Discovery Feedback Thread

[Cannon]

I think the key reason a player should be sanctioned is for disruptive behaviour and rule breaking (not just rule breaking). As such,

- I'd like to see less serious sanction/punishments for first time offenders.

- Maybe just warning notifications and a small fine (1-5M) in the ship hold for some types of rule breaking e.g. load-out/id/rep problems.

- A "guide-line list" of punishments so that sanctions are consistent and maybe have this list voted on by the community. It would be difficult to get community consensus but it might be possible. This would be a guide for the admins and very disruptive behaviour should get more serious punishment than indicated by the list.

I think that once an admin is voted in they should stay an admin unless the other admins vote 'em out or they leave. I don't like the idea of constantly re-electing admins. I'm happy with the current admin selection system and don't want to see it become a popularity contest: "make me an admin and I'll give everyone who votes for me 1,999,999,999 credits"

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[Drake]

I tend to vote 'yes' for potential Admins I don't know very well, not because I don't care, but because I for the most part trust Igiss and his choices, and have for the most part been pretty good (a few Admins are a bit too zealous, perhaps, but that's been covered already). I really don't see any way to have a community-elected (or re-elected) Admin team without public polls. But, as I mentioned in the last election thread, each poll should be separate or have an 'I don't know him/Abstain' option for each candidate, so that people aren't forced to vote Yes or No to someone they don't know.

Only other way to do it that I can think of is to just let Igiss and the team elect new Admins with no community input at all. Which we really might as well do, since I don't think any potential Admin has ever not been elected... But those election threads at least give dissenters the chance to voice their opinions and can say 'I told you so!' later on if things don't work out well.

[13CentKiller]

Blackstarr basically brought up what I was trying to say in my first post.

Its as if there is a massive transition on the forum from being a member to becoming an administrator.

BULLDOGNK was a PERFECT example of this:

Tony was a cool headed funny guy to be with and talk to. As soon as the administrative privilege was issued to him, he was all rough and tough, as his first post as an administrator suggested he would be. His attitude went down hill so quickly it wasn't funny. He wasn't fun play with laugh with or someone I would want to communicate with. Instead when I started a conversation in Skype about the modding he would threaten me and go and check my account out on the RP server to see if I was up to no good.

This is exactly what I'm beginning to see surface in the current administrators. The only one that is still fun to talk to and play with is Virus, mind you he is the only one I have really had a chance to talk to apart from Hood and Del. Del used/uses Teamspeak too, and I have noticed that there has been a significant difference in behavior towards members he interacts with, both in TS and out.

Long story short. Letting it all get to your head makes you look power hungry, arrogant and nasty. Something I've seen all to often in other communities.

Over-all your still taking time out of real life and putting into Discovery life.

I hope I didn't come off to harsh. :(

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[Xoria]

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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[BaconSoda]

You know, I think Ima post before reading through this, but I do plan on doing so.

before I begin, let me explain this part here:

Sanctions as well, are starting to be a bit of a problem. I see the precendence was set recently for swearers to be banned for 30 days. Fine, but then I saw a relatively recent sanction by Xoria in which the person was banned for 7 days for dropping the F-bomb..

This sanction was not only because the person dropped the F-Bomb, but because the person spat at me as a person ingame. Regrettably, the entire system of Cambridge decided to do that at the time, and this person just happened to be the one who took it too far and decided to swear at me. If you look at the rest of the sanction, it also reads as follows:

Also, consider this your warning for out of character comments. Next time it will be 10% of your credits for each line of OOC chat.

That is entailing the rest of what he did to me to warrant a sanction.

ANYWAY:

I do think this community is the best community on the internet that I have been a part of. If I could point towards Guild Wars Guru, that community is a bastion of rudeness and haberdashery, of which this community has nothing of the sort. Of course, that is mainly because of the metagaming nature of Guild Wars, and not completely the fault of the community at Guild Wars Guru...

At any rate, I think that the eldest among us could be a little more polite to other members. This includes admins, moderators, factioners, and independents. In other words, everyone could be a tad nicer to each other. Of course, this is only if we want to stop ourselves from becoming like the good folks at Guild Wars Guru.

I also think that a harder stance could be taken against OoRP in system chat and incomprehensible foreign languages (Such as those not found in Freelancer) in system chat. It isn't healthy for a Roleplaying environment, and I do think it should have a harder punishment than swearing for excessive OoRP. Because of the console messages, I do think that there is no excuse for OoRP, unless the person has never seen that console message, which is applicable for people of very low level, but definitely not for people who no longer have a Civilian ID.

Well, that's what I think.

EDIT: I also think a harder stance could be adapted against the use of random symbols and leet-speak in names. It isn't good for Roleplaying as well, mainly because it breaks immersion and is plainly ugly, as well as the stated reason of it messes with the alphabetizing of the server.

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[8:32:45 PM] Dusty Lens: Oh no, let me get that. Hello? Oh it's my grandma. She says to be roleplay.
[12:49:19 AM] Elgatodiablo: You know its nice that you have all that proof and all, Bacon... but I just don't believe you.

[Geisha_Maiko]

Some of the Admins here are nothing more than mere Bullies.
They might started as cool players, but the Power has gone straight to their heads.
Instead of me giving pages of logs and examples, I can just point out this:

Their Avatars and Signatures.

Most of them do not reflect that the Admin is going to be Natural and Unbiased.
Stuff like GAME OVER and YEAH, We seen it all and hear it all before ,So Don't even try......
Is not a good sign.

Being proud of a BAN HAMMER should not be an Award.
Snide comments in the Sanctions isn't appreciated either . Saying " Congrats, you won the Darwin award " should be against the forums rules of Insulting players.

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[looqas]

My thoughts after reading the thread.

-I've got no problem with the admins. It's really their house and their rules. And don't start about Igiss owning the place.

-mjolnir and doom had it right. The complete Admin notice thing has gotten out of hand and messy. But I blame the community for it since the admins have actually listened to our whining. Get hold of Igiss and TELL HIM to re-write the rules pronto.

-I like the recent transparency thing the admins have sometimes showed. Like the Xoria's post, the posts about admin voting on certain issues (like the indie flame a while back).

-If you feel that some admin is out of bounds take it to PMs. All you'll ever achieve "exposing" the corrupt admin is enforcing the us-vs-them mentality. If a sanction seems hard, so what? Different judges different verdicts. But I'd like to see newbies given some slack, but on the other hand I'd like them to crack down real hard on the old hands here who get caught breaking the rules.

-Maybe the admin term could 6 months? General vote to extend/terminate his rights? It would make admins think on re-election and possible give a good escape back to normal player.

Feedback on Disco and on me as a player in general.

I know from a personal experience that after 6 month or so you start to feel like you know the place and how it operates. You have made friends and start to have a slight swollen feeling in your head, like your opinion matters really. Especially if you are in a powerful faction. And slowly but surely you start to think that you and your faction are really something special and above the law a bit and the power starts to corrupt you a bit. You start using the forums, the in-game actions and mechanics how the game works to teach the new guys a lesson. Be that RP, equipment, sanction, advice or whatever. You claim you RP but really all you do is not to cut slack to the indie new guy. Your stance hardens on issues. Be that a forum flame and how you treat people. And by now you know who you gonna call, right? If you have played your cards right you have friends all over the place. Put a word around in Skype. Screw the RP. You only cut slack to your opposing faction and known friends. It's the newbies that need to put to place, right?

I see these ideas taking hold in me. Lack of empathy and time towards the new guys. Who needs empathy when you got friends who are willing to back you up? Things "suddenly" like, say 3xGB rape that happens to ME, don't get just a shrug of my shoulders, but I decide to do something about. I go to forums/skype and insinuate, imply, you know, work the ground a bit sow some seeds. Brand them. Instead I should have PMed the guys in GOOD spirit that maybe it was not as much fun as you thought it to be AND just shrugged and moved on. This has happened to me to some extent, so nobody needs to get angry and retort. Take this as a rhetorical question.

So this in mind I think we NEED the new players to bring the softness, leniency and empathy of heart to Disco.

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Flying under radar.

[kingvaillant]

Since pretty much everyone said what I wanted to...in better words (Mjolnir, Cannon, Doom, Jinx, etc), I'll say something else.

I do believe we did a giant mistake by asking the admin to involve themselves into in-games issues, mainly between factions and indies. Listening to one or two whiners just showed that a minority(=whiners, not indies) has had too much powers here (speaking about the whiners). Factions and indies operated in the same ways for a VERY long time, slapping themselves once in a while but generally used to get along. By asking admins to "regulate" how stuff work for factions and indies, it created way more frustrations than the opposite, more lawyering, etc.

Also, dictating other things, like how the ID should work for certain affiliations, created a lot of trouble, more confusion and some kind of paranoia to be sanctioned.

WE have gotten to the point where we can be sanctioned for EVERYTHING. everytime I play, I always gotta watch my back instead of relaxing... because whiners have too much capabilities now to report people, instead of fixing an issue by themselves. Like a baby(whiner) going to his mother(admin) to cry. By filling a lot of loopholes, we created alot of frustrations and even more loopholes. I think we got way too far from the whole image of the thing

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[mwerte]

With all the recent admin notices and new rules and heavier sanctions it has gotten to the point where if I'm interacting with someone, I'm running FRAPs so they can't take something out of context and get me sanctioned for it. I'm almost afraid to do anything "origional" with the different roles that I play. And that is sad.

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[Dragonego]

I am VERY happy with the whole mod. No problems whatsoever, Infact, Without discovery, freelancer isn't really freelancer in my opinion.

VERY happy.

Excellent.

Awesome.