Posts: 2,122
Threads: 244
Joined: Oct 2007
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Since so many people seem to be operating with misconceptions about rule violation reports, here are a few facts :
1. They aren't so common. 3 were posted today, 5 Sunday, 9 Saturday, 2 Friday, 6 Thursday, and 3 Wednesday. Weekdays average 3 to 5, and weekends a handful more. Out of several hundred players on the server during those time periods, that is a remarkably small number of reports. Each report takes between 10 and 20 minutes to research and post on, depending on how complicated it is.
2. We take no action at all, or issue private warnings on average for about half of the reports. The reasons range from insufficient evidence (some accusations are extremely difficult to prove at all) to giving the accused the benefit of the doubt due to extenuating circumstances. Those warnings are private, so of course the rest of you aren't aware of them. One problem is that often it is not apparent who owns the character, so a public sanction thread is the only way to find out.
3. We take into account whether or not the offender has been sanctioned before, and the attitude displayed in the evidence. For example : drop an f-word, and you get one ban length, apply the f-word to someone personally and the ban increases. Another example : having illegal guns is less of a problem than rampaging around shooting people with illegal guns, and the sanctions reflect this.
4. Since the use of Bastille was criticized : Bastille is a way to get someone to respond without actually doing harm to their character. They aren't prohibited from playing on other characters, and they lose nothing, yet. It gets their attention, usually after they have ignored us already.
5. Credit fines are imposed because experience has demonstrated over and over again that players ignore simply losing their guns and just replace them with the same ones that were taken away. The same goes for rep fixes. In the case of my sanctions, credit fines are proportional to the treasury of the player. Loss of 1 million means entirely different things depending on whether you have a treasury of 2 million or 100 million. The point is to make the violation of the rule more costly than fun. When you look at how many people don't even acknowledge the fine and go ahead and violate the rule again, just imagine if there was no fine at all.
6. Admins discuss sanctions. We do it on skype calls, or in the Admin chat, or in the violation report itself. Unless it is an irrefutable issue like cursing, complex sanctions for complex rule violations rarely are made before at least 2 Admins agree on it first.
7. And one note about the official server rules thread : that is Igiss' domain, not the Admins'. He has retained control over what is stated there, so Admin Notices are our only venue until he updates his thread to reflect Admin decisions, most of which he participates in when it comes to server rules.
What do I dislike about Discovery? There's no reason to be specific. I dislike the same things here that can be found in every schoolyard playground on planet Earth. C'est la vie.
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