04-08-2013, 06:08 PM
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<PSA>
Apart from the games, other interesting things this week... the oh-my-gosh so dramatic bans.
Seriously. It isn't that hard to not be a total douchebag in pracs. Practices _still_ make up the majority of all SubSpace games, so enforcing rules just for the games that are the most controlled is stupid. Hence bans for pracs.
I refuse to believe I'm the only one who remembers the fun times of people randomly starting to SC to end pracs faster or get back the toys they previously lost on lag outs, causing other people to SC, etc.
Like, totally. It's not very hard to just let the bot handle most of these things. Yes. Get yourself a fresh ship if you "tablag" at the beginning of a prac and it burns you. Don't try to pull this mid-prac.
Most of the douchebaggery just leads to people not wanting to play, since nothing will make sense anyways. Pracs have been in a rather good place recently, don't kill the buzz.
While it might be super cool to totally rebel against... me? It kind of is a huge finger to whoever you're practicing with. I, on the other hand, don't give a rat's ass.
</PSA>
Schedule shall appear hereish. Tomorrow..ish.
Caer, I disagree with that. People ruining pracs only becomes a problem when it's actually happening consistently. You came across two incidents in the past two weeks, where the players in question only did something wrong once (and in Rage's case, this happened two weeks ago and he had not done anything else wrong since then) and chose to act on these in order to make an example of Rage and Legacy. Saying that this is what leads people to not play is incorrect. In fact, when the rest of our team found out that Rage was banned for our Sunday game, the captains were pretty indifferent about even playing league anymore.
I can share an anecdote from my experience running HZ for 5+ years: when the old sysop stepped down and appointed me the new sysop, one of the first things I did was abolish banning. If you've played HZ at all (which I know that you have, Caer!) you know that prior to me taking over, the zone was pretty much known across subspace for having some of the strictest language rules and having nothing but "nazi mods." Some of the policies and development changes I implemented along with getting rid of bans was to automate the zone as much as possible to ensure that things that could get you banned or penalized in the past were no longer possible. In HZ, the biggest issue was the strict language policy, which I replaced with a modified version of a language filter our development team was able to code into ASSS. To date, there have probably been less than 10 bans since the policies changed, and all (or most) for hacking/cheating.
I realize the anecdote doesn't seem to have a lot to do with the situation at hand, but where I relate it is the fact that in both of our situations we identified a problem and came up with a solution. I changed the system at it's core, so the problem wouldn't happen anymore, whereas you put a bandaid on it by banning two people and hoping that your iron fist would prevent people from doing it in the future. I disagree with that assessment. I think a better course of action would be to slightly modify the bot code that disallows somebody from re-entering a game from instead of associating players by name, to associating them by MID and IP. It would take a bit of coding, but in the long run it would fix the issue from ever happening again. Alternatively, imo there should at least be one mod on at all times. Rage's ban could have easily been averted if a mod was on to answer the ?cheater message, and had just speclocked him for the remainder of the game. Of course that would have probably killed the prac, since it looks like it was 2:00 AM and there didn't seem to be any players in spec willing to sub in when Rage's team lost a player, which is the only reason he subbed in to begin with.
TLDR: the zone should avoid banning people as a bandaid solution, as it harms more than helps. There are different (and better) ways of handling situations that right now are bannable offenses.
Adept | Critical Mass