Improve the way staff handle grief reports

Though this statement is true, but what if it's not a wrongful ban and the accused was given 24 hours and decided to grief, but didn't grief enough to warrant a rollback. Now suddenly the mayor is out those materials and stuck cleaning up the mess that could have been handled sooner.

There will always be two sides to this. I'm obviously on the fence because both sides have pretty big holes. Sure it sucks to be wrongfully accused and punished. But it also sucks to be a victim who receives help too late (not all grief gets rolledback).

It would be great if there was away that a smod could judge the grief and if it seemed intentional, then ban right then and there.... but if it seemed like a misunderstanding, give 24 hours to investigate further. Something like that would be nice, but then it's not fair to ALL users and problems/people complaining can come from that as well.

 

I really like that idea. Just a common sense measure to prevent lack of communication without completely changing any huge part of the process. An "If you have any co-mayors, have you consulted them?" or even just being required to tag all co-mayors in the grief report so that in the event that it is a false grief report, the co-mayors will eventually see it and hopefully in time to prevent any wrongful ban or at least eventually uncover the innocence of the accused party.

There is also a burden of responsibility on the user to know for certain where they are allowed to edit blocks. For example, it seems like in this case the user thought someone was a co-mayor of a region who was never co-mayor of that region in the first place and if they're making town wide changes, it should likely be common sense to talk to all the mayors at some point about it. They might sometimes be builders who might not know better, but we need to protect the mayors as well. So I just don't see this instance as being worth making any sudden changes. It isn't as if we don't quickly forgive them and let them back on, especially if they didn't mean to cause havoc. Although like @THCOOL and @Ladyvamptress, I do definitely see the holes in the system and I hate the idea of too quickly banning someone who doesn't deserve it. I just have yet to see a solution that definitely improves both sides.

 

This^ This is exactly what I was trying to say while throwing out some other ideas into the pot.
I'm horrible at trying to explain things.

 

The guidelines for rollbacks are ~$7500 in damages or about an hour to fix. Fixing a wrongful ban in nearly every case will take far longer, if it can be fixed. You're missing my point, really.

Given rollback guidelines as they are, we simply aren't going to lose players if a little bit more grief happens. Is it an inconvenience? Sure, a minor one, but if there's enough grief to be a major inconvenience to fix, it should qualify for a rollback anyway.

On the flip side however, it's very easy to see players quitting simply because we were too quick to ban them for something they were allowed to do.

Nevermind the fact that you could easily remove the accused player from the region in the meantime, avoiding the issue you've brought up entirely.

There are two sides sure, but in my opinion the adverse effects on one side are far worse than on the other. One one side you've got banning people because they might cause a minor inconvenience, and on the other, you've got a minor inconvenience.

 

I could argue that a phrasing better than the words I chose to make the example could make the difference, but I wouldn't believe that myself. What you said is true.

Even better. Ok, no insta-ban, not even temporary.

However griefing and rollback guidelines should definitely be changed:

Let's put aside the fact that this distinction based on the mere number of block edit count is incomplete at best, I have a compelling question: is this distinction binding to staff? I mean: does staff have to ban someone because they put 100 cobble blocks, or just warn someone who stole "only" 5 diamond blocks; or do they have a bare minimum of discretion to use common sense?

I think the best would be:

• a better algorithm than the current one, based not on the mere block edit count but on many different aspects (worth, amount, location, type, locks, etc.);
• this algorithm should be not binding to staff and leave some discretion (the keyword is "guidelines");
• if a staff member decides against the algorithm, fine; however they should report it to the rest of staff so that the algorithm can be improved;
• probably the numbers behind this algorithm shouldn't be public (trolls that grief just a tiny bit below the ban threshold);
  • however there should definitely be some algorithm/guideline, because total staff discretion without a beacon could be even worse than the current, flawed, system (not that anyone suggested total staff discretion, but I wanted to point it out just in case).

I'm tempted to say that these thresholds are too high, all the more so when the victim of the grief is a builder with no good tools to make that money back and/or fix it fast (which tools are taken into account when estimating the time to fix?); however it takes time for staff as well to do a rollback, so there should be a balance. Hence:

• how long does it actually take to do a rollback?
  • does it take roughly the same amount of time, or does it somehow depend on the type of grief?
    • if so, what does it depend on and how?
• is there anything that could be technically done to improve the time it takes for staff to do a rollback?

 

There's some leeway for obviously more expensive blocks - the numbers in the guidelines are assuming generic low value blocks (dirt, stone, etc, all .05-.1 server worth). It's stated to take into account for more expensive blocks.

I don't see these as relevant to the suggestion, as these are regarding how the guidelines are applied, and are all basically the case already.

Time to do a rollback is really negligible. However long it takes the given SA to survey, logblock to satisfaction, and complete the rollback process.

I think the longest it ever took me to do a rollback was 20-30 minutes, and this was for an extremely severe, multi-million dollar rollback. Generally it'd be less.

You can say the numbers are too high and I won't really disagree, to be honest I don't see why we have to impose the limit anymore (the limit was from when it was exclusively Andrew doing them, along with everything else he does). Now that we have two SA's and barely any grief, I think removing the bar at all would be fairly inconsequential/

 

Good point. While the grief report waits to hear both sides of the story, the player would be removed until it's resolved. Banning people without both sides to the story isn't a good idea, and will most likely end up in them quitting the server.

 

Didn't know, glad to hear

This is good news! IDK why, but I was under the impression that rollback was an extremely fiddly job; but things being as you said, I'd be +100 to a complete removal of the limit

 

Yeah, I don't think that the player would grief multiple towns in the time it takes for the report to be resolved.