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Just checking in again now. I'm curious as to what actions in the past couple years you guys have seen and considered abusive? I know that the thing you mentioned was an example, but it still reflects an assumption about the GP team many seem to have and I don't see any evidence for it.
That and the "all GPs are 13" deal.. What exactly leads people to believe this? The youngest person on the team is 15 and I don't think you'd ever be able to tell from how they conduct themself unless they directly told you. Granted, they aren't all adults (many, maybe most, are), but being an adult doesn't always mean you're mature.
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I agree that's It's a long-standing and probably not entirely accurate assumption that people make. There's also the unfortunate point that police forces in the US are dealing with now: a few bad apples tend to make everyone look bad. However, there have been situations where people have been warned, banned, etc for very questionable things.
I can't provide any specific examples unfortunately (I mean normally my situation is a painfully obvious one but that problem is way over the GP team's head), however I believe David and Thallen mentioned a few. Also, most people I and others have spoken to have been victim of or witnessed incidents where somebody says something harmless or something that isn't against the game rules and was immediately disconnected, warned, banned, whatever. If there wasn't some sort of problem there would be no reason for a significant portion of the playerbase to talk about it.
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I can only think of Soren as someone who actually abused their powers in recent times. Granted, I've only been in charge since recently, so some stuff could have escaped me. I still think I pay enough attention that I would have caught it being mentioned here, though?
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Dark mentioned something just a few posts ago, if you weren't aware of that you might want to look into it. Not commenting on whether he's telling the truth or not, just pointing it out. If It's not true or that's not the whole story you should clear that up since rumors like that tend to spread very fast and give a very negative image.
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If you think the beginning of this thread was the result of "abuse", I explained earlier that this wasn't the case. The GP is new and thought that he should warn him even if he was joking about impersonating staff, as was the case.
Since it was a mistake, it won't be held against him. When we're evaluating someone's ban history we check the evidence for bans and warnings to make sure they weren't mistakes that will prevent them from being hired. We don't want to hire someone who has been calling someone racial slurs or impersonating staff to scam accounts for years and hasn't stopped.
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Then that's great. And I totally agree that people who have a long, decorated history of breaking rules and being warned/banned shouldn't be trusted in a position of power. However it still stands that the impression players get is that if you've ever been as much as PMed by an admin you can basically forget becoming GP. Like I mentioned earlier (and Thallen/David too,) there were a lot of good candidates from the sparring community alone that were downright ignored except for Fulgore.
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I certainly hope you aren't taking half of the posts here at face value, though. If your evidence for abuse is something like "this user said this admin banned him for calling him hawt" then I'd like to mention that nobody here besides staff is held to any standards for what they say and that when I personally look into pretty much anything posted here about someone being banned for "seemingly no reason" it's not true in the slightest. In the future, I'd like to be more open about this but I'm not sure I'm allowed to. We will see.
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As I said, I can't comment on any specifics myself because I don't remember, but others have mentioned some recent cases, and many players have stories about that time they or a friend were disconnected/reset/warned/banned for questionable "infractions".
Since Jarace is asking, I'd encourage any player that reads this and knows of a situation let him know about it, since it seems he actually wants to improve the team and its image.
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If you feel the need to, private message me about it and we can talk about potential abuse there.
Dread and I addressed this earlier, but the system isn't perfect and until everyone involved in it is magically endowed with psychic powers, it won't be.
We're looking to improve the situation with spar arenas, and when a hacker gets away with stuff like that we do try to figure out why it might have happened, including talking to gps who were on and could have dealt with it.
A large barrier to communication for staff comes from the fact that we don't allow leaking, so we can't always tell you that there is already something in place or we already take actions to mitigate this or that.
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Systems will never be perfect, we can definitely both agree there.
There will always be room for improvement if you want to improve. Being more transparent about steps you're taking to improve and being careful about members of your team asking for suggestions while simultaneous dismissing/arguing against every valid suggestion will go a long way towards improving player's attitudes towards you and getting rid of the negative image that is being spread around.
That's something that the whole team and the employees of Toonslab can read and take something from too. Transparency goes a long way - if you want credible examples in the game industry right now here's a few examples to varying degrees:
1) Grinding Gear Games and ALL of their interaction with the Path of Exile community.
2) Stunlock Studios and ALL of their interaction with the Battlerite community.
3) Arena.NET and Riot Games have both run reddit threads relating to their games Guild Wars 2 and League of Legends where admins allowed players to claim their bans were unwarranted and then provided the reasons publically with screenshots and chat logs to counter the claims. This is a little extreme and can be questionable in some cases, but it was a very effective approach to raising player's images of the PR teams within these companies and also provided some good humor.
It's good that you and Dread are actively looking to improve. Take the valid suggestions and do something with them, often the people (especially older players who've been around since early 2000s) making suggestions have as much experience as you guys or more with organizing, running and managing things like this.