[Poruku]

So, recently, this thread was posted: https://neus-projects.net/forums/showthr...2#pid50152

And subsequently locked, for a reason I'm not quite grasping. I think many people posted a lot of very important points and discussed things in a mostly civil manner, even though there were disagreements.

That being said, I'm not trying to revive a locked thread, what I want to talk about is the more general matter at hand being transparency and how bans are being investigated and dealt out. However, if people want to shed light on things, go ahead. If this thread gets locked too, that's fine. If I'm out of line, let me know.


My perspective on recent events

Much like Mother's ban, this ban came out of left field for the banees. One second they're playing the game, and the next second they just got banned, sometimes mid-rp. I spoke with Croakie and they didn't seem to know or understand why they were banned. She even made a post asking why, and it got no replies. Even more puzzling is Lumi who barely speaks in ooc, etc. No replies to any of the threads.

When it happened, of course, everyone jumps into voice chat and tries to understand what the hell is going on. Everyone is speculating about what exactly happened. 4 players including a major leader just got removed for a week, messing over plans for many and delivering a sizeable emotional blow, and for what? We don't know. Am I going to be next? Am I gatekeeping? The ban message doesn't give us any information and the people who got banned did not get any heads up. So of course, everyone in the community is now free to make up their own mind about what exactly happened. People speculate, and talk to each other in private, sharing even more speculation and rumors.

And this goes on until a thread is posted.

The thread barely elaborated on the issue out of a desire to protect the people involved, something I can understand, but it also made it fairly ineffective at clearing the air and clearing confusion. In addition, we have seen multiple fair points and replies being made with no response from the admin team about them. What are we supposed to believe?

Then, the thread is locked, and we're supposed to move on?

I trust the GM team, but I think this is a problematic way to handle things, and I'd like to make my points concise:

1: Little to no communication with the accused
Based on the fact every banned player was confused and made a ban appeal, it's safe to assume the GM team did not reach out to them to get their side of the story. And based on the fact Lumi and Aegis got banned, we can assume they didn't get the full story due to this. This is unfair to the accused because it means the evidence gathered will be entirely in the favor of the accuser. Not only that, but it also means they will get no warnings and thus have no opportunity to rectify their behavior. Even worse, they'll get suddenly banned mid-rp, having the rug pulled out from under their feet. A very stressful and confusing moment.

2: Whoever talks to the GMs first has the advantage
Related to point 1, a big issue here is that the GMs are clearly weaponizable. I'm not saying that the accuser had bad intentions, but what I'm saying is that whenever there is an OOC conflict, whoever messages the GMs gets an advantage as they can feed any evidence they see fit to the team and nobody on the opposing side will know. This, in my opinion, is not a very healthy part of a community, as it means the GMs aren't being used to solve issues, they're being used to ban. So when you reach out to a GM, you're going with the nuclear option, and you better strike first as it gives you the high ground. This brings me to the last point.

3: Bans based on OOC drama are counter-productive
What was even accomplished with these bans? Massive confusion, frustration, stress, disruption of events in game, increase of hostility between players, and the player base being left to speculate. A one week ban without a proper explanation and reached understanding beforehand is essentially pointless unless your goal is to completely kick out some people from the game and never have to deal with them again. Because these people will just come back after one week and guess what, everything is worse now because people are scared, they feel antagonized, they still feel confused, they wonder if they should even continue playing.

I believe people should not be banned so quickly for this sort of thing as all it does is send a bomb in a warzone. It sets a grim precedent and it simply does not allow people to learn from their mistakes. Even worse, it can make people fear the GMs.

There's a big difference between a ban given because a game rule was clearly broken, and a ban given for unclear OOC drama reasons. The latter needs to be addressed much more carefully. It's something to solve, not to punish. DM people and give them warnings, tell them what's going wrong, hear their side, make them understand, tell them what needs to change. If they keep doing nefarious things with that knowledge, then give them a sizeable ban. But this? This just ain't it.



I apologize if this post is making unpleasant things resurface, but I just had to speak up about this personally. Nobody asked me to do this, I barely ever speak with any of the players involved. But as a bystander, it just felt like it had to be said.