That you agreed to when you started playing on their servers. You broke your word and got punished. Now you know your place. FC has got you on a leash.
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This one has been somewhat roughly disabused of the notion that Officials are supposed to be representative of the game as a whole.
With the notation that official servers are only for introducing new players to the game and giving a basic experience (this one takes severe umbrage at that, but that is a different topic), the rules make sense.
Officials arenāt meant to be the real game.
They are the tutorial/noob zone.
As much as this one despises that conceit, it is the one they operate under. Thus these rules are, while odious, understandable in context.
TLDR; This one agrees in principle, but we are not in a principled environ.
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I disagree with this 100%. Officials are about as real as it gets. Unfortunately they suffer from many issues and I wouldnāt recommend any noob use it as a tutorial for pvp that is. On the other hand reintroducing chaos severs (blitz) back into the mode pool would be a great introduction for new players imo.
Also Iām assuming you are ok with the rules because you havenāt been banned? I thought Iād be ok with them as well until I got banned and found myself second guessing the tos. Yes there is a massive difference between pve and pvp when it comes to the tos.
Because we are barbarians, itās what we do 
Maybe or maybe not. Our team as well as many others have been suspended/banned for building big pvp bases. Letās say we have very good reason to suspect that blocks numbers are considered when a complaint is made.
You were as vague as Funcom on this one. Could you enlighten us?
Agreed 
IDEA - maybe NPCās and World Bosses could do their own dirty work. If someone builds on their spawn spot or a vital part of the game then the Boss/NPCās spawn in anyway and Purge any buildings in their way. Yes this would require extra work from the devs but less time/money would be spent dealing with complaints. And most importantly this would be a fun way of dealing with some of the problems.
And hereās another one of those ever-present tropes from these discussions. āI donāt know exactly why I was banned, but I believe itās the size of my base, so Iāll present that as the fact.ā
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 itās 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 itās just a number, then you donāt 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, itās not about a number, itās about the effects.
Sure. Hereās 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 itās 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 canāt 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 havenāt 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 donāt have enough people, the people they have will either do sloppy work and take actions they shouldnāt, 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 donāt 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.
Letās 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 theyāre not gonna do that.
The real problem is not that we have server moderation ā 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 itās 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 doesnāt know why she was targeted by admin action. The former group has people who say things like āwell itās a bullshŃt rule anywayā. One of these groups belongs on the official servers, the other doesnāt.
EDIT: And if you donāt believe me, let me take something @Taemien said and I didnāt jump on back then because I didnāt want to make this discussion even worse:
Sounds reasonable, right? Sure, but itās wrong. There actually have been complaints about that rule, and they unsurprisingly came from the same people who will first pretend they didnāt break any rules and then come out and say āitās a complete bullshŃt ruleā.
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Actually, my buildings including what got admin wiped was there for well over 3 years. Long before Funcom brought up the rules and regulations, and before they thought of enforcing them.
I agree what @Taemien posted was incorrect. My big FU sign after a team blocked every cave and build spot on the map and even walled off our base kind of and did fall into the complaint that he had never seen as Zendesk even clarified the reason we were banned as well as the original rule breakers.
This is untrue. I said āLetās say we have very good reason to suspect that blocks numbers are considered when a complaint is made.ā
At no point did I say that it was a fact I said āsuspectā there is a difference. I canāt go into this further but a team that I know let us know to be careful of the amount of building pieces used.
Thank you for clarifying the point you made earlier about ways to improve things. You made some good points. But at the end of the day this is a game and a game should be fun, if we are not intentionally cheating then the only thing that should control how we play the game should be the game itself by using in-game assets. I donāt think the majority of players want to be cross-referencing every action they make with a rule book.
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Why on earth do yo think this?
The Conan neebs family server is pretty well dead. Might as well be my private server. But I still play like there are 30 people on, each needing a share of the resources. Played solo the same way.
whaaaa 
We may not agree but when youāre right , Youāre right.
Correct, you stopped short of presenting it as fact. A lot of people Iāve seen here donāt stop there. They say, with perfect confidence, āwe were banned for building bigā. Invariably, when you press them, it turns out that they donāt have any confirmation about why they were banned. A surprisingly large number of them admits they didnāt even ask for any information at all.
So yeah, youāll excuse me if Iām not exactly trusting when it comes to this community. Just like Funcom has eroded the trust I had in them, so have the people on these forums.
āCheatingā? No, thatās not good enough. If Iām playing on a PVE(-C) server, thereās a myriad of ways how you can intentionally ruin my fun without cheating. And Iām not merely talking about dick moves like paving over the Shattered Springs with sandstone. No, Iām talking about stuff like walling in someoneās base, or building sandstone webs right at the edge of their claim so that they can neither repair nor expand their builds, or building an outpost close to them to pull your purge towards them, or walling off all of the newbie spawns on the map.
Iāve seen all of those. Those arenāt ācheatingā, but they shouldnāt be allowed.
And neither should be building āfriendship windmillsā in shape of swastikas, or telling a 13-year old player you intend to r*pe them.
Iāve witnessed those too.
Ideally, I could agree with a modification of what you said, something along the lines of āif we are not intentionally ruining someone elseās funā. That could be made to work using additional no-build zones, so that you canāt accidentally block content other people are going to need.
Unfortunately, the game is based on a rather old version of the engine (4.15) and heavily modified at that, and the official servers have crappy specs, so thereās a very practical limit to how well the game will run on those servers. As a result, you get another rule that tells you not to build stuff that will make the server shŃt its bed.
And on top of that, you have serial refreshers who get bored of the game but donāt want to let their stuff decay, so they make sure that all the land they claimed stays claimed just in case they decide to come back. As a result, you get another bunch of rules that tell you not to build bridges, villages, and stuff like that ā in short, to limit your claim to what you actually need rather than an orgy of purely decorative builds ā because if we let every serial refresher do that, we end up with servers where newcomers can admire all the abandoned theme parks without having a decent spot to build their own base.
So yeah, nice sentiment, but no cigar. Iād love to see Funcom make it possible, though, by getting better official servers and introducing an upkeep system to deal with serial refreshers. Thing is, theyāre stuck with this G-Portal dumpster fire for whatever reason, and if you even dare suggest an upkeep system, youāll get as much noise from serial refreshers as you get from the āreporting is the new metaā crowd. 
You can see how none of that happens on pvp though? Iām sure someone will pull out some random case of one of those things happening but all and all those arenāt issues pvp has. So like I was originally saying if you havenāt experienced pvp the way I have or many others than you wouldnāt understand that itās been completely weaponized to the point of many people leaving the game. I can assure you players are leaving a lot faster than they are coming. I can agree itās not all because of the tos but it certainly plays a large role.
We can all argue all day long because weāre on different sides of the fence and thatās not going to change.
I did agree with you improvements on the rules
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Yes!
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1 foundation wide or notā¦ that thing is massive if you actually built a bridge that longā¦ I thought you built one to cross the riverā¦ as inā¦ implying that itās maximum length is the narrowest width of the river around that zoneā¦ but the thing you drew there is hugeā¦
Hereās the bridge I builtā¦ and this is on my OWN server where I donāt have landclaim rules and this one actually serves a very useful purpose since itās near the shattered basin so this opens up the path to the north without climbing or getting off your horse. Anything āmoreā would be overkill imo.
Are you sure it was the number of blocks? Because one of the Funcom guidelines for taking action I believe is when building pieces are not used for the purpose they were designed for in an excessive manner. So if your ābig pvp baseā was one of those that used foundations for wallsā¦ then yes that is potentially bannable from what I understandā¦
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Because thats what happened in my situation. You kind of get to know who is who when they log in on the debug menu, and when you get a couple days of new players, then you get a banā¦its safe to make that assumption.
The line is to indicate where it was, it has nothing to do with length. It was to disprove the lie that I blocked multiple build areas and covered half the river.
Oh I remember that! People that found using the āmuteā feature too difficult.
For that there is a different āfixā which I and other suggested a bunch and Funcom seems to have taken some tiny step in that direction.
The weaponization of the reporting system can only stop if there are consequencesā¦ With the āwin at all costsā attitude often displayed by some, it is simply unreasonable to assume that allowing anonymous reports is a good idea and that people will use those āhonorablyāā¦ that was never going to work.
And to hold people accountable the anonymous reports need to endā¦ they took a step in that direction with introducing that ingame ticket system, however they seem to be conducing all stuff through their Zendesk website stillā¦
If I was them, I would ignore every single report where the reporting person isnāt clearly identifiable via requiring a login or something, otherwise itās just a free for all and yes, thatās how you ended up with a āreport metaāā¦ Iām pretty sure nobody would do that if there was a risk of actually getting banned and they had no possibility to do a report without revealing their identityā¦
Ah, I see! I thought it was that long 
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Players can use alternate accounts. Funcom probably donāt have the resources to validate all of these.
No I an not totally sure but we were advised by a very good source that we should be very careful when it comes to block numbers. I havenāt really seen foundation walls being bannable but that might be worth looking into. We did have some as well as some webbing. But the webbing was removed long before the ban. I should probably point out that the base was built before the rules. This base was also a good example of weaponised reporting. The other team were ready and waiting to collect as I dragged a thrall back to a non existent base.
Thatās not an issue, an account is an account. As for validating, that part is fairly easy and it would be part of the standard job. It does ofc depend on the resourcefulness of the admin taking on the ticket, I for one would definitely perform a few quick checks before taking action seeing as they have the tools and means to do it.
Iām pretty sure they have some internal tools aimed at admins, there is no reason why they wouldnāt have them 
Theyāre not as good as those used by Pippi modded servers. Not even close.
Yes, and? Oh, I see, because the infractions that are more likely to happen on PVE servers donāt happen on PVP servers, that means that no infractions happen on PVP servers. Do I have that right?
But letās ignore the fact that this is a fallacy, letās talk about the track record instead. You know they removed the ability to stack fence foundations as close it was possible before, right? Do you want to hazard a guess how conversations with the āi WaS bAnNeD uNfAiRLyā crowd used to go before that?
Of course, you canāt really expect people to know that fence foundation stacking is a TOS violation if the post that says they are is buried 100 posts deep in a non-pinned thread. But Iāve already said multiple times that Funcom needs to communicate better. Thatās not really my point.
My point is that most people who complained about āweaponized reportingā are unwilling to accept any responsibility, regardless of whether they come from PVP or PVE servers. In fact, the only reason they come mostly from PVP servers is that other PVP players have cottoned onto this and decided to take advantage of it.
To this very day, youāll find people who insist that they didnāt break any rules, only to change their tune to āare you serious? the rules are bullshŃtā when you explain that the rules forbid playing the way they think they should be allowed to play. Claim spam, for example. āHow else will I defend my base from trebs?ā Dunno, donāt care, you broke the rules. POI blocking is another one. āAre you kidding me? That makes it impossible to build in the āmetaā locations.ā Dunno, donāt care, you broke the rules.
And thatās why I keep saying that the majority of the āweaponized reportingā claims are bogus. Youāve got people who honestly tried adapting to the new rules and got targeted by admins. I know a few, because they presented their cases and it turned out that nobody can even hazard a guess why they got banned. But the vast majority of the rest turned out to be people who thought they should be allowed to play in a way that breaks the rules.
Letās go back to the example in this thread:
What you see here is someone who thinks that it should be perfectly fine to have someone scream the n-word into their mike or tell a 13-year old theyāll r*pe them, because using the āmuteā feature is easy. In other words, the rules should be changed to cater to them. Iām not even going to touch the concepts that seem to go over their head, like the fact that I shouldnāt have to share a server with people who canāt display a modicum of human decency. No, letās just focus on their attitude towards the rules.
And donāt let them fool you into thinking this is simply about āfree speechā, because weāre talking about the same person who broke the rule about building bridges and is now complaining about how thatās unfair.
So yeah, I agree that the situation could and should improve. But I trust people who complain about āreporting metaā as much as I trust @Nemisis here.
Wow, that really came in from left field didnt it? I guess some people need it spelled out in simple english to understand peoples points. Just because a person could say those things, doesnt mean you need to. Click mute, and the problems are all solved.
Remember, the world is full of all kinds of people.
Again, the real estate was built years before any mention of the TOS, and years before Funcom decided to slap 30 day bans on people for buildings. I never said āunfairā, I said getting banned on a PVP server for building is a bullsh*t rule. PVE is a different story, which is why I dont comment much on that.
Please try to be accurate if youre going to sling arrows this way.