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01-16-2017
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Banned
Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: Canada
Posts: 264
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This is ultimately the question you should be asking instead of insisting that your method is infallible. In the end, you and your team are the front facing community presence of Toonslab, even though you're only volunteers, because god forbid Xor, MD or unixmad make a public statement about something. You have to live up to that professionally and if there's way to improve then you should be trying to find them.
If you put your mind to it I'm sure you could work magic with the current tools available for dealing with problem players, specifically hackers in this case. You just need better approaches to finding and getting rid of them in a timely manner. You can't rely on code as you and I have both stated, therefore to do that, you have to rely on and hone your team's habits, response times and approaches to dealing with hackers or hire more effective volunteers.
Elder Scrolls Online (and many other games) had this problem early on as well - bots teleporting all over the world insta-mining minerals and other trade items. Zenimax managed to argue that there wasn't a problem for a while but it took them no time to clean up the hackers once they acknowledged there was a problem and they could in fact do something about it. edit: Yes, they have full access to their game and engine, but the first step of their solution was to acknowledge that there's a problem. Once you acknowledge there's a problem you can solve somehow, then you can start solving it. For future reference also, using [software] and then changing your IP after you get banned doesn't show that you have knowledge.
Last edited by Relic; 01-16-2017 at 07:48 PM.
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01-16-2017
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Banned
Join Date: May 2015
Posts: 934
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01-16-2017
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Modern Day Artisan
Join Date: Jan 2016
Location: Australia
Posts: 549
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When i used to play i loved if someone would cuss at you in pms admin would say "there is a reason the block option exists" but when it came to them they would ban for harassing an admin. I remember being banned in 2012 for asking an admin for the hat of a long gone player (had absolutely no knowledge on the game) and was banned because i asked multiple times without a response and was banned. lmao |
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cute frog
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 1,644
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The problem isn't that they're being banned enough. The problem is they keep coming back. Even if there are people dedicated to these areas, people will keep coming back.
Personally, I think there should be a portion of the application that gives situations that the player must respond to. Someone suggested this here and I've been an advocate for the idea because I feel as if it would give an idea of how the player would do in certain situations. Things like "You see your best friend who is an admin adding hats and multiple other items to their player account while nobody else is online", just as an example.
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of Orange
Join Date: Sep 2011
Posts: 826
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You're fighting a losing battle if you're trying to convince active players that continually banning hackers is ineffective. It's just incorrect in every single way conceivable. |
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cute frog
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 1,644
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01-16-2017
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Custom User Title
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Winterfell
Posts: 583
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Maybe they weren't checking the incoming reports - or were too busy dealing with another problem considering there are usually 4000+ players online. I would've pmed a staff member to check it out, but most of the ones I knew were offline(I did still pm them). The problem is, I don't even know who's a GP these days considering there's no staff list. But if the two GP were not busy, they should've just took the persons graalid/ gathered evidence and reported it to a higher up if they had difficulty banning him . Maybe they did, who knows. But one things for sure, this thread has gone sort of off topic XD. |
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Banned
Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: Canada
Posts: 264
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You're still telling us "you're wrong, but if anybody has any suggestions for us we'd love to hear them", so I'm not sure what to tell you.
Also, I would like to point out that often ban history/account history on iClassic is a result of someone being warned, disconnected, status reset, or banned for something stupid that isn't even really against the rules - which goes right back to hiring responsible, mature, objective people rather than hiring "xXInuyasha360noscope -looking for gf 13 yrs old-" because he's never been banned and then firing him when he throws a temper tantrum over somebody saying they hate Inuyasha and eliminating the person he banned from ever getting a GP job because they were banned. I'm again not saying that you should ignore account history entirely - there are some disgusting, toxic people on Graal who shouldn't be trusted with anything ever. But there are plenty of people with like a single status reset, or warn, or something stupid for a minor infraction - people who I'm assuming get overlooked based on what you guys have said, and mine and other's experience - who are much more qualified than my previous example. edit: to be sure, I'm not saying this inuyasha guy actually happened, since I suspect you'll point that out as a counter-argument. But in a less extreme way it seems to be how you guys are approaching running the GP team.
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Super Moderator
Join Date: Aug 2011
Posts: 724
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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. 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? 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. 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. 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. If that wasn't as much of an issue, I'm certain people would be a lot more satisfied with how we do things. |
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cute frog
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 1,644
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2. Again, you'll find a hacker in the battle arena like, every two hours, and some days there won't even be any hackers online. Staff already "patrol" the battle arena because reports for other things typically happen there. They can't just sit in the room and watch every single spar, because a) they would probably get bored, and b) there's always something else that needs attention. 3. What you fail to understand is that all of these things already happen during the application process. Again, you can't tell if a person will go rogue in the future. There is a training process for new GPs. If a GP is caught abusing their powers they will be terminated (and possibly have their personal banned depending on the severity on the situation). You just have to work with what you're given based on what they tell you. I'm sure if the GPs had a magic crystal ball that let them see if the applicant would become corrupt, they would use it for every single applicant they received. Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. There's only so much an interviewer can ask a person before they just run out of ways to evaluate the person. At that point it just comes down to what happens in the future with the staff member. I'm not saying you're wrong at all. Just because I'm pointing out flaws in your own systems doesn't mean they're bad systems. Again, no system is flawless. |
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Banned
Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: Canada
Posts: 264
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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.
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.
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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01-16-2017
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Banned
Join Date: Aug 2015
Location: San Francisco, California
Posts: 430
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We should all be friends (: Yay friendship amirite?
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01-17-2017
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Super Moderator
Join Date: Aug 2011
Posts: 724
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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. |
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01-17-2017
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3bad
Join Date: Sep 2014
Posts: 505
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I've had a couple of bad experiences with GPs in the past, I'll mention them if I feel they'd be relevant in the thread, but it's these experiences that made my ban history look like an encyclopedia (6 bans, last one was over a year ago) Anyway Jarace's post looks promising and made me wanna apply as I have tons of game experience |
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01-17-2017
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Banned
Join Date: Sep 2015
Location: Canada
Posts: 264
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