I have no hate for staff on how they handled my appeal, in fact, I got no responses other than "denied" and "unbanned" on my appeals. Neither is more effective than the other, they do the same.

 

Actually, I am in agreement with knears here (and we seem to miss on a lot of things). Patience, whether it be waiting out a tempban or waiting for a response, is a virtue that should be expressed. If you are patient and don't post and just find other ways to fill in the void of ECC time, it makes things worth it.

Now, I haven't been banned under the new system, nor do I plan to. But, like I said in my first post, the system is fine. The Mods are busy, and have lives outside of ECC. I think we should be respecting that and not bashing them for getting appeals done within hours.

Also, I personally see a larger societal problem if people are really desperate and bumping their appeal in order to get it done faster. Just my observation.

 

How is @outragedzombie not perma banned

 

well, I think this is a decent suggestion. so, a long time ago, I came on the server, found out about sg kits and the donation system, and it made me and so I griefed a town massively. I appealed and my appeal took somewhere around 2 days to get to. TBH, I knew that what I did was wrong, but I felt annoyed that it took so long to get to my appeal. It also made me feel like not coming back to the server. I'm for this suggestion

 

I find a part of the appeal process is the patience in waiting for it to be handled. If someone is mature enough to 'ask' to come back and wait for an an answer without whining about how long it's taking is certainly showing the maturity that might suggest they have changed and will be be good, contributing citizens of ECC upon their return.

When I first joined staff back in 2012 there was pressure to handle appeals as swiftly as complaints, but that led to the staff being harassed and chewed out when a serious troll or scam offender had to wait more than 20 minutes for their appeal to be handled. Not just read or acknowledged, but fully handled. That gives more power to the rule breakers than the rule enforcers, and I was quite glad when it changed. Staff members are not lap dogs to come at the snap of your fingers and do your bidding simply because you want what you want right now.

When I was back on staff recently my understanding of moderator requirements (blue) was that they checked appeals for format and perhaps that the ban reason is correct, or to ask for the applicant to copy/paste the rule they broke, but otherwise they didn't touch it. Ages ago we used to 'acknowledge' the appeal by posting the rule they broke and explaining it, putting all the work on the mods and not the person trying to appeal... in that sense the current system is better, and it's not like the appeal is going to vanish. Acknowledged by a mod post or not, the appeal is there, open, and the staff who can, or should, handle it are capable of seeing that without anyone else's help.

I can absolutely get behind swift appeals for first time offenders, builders who swore, trolled or minorly griefed... but, once Res+ is reached, and a written statement about having read the rules is on file as part of that application (at least once, if not multiple times), then you should be held to a higher standard when it comes to rule breaches and punishments.

For someone who has a rule breach like hacking, multi-accounting, scamming (loans or donations), they did more harm while they were on the server than they are currently doing while off of it. It takes a long, hard look and a lot of thinking before considering letting them back on to ECC. For a repeat scammer even the long wait to appeal isn't always a deterrent... why else would we be seeing them in the appeals section as often as we do?

Perhaps a better solution would be to have all appeals sent to an 'appeal@ecocitycraft.com' address that SM+ staff can access and then no one but staff get to see that someone is waiting for an answer? Out of our sight, out of our mind, really, because what staff are doing in the appeals and complaints section (aside from the appeal or complaint poster) really have no stake in the outcome, nor do we need to be the peanut gallery about it.

What business is it of ours, those who keep to the rules, aren't currently on the staff team, if there are appeals waiting to be processed? Does a scammer's waiting period affect the general play of the community as a whole while they are waiting? No. Those scammed and waiting on a repayment plan might have an interest, assuming they didn't decide to quit because they had been scammed in the first place. Of the two... I'd rather the scammer quit.

(Sorry if any of this post is rambling... I've been awake for a while at the time of this posting.)

 

I waited over a month for a response on my appeal. If one doesn't want to wait that long (or the average time, about 1-2 days for a response) they shouldnt get banned in the first place.

 

Well said KMax.
I also personally believe we lose far more newer players to being scammed/ or cheated than because their appeal "took too long" I see far more whining from long term/ experienced players about the length of time than from our newest players who normally understand they did wrong and wish to rejoin the server to play and not to just wreck more havoc.
More amazing to me is how someone will be banned for months and then all of a sudden "miss the server" and "have to play again" and are not even patient enough to wait a couple of days/ or even a week to get a response.
I do not pretend to have knowledge of how many rule abiding players we lose versus how many rule breaking players we keep - that is for the staff and owners to decide, however, there are times I feel as a community we lose far too many players that would be awesome for the community to those who are a huge negative drain on our server.

 

Hello @a18greek18,

I think that the staff team does a good job in the way we handle appeals. What you don't see is the stuff 'behind the scenes'. As the staff team we discuss things as a team and we have guidelines on the way in which to issue punishments and how to go about the appeals.

Personally, I dont think there is any need to do change the way we do things.
Also, if you dont want to have to wait for your appeal to be handled, don't get banned.

 

-1, don't get banned and you don't have to deal with it, not that hard

 

well for one thing outragedzombie has quite a ban history so i dont blame staff for letting him wait.....

 

Thanks for the reply a18. Some appeals are more straight forward than others, and whilst it may not seem that way to the other users, we have to go make sure that we let the people that are truley remorseful for their actions back onto the server. I'd also like to mention that even if there is such a thing as staff chat :p you wouldn't be able go see it XD (or staff ts for that matter). If you have any more questions I'd be glad to a answer them because we are always looking for ways to improve as a staff team.

 

Well, I'm not gonna disagree with everything you said. I agree and disagree with things brought up in this.

A person who breaks a rule and gets banned should learn to be patient - especially if they're resident+ . I say this because it's common sense, don't break the rules so you don't get banned.

I feel that giving the responsibility of appeals to SMods is better than the older system. (Well, I wasn't there back in the old days but from my experience the new system runs smoothly).

The problem is that the SMod team, in my opinion, were always one step behind in work than the other parts of the team. I feel that most of the work done by SMods are LWCs - just because of the massive quantity of LWCs to be honest, and how long it takes to do one with no mistakes. Grief reports are also time consuming in terms of judging type of grief, checking all the area and making sure you've done everything correctly.

SMods work tend to consume more time than regular mod work (And I'm pretty sure GA+ work is even longer , but I could be wrong :p). I think that we need some Admin leadership and involvement in the staff team. My suggestion is give GameAdmins+ a voice in motivating and encouraging forum work, and distributing it between the staff members. Usually what would happen in the system when I was on the team is that a guy would say 'Doing LWCs , and some may help, and he may stop at a certain LWC and go do something else / log off. I think that if we get the Admin team to ask the SMod to specify which LWCs / the quantity he is able to do, and at the same time motivate another SMod to tackle another section of the forum work at the same time.

 

From What I've seen these are the responses I gathered:
Mods: can't agree as it makes them look bad, but can't 100% disagree because they know its true
People that have been affected by this: +1 I don't like waiting even though I broke a basic rule
People that haven't bern affected by this/people that have but disagree: -1, use common sense

It's a funny pattern

 

If you dont like waiting to have your ban appeal looked at.

Please dont get banned,
Its actually hard and you have to go out of your way to actually break the rules....

So if you get banned, you honestly deserve the wait.

As far as tagging goes,
Its to show that it is moving along and you know that the super mod+ will have a alert waiting for them.
They dont have to do that, like i dont have to tag GA's for scamming appeals and link them to the complaints that the player was convicted for.
But i do it because i then know that appeal will be handled shortly because someone has been tagged and they have all the infomation in the topic already.

You also dont really suggest anything, you simply state the system currently doesnt work and thats about it...

So -1 for me.

 

Every ban is a serious ban. That's why you can't acees the server until appeal, because it's serious. If you think trolling, and w/e else you did isn't serious well... Can't really help you there

 

Step 1. Log off
Step 2. Uninstall and reinstall
Step 3. Issue solved

Your solution
Step 1. Spam my pt
Step 2. Get banned

You seem to stretch the truth on everything you say