silken you left out a category of people that break the rules: "your rules are dumb" unfortunately... I will just stop while I am ahead
I forgotten to add on my survey is staff needs to actually grade severity of mod classification beacuse all mods are baaaaddd.
I'm having trouble with the survey, because the question about major griefing describes things I would not consider major griefing. e.g. Setting fire to something and covering with water. To me those are minor annoyances because they don't damage anything and are easily removed.
I would agree that covering something with water (to a certain extent) isn't major griefing. If you could undo it with one to three-ish empty buckets, it's really just an annoyance.
The intention behind the griefing is to cause more damage and cover wide areas instead of just take a couple blocks. That's the reason these fall under major. Some of the worst griefing I've helped to clean up has been from flooding an area or buildings with water.
But there's different levels too, which the survey doesn't really cover. Burning down a tree shouldn't carry the same punishment as blowing up a whole base, for instance.
For the spamming chat questions, are we talking about punishment for the first time offense or punishment for players spamming repeatedly even after being asked to stop?
Over 100 entries in so far with some helpful comments and notes. Glad to see the input so far and looking forward to working it all together to determine changes for EMC.
So my view on the rules are this If a block is protected and someone trys to brake it and fails then that should not be an offence (now thinking about it idk if it is lol) More might come to me over time (also this is not a rule but how about a nickname for utopia like smp0 or s ok something like that)
Figured I'd also throw this into the open... I think the survey is a bit flawed because of the way the offenses are presented. It only takes total playtime on the server into account (changes in punishment based on playtime) yet it leaves out something much more important: did the offending player actually changed their way? Playtime on the server is an important factor I think (if you played for 5 years you should know what you're getting yourself into, though.. even vets can make dumb mistakes (I still feel somewhat bad about my "botched" auction even though nothing bad happened). But I think it's even more important to also pay attention to repeat offenders. If someone was warned not to do something and then still proceeds in doing that then I think that definitely deserves a heavier punishment than if someone committed a first time offense. However, this aspect was fully left out of the survey which I think is a bad thing. Just my 2 cents here obviously.
Survey is intended to get a feel of how serious players think we should take offenses, based on time as a player. Repeat offenders then use this scale as a baseline and increase if necessary. That being said, things like spamming, etc are not usually increased harshly because it's chat based and chat based offenses are generally not a 'you didn't learn your lesson' situation because most are more like 'eh, you slipped up'. Note I said MOST, not always.
In theory, though, offenses should be treated the same, no matter how long the player has been playing. An 18 year old committing a crime is no worse nor better than a 50 year old.
Everything on this topic is subjective, but to have a fair and balanced rule set to go on, it should be implemented blindly... (This just makes me imagine krysyy as lady justice which is just hilarious to me for some reason)
My suggestion for the handling of first time offenses, with exception of things like major griefing: Have the offender complete a tutorial explaining the rule, why it exists, and ending with a quiz to make sure they understand. I think this would save the staff a lot of time dealing with first-time offending players, make sure that the rules are better understood to reduce repeat offenses, and be a much better experience for the player. The player would log in and find themselves in a tutorial world specific to the rule they broke. Once they completed the tutorial and quiz successfully, then they could resume playing. If they did another offense of the same rule, then of course that'd be dealt with much more harshly.
One thing I thought of that hasn't been mentioned yet, I think, are 'Alts'. If a player's Alt is found to be griefing or using MODs, but the primary account is acting the perfect member . . . . off with their heads. That's my nice side.
