longer has donation features to help him, which may cause him to give up completely. Also, how would this be fair for players who didn't have any donation features? How would we punish them differently? I know, for example, you Dork are very irked with the "unfair" treatment staff gives you. Not to single you out, but you complain that you are warned while other players aren't, which is quite a common complaint. So now your donation features are removed for 24 hours after you are unbanned. But, a player who was banned with no donation features is unbanned for the same offense you committed, however, since he has no donation features, they can't be temporarily removed. So how would this affect his punishment? A higher negative balance? Lol... no.

Why our System should stay - Our current system works well. While there are players who feel the Staff are spineless, and their warnings mean nothing, most do not. In-game, if a player breaks a rule, there's a system in place on how to deal with them. It's been effective for the past 3 years, and still is now. Trying to dramatically change it will not help whatever problems you see.

How our System can be improved - I didn't say it was perfect; there's some things Staff could do better of course. If there was something to work on, it should punishments for repeat offenders. A player will have cursed yesterday to the point where he will get a kick, then today he will do the same until he gets a kick and stops, then tomorrow the process will repeat. They obviously aren't learning their lesson, so harsher punishment should ensue, however it does not. This is a big problem, IMO. These repeat offenders are spreading the feeling that our current punishment system is ineffective. I believe that Staff should focus more on cracking down on these repeat offenders, but no new system is needed for this. They should be mindful of these people and increase their punishment accordingly. On top of this, a possible increase to tempbans, making them longer than just a few hours, could be helpful.

 

You realize warnings are often given to small offenders, right? We can't just start fining every single person instead of warning them. Not everyone is a repeat offender.
I would agree with giving repeat offenders fines. I'm okay with that. But that's only for repeat offenders (or first time big offender), not the small first time offenders we see often.
The warnings are there to warn the user, pointing out that punishment may follow if he decides to continue.
A warning isn't intended as a punishment, nor will it ever be a punishment.

Negative balances are a possibility, so the ability to fine users can be done.We can't give every staffmember this ability. But 1 person isn't enough, the workload would be too much. So we give this ability to GAs. We would have GAs tagged in a lot of complaints, doing a lot of fines. But this won't stop scammers, this won't stop scammers, this won't stop anything. I don't think this will stop the big scammers, fines scare the smalltime scammers away. But the big time scammers will just scam more to make up for the fines.
I do agree that it would stop other repeat offenders from repeating their crimes, though. Just not scammers. (Which is the main problem nowadays)

 

Hey Harryhaz1

First off thanks for making this thread, as I see this to be an issue as well. Now let me tell you what I think of this matter.

Coming from a guy who's auctions usually turn out in this way, I agree that we need to fix the system. I agree with kukelekuuk00 that we can't just go around insta- banning players because not everyone is a repeat offender. On another note I also agree with dork1877 when he says that even the bans mean nothing to anyone. As this conversation grows, I want to note that this problem is not the only problem, and certainly not the most important on the to-do list that Andrew has, and that is why it hasn't been solved/dealt with.

I think there should be a "fine" system, but not in the way some people are seeing it. Giving someone a "fine" is still less of a punishment as making them pay the money for the item. Although we also can't force people as MoofinK said because then we lose even more players because we seem "power hungry."

I think that the current system does enough to the major/repeat offenders, and nudges the first offenders away form becoming repeat. I would like to see some more ideas on this topic, and always enjoy posts on how we can improve ECC as a whole. Remember that Andrew and the staff will only do what benefits the server, so if a change like this will hurt ECC, then it won't happen.

Thanks!

 

By the way Falconaire your post was a lovely read, and I agree with everything you touch on :) +1

 

Not true.

Evidence: The abundance of repeat offenders.

 

chocolatecheese1 I never said that they don't become repeat offenders, I just said that the current system gives them a small boost away. Many of them are too ignorant and self centered to see we are trying to help them, and those are the ones that like to go and cause trouble.

 

What I think is wrong is that warnings from "X" day are not transferred over to "Y" day.
So say I curse 3 times and get 3 warnings, then I stop.
I know that I can do it again the next day.

I have two things that could change this:
Either make warnings more serious and temp-bans more common or less serious.

Or

Make it so that warnings carry over from day to day and are removed or reloaded every few days. I mean a bad word every two day or so never hurt anyone but I feel that if they just use their three/four warnings up every day to cuss someone out then the system isn't doing it's job as harry stated.

If they get (within the 3-5 days) the amount of warnings allotted in the time period then they get a tempban for 24 hours or so, or until the warning period is reset. This also ties into my first idea of making temp-bans less time, less serious, and more common. That way people would get removed from the server more which I feel calms me down the most is when I'm physically removed from the server.

I'm going to be honest, when I get a warning It doesn't hinder my behavior. Especially something as little (IMO) and repetitive as a user slandering me and myself slandering him/her. Or cursing.

 

First of all, no one ever has suggested permabanning first time/low level offenders. Using that as straw man target is disingenuous and counter productive. Add to the discussion, don't try to derail it with false analogies. kk thanx bai

Not so surprisingly, I categorically disagree with pretty much everything Flacon said.

"Fines/Property Loss - Firstly, this would take way too much time." Do you want the problem fixed or not? No one has time for anything new ever.

So now add a negative balance to this, how the heck do you expect them to pay back their debts in addition to their negative balance? If you dont like it, dont break the rules. I have zero compassion for people that break the rules more than once.

Muting - Possibly one of the most frustrating punishments for a chat based game.
ummm exactly. If you are constantly trolling/spamming/chatting in auc you should get muted in that channel. Not a short term kick, but a long term mute.

Removal of Supporter Features - Again, this would have to be reserved for some of the highest forms of punishment.
ummm ok done
Just like negative balances, it will now take the offender much longer to pay off his debts because he no longer has donation features to help him.
I have one thing to say. Do you know what this is?

Its the worlds smallest violin playing "Just For the Spammers"

So how would this affect his punishment? A higher negative balance? Lol... no
Actually Lol YES

Our current system works well.
If it did, we wouldnt even be having this discussion... now would we?

Trying to dramatically change it will not help whatever problems you see.
How the EFF do you know that? Do you have an effing time machine?

How our System can be improved
Finally, you start talking some sense

 

Damn boi went off.

 

LOL