Rule 1.0

[Petitioner]

The three posts above this, I am essentially in agreement with. I can't really elaborate more on the things that Wulverine posted, but for thoroughness's sake, I feel obliged to list my concerns with the recent staff decision approximately in order of concern.


The way that the sanction was handled. Nevermind the fact that the whole thing was entirely in violation of all previous ruling and precedent (1.0, as Garrett explained, and the statement coinciding with the release of the new ruleset stating that everyone in the community possessed a clean slate from there on out), the posting of it in the announcements section rather than in the sanctions section seems extremely sanctimonious. It's almost as if the admin team expected that people would find this decision to be shaky at best and decided to try and make it into a bigger issue than it really was -- something "more important than the rules and mundane affairs" -- to try and justify the suddenness, the procedural irregularity, and the heavy-handedness. Unfortunately, all it's done is made me (and some others who can voice their own opinions if they agree with me) even more concerned.


The people who were banned. Karst and Impy have been incredibly productive members of the community their entire time here. Karst in particular has always been friendly, helpful, upbeat (hell, anyone who's been with him on Teamspeak for more than five minutes has heard him dancing in his chair and whistling about how awesome ALG is just because he's so goddamn happy to be here), insightful, and knowledgeable members of the community, and I personally find his banning so soon after spearheading an effort to fix the mining system (which, by the way, is still terribly broken) which everyone and anyone who was remotely knowledgeable about how mining actually worked or ever participated in mining for profit agreed was entirely needed, and in the process calling into question the competencies of the people currently assigned to that position, to be rather eyebrow-raising at best.

Impy as well has actively sought out exploits and loopholes, not to take advantage of them, but to make the team aware of them so as to prevent anyone else from ruining the fun of others by using them. Impy tries to stop problems before they even start. He has never been banned from either the gameserver or the forums for even a day, is a courteous pirate who avoids causing issues for people ingame, and is generally kind of a stand-up guy, even if he does sometimes have a stand-offish attitude.

Mephistoles, while not someone I personally get along with, has never gone out of his way to ruin anyone else's fun nor to actively cause issues for people. He does his thing and lets others do theirs, and his laconic style of posting on the forums is, by his own admission, more for comedic value than for any other reason. Snoopy, going by what comments admins posted in that thread, was essentially banned for being a bitter vet, and not even a particular harmful or obnoxious one. I have yet to see a single post by him that I think is rather troublesome. I can't really speak for Swifty or Lythrilux, so I won't, but I will say that I can kind of understand banning Lyth solely because of how often he's gotten in trouble recently, for his pompous attitude, and his refusal to consider his own wrong-doing; but that still does not warrant the gross procedural violations here.


The lack of concern for the factions affected. Simply saying "come to us if you need help dealing with your most important member being out of the picture without an hour's warning" is unequivocally not sufficient in a situation like this. I admit I don't know how the team could have better handled this particular aspect of the whole decision, but I am terrified for the future of ALG, BHG, and JM in response to this (though I think there's enough cool heads in Core to think up some solution, and I wish them all the best in this regard).

Saying "one solution creates another problem" isn't necessarily a good argument to avoid doing things that need to be done like banning toxic community members, because sometimes you just have to rip off the band-aid, but even if all the folks who were excised from public participation here (and you're kidding yourself if you think nobody plays or even leads factions despite being banned) did deserve their bans, was it really, on balance, the best thing for the community? Would Karst not ever touching anything Discovery-related again really be beneficial for the community? Because when you permaban someone, you're saying "there is nothing you could do to contribute to the community further than you might have in the past, and you are so detrimental that we refuse to attempt to further guide you to behave more constructively". Was that really what you wanted to say to all of the people involved?


In short, I think the staff seriously needs to re-examine this decision, to put it mildly.