Two rule sets

[barneygale]

Hi friends,

I've returned from a several-week absence from the server to find the entrance and porch of my house blocked up and protected. As I was not added to the region, my porch became a player trap (i.e. I could not escape without being TP'd out by staff). I must give this particular griefer some credit, as they actually /mail'd me to let me know they were about to grief my build, though they didn't let me know about the player trap I would spawn into. Regrettably I couldn't read their /mail from my hospital bed.

Ordinarily this thing would be easily sorted by a /modreq, and my experience here has been pretty uniformly positive over the last few years. I usually trust in the effectiveness of the staff to remove grief so I don't have screenshots of my completed porch (pre-grief).

Here's my land claim:

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Note that while this claim abuts spawn, it is not in spawn (as confirmed by /rg i). And while it looks like a mess here, I matched the east roads blocks in further development of my build. The area is perfectly passable and was visited by several staffers before the griefer set their sights on it.

And here's the joyous scene I spawned into today:

Note the warnings in chat where I cannot break the blocks in my own build. I had to /modreq to escape my griefed, protected home 😞

The complicating factor is that this player is actually a staffer. From this I take that an appeal will be fruitless, but perhaps some lessons could be learned for future incidents. Ideas:

1. If staff follow a different rule set to players, could it be published?
2. Should penalties for staff rule-breaking be the same as for regular players? More severe? Less?
3. If building player traps is still a rule-breaking offence for both staff and us plebs, could staff training be improved so that newer staffers are less likely to make this mistake?

I'm not naming the staff member though they may wish to name themselves.

Cheers

[cheezychicken]

Hi there, as you may notice in your first photo your claim fence replaced the original spawn road that was placed there, made of quartz. I (perhaps naively) didn't protect the small stubs of road, in the hopes that people wouldn't grief them even without a region. The other Padmins and I were made aware of what you were doing, and after a short discussion agreed that it was grief and therefore should be rolled back. I sent you a /mail and gave you a few days to allow you to make changes because I recognised that it was the entrance to your base and therefore may need some action on your end. Since there was no response I rolled your grief back, in accordance with the standard procedure for grief that every staff member follows. I recognise that you had no ability to respond, but I couldn't have known that until today.

The region covering your entrance, that created the "player trap", was extended ~5 blocks below ground level, as is policy for protecting builds. I have since shrunk this so that it only covers the road itself, allowing you to build a short tunnel to maintain access to your existing base without griefing the spawn build again. I would also like to point out that this "player trap" had an exit, back down into your base, from which you could create another entrance quite easily; this is why I am referring to it in quotes.

Your argument for why what you did was not grief seems to boil down to "it wasn't in a region" and "it wasn't in a claim", when regions and claims are not required for grief protection in any situation. I understand that you may have made an assumption that the build could be modified, but at the end of the day you modified another player's build without permission, and that is one of the base definitions of grief.

To answer your questions:

1. If staff follow a different rule set to players, could it be published?

Staff follow the same rules as everyone else, there are no exceptions to any rules for staff.

       2. Should penalties for staff rule-breaking be the same as for regular players? More severe? Less?

In the rare cases that a staff member does break the rules, they are dealt with in the same way as any other player. 

       3. If building player traps is still a rule-breaking offence for both staff and us plebs, could staff training be improved so that newer staffers are less likely to make this mistake?

As this was not a player trap, this isn't really applicable. I will accept that in certain cases rollbacks do create situations where players get stuck, but this is an unavoidable consequence of reverting blocks that have been placed or destroyed, and is generally fixed with a modreq to get out of the "trap".

I'd be happy for other staff and players to chime in with their thoughts and opinions. If I genuinely got it wrong I am more than happy to revert the rollback, but there's no new information within this post that would change my mind.