Regarding my last thread

[Forever_A_Steve]

Those who strive not to make mistakes of the past make new mistakes. See France from 1790-1890, Chile, etc.

 

I'm still for near-universal rollbacks, could you give some general description of who shouldn't be rolled back?

 

Your Mistakes Don't Define You, They Teach You. 

 

And general description would be anyone but 2nd or 3rd time offenders. 

 

First timers deserve better. 

[barneygale]

tobylane, who gains from the rollback Forever_A_Steve is talking about? Again, nerd is not a state. The staff are not moral police, they only need to dispense enough justice to keep your players happy. Rolling back significant portions of a town might be righteous but that alone doesn't make it the right thing to do.

[tobylane]

Yes barney, but place some limit on how far in the opposite direction you're going otherwise it sounds incomplete. Dispensing enough justice is the issue it's been all along, a four week holiday is nothing to someone who has no attachment to Nerd but an agonising lesson to someone as attached as I believe shwk is. There isn't a one size fits all snugly, and I've not seen a compelling reason why we should do anything less than aim to cover as many people as possible, ie everyone gets what the 90th percentile needs. Do you want mods to be judging for themselves how long each person needs, and for their/the admin's word to be final?

[Forever_A_Steve]

Yes barney, but place some limit on how far in the opposite direction you're going otherwise it sounds incomplete. Dispensing enough justice is the issue it's been all along, a four week holiday is nothing to someone who has no attachment to Nerd but an agonising lesson to someone as attached as I believe shwk is. 

 

 

Nononono.

 

A 4 week ban for someone new is overkill. It doesn't mean a 4 week vacation. It means they are never coming back.

 

Is that what you really want? Players who arent given the chance to learn their lesson and a bad rep?

[tobylane]

Sometimes that is what we want. We can't predict, we don't have the time to investigate, and we don't want to allow too many bad back in with the good. We aren't that desperate. Please think about a way to know the difference between someone who learns the lesson straightaway, and someone who will have a history with the admins rivalling Forzaire.

[Forever_A_Steve]

Sometimes that is what we want. We can't predict, we don't have the time to investigate, and we don't want to allow too many bad back in with the good. We aren't that desperate. Please think about a way to know the difference between someone who learns the lesson straightaway, and someone who will have a history with the admins rivalling Forzaire.

 

 

Theres no way of doing so, which is why the 2 tier system is best. 

 

Slap on the wrist and then harsher ban. 

[barneygale]

Sometimes that is what we want. We can't predict, we don't have the time to investigate, and we don't want to allow too many bad back in with the good. We aren't that desperate.

I'd rather we risked letting some bad people back on if it means retaining lots of players who get banned for doing something stupid when they first join the server. You don't need to be "desperate" to want more players. More players on nerd is always more fun; show me an instance where it hasn't been! That kind of attitude would never have flown in the early years when servers were getting set up and changed about all the time, and we ran things like minigames years before it became popular! There's always room for improvement.

Please think about a way to know the difference between someone who learns the lesson straightaway, and someone who will have a history with the admins rivalling Forzaire.

Just use common sense. I struggle why it's considered so hard to just set xray ban lengths. If Forzaire logs on immediately xrays + lavas someone's base, ban him for a few more months. If a noob logs on and immediately xrays 10 diamond then PM them and tempban them for a day or two. If they don't get the message then ban them some more.

[Forever_A_Steve]

I'd rather we risked letting some bad people back on if it means retaining lots of players who get banned for doing something stupid when they first join the server. You don't need to be "desperate" to want more players. More players on nerd is always more fun; show me an instance where it hasn't been! That kind of attitude would never have flown in the early years when servers were getting set up and changed about all the time, and we ran things like minigames years before it became popular! There's always room for improvement.

Just use common sense. I struggle why it's considered so hard to just set xray ban lengths. If Forzaire logs on immediately xrays + lavas someone's base, ban him for a few more months. If a noob logs on and immediately xrays 10 diamond then PM them and tempban them for a day or two. If they don't get the message then ban them some more.

 

 

^

this guy gets it

[tobylane]

I'm yet to be convinced on waiting to see "if they don't get the message then ban more".

 

I'm also yet to be convinced that some people will accept common sense, as common sense is the same thing as discretion.

 

To put it another way: who are we giving the benefit of the doubt to for their gain, and who for our gain. I give it to people who take crops without replanting, or take three iron for their first pick. I don't give it to someone who seeks to offend others, or who installs a mod that is clearly for bad purposes. A slap on the wrist for those who have the benefit of the doubt of that mod, and a ban (temp ban when we can) for those who do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Edited December 11, 2015 by tobylane

[Herr_Fawkes]

 

Just use common sense. I struggle why it's considered so hard to just set xray ban lengths. If Forzaire logs on immediately xrays + lavas someone's base, ban him for a few more months. If a noob logs on and immediately xrays 10 diamond then PM them and tempban them for a day or two. If they don't get the message then ban them some more. 

At some level, it's not the server's job to cater to n00bs who want to show up and xray their way to a few diamonds. The people who show up and immediately use a hacked client/xray aren't equivalent to the people who, as tobylane said, forget to replant or grief a build by mistake. Those are generally honest mistakes made by people who aren't familiar with how nerd's servers are run, but are willing to play mostly-vanilla MC, which is what the server's designed for. Someone who joins and xrays straightaway isn't here to do that. Xray isn't part of vanilla MC, nor will it ever be. The major gameplay in Minecraft involves mining, not xraying. Why should we tolerate players who don't want to play by our rules? Use of xray isn't a n00by mistake, it's an intentional hack. It should be punished heavily. That said, I don't like the edit rollback associated with xray because it screws over anyone who works with an xrayer, and I've never been into punishing the community because one person can't play by the rules. Remember Fort Honk in rev14? When the main builder on that got banned for xray, and when his edits rolled back, everyone else who worked on it got the shaft. So did everyone who used its villagers. We need a smarter punishment for xray, but it shouldn't involve lowering ban lengths because xray isn't an innocent mistake. 

[tobylane]

Just use common sense. I struggle why it's considered so hard to just set xray ban lengths. If Forzaire logs on immediately xrays + lavas someone's base, ban him for a few more months. If a noob logs on and immediately xrays 10 diamond then PM them and tempban them for a day or two. If they don't get the message then ban them some more.

 

That's hindsight. That's no good with first time offenders.

[barneygale]

Ah sorry tobylane, I misread your post. You can't predict whether someone will learn their lesson or come back to grief/xray more, but that doesn't mean you need to have a policy of assuming the worst. You could have a system that increases with each offense: 3 day ban, 10 day ban, 30 day ban, perma (subject to appeal). If someone is egreiously hacking/griefing/harassing then you can jump straight to perma if you want.

Is xray/grief even much of an issue nowadays? When the banning policy was laid down we had

1. a /lot/ of people joining from grief team videos / livestreams

2. primitive rollback tools that often needed a lot of manual fixing

3. primitive xray detection tools (basically logblock/bigbrother and a lot of patience)

4. a survival server, where xray is more gamebreaking than on pve

none of these are really issues anymore. Grief gets magic'd away with a couple logblock commands, and is usually fixed as soon as the mod gets to the modreq. Watson makes tracking xrayers really easy. These are all good things, and perhaps one reason to revise ban lengths down is that grief and xray aren't as hard to fight as they were when the rules were laid down.

Edited December 11, 2015 by barneygale

[Forever_A_Steve]

Just a snippit from totemo (who does the x-ray enforcement)

 

 

The majority of people that have been banned for x-ray around here (and it's mostly bans issued by me) don't do it again and they're valued and trusted players.

There's not much covering of tracks going on. But let me assure you that I do notice a lot of things, even if I choose not to ban immediately.

 

 

along with permalink for proof
https://www.reddit.com/r/mcpublic/comments/3w8q68/seeking_feedback_ban_durations/cxv8hz0

[twilexis]

In rev 12 half of Rose City was nuked from orbit because one of the most active mayors was banned for xray. This isn't that much of an uncommon occurrence. We just rebuilt. While it was frustrating as hell to see half-completed builds/town facilities go missing, I agree with troop. If he didn't cheat it wouldn't have happened.

 

Fact is that if you're active enough to be part of a cardinal portal town then you're also active enough to know the punishment for xraying. The consequences are always highlighted at spawn, there's no excuse for missing it. No sympathy from me.

[Forever_A_Steve]

In rev 12 half of Rose City was nuked from orbit because one of the most active mayors was banned for xray. This isn't that much of an uncommon occurrence. We just rebuilt. While it was frustrating as hell to see half-completed builds/town facilities go missing, I agree with troop. If he didn't cheat it wouldn't have happened.

 

Fact is that if you're active enough to be part of a cardinal portal town then you're also active enough to know the punishment for xraying. The consequences are always highlighted at spawn, there's no excuse for missing it. No sympathy from me.

 

 

So if that happens again, you would be cool with it? 

[twilexis]

I'd be pissed at the person, but I'd be fine with the rollback.

[jllmprrt]

back again and about time too.

I've always thought the X-ray ban was way over the top, like I understand it's a serious offense and all that but why roll back all their edits? Like they have logs of every block they've mined, and the stuff they built before they xrayed shouldn't be rolled back because they didn't cheat to get it. I know next to nothing about mod permissions so I don't know if a rollback of this magnitude is even possible, but people should only be punished for the stuff they do after they X-ray, not before. It's not fair to every other member of such and such town if "le_meme_man_xx" decides to X-ray and other peoples builds are affected because he helped them out before he cheated.

[joshuaherman]

In my opinion we should remove bans and just have a tempban system or streamline the banning system in some way. Unless you do something really horrible or illegal or harass someone I would have 1 year bans and 1 month bans for major offenses such as large griefing and week long bans for everything. 1 day bans would be for grief and for homophobia i would go for 1 hour bans. X-ray bans should stay the same as automatic 1 month bans and not do a roll back .

 

The other problem was that Survival started being a problem that no one wanted to solve and that people would eventually give up trying to solve. It almost seems like that Survival became classist. People would use the word "toxic player" to mean that they were of a lower class and should be treated with derision. The real problem is that we were treating our players like they were the problem. Once that started it was inevitable that people would leave and Survival stopped being sustainable.

 

Roastnewt and Four_down have large amounts of experience promoting servers and it seems like everyone would ignore them just because they in the past rubbed people the wrong way. Maybe when we were a much bigger server you could justify it but now it doesn't make much sense that we should ignore their obvious performance in creating sustainable servers and even since their servers are designed to make money it doesn't mean that their advise is meaningless. Countless times they make suggestions and no one either implements them or they are totally ignored. They seem to be much more patient than most people.

 

If we really want to grow the servers we need to take all the help we can get not just ignore people. Also, we can't keep on treating players as a problem.

[Forever_A_Steve]

Once we implement more server population friendly rules and punishments, I think we should put advertising on overdrive. 

 

But also since we have the new text that pops out at us, notifying us of a reset. I think it should also pop up whenever a new player joins the rev (or is new to the rev) that goes through the rules with 10 seconds on each rule.

 

 

Also rule reminders with an updated nerd.nu wiki page link in the server announcements would help keep newer players informed.

[c45y]

Once we implement more server population friendly rules and punishments, I think we should put advertising on overdrive. 

 

But also since we have the new text that pops out at us, notifying us of a reset. I think it should also pop up whenever a new player joins the rev (or is new to the rev) that goes through the rules with 10 seconds on each rule.

 

 

Also rule reminders with an updated nerd.nu wiki page link in the server announcements would help keep newer players informed.

 

LETS ADD LOTS OF PRETTY COLORS AND SHIT TO CHAT AS WELL LIKE ALL THOSE OTHER SERVERS!!!!

[tobylane]

So we're all for tempbans, but they aren't an option yet. Status quo till then?

[twilexis]

LETS ADD LOTS OF PRETTY COLORS AND SHIT TO CHAT AS WELL LIKE ALL THOSE OTHER SERVERS!!!!

 

[torteela]

IMHO, we could certainly stand to simplify and streamline the rules. Maybe not to the extent of being overly broad in the sense that they once were with "don't be or build a dick", but enough so that players can read just a short summary to get a sense of the general standard for conduct on the server.

 

There will always be rules lawyers, and they'll always find new loopholes no matter how many revisions are made to the rules. At some point you just have to stop and say "okay, here are the rules; this is as complex as they need to be" and tell the rules lawyers "I'm sorry that you feel the staff are unfairly subjective, however the mods have been carefully appointed from a pool of players who have proven themselves fair and trustworthy in judgement. The admins will review this case to ensure that you were not treated unfairly" and then have an admin double-check the logs to make sure the interaction was reasonable.

Agree with this.

 

Some suggestions:

1. Set ban lengths on ban - use some kind of formula or guide, but allow mod discretion. Still allow people to appeal, if they want, but most bans automatically expire.

2. Give people a link to an unlisted ban appeal page via their "Banned: ..." message when they attempt to connect, like nerd.nu/appeal/80gt8s0g. Only the banned player and the mods know about the page, so they can post their appeal without signing up.

I like both of these. If we can't or don't want to do temp bans I think doing appeals like in #2 this would be much better than the way they're done now.

But also since we have the new text that pops out at us, notifying us of a reset. I think it should also pop up whenever a new player joins the rev (or is new to the rev) that goes through the rules with 10 seconds on each rule.

Please no i don't want to spend the first 5 minutes of the rev not being able to look at anything but rules thanks.

We can just replace the huge walls of signs of rules in spawn with 2:

"Punch this to read the rules" which opens a link to a nicely formatted webpage with the server rules.

"I read and agree to follow the rules" which plops you into the world.

Like the rules room this rev you'd only have to do that on first join. There could be a slightly different room you get sent to on your first join after a ban which says "make sure to reread the rules so you don't get banned again."

General thoughts:

I think in general ban lengths should be shorter, like on the scale of hours and days instead of weeks and months. If someone joins just to troll its usually pretty obvious, they'll start spamming racial slurs or server advertisements in chat right away, or have almost entirely grief edits. I think for these people the current system works good. However, if someone actually wants to be a contributing member of the community, just seeing that they're banned will make them think "Gee, I should probably follow the rules so I don't get banned because I want to play on this server. I did a bad thing and I won't do it again." These people don't need any sort of appeal process and a temp ban that automatically expires would be better. Having that private appeal link barney mentioned would be nice for this. It could have what rule the player broke, how they broke it, and maybe a brief statement from the banning mod if the ban length differs from the guidelines i.e. "I banned you for x days instead of y days because of z."

I agree with the general idea behind rollbacks, that you shouldn't profit from cheating. I think inventory wipes should stay for everyone. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like most x-rayers are solo players who get caught pretty quickly. Its fine to do the rollback for them, just make the ban length shorter so if they want to come back and play legit its not so discouraging. Four weeks is a long time on the internet. I'd say make it a few days. Either they'll come back and play legit, which means everything's cool, or they'll keep cheating, which means we can be pretty confident in making an indefinite ban that requires an appeal.

Personally I feel if you're part of a city/project that you actually care about you should realize that if you x-ray and get caught it's going to fuck things up for the people you're working with, so you shouldn't do it. However, I can also see how much it'd suck to see half your town gone because someone you thought you could trust was cheating. Chasing villagers around is a pain in the ass. So there should be some middle ground. An idea I had was that the other people involved with the build that will be effected are given a list of the materials that will be rolled back, and if they can mine those materials legit and put them in a chest or something, those edits won't be rolled back and the materials get deleted. I don't think there needs to be any set time limit for that as long as it seems like there's an honest effort to get the materials together, that way a town isn't forced to stop everything else they want to do to go mine 30,000 smooth stone. I'm sure someone can come up with a better solution, but I feel like not rewarding the cheating while not unfairly burdening the people who weren't cheating will be the core idea of the best solution.

[joshuaherman]

So we're all for tempbans, but they aren't an option yet. Status quo till then?

If we don't implement tempbans and only adjust for the length of the bans then I don't think we will achieve much to do anything with the revision of the banning system. Just adjusting the amount of time doesn't make much sense since the bans will probably become longer periods of time because people don't have the time to appeal and its not worth it.

[Trooprm32]

If we don't implement tempbans and only adjust for the length of the bans then I don't think we will achieve much to do anything with the revision of the banning system. Just adjusting the amount of time doesn't make much sense since the bans will probably become longer periods of time because people don't have the time to appeal and its not worth it.

 

Get on that then