And here’s another one of those ever-present tropes from these discussions. “I don’t know exactly why I was banned, but I believe it’s the size of my base, so I’ll present that as the fact.”
The rules talk about the impact of your build. The various clarifications Funcom staff wrote talk about the impact of your build. And yet people keep pushing the idea that it’s the size, rather than the impact, of the build that matters.
Why do people insist on this? I can think of only one answer: you would rather have the game force a limit on you than take responsibility for your own actions. After all, if it’s just a number, then you don’t have to put an effort into thinking about how your actions affect the others.
But if you look at everything Funcom wrote about these things, it’s not about a number, it’s about the effects.
Sure. Here’s a bunch of things they could do to improve the situation:
- Clarify certain concepts and edge cases. There are still open questions after the last round of clarifications, questions that should be addressed. Also, there are things that people have been squabbling about frequently on these forums. For example, is it a violation of the rules to build in such a way that it becomes impossible to trigger the in-game discovery of a POI? All of these things should be addressed and clarified in another pinned post, just like they did for walls, villages, and such.
- Add more no-build zones. Now that 3.0 update is out and it’s possible to turn off the no-build zones on private servers and in single-payer, Funcom should add more no-build zones to their maps, so you can’t build over certain spots like world bosses or important POIs.
- Establish a warning system. When someone reports your clan and Funcom reviews the report, if they find you broke the rules, they should be able to send your clan a message that says you are in violation of the rules for such-and-such reason and have X days to fix that. After X days, they look again, and if you haven’t fixed things properly, you get admin-wiped and/or suspended.
- Communicate about admin action. Upon suspension or ban, you should be able to request the information about it via Zendesk and get an explanation that is detailed enough to allow you to avoid repeating that mistake in the future.
- Hire enough staff to avoid overloading the server moderation. If they don’t have enough people, the people they have will either do sloppy work and take actions they shouldn’t, or tickets will get auto-closed without being reviewed. Neither is an acceptable outcome, so they should hire more people.
Any of these measures would make the situation better. All of them together, if implemented properly, would pretty much reduce the problems to a negligible percentage.
Except that they don’t seem to be spending as much time/money dealing with complaints as you seem to think. In fact, what we have is just a bunch of people being really loud about it on the forums.
Let’s face it, even if they did all of the things I recommended above, there would still be people coming to these forums to complain about unfair bans, lying through their teeth and doing everything they can to avoid assuming the responsibility for their own actions. There is literally no way to avoid that, other than having Funcom proactively publish every single admin action, with all the evidence and details of their review, and they’re not gonna do that.
The real problem is not that we have server moderation – I still remember what it was like before the rules, and it sucked. The real problem is not that the moderation is abysmal or incredibly unfair, despite what a handful of loud people want everyone else to believe.
No, the real problem is that it’s just bad enough, that those who think rules should be different will get their claims of unfair bans amplified by those who truly tried to avoid breaking the rules. The latter group has people like @Kikigirl, who has shown both a reasonable attitude and enough proof to make it clear that she really doesn’t know why she was targeted by admin action. The former group has people who say things like “well it’s a bullshіt rule anyway”. One of these groups belongs on the official servers, the other doesn’t.
EDIT: And if you don’t believe me, let me take something @Taemien said and I didn’t jump on back then because I didn’t want to make this discussion even worse:
Sounds reasonable, right? Sure, but it’s wrong. There actually have been complaints about that rule, and they unsurprisingly came from the same people who will first pretend they didn’t break any rules and then come out and say “it’s a complete bullshіt rule”.