a pretty good suggestion

[Barsook]

Allow for discussion by the community.

Please no. That conversation is never going to be a pleasant one. Either dogpiling or fighting. Would rather not.

Same, but having a thread on who/why/how long is what I'm supporting.

[mansa]

It also is a lot of fun as a spectator to watch the drama unfold.

[betweenford]

Bans becoming a spectacle isnt really something I support.

[Halaster]

I'll go ahead and go on record and say this now:  this is not happening.  And by this I mean, publishing a list of who gets banned and why.

I get that it works for some other MUD's, good for them.  But we are not doing it.  We will not publish a list of bans, who was banned, why they were banned.  Nor will we seek a larger community input or discussion on why a ban happened.  I believe that there is some desire for accountability and transparency, but I also believe a lot of people just want to watch the drama.  They see their neighbors being arrested by the cops and want to find out all the gossip and details.   And, as Cnemus put it earlier, some people may make a mistake, get themselves banned for a while, but that doesn't need the public exposure so they can be mocked or made fun of.  It's a private matter.

If a situation arises where it needs to be made public, like with the recent one, sure we'll publicly talk about it.  But there will not be a list of who is banned and why.  Amos the player gets caught cheating and we give them a 30 day ban, that's not the business of the community (unless it somehow affects the whole community).

[Dracul]

Disappointing. I appreciate transparency.

[Barsook]

Fair enough and I respect the choice here.

[Dar]

I feel a little guilty by swaying this decision by giving an example to a list of ban announcement that was exceptionally toxic. lol. I didn't actually read them before linking them.

[Tranquil]

Yeah, I feel like this would bring more bad then good - and I am generally appreciative of transparency. It'd look like show trials, because it's not like the offending party could defend themselves publicly.

[Halaster]

I feel a little guilty by swaying this decision by giving an example to a list of ban announcement that was exceptionally toxic. lol. I didn't actually read them before linking them.

It was actually a fascinating read for me.  I went through some forums of theirs, etc.  I guess I should have known this, but it was interesting to me to see how similar many of the issues are with Arm and these other games.  They have the same kinds of communication issues between players and staff, they have the same kind of shenanigans going on by a tiny group of players, they have a lot of wonderful players, etc.  It actually made me realize how much alike we are to those, which I was fascinated to read.

[LXXXVIII]

Disappointing. I appreciate transparency.

Same.

This is the core of why this idea was alright by me and why I still think we need a change, of some sort: this game hasn't been fostering a culture of psychological safety. I usually dislike hippie dippie terms like psychological safety. But oh my isn't it apt in describing what this community needs more of.



The chart speaks for itself. The evidence speaks for itself. We've had three or so people banned in the last month simply for speaking different viewpoints that the staff found disagreeable (chart on the left). These people didn't metagame, didn't threaten other players, and didn't break any known rule. Delirium, Delirium's husband, and even that dwarf: they broke absolutely no rule besides expressing their views on difficult situations which hurt players. These players were trying to help other players and should not have been banned. Staff has never admitted a mistake in banning these people. They would rather blame others, or leap on opportunities to publicly cast out clear offenders like ibusoe to reinforce a false notion of common knowledge, create an illusion that their decisions to ban people are always justified, when the fact is that not every action Staff has made to ban people has been justified.

We need a transparent culture where decisions are not made to punish people on a whim. We need to more closely resemble the chart on the right. We need transparency similar to what this thread advocates.

It would help us all if we stopped settling for a culture resembling the chart on the left.

If I am somehow punished for posting this, it will completely prove my point that we operate like the chart on the left.

Thank you, and I hope we can all grow and become better people here.

[Halaster]

We've had three or so people banned in the last month simply for speaking different viewpoints that the staff found disagreeable (chart on the left). These people didn't metagame, didn't threaten other players, and didn't break any known rule. Delirium, Delirium's husband, and even that dwarf:

To be clear:

Delirium was banned by me because I got frustrated.  I apologized, lifted the ban, admitted my mistake.  She is welcome back at any time of her choosing.

Her husband was NOT banned - he has chosen not to play.  He is welcome back any time of his choosing.

"the dwarf guy" was a player who had been previously banned from the GDB and that was a GDB alt account they made to get around the ban.  They were banned for some pretty serious flaming, trolling, and general awfulness on the GDB.  They made several alt accounts that were also banned.  They were warned to stop making alt accounts to get around the ban.  They did it again anyway, so then their game account was banned.

[Brokkr]

I am going to be blunt here.  This is not a decision the community gets to make.  This is a decision the owners of the game have to make.

There are a significant number of bans that are the result of player behavior that essentially comes down to them going through a rough patch in real life.  Some of these cases involve very real mental health issues.  We know this because some players self-divulge these reasons.

There is absolutely no way underlying issues like this are going to be put in front of the community as a whole.  There is no valid reason the community needs to know any of that.

[kahuna]

Dealing with trolls is a herculean effort and kudos to the staff for showing a small peek behind the curtain of what you have to deal with running a mud. Until federal laws on cyberstalking start come in effect you'll always have people whose sole purpose is to manipulate, disrupt, and be inflammatory. It is a colossal waste of time and energy and I think that in certain circumstances they don't deserve anonymity. You don't need a list but it's important to address it like you did in the most recent example.

[Bebop]

I don't get why we're saying public bans aren't going to happen and a public ban just happened.

[HazelHomewrecker]

I don't get why we're saying public bans aren't going to happen and a public ban just happened.

The ban on Ibusoe was forced to be public specifically because Ibusoe was threatening to MAKE it public to trash on Armageddon and its Staff on various sites like the Shadowboard/Reddit and whatnot. So, by taking the initiative and just publishing everything themselves, they've saved themselves the hassle--and have provided the necessary proof--to show that he's unhinged, and that (most of) what he claimed were baseless lies conjured to harm the game out of pettiness for being banned.

Though, I've certainly seen staff jump into threads and be like "locked, you're banned" which is definitely more public than it should be, but that's just my opinion.

EDITED TO ADD:

All-in-all, I don't want to see bans become a public stoning situation, where everyone sits in a thread and jabs at them every time something happens. It's not necessary for us to be provided a player's name and a reason for why they were banned, not even for "transparency," because THEY deserve the privacy. I won't say the same for what happened with Ibusoe given the situation, but for people who might be going through a hard time and are letting it affect their playing experience? Or people who would LIKE to keep it private? It's not fair to them, not in the slightest.

[Halaster]

I don't get why we're saying public bans aren't going to happen and a public ban just happened.

We're not saying that.  We're saying we're not going to publicize a list of bans with who, why, what.  To quote myself:

"If a situation arises where it needs to be made public, like with the recent one, sure we'll publicly talk about it.  But there will not be a list of who is banned and why.  Amos the player gets caught cheating and we give them a 30 day ban, that's not the business of the community (unless it somehow affects the whole community)."

[Lotion]

This is a decision the owners of the game have to make.

Who owns the game?
In my mind the notion that ArmageddonMUD is a thing to be owned is truly boggling.

[HazelHomewrecker]

This is a decision the owners of the game have to make.

Who owns the game?
In my mind the notion that ArmageddonMUD is a thing to be owned is truly boggling.

I think he meant like.. the staff at-large--Producers, Admins, etcetera.

[Halaster]

This is a decision the owners of the game have to make.

Who owns the game?
In my mind the notion that ArmageddonMUD is a thing to be owned is truly boggling.

At any given moment, the Producer team owns the game, it's been that way since soon after inception.  All games are owned by someone.  Blizzard owns WoW, Nintendo owns Mario, etc.

[Miradus]

Who owns the game?
In my mind the notion that ArmageddonMUD is a thing to be owned is truly boggling.

It's a physical box sitting somewhere and someone is paying for the electricity, the floor space, the hardware itself, and the bandwidth you use to connect to it.

Of course it's owned.

[tiny rainbow]

Authority can go wrong. Authority can make mistakes. Making structures that have the presumption that anything an authority says can never be challenged has another word for it - fascism. It all sounds a great idea until you've seen the kind of mistakes that can be made.

Give you an example - my most RECENT request, trying to organise a plot:

• I mentioned happily something I really enjoyed in Armageddon one time, finding something out one time in the same place. It also helped make my point to prove that I knew what I was talking about when it comes to the lore of the area, and notice things sometimes staff don't I wish this was more a rare weird thing to be proud of!

• They said the link to the report didn't work even though it had a correct ID, I linked it again the other way, and also copypasted as they asked. It clearly had a (hundreds of days ago) bit at the start.

• But then I get a pretty random-seeming reply to this vaguely related hundreds of days ago copypaste from the resolved request (which I'd linked to properly twice beforehand) instead, and the original request is closed! AND a weird statement about it not being important that something that was removed hundreds of years ago IC is mentioned as being visible from other rooms (which is also disregarding the idea of lore/the game world making any sense) - worse was it was also completely untrue, it was fixed literally hundreds of days ago (and easy to see in game by any staff that is able to move around in the game world), I thought that was the whole point of keeping old requests It didn't make me enthusiastic about trying to organise new plots in future, at all.

It's just like there's no sanity check before things get decided and locked forever with no reply - I've had this feeling a few times that no one really checks entirely into what is going on with situations (players can be incredibly manipulative when they want an IC leadership position etc - I found out later one player I had an issue with in a complaint turned out to have given hard drugs to teenagers to get them to appear in music videos which is like some kind of Weinstein horror story), and it makes me feel really bad, because you should be able to rely on staff with stuff like that.

Applying this same kind of model to punishments is a horrible path to go down.

[tiny rainbow]

It's also for these kind of reasons that most countries don't engage in the practice of pillorying people anymore. Some countries like to publicise everything, but it's just one of those weird things since it seems like the decisions that are more grounded in research seem to support that it doesn't help society overall to treat people like that, and most only publicise in cases of severe, incredible wrongdoing (like the case mentioned) - it's the norm in most places to deliberately forget things after a certain amount of time, even. To try give people chances to change instead of condemning forever unless the danger is too high, because no decision can be assumed to be truly infallible and without bias.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sq12wl37WQ - this kind of thing can also make people who have genuine (not faked, like this recent thing, which is one of the few examples I can think of where it's justified) grievances into villains, because they can't get justice any other way. It turns it into a massive us and them situation, where the path for talking gets burned and salted - it's not good for communities or anyone that has to deal with it - Armageddon seems like it's ahead of a lot of places in allowing us to talk about these things, when you see how bad things can get.

[Dan]

Glad it's not happening. Mind your business people, someone else's ban isn't your problem and it doesn't affect you... unless it does somehow, then take it up with staff.

Dragging out and publicly broadcasting negative behavior and subsequent bans on a regular basis does nothing good for the community. They should be rare, quick and clean. If additional information needs to be provided for the good of the community because something is higher profile, so be it.

[creeper386]

I completely agree with dragging players out into the open for public humiliation isn't a good thing.

There is benefits to knowing how rules are being applied and how. Allowing and documenting expectations and showing shifts in how policies are applied. These are all beneficial things that can also allow input if things are going in a direction that the populace doesn't support.

Otherwise, and I've seen this happen before, you end up with a staff that might be shifting in one direction, ostracizing parts of the player base to the point where there are just a small niche of players that the game might as well be dead.

[Filthy_Grey_Rat]

oh man, this got long and quickly.

Um, I don't think it's a good idea for bannings or other punishments to become public by a change in policy. That psychological safety chart proves it. If I can't make a mistake without the entire GDB commenting on it, dissecting it, drawing inferences from it, and claiming they have science to prove their theories about it, I can't safely learn from my mistakes. There's a lot of posts in here that reaffirm my fears of even posting at all on the GDB, because, I mean,  look at all them replies. Nope.

And when it's necessary for the community or the game to make it public, clearly, it will be.


ETA: Wow I got sidetracked.

The Good Suggestion in that clip or quote, was 'Keeping evidence'. Ban a player? Enact a punishment? Tuck the receipts away with a clear label filed under 'Don't even look at, these are just for security, not for skimming' or something. Or just the top tier printing a copy, idk. Surely you all know what I mean.