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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I looked at Darkk's post, and yeah, that was before I could have caught or done anything about it. I was just a normal GP at the time. She isn't here anymore, though.
No, not every ban in the past has been perfect. But in general, I've seen an improvement over the years in a lot of areas. I didn't include your ban because, as you said, it didn't originate from the GP team.
#3 is something I'm interested in doing, but I would have to get that cleared. I think Albus might have done it once or twice, but that was so long ago I can't remember anymore. I'll read up on the others.
Nobody on the team was asking for advice and dismissing it that I saw. I assume you mean CM, and honestly, I haven't read many of his posts in this thread since it seemed like he was explaining things on our side. He isn't staff at present. If I missed something from a staff member (I think the only other ones in the thread are Milo and Dread) please point it out to me here or in a private message.
There has been some quality discussion here and I'd like to thank everyone that was involved in it by offering constructive criticism thus far. Dread and are always looking for ways to improve. It might not be obvious that we have worked on a lot of the stuff mentioned here prior to now, but it is happening.
To anyone who hasn't applied until now because they're worried about old bans weighing them down, please apply anyway if you're interested. The worst that happens is you don't get a response. And in case this also needs to be cleared up,(I figured this was a given, but I suppose it must be said) game experience is a must, and if you have lots of it your application will stand out.