EMC New Permanent Ban Stance

IP banning is kind of pointless for a couple reasons, and bad for another. that reason is, what if multiple people play on EMC using the same computer? does that mean because one of them decided to get banned the others lose out? how is that fair? and the reason it is pointless is, your ip can be reset and changed with about 5 minutes work at the slowest.

Ahh I see thanks for clearing that up, I thought this idea was good but now it's even better!

Totally agree... but you know.... there are quite a few people on EMC that think as long as you post a well written thread explaining yourself you should be able escape scrutiny AND a permaban.. heck, you might even be patted on the back for being an outstanding person. Maybe what this guy should do is enlist the help of someone to construct a "look how great of a guy I am even though I cheated" post for him....

EDIT:

Hey, they should feel lucky they are able to come back at all! If you got perma banned 4 days ago and the retro active policy takes effect and you fall into it, if you ask me when presented 2 choices:
1. Never be able to play on EMC again
OR
2. get to play a gain with a second chance but with a clean slate

well, I can't really see the argument for that being unfair.. getting to come back with no rupees and reset res is better than not coming back at all and still have no rupees or a res!

Here's the short answers to that.

Anyone that tries to go around the ban ruling - transferring rupees off the banned players lot. Will have action taken to remedy that. Alts get banned and friends accounts get the rupees removed from their accounts or banned as well. It's really on a case by case basis.

Permabans have never been for IP. We ban the account, not the player, unless the player has shown to be a rulebreaker on the other accounts. The main reason for this is many households have more than one person who plays. We don't want to ban another person just because one member of the household caused an issue.

If I got banned, does that mean krysyy should get banned too? Alt's get close attention after a player gets banned, but we won't ban them all unless they warrant it.

This is something I agree with, but I also feel that it's also partly combat-able. Eg: say for whatever reason I thought it was a good idea to go on a mad rampage saying a lot of expletives. Now, for the sake of example, let's say this is permabannable. So I've spammed, stuff like that, permabanned ect. Now, we all know that JackBiggin2 is me, so there's no reason to not ban that account too, since it's just a "fact" that it's me, and not someone else.

Let's go to another (this time real) situation. Bare in mind this happened long before this update. Someone is banned for griefing, they're gone for good, or so it seems. However, this player buys an alt a few days later and logs in with it. Now, they tell me it's them, and IP logs or similar could confirm that. They have an identical personality, act in the same way, do pretty much the same things ect. It's obvious that person is an alt, and they've said so themselves. So why doesn't that griefer get banned?

I'm not saying go IP ban the person when they're banned or anything - just to ban the known/confirmed alts.

sorry, but I couldnt help myself, you totally reminded me of this:

I see what your saying. And it makes sense. But you guys as staff have to remember, the general emc public doesnt know what stuff you can and cant track (obviously thats by design), so sometimes, like in this case, YOU know that you'll be able to keep an eye on this type of thing, but WE dont know that, so I just said what a few people were probably thinking: what about the people that try to get around that?

I see now that the staff has taken this (the circumventing) into consideration and have ways to prevent people from getting away with cheating, and thats good enough for me. I have to remind myself that sometimes that it's the EMC staff not some knuckles-heads in a basement, and that EMC is in very capable hands. That being said, I really like this direction. The innocent have nothing to fear.

Now if I am thinking correctly this fine morning, I would think that if it is a known fact that it is the same person that they would perm-ban him. I mean why wouldn't they? It is the same person with the same exact motive (most likely). If they do not have the same motive they would surly come to a moderator and tell them so that they would have a chance at not getting perm-banned.

Thing is, the person wasn't banned. Do I know what happened on the moderation side of things? No. But a member of staff basically saying "so yeah, you griefed. Here's permission to come back on an alt" just defeats the purpose of the ban in my eyes. I just hope so much that this new policy prevents that.

I can assure you, there are individuals (not going to name drop) that have been banned for flying/xray, admitted to it, then logged on with an alt account ADMITTED it was them using an alt account because their other act was banned.. screenshots were taken clearly highlighting the individual stating all this... it was brought to a mods attention, and they said there was nothing wrong with them using the alt account. Keep in mind, I cant speak for what arrangments was made with that player during their appeal process, they might have been granted the appeal, but from what I can tell, correct me if Im wrong here MODs, even if they know its a banned players alt account, they will let it fly.

That is what I was thinking. Coming back on alt would just defeat the point of the perm-ban.

Don't see why not...

Shur! Good Idea

Wouldn't you have to like purchase MC again?

Indeed.

~Cliffs Below~

Sorry, Chickeneer, but that isn't what double jeopardy is... Double Jeopardy is being charged twice for a singular infraction, after the case of that infraction has been discussed and decided. The question you were addressing is of actions taken prior to a new rule being enacted. This is simply a matter of knowing the rules before taking action. If, suddenly, EMC made it a perma-banning offense to have a 1.4 Snapshot thread, effective retroactively to the date the server opened, you would see that such a rule isn't fair. Part of the reason for having rules in place is to function as a deterrent. Without their knowledge, people who committed a permanently bannable offense 4 days ago will receive a reset if their appeal is worthy of a 2nd chance. Someone in this massive thread alluded to this, and that a "situation" where people realized they could have an appeal granted without repercussion led to a series of bannable offenses. It is clear in the case of these individuals that they would not have acted in such a manner if they were reasonably aware of the consequences. Thus, enacting a new punishment should only be active from the date of its inception (and promulgation of its existence) in order to ensure fairness, legitimacy, and a defined intent of having rules - that is, to not only punish people but also to deter them.

Dejaja, that seems rather fair to me. The player is not actually getting away with cheating, they are being punished by having an account banned. The punishment is not "you can't play EMC now" - the punishment is instead "you can't use this account now". Banning all alts would prevent a rehabilitative aspect of the punishment, and would remove a well-behaved person who has learned their lesson from the Empire.

In general, this thread has gone off-topic several times. The most annoying to sift through is the constant mention of individual players and their bans/consequences. For players like myself, who have no idea who PThagaard or WCG_Elite are, this is rather frustrating. Also, a few pages of this thread were dedicated to just discussion of such members... This clearly isn't the place for that, so why are you doing it? Without actually explaining the situation and how it relates to this thread, you aren't helping to clarify the point. It seems like a third of the posts in this thread are ban appeal oriented, but it would be much easier to see important related content if such discussion was avoided. Isn't off-topic conversation frowned upon on forums any more? (rhetorical question)

~EDIT~
Sorry for such a long post... Cliffs: Retroactive punishments and rule changes undermine the deterrent aspect of rule-making. Banning one account is punishment enough, while allowing for improved behavior on another account. Please stay on topic, the discussion of PThagaard and WCG_Elite's respective bans (among others) is confusing to those of us who are unfamiliar.

A similar loophole was exploited many years ago in the real world. A banker stole a measly amount of money from each bank account on his system (I cannot recall which currency it was, but it was the equivalent of, say, 10 pence or a quarter).

The banker was immediately arrested upon the discovery of his crime, to which he pleaded guilty. After a year, the banker was released to the world, with the gross amount of money acquired by fraud still in his account, making him a multi-millionaire.

Due to the pettiness of each case of theft, none of the victims bothered to take the banker to court over such a little sum- it would be uneconomic to spend time and money on court fees etc.

So basically, the banker became a multi-millionaire by cheating the system and taking a slap on the wrist from the justice system. Since this event, all banks have taken measures to stop there from being a repeat of this offence.

Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that this is a very good idea as those who have acquired their assets illegitimately will no longer be allowed to keep them. This means no unfair advantages over other players.

I have personally tried to stick to answering questions in the full broad, rather than individual situations. I know I have not completely stuck to this.

On your comment of the retroactive situation. I understand the full real life legality of what you said. However, at the same time, this is a gaming community rather than law entity. We obtained some new tools among the staff that was helping us catch people in a different light than we had before, but before fully analyzing what we had, we just acted. After that point we had people appealing to bans to these situations and realized that we needed to alter the system a little bit, and for the affect to heard, and avoid the future reference of ban appeals to come, to these current cases, we decided the best action would be to put it in effect of the usage of our new tools.

Now, it is important to know that no rules have changed.

This would constitute a rule change. Which is different. It would be entirely unfair to ban someone 4 days ago for a rule we put in to affect today. And we would not do that. What we have altered however, is the punishment. Which is never set in stone, subject to case anyways, and we are just simply letting you know how the punishments will be going from now on. We really do not have to tell you how you would be punished for the doing the wrong thing. We could have just started the resetting on our own, but we have chosen to tell the community, mainly because we do not like banning people, and we hope this deters others from doing it.

This is entirely different from the point you are trying to prove. No punishment is set in stone. However, the punishment for doing the things that land players in this position is "Permanently Banned" and any watering down of that punishment in any way after committing a crime that is basically written out as the punishment is "Minecraft Death" then thats a nice move on our part to start with.

The punishment for cheating is still PermaBanned. That hasnt changed. But the extent of how much we lessen that sentence has. Which is perfectly in our bounds to alter any time.