Currently, what is the actual reason for applying materialistic sanctions in the case of a player overstepping server rules?
This is a thing I have found myself thinking about very often, because such sort of sanctions are definitely effective: you lose time spent online.
However, these sanctions seem like a very....well, it is hard to explain. For example, a player, a pirate, is pirating an ore hauler. He F1ns. What is the chance that YOU would waste your time to report him....if you DID kill him and take his ore. Of course not, you are glad for it. You got his money. But what if he sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiides away? Then you can, quote, take revenge via sanction. You can report the player and the admins will take away his profits, his guns and perhaps even ban him.
This is the dilemma we face right now: the rulebreaker is not educated unless it is profitable for the reporter.
This is what I really do not like about the current sanctions. They are very selective: The players reporting other players are doing so not out of principal, but do only if there is any gain to be had.
How many of you would bother reporting a swearing or oorping starflyer? Not many, it is only a starflyer. But what if it was a Cap8 Battleship? Oh man, I am sure there would be a few threads for that.
In other words, the current punishment method spawns selectivity when it comes to reporting players and people usually do it out of profitable reasons. So what can we do about it?
Remove cash/cargo/equipment fines and resort to bastilling the person's ship for an x amount of time instead. That way you not only make the player actually seek help on the forums, but also it serves the same purpose. But instead of removing profit he HAD gained over the course of time, you prevent him from using that character for the game.
Of course, this soltuion is still flawed, because I am sure that any unlawful would still report every enemy cap just to have one less problem to worry about. So how do we make sure that players are reported because they break the rules, not because they have made someone mad when they did?
The reason for sanctions is not to punish the player, but to educate them. More warnings, less sanctions. But that would require more reports to process, and such, more admins.
If I had a million for every time I heard someone saying: ''Dude, I should totally wait till he buys a new ship and then report him'', I would give up on mining.
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