Public Blacklist

I posted this on another thread,but I wanted to give it more attention,because I think this idea could really work.

 

I think this is an idea that has been on a lot of people's minds. I am interested to see what comes of this but everyone keep in mind all the potential for damage here.

 

What pontential for damage do you mean?

 

Well there are a lot of things, but the fundamental issue is that the wrong people might get on the list. This can come from the way you accept suggestions for the list- who's word do you accept and how do you scrutinize it for malice or negligence? It's incredibly easy to mistake one player for another, hell I confuse JoshTG and JTG all the time and the former's name is twice as long as the latter's.

There's also issues in how you define what kind of person decides to be on the list. Cases like Muckymuck are obvious but beyond that things get really contentious. Do you blacklist everyone who griefs even once? If not, how much griefing is required? What kinds of griefing? How do you qualify how much someone has griefed? What even constitutes as griefing? I've heard many established members of the community say that they have alts where they grief. Some of them guards. Hell, I'm pretty sure MM griefs on alt accounts.

The thing is, griefing is a lot like pollution. Collectively it's a serious issue but individual cases are ultimately pretty trivial. Outside of teamkilling Rayne I haven't griefed in KAG, but I have in Call of Duty and I found it funny as hell. I'm sure that the vast majority of people who have griefed are otherwise legitimate players and when you start a witchhunt you may end up losing a large proportion of potential players, something that's ill afforded in our modest playerbase.

 

I think getting a longer ban every time you grief would be best, it avoids perma banning ( i wish we could do this ) and it promotes one to change they're attitude .
If say a first offence would be a one week ban, second offence two week ban, and so on, capping maybe at 3 months or so.

 

@Contrary :
I would suggest that guards controlled the list. Someone said that steam doesn't like global bans because people spent money.
So it would be just like classic guard system,but server owners would be able to choose if they want to follow the global blacklist,or not.

@Geti
Well that's a good suggestion,if anyone could make that,it would be nice.But I can't do it,I wouldn't even know how to start it(mainly the code part).

 

I think this would be better as more of a public community project as the guards are not especially active, generally speaking. What we could do is start making our reports public?

 

To go along with what I was saying in https://forum.kag2d.com/threads/changing-grief-policy.17574/

Maybe changing the report policy to allow all reports to be allowed, as long as they have at least pictures as proof.

This allows for a chance for them to be put on a blacklist, while not being directly banned. Marking reports with notes like "partial evidence" or "full evidence" would be good. Partial being pictures and Full being video evidence. Server owners can then go through both lists, either selecting individuals, "full evidence" cases only, or both "full and partial evidence" cases.

 

The only possible reason I can see where opponents to the idea would have a valid case is if this notional banlist were mandatory to all servers. The proposed banlist, like most all server features, would be optional to implement via an 'autoconfig.cfg' or seclevs setting, and therefore left completely up to the server owner if he wants to allow those bad actors in or not. I can't see how anyone could justify a position that forbids a server admin from banning or allowing whoever he damn well pleases; it's private property!

 

It's not a criticism of the idea per se, because anyone who agreed with me could just not sign up to the list (as you say) but I do think there's kind of an issue with the difference in administration between servers. I wouldn't really want to exclude players banned for stuff like mouthing off at an admin on another server. It would only take 1 server with a bad admin team to join the list, and their poor decisions would be amplified across the community.

If there were a way to flag up the nature of the offence, such that people could opt-in to 'griefer' and 'hacker' lists without the rest of it then that would be a nice solution. But it would also be more work on top of an already daunting task.

 

Looking through that all, it looks like it might have been easier to maintain with an official way to appeal bans. Rather than just have people shout that x is innocent. I think just a very clear cut set of rules would be a great help and I'd really like the list to come back. Of course I'm an idiot when it comes to server based stuff so...

Edit: stupid slow internet made me double post. sorry for the two alerts

 

If the central authority was quite prepared to eject servers with overzealous banning policies then yeah, consider my concerns muted.