Change ideas to Punishment & Appeals system

Hey,
So I wanted to suggest that somethings are changed with the way mineplex handles with punishments and appeals. Myself, and others I know have had some problems with the system for appeals, and the ways punishments are given. Whether it be getting a punishment with no malicious intent or having punishments from the past going against the player.

I feel as if with punishments, the player should have some type of malicious intent or constant behaviour when it comes to chat punishments and with the discord. I know there are warnings, but often, and especially with forum reports, the player won't get a warning before getting muted. It's not publicly stated anywhere to my knowledge where it says the player won't get warned if forum reported, which brings a lot of confusion to the player.

Another thing is, if a player is known to have a lot of people wanting them off the network, that unless the player in hand is clearly breaking rules like hacking or obvious chat offenses, the player shouldn't be punished. Often for players like these, people will try to either forge evidence of sorts, use old evidence, or report the player completely out of context.


Other than punishments themselves, I feel like the appeal system should lighten up a bit. Currently there is a rule where there's only 2 justified appeals per player. What I've seen on the server is where there will be a player who gets perm banned for a mistake, and then can't appeal because they used their 2 justified appeals 2-3 years ago. Meaning the player can't return to the server at all, even if it was a simple innap username or skin thing, they wouldn't be allowed back.

I feel as if the appeal system shouldn't be based around numbers of justified appeals, but instead around the situation. So lets say someone is hanging out with friends, says something that made since in the conversation, but from the outside would look innapropriate. In that case they get muted. They appeal, it gets accepted, and they move on. Later that month they get a perm ban because a friend changes their username, they change their username back, appeal, that's their 2nd justified appeal done. 1-2 years later they're hanging around the server, says something as a joke in mineplex discord, it gets taken wrong, and they're perm banned. They try to appeal, and it gets denied because they have already used their 2 justified appeals a few years ago.

Another idea could be that each platform of the server gets it's own 2 justified appeal. Someone getting banned off the discord once, and forums once, shouldn't affect the player if they get banned ingame, to where they can't appeal.

I think that if the number system isn't taken away with the amount of justified appeals, there should atleast be an option of some sort to win back a justified appeal in some way so the player isn't permanently banned from a platform of the server.

I know a lot of people on the network might not necessarily agree with these ideas, however none of this applies to hackers, or someone spamming innap things in chat. This is mainly for players who are active on the server, and don't have any bad intentions as a whole.

 

Hey there! You bring up a lot of points here, and I would like to give my opinion on some of them.

I see what you're getting at here, but with Discord, I feel as though a sufficient amount of warnings are given, especially with something such as spamming. For example, if a member is spamming, the bot will tell them to stop until finally after a few times, it will go ahead and mute them. Now onto the in-game side of things. True, forum reports are quite different as you mentioned since you aren't warned in the first place. It may bring some confusion, but once they look around elsewhere asking what [FR] means and why there was no warning, they'd find their answer I'm sure.

I honestly think this should go for all players as I don't think it would make sense for staff members to look further into a report just for somebody who may not have a good reputation per se on the network.

I honestly don't agree with this. I feel as though this would just give the player way too many chances. I honestly don't think that this should be a thing.

 

Heyo!

I definitely know where you're coming from with this. Although the appeal system was recently changed to become more pro-player, there are still multiple people who use up all of their appeals due to innocent mistakes that shouldn't be punished so harshly. One recent instance is someone I know who got perm muted for accidentally pasting an email address they had on their clipboard while trying to type the "v" key instead; they did this at the end of a message and didn't realize in time, sending it. They got muted after and had to use their second justified punishment appeal on this, despite not having any sort of ill intent towards anyone on the server.

A common response to threads like these is "Mistakes happen, but people should learn from them," which is true in the case of a slip in behavior. If a player makes a death threat in a moment of anger, they slipped up, and the argument of forgiveness can apply. However, someone's finger slipping onto their "ctrl" key while typing is a completely different kind of mistake.

I honestly don't think adding more appeals is the way to go. The situation has to be looked at both ways, and giving out more appeals can invite hackers or toxic individuals to appeal their lengthy punishments (or permanent ones) repeatedly. Cross-platform (in-game, forums, discord) appeals could be hard to keep track of for staff, which is a reason I've seen for ideas like these being denied. Gaining more appeals over time is another idea, but would end up being too complicated to be viable (in my opinion, and from what I can tell many of the staffs').

That being said, I think what you're getting at is that staff handling appeals should be more interested in whether or not the player deserves another chance, rather than disallowing people to appeal once they hit their maximum of two appeals. The flaw with this is that staff would then have to judge off of written responses who is more sincere, or more deserving of having their punishment removed, and this would be hard to judge fairly across everyone who appeals. Nevertheless, I agree that the effort should be made to alter the appeal system this way, so that if a staff member can judge from an appeal that a player had no malicious intent, that player should be unpunished.

Plenty of people get muted for joking with friends, and they're often told that it's justified because they technically broke a rule (often general rudeness). However, staff can't always discern the context of a conversation, as they're simply human, and mute lengths get progressively longer over time. With enough ill-worded or misunderstood jokes, players can be muted for months at a time for saying things that genuinely aren't malicious or harmful to the community. That's why context is so important; there are plenty of people I know irl who I exchange phrases with such as "I hate you" or "you're the worst" with, and when we say them aloud, they're laced with camaraderie; we say them because we mean the exact opposite. I know not to say those sorts of phrases, which can be misinterpreted over text, on Mineplex. However, a player who said "I hate you" to another individual, if they were reported right then, would likely be muted (I don't know the internal report guidelines, I'm just speculating from what I know others have said when being muted). If the exchange went like this:
> Player 1: "I hate you"
> Player 2: "Love you too"
> Player 1: "<3"
I sincerely doubt anyone would be punished. The intent is much more clear.

Another common one: death threats. This offense is punished more severely than general rudeness (for good reason when the threat is legitimate), but it's easy to say things like "<player> die pls lol" or "I hope you die" in the context of a game. I've had both said to me multiple times since I'm a defender main in Castle Siege; most of the time, it's someone I know, others it's not, but I tend to find it more amusing than threatening. I don't always respond, meaning those could be interpreted as actual death threats. Further, people have been muted for saying things like:
> Player 1: "please die <player 2>"
> Player 1: "in game <3"
The reasoning is that, if were all in one line, it would be a joke. Since it's in two, it's a death threat.

My point with all these examples? It's very easy for messages to be misinterpreted, and if a player making the appeal has a legitimate explanation or justification for their words, they should be unpunished. It's hard for someone making a report or issuing a punishment to understand someone else's intent, and instances like these are often treated as legitimate punishments because "please die" is a death threat (while "please die in game <3" is not) according to the rules.

A huge +1 from me on your opinions. I myself think the way to go, however, is to revise how punishments are issued and how appeals are handled rather than increasing the number of appeals (which is just putting a band aid over a stab wound, in my humble opinion).



TL;DR: Don't give people more appeals. Don't add cross-platform appeals all linked to the same account (Discord/forums/in-game). Add more leniency in how messages are interpreted and in judging when to forgive players for mistakes.

 

Mineplex should incorporate attorneys and juries during appeals

 

I think that she might be talking about a video game my guy

 

If the rule broken was sev 2+ that means there would be something either malicious, unsafe, or not kid-friendly enough to not get a warning. For Discord I feel like I know what rule you're trying to get at, but it's probably better to specify that rule change instead of us having to decide what needs a warning and what doesn't for everything said in chat/Discord.

For forum reports, it says so on our report guide right here -> "(Something that would warrant a player a warning in-game will not necessarily be sufficient for a punishment in a report.)" This is under the general requirememts directly under us telling players they need excessive evidence for severity 1 chat rules.

Normal staff do not know and would not know this. Simple as that unfortunately. As for forged evidence, it likely doesn't happen and they usually end up being caught anyways. We have a timer (2 weeks) for old evidence and there are specific que's which set off when x screenshot/video could have been taken. To fix this old time issue we really just need a date/timr on the scoreboard and this would be fixed. Until then, just don't break rules and there isn't much to worry about there. Reporting out of context doesn't generally happen much either imo. 99% of the time if something looks like it has more context or it doesn't have enough context, the report gets denied. Worst case scenario, someone said something that alone would be punishable, which in this case they still broke the rules regardless then.

If someone is perm banned/muted and its been a while and have both of their appeals used, we encourage them to appeal still. We understand completely that people can still have mistakes after a while and we aren't completely opposed to giving people a 3rd chance regardless of their 2 appeals being used. So if it's been a while since your perm mute/ban, try appealing still.

This one is very important and I recommend everyone read it. Here's the thing though, each account EVERYWHERE has 2 justified appeals available. Your Discord account? 2 appeals. Your main in-game Java account? 2 appeals. Your alt for Java? 2 appeals. Bedrock account? 2 appeals. Everything has 2 appeals. The scenario you gave just doesn't make sense to me as you said 2 appeals for in-game and 1 for discord. The appeal for discord shouldn't have been denied for 2 justified appeals unless you used both on discord already. Everything said in the appeal is also taken into account and whether or not the person handling said appeal will deny or accept it.

Above.

tl;dr - Your appeals idea is already a thing and the thing stated at first sounds like a general rule issue via Discord that you should talk to Toki about or make a seperate thread about. I say make another thread for it because that situation sounds like it can be a lot more specific instead of generalized and also sounds like it's towards a specific rule or two. Would be a shame to have it get lost in this sea of paragraphs.

 

There's no law that prevents the banned and the staff from going to irl court.

 

It’s a huge waste of time and money though over something as small as a video game ban lol

 

It is still useful though