When the Mods are a sleep - The kid's come out to play!

what if, instead of a vote to kick system. when a certain number of ppl ignore that player in a day then they get kicked?

Off Topic:

How do you go about licensing? I'm very interested on how it's done. Do the students pay for their own license or does the school give out x amount of licenses that anyone can use?

On Topic:

A good idea. I think it would encourage people to make friends and be friendly towards other players so they can be 'on their side' when it comes to voting!

Our moderators only have the power to kick and ban players, as well as TP to a player (not TP a player somewhere else). Senior moderators have more power and of course Admins have even more.

We do add moderators as we find the right fits. However I would say that letting the community vote is a bad idea. One of the things that makes us so successful is our legendary moderation team. Jeremy and I have many years of experience in this area and have learned what type of people make good staff. Just because you have 100 friends on the server doesn't mean you would be a fair moderator or that you are someone we want to represent the community and set an example.

My friends set it up, I'm not sure how but they just downloaded one copy and people run it, it takes the files from teh school server to play, they connect to the server and presto! They don't pay a thing, and their school login username is used for their player name.

Glad to see I have at least one supporter

Justin I think that both you and Jeremy and everyone else are brilliant, but it's evident that tighter rules are needed.

That's why I suggested the interview part, maybe not even that but monitor a players activity in game when you're on etc. I think everyone would agree that either more Moderators need to be instated or that we need "Ops" or some sort of other player with power.

I am working on new moderation system that lets you easily file complaints either in-game or on the site. Having members of the community report incidents is key and we rely a lot on the members that do this. It is impossible to have enough moderators to watch every player make every move and stare at the chat 24/7.

This is the same as something like XBL. You can file a complaint, and you can ignore the person. Same thing here

When there online...

This I understand, but surely a good idea would be to give Moderator privileges to people in different time zones so that people will be covered at least the majority of the time?

Yeah, but XBL doesn't really work that well for reports. Why not trial run a voting system at least to see how it goes? We're all crying out for more protection and I think a trial would be a sensible way forward.

I will go back to my XBL example again. When you play a game on XBL, do you expect a moderator to instantly ban someone if they say f***? Or how about a chat room on Yahoo? Do you expect every room to have a moderator sitting in it reading every message? No you don't.

And as far as when there online, that is also not true. Just because you can't see a staff member doesn't mean they are not close by. If you message the moderators on the site it is handled promptly (ask anyone who has done this).

Protection? /ch ignore and report

Nothing you say will convince us to add unfit moderators to the team, this is one of our core beliefs.

Take right now for instance.

It's 6:50pm over in the UK.
38 players in smp1
46 players in smp2

0 Mods or Admins are online.

Yeah Justin I get that but...you wouldn't need more than one person online at a time. Comparing the Empire to XBL isn't a fair comparison since there are literally thousands of different lobbies for games. You guys have 2 servers for SMP and one Mod per server is able to control actions.

I never said add people who aren't fit. I've given my suggestions and I understand that you only want the bets of the best to moderate but please at least consider some of the things I've said? I'm trying to do what's best for everyone here and doing nothing is not the best.

/ch ignore doesn't stop greifers. I know you have to be careful with your permissions but persistent offenders aren't being caught often enough.

Please just consider these things Justin, I love the server and you guys are a great team but we've got to keep the community a safe place for everyone.

This is the trouble that arises with busy and popular servers I'm afraid. Unless something is done it will just get out of control.

I'm not saying your doing a bad job Justin, don't get the wrong idea. You have done a brilliant job so far. But the players are not dying, they are multiplying. (Did you like that little rhyme I did there?)

How quickly have I responded to this? I was just looking through private conversations were people have reported something and none of them went longer than a couple minutes before a moderator responded. You don't think we watch what is going on when we are not connected? For example just 5 seconds ago one player told another they were using an x-ray texture pack on smp1.

If say 15 moderators were online right now on smp1, do you think that is enough to personally watch every player and action?

We rely on the community to report problems so we can weed out the trouble makers. Trust me it is a lot better if BobTheBuilder goes 5 minutes without being punished for swearing in chat than it is to have a bunch of unfit power hungry mods running around

Again I am not against adding moderators, I am just against adding the wrong ones and I know it is impossible for us to monitor every player in real time.

Haha I am not shooting any of you guys down, I know you all want what is best for the community Just giving my opinion as well

Okay I give up, Justin I think you're great but I am stressing that you shouldn't add unfit Mods. I'm done here, no point wasting my energy.

dont worry we will add more

I couldnt agree more with you Justin, moderators are people that are given a massive amount of trust, appointing an unfit moderator would cause shear chaos and leave the server realling from it for several weeks... trust me Ive seen it happen on my server that I ran...

One mistake I made was allowing a moderator to have some of the priviladges an admin had so that I could go on holiday. I did this because he was the most trusted person to me and where I was going on holiday there was no internet connection. Long story short... I came back and saw about 20 new moderators, I was left for weeks and weeks being constantly nagged by players to become a mod.... "aww but this guy became a mod in one day yadda yadda yadda". Not to mention all the players that I lost from this ordeal, my regular player never returned and in the end that is why I decided to shut it down, it was never the same.

So guys, I'm sure Justin will add Moderators as he sees fit. The last thing the community needs is a wrongly appointed mod. Come on guys lets work as a community, the Moderators and Admins aren't gods, as much as I would like to call them that, they aren't... they cant be there all the time, they have lives too! What Justin says is very important, we need to work together as a community so that we can help "weed" out the trouble makers... Sometimes in order for the Moderators to do their jobs properly with regard to kicking and banning people, they require the help from us through swift reporting of trouble makers.

So guys, as with any community, it is a team effort, good communities can only be formed if everyone works together as a team... I always like to say to any team I lead "individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean."

I thought I would finish up by quoting Henry Ford... a great pioneer of the assembly-line production method, hopefully how you interpret it is the way you need to approach being part of Empire Minecraft.

"Coming together is a beggining. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."

Regards
MR2R2M

I sort of agree with this idea,bu then I agree with AusQB's idea. This problem constantly bugs me. Today for example there was a guy that was spamming the chat zone. Gwormn and I were in a mine.....then gwormns site of the lava next to him was blocked by the spamming. He soon fell into the lava and died. I agree with AusQB and we should hide the mods name so that people can't see them, therefor when they do the evil actions they get cuaght red-handed, but it would enable the players to talk to the mods, what do you think everyone?
Another BIG problem is griefers. I know we have complained about this so much and there is nothing we can do about it but today gwormn and I were building an outpost and some guy came over and tore down half of it. He was moving fast so the snapshots I took are hard to see the name. I will try and post his picture on there. And the thing is he did it right in front of us,so he knew he could do this when no mods were on and not get cuaght. It all pisses me off when people spam or grief.

+1 to this

I really don't see why ignoring and reporting here on the site isn't enough. Have you guys not seen the massive graveyard of banned players? If you break the rules consistently you will get caught. In the mean time... just ignore