Player Banned: Mort

[Chxlls]

Requesting evidence as 1IC of FdM} as Mort has been an outstanding member.

[Petitioner]

To be entirely honest, nobody should post here in the first place except Mort and factions he's a member of.

Correct. This thread is not for discussion by those uninvolved in the sanction, and all posts to that effect have been moved to the staff feedback thread. Further posts by anyone not involved will be treated less kindly; there is an appropriate thread for such discussions, this is not it.

Though at this point, I think you can just post it publicly here as Jeuge suggests over in staff feedback.

Applicable evidence has been sent to all requesters. If @Mort wishes to post it publicly, he is permitted to do so, but it is against policy for the team to publicly post evidence without the sanctionee's consent (highly exceptional cases notwithstanding).

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Recruitment | Task Force Prometheus | ICN FIRESTORM

[Haste]

Mort was not sanctioned for the use of setmessages.

While I do personally believe that it is a problem when players don't participate, at all, in the roleplay environment except by tossing some pre-written engagement notice setmessages into local chat to technically abide by the server rules, that is not what this sanction is about. It is a separate discussion that rears its head every couple years, and the community (and staff team) have yet to find a genuinely good solution to this problem. The official Discovery server is a roleplay server, and most people in our community can probably see that it is among the reasons the server has stood the test of time -- unlike most of the Freelancer servers still around.

And that is where this sanction comes in. In order to have a functioning, healthy roleplaying environment, minimum standards have to be enforced. Among those enforced standards is this section of rule 1.1:

Communication in-game and in the roleplaying areas of the forums must be in-character and appropriate for Discovery Freelancer's setting.

Messages like "on the radar contact" are not in character. They are references to other players' (limited) English skills. Mort knows this. Almost everyone who's posted in this thread knows this. There was a point in time at which I personally got a chuckle out of these references, and I think there is a time and place for players to be a little bit silly and post some well-disguised (meta-)references to things outside of the game. But that time is not "all the time", and "well-disguised" is not the eighty-seventh literal copy-paste of the same message.

This reminds me of what I posted recently, so I'll just drop the quote here:

Once upon a time, I was a bit of a toxic asshole. Even more so than I am today -- if you can imagine. I would go around flying ships with shitpost names, write in all lowercase with broken grammar and spelling, and try to bait people (worse than myself) into fighting me so I could then wipe the floor with them. I found this really quite funny, and barely played the game "as intended" anymore -- actually participating in the roleplay environment. At the time, I had little respect for the staff team. I thought they were corrupt, or idiots. Probably corrupt idiots, actually.

However, one day an administrator PMed me, and told me that I kept popping up in staff discussions and violation reports, and that eventually I was going to have to face the consequences of my actions. There wasn't a warning, a big credit fine, no ships were deleted and I wasn't banned. I was just PMed on good old Skype by an administrator, and he and I had a chat. I took his words to heart -- even though I also thought he was just about the only competent person on the administrative staff team at the time -- and learned to behave just a little bit better. I think had I been sanctioned instead, all it would've done is reinforce my feelings about the inadequacy of the staff team, and my behaviour wouldn't have improved at all.

Now, a perfectly valid question to ask in response to the above quote is, of course, to ask why Mort wasn't warned, just like I was. To be quite honest, I don't have a good answer to that right now. Staff decisions are made by vote, and I was one of the people who voted for a month ban. I will say that nobody who voted on this sanction voted for a lesser punishment. I do know that I was worried a warning alone wouldn't get the message across, and that Mort would just laugh it off and continue playing the same way -- simply delaying this same ban (or a more severe one) until the next violation report(s) came in.

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Now, I'm going to quote HonourWolf to address other community concerns:

[snip]

Admins are citing low RP interactions yet don't go after the Zoner Whales that fly through house space, drop cargo to ram into them, or give dogshit one word replies to avoid interaction at all cause.

Do people who dock at the first sign of trouble exhibit low-quality interactions as well?

Those interactions are equally problematic. Nobody on the staff team is saying they're acceptable. Roleplay standards have been dropping for many years and have reached a point where a lot of people have started questioning whether the "RP" in the server name still belongs there. If we want to fix that and reverse the trend, a single ban is obviously not going to do the trick.

But we can only act on rule violations we're made aware of. If there's no report, there's likely not going to be a sanction either, unless a staff member was around to witness it happening. In addition, "(nearly) silent powertraders" are often -- but not always -- relatively new players. Newer players are often thrown a bone, and rather than big public sanctions we'll try and warn them in private if possible (though we often have to resort to putting their ship in Bastille to get their attention).

[Emperor Tekagi]

So after reviewing the evidence - if you even want to call two instances without any given context except for them containing "on the radar contact" memes with 3 months in-between that - I wonder why this wasn't just made into a warning or like 3-5 days ban for all it matters.

A month seems very severe for one of your /1/2/3s being a mild shitpost reference and the two instances provided as evidence feel like very thin justification for this. Did he do this more often? I mean yeah, I saw him do it myself whilst he was on a LSS ship. Funnily enough, I never witnessed him doing it on any of the factions ships which requested evidence here. So he knows better and should have been given a slap on the wrist.. but a month? Not gonna lie, that is silly and feels like staff either withholds evidence provided to them or just decided this on hearsay about further instances of Mort dropping this low-tier meme post which nobody bothered to report.

Edit: Which means: If staff wanted to proactively ban him using their own experience and observations, tell us so and make that transparent. But that also means people will want you to act more proactively in general, not selectively so I understand if that's something you hesitate with. Right now, we have to assume you just used two instances with a long time inbetween to justify this, which feels weird.

[Gallic Navy]

Hello, we have reviewed the evidence, and as a faction, want to formally request a review of this sanction and overturning it into a warning maximum for our vital member, based on the (lack of) evidence of nefarious intent, and lack of any warnings prior that you had plenty of time to issue.

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[9th.Legion]

As 1ic of the Eclipse Vanguard and Mort being a awesome and very positive member of EV, i would like to see the evidence.

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[Petitioner]

As 1ic of the Eclipse Vanguard and Mort being a awesome and very positive member of EV, i would like to see the evidence.

Evidence sent.

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Recruitment | Task Force Prometheus | ICN FIRESTORM

[TheDoctorXI]

On receipt of the "evidence", I'm formally requesting a review by the Staff with a view to overturning the ban. This is a slap on the wrist at best, or a warning at worst.

The earliest supplied logs suggest the reporter had since January to report it, then left a three month gap before providing anything else. This is nothing, if not malicious and unfounded and without precedence.

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Information ≛ Recruitment ≛ After Action Reports ≛ Feedback

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"Honour. Courage. Commitment."
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TheDoctorXI
Discord: thedoctorxi
Liberty Navy 46th Fleet

[Knusperflakes]

As 1IC of DTR where Mort is also a member, I would like to request to see the evidence too.

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[L1ght]

I have received this evidence from my fellow friends as Mort is an Aegis member.





It is very concerning that there were staff members who voted YES on a one month ban on this, it is even more concerning that no one with half a brain cell stepped in to say "Hello maybe we are being a bit unfair because we don't like him because he's russian/talked bad about me/ stole my cargo/ shit in my pants / etc... ". In what world is this even warning worthy let alone a full month ban??? I mean a lot of us know the current staff team is incompetent but this is just next level. In a world where you have countless pages criticising staff duality and biases, where you have certain OF members shooting their own faction for shits and giggles without "rp" and get pmed by an Admin to apologize just to avoid a sanction , where a Birdie and his like have existed for DECADES, you now of all people pick to ban Mort because you feel like it. If y'all had any common sense you'd revert the ban, invis all the relating posts and pretend this never happened to save face.

Standards seems to have went through the ground and through the cellar since I was a staff member, next thing you know there's going to be bans flying about for criticising staff. There's 0 grounds for this ban to stand, majority of the player base does what Mort did.

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