rule 0 gone wrong (almost died) (LIVE)

[remanseptim]

some people got 3 month banned for posting ascii trollface after being told not to.

i got 2 hour banned last week for doing the exact same thing, but spamming it in OOC during an ongoing round and having prior notes and having a long, noted history of similar infractions.
when a different admin being online means you can receive such VASTLY different punishments for the same infractions (or lesser, in the case of those who did it during roundend) you know there's a problem.

rule 0 in its current state invites bias to the adminship. the only reason these guys' punishments are so severe is that nobody gives a fuck since they're literally who's, they do not have any friends in the playerbase or adminship to offer backlash at this excessive punishment.

there are some who got banned for doing it on roundend, others who did it during the ongoing round: The latter deserves more of a punishment, but 3 months is still unbelievably, unnecessarily excessive.


my suggestion is as follows: either literally axe rule 0, or modify it in some way that prevents breaking the rules from being a game of russian roulette where you either get a 2 hour ban with a funny message or 3 months off of spacemans with the world's fastest appeal denial.

ANYTHING to invite some level of consistency to how admins operate.

[trexter555]

rule 0 shouldn’t exist in the first place, leads to shitty admins giving 3 month bans for what is honestly at most a weekban

[Intercept0r]

Ascii spam people are the spessman equivalent of sovereign citizens. Change my mind.

[remanseptim]

retards who appeal to the secret rule are sovereign citizens

[Arianya]

This thread seems like a complete non-sequitur to what it suggests to change.

Rule 0 has no effect on ban lengths - the only ban with any kind of prescribed ban (and even that more a suggestion then written in stone) is 24 hours per innocent person killed.

If you get a ban where you feel you did it in fact do what got you banned, but is too long, that's the entire purpose of ban appeals. It exists so that other admins and headadmins can oversee other's bans.

Ultimately, written in stone ban times would have the opposite issue - now instead of issuing a minor ban to suit the context, admins would have to hand out whatever the guideline was or receive the furor of the headmins.

Not to mention the time and stress of trying to put a number to every situation imaginable under our existing rules.

[Arianya]

Slightly offtopic, but I will note from having read far too many ban appeals: Don't swing for the fences all the time. I see far too many ban appeals where someone tries to swing for "I DID NOTHING WRONG UNBAN ME NOW AND GIVE ME YOUR FIRSTBORN IN SACRIFICE" where they could quite easily and successfully make the argument for a reduced ban length.

Going in too hard just gives the impression you're completely intractable and that there's no point even meeting you halfway.

[Vekter]

If you are explicitly told by an admin not to do something and you do it anyway, you deserve whatever punishment you get.

Though yeah okay three months is a bit much

Also the trollface thing is stupid and needs to stop anyway, y'all can find funnier shit to do that doesn't involve ASCII dicks or dead memes from the 2010s.

[remanseptim]

the punishment you do get should be consistent with others in your exact situation, regardless of the admin presiding over the situation.
this isn't about the length of their ban alone; my thoughts on that are separate.
this is about how radically different punishments can be depending on the admin dishing them out and the players receiving them.
if it were a difference of one day to one week, that would be different, but two hours versus three months is absolutely absurd.

what I'm attempting to contest here, once again, is the lack of consistency. trying to counter my argument with a blanket 'they deserve it' is foolish and reductive.

every admin knows I've got a shit ton of notes, many of which are for spamming bullshit both on the radio and in OOC. despite being explicitly told I'd eat a ban if I posted trollface, I posted trollface. got slammed with a short ban, ate it like a man, reconnected hours later and slipped people as clown.

these people, who apparently were light on notes, followed that precise line of thought and got banned for 90 days and had their appeals denied at blistering speed. sure, a ban is a ban, but one had me playing again within a day while the others won't have them back until 2021. these are wildly different outcomes, with wildly different ramifications, for the exact same offense.

I don't think it's right, that for whatever reason, some people can get away with a slap on the wrist while others should get decimated. it simply isn't right or fair.

however, one thing is true: this wasn't a violation of any rules on the banning admin's part. rule 0 explicitly allows discrepancies like this.

[Farquaar]

I think what you’re asking for isn’t for Rule 0 to be axed. It seems like you actually want the rules to establish mandatory minimum “sentences” and principles that should be taken into account during “sentencing”.

I don’t really care since it’s a video game community. Of course treatment is going to be a bit arbitrary. This isn’t a court with a jury trial, it’s a bunch of average joes trying to keep the shitters out and keep edgy regulars in line.

[oranges]

You deserve every ban you've gotten reman so no complaints here

[NecromancerAnne]

Rule 0 exists for edge cases and to ensure you can't rules lawyer out of edge cases where an admin has deemed something significantly disruptive to require a ban, even if it has no strict wording in the rules. It's to make sure you cannot skirt the line hard enough to basically get away with cheapening everyone elses time playing this game which is meant to be a social experience with other people, and not the social construct to which individuals with a sociopathic streak can take their angst out on others. It's for those who not only can't stop kicking down the sand castle, but when they realized they can't kick down the sand castles anymore, they just start hiding the shovels and buckets so nobody can make castles to begin with.

Ban lengths are loose and fast mostly because why give concrete lengths at all? The more insight into how the system works, the more you can easily dance around it. I find it absurd this was given a specific rule dealing witg ascii when there already exists one in a Rule 1 precedent from before.

Rule 0 itself is often not actually invoked at all. The example you provided reman is a ban that uses an already existing lower rule. Rule 1, as it falls under spam, and generally negatively affects the experience of the entire server. Rule 0 was never required to be invoked. Rule 0 is never invoked for the sake of ban lengths, as those are always up to admin discretion and is based entirely on eyeballing and admin informed opinion.

Just don't be a dumbass and literally nothing will happen. If someone gives you a 2 hour ban for spam despite your note history, and you somehow find it incredulous that someone else copped a 3 month ban on a first offense, maybe you're being set up for a bigger fall. Or maybe you just got off light because someone didn't want to have to deal with you throwing a bitch fit in appeals because you got banned for deliberately and egregiously breaking the rules. Come to your own conclusions on it, hopefully you'll figure out where the problem lies, since you opted to make a thread about it anyway.

[remanseptim]

the situation which spurred this on has thus been resolved, and a precedent has also been set by the king jannies.
this suggests that similar situations will be handled appropriately in the future, and that's good enough for me.

[Domitius]

To bring this policy thread to a close I am copying and pasting our ruling about disruptive ascii to here.

Going forward, we've decided that posting ascii which is disruptive to the round is punishable by default with a half day ban. This is in order to reduce the occurrence of it.

Headmin Votes
Coconutwarrior97: Yes, three months is way too much considering when someone admits to metacomming we typically ban them for a monthish.
Domitius: Yes.
Naloac: Yes.