Thanks for your response @Sol_Invictus,
The title was for the repost. This is our first IA ban for you. I updated it to remove the confusion.
You make some good points here. Firstly:
That’s correct, and an unfortunate tradeoff between the old block feature and the new one.
The old block feature locks you out of your account entirely, including forums, and would not allow you respond to any of this in forum PM or defend yourself here publicly. It also freezes your empire entirely.
The new block feature locks you out of just your empire. You still have access to everything else (including other galaxies) but it does not freeze your empire.
The urgency of the situation required me to choose which one of these was most fair. I decided that it as the latter. This is going to be improved though, including a Suspended but accessible account status that would allow you to defend yourself before the actual ban and possibly prevent it.
This speaks to your next point:
Yes, this is accurate.
However, although I appreciate your explanation and even understand your perspective, it is not sufficient defense for the violations. Here’s why:
- Discussing plans with anybody except your family is illegal
- Providing intel with anybody except your family is illegal
Your explanations that you were joking, the intel was 2 days old, and that it was not specific coordinates and locations, amongst others, do not make any difference.
If you share plans or provide target intel to anybody except your family, this is a blockable offense.
For comparison, I blocked @TheBigOne last year for doing less than what you did here. He was helping a relatively new player and provided advice about clearing cores, without specifying a system or a family. He got blocked.
Yes, this is very strict, but it is the only way we can fairly and consistently enforce a rule that is intended to forbid coordination outside of your own family.
Whether or not this rule is a good rule (I personally don’t think it is) is besides the point. If we have it, we have to enforce it. More on that further down.
Rule violations are for the staff to decide, not the players. We give as much information as we can to help players know, but ultimately the mods have to make the call.
We are aware that others use out-of-game messages to bypass this. What you’re saying here though is, now that you know this is against the rules, you’re content to just keep doing it but take the messages off site.
“Ok, then I’ll break the rules, and just do it elsewhere, like everybody else” isn’t a great argument to make if you’re trying to prove that you follow the rules.
The point is that the player who responded was showing concern about IA, and rightly so. Clearly this isn’t just the Staff who sees your messages as problematic.
Despite the concern, and explicit mention of IA, you continued. You yourself even mentioned IA twice in your own messages to try to downplay your actions.
Sol, where were you when I was making this same point?! 
I could have used the backup. 
I loathe this rule. I think it kills the social depth of the experience, prevents friends from enjoying the game together, and prevents people from helping new players (even sometimes their enemies).
I don’t know if you were around, but last year I removed this rule entirely and the community at large threw a huge fit over it. The compromise we came to is that MW keeps this rule but SN can allow unofficial alliances, hence the acronym UA instead of IA.
Still, as mentioned, as much as I dislike the rule we have to enforce it fairly and consistently when it is in place. This is the inverse of when we tell players:
Staff has to do their part as well. I’ve told Staff specifically that:
The point is that I agree with you, this rule sucks. That doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t follow it while other families do, you gain an unfair advantage.
You make a good point here that this is an unnecessary risk, which is why we the Suspended but accessible account status is now on our list.
However, in this specific case, your defense doesn’t change the ban. Therefore it is not our ban that negatively effects 4 other players, it is your actions.
This is something we often here when players get caught and then blocked. Despite the fact that they broke the rules, they consider it the fault of Staff that their family is suffering.
The truth is both. I will admit that our processes need to be improved, but I think players should also take responsibility for their own actions. After all, your family would have no reason to suffer from this process if you did not violate the rules.
Your criticism is valid, but players using it as a means to dodge their own responsibility isn’t.
I appreciate that you said you’re willing to accept that it is your fault if the ban is deemed valid.
This is a great question. There are 3 things here:
- Intent
- Severity of offense
- Severity of punishment
Intent
The difference for here for you is that you not only shared the info about the bug, but you specifically recommended actions because of it.
There’s a difference between publicly discussing a bug in chat and privately telling another player how to use it to effect their actions against another family.
Your intent here showed us that you wanted to share this info to not only provide another player with an advantage, but to provide a common enemy with a disadvantage. You directly benefit from this.
The original message shows no such intent. They are just complaining about the round and me breaking the game.
Severity of offense
How severe a violation is partially determined by intent, as described above, but also awareness and regard for the rules. If you know something is wrong and still do it anyway, that is a more severe violation than if you simply made a mistake.
In your situation, given everything we were considering, we concluded that you were aware that you were doing things that could get you in trouble.
The original message showed no such awareness, and was therefore less severe.
Severity of punishment
You make a good point that you were able to infer information from the message that was sent to you. As such, we’re going to look into that further.
However, whether or not this turns into a warning vs a block is something that requires further evaluation. It’s not as simple as “hey, this other person did this thing too”. This is why it took us 4 days to decide on your punishment after we already concluded that offense did occur.
I bring this up because players who get blocked often get upset if somebody else’s punishment doesn’t match theirs, because they don’t account for context.
If another player gets a warning, you might think that we are treating you unfairly. However, you’d be ignoring the fact that you made repeat violations, showed specific intent within the violations, and were aware that they would be seen as violations.
If the other player does not show these things, you should not expect that their punishment will match your own.
I didn’t change any mechanics, I refactored code. This is necessary work for us to finally fix several severe problems with one of our core features: battle.
Regardless, “to gain an advantage” and “to not get a disadvantage” are 2 ways to say the same thing. Coordinating with another family for either is against the rules.
As mentioned, there’s a difference between publicly discussing a bug in chat and privately telling another player how to use it to effect their actions against another family.
The former does not justify the latter.
We are not required to prove that we also know the specific location or time. We are required to prove that you communicated location or time at all, including inferred language. “Hey, here’s some info on that thing ;)” isn’t gonna get you a free pass here.
Let’s look at the exchange again:
[…] Luckily I take more than mods can retake…u know what that means…somewhere tomorrow
At least you know a little…should be enough
When I am aware mods and Pie are always on the prowl for IA’s than yes. […]
Clear and coded are opposites; you are using coded language in place of clear language to refer to information that the other player knows or at least can conclude, without having to specifically say it.
This is a dodgy attempt to circumvent the rules, and a poor defense, especially when you demonstrate awareness that communicating the same information more clearly would get you in trouble.
Going back to this one real quick:
Imo you guys have been looking for reason to ban me.
Remember, the mods who were investigating this and reading these messages didn’t know it was you until after they already decided on a ban length.
It was impossible for them to be thinking “i wanna ban Sol, and am looking for a reason” because they didn’t know who they were banning.
Keep in mind that bias works in both directions; not only do we want to avoid being too hard on somebody who we don’t like, we also want to avoid being too easy on somebody who we do like.
I admit I did not handle this correctly. Not only did my timing complicate things, I shouldn’t have even been the one to tell you.
Fwiw we are still working on this process, and will take your feedback above as proof that it still needs improvement. Thanks for the insight.
NONE is incorrect. You were playing by different rules than other families. This is inherently unfair. Additionally, you specifically put your enemies at an unfair disadvantage which gave you a relative strategic benefit.
Thus, the round’s fairness was compromised to your benefit. This is the whole reason a ban is necessary; to rebalance the imbalance.
Yes, that did also compromise the fairness. However:
- It was not a result of a rule violation
- The bug did not intentionally favor any specific family or player
The same cannot be said for your violations.
We addressed your concerns about poll visibility, and solved the problem thanks to your feedback. I’m not sure what your complaint here is.
Given the lengths we’ve gone to in order to ensure that you yourself were protected from undue bias during all of this, I can say with confidence that fairness starts with the bottom.
All of our actions here, from investigations, to round setup, to ideas, and more, all start with consideration for the players. This includes players who commit rule violations. This is why we’re able to have this conversation at all.
You’re presuming guilt without an investigation. And you guys call the staff here authoritarian?
If you’re serious about this, send us a report and we’ll investigate it. Until then, “every fam that has done x” being guilty is purely speculation.
That one isn’t, no. But yes, NAP talks do become more complicated because of this rule. Families have messaged staff asking if a specific message about a NAP offer is allowed. Sometimes we say yes, sometimes we say no and explain why. While your example is fine, this wouldn’t be:
we want 50 planets for a NAP. there has to be at least 1 from these 5 systems that we share with [specific family]
This is blockable. This would have to avoid mentioning the other family to be ok.
Ultimately, context matters for a lot. See my points to Sol about intent and severity.
When in doubt though, don’t share plans or intel outside of your family. That is a sure way to avoid any problems.
Yes, impersonation is against the rules. However, the players in question have acknowledged that it is a theme and not actual impersonation.
If they were to message players saying that they are actually the mods though, that would be against the rules and would be blockable.
This is fair question, no worries about stirring the pot.
We’re evolving this process as we speak, including finding ways to increase transparency without public shaming, allowing players to offer an explanation before the ban, and overall with an aim to be more consistent.
All of this recent work is long overdue. We’re not changing things up for the sake of causing headache, we’re trying to formalize things that have long been fast and loose.
Players have long been critical of our lack of consistency, lack of transparency, and lack of objectivity. They were right, and these recent changes are a result of our work to address that feedback.
It’s not perfect right now, but it is better, and everybody’s feedback here (including and especially Sol’s) is going to lead to even better results over time.
You’re right, the rules clearly state that impersonation is not allowed.
The rules also very clearly state that whether or not something is a violation is up to the Staff to decide. The Staff does not consider this theme to be impersonation.
Polls don’t decide violations. While we would certainly consider what such a poll means, we would not make enforcements based on it.
This isn’t accurate; the theme has been evaluated by staff and determined that it isn’t impersonation. The same for your hypothetical IA here would not be true.
Me too! 
And yes everybody, I’m aware that my giant walls of text take forever to read.
On a serious note though we are behind the scenes working to slowly remove my involvement from these matters. My time is best spent on the game’s code.
This has a good first step. I don’t even entirely agree with the ban length myself but I am putting my trust in the mods’ judgement and don’t intend to undermine their authority. In future situations I will ideally be even less involved.
Agreed!
However, as much as I agree with you and even @Sol_Invictus on some of this, there are many, many players who disagree with us.
My job is to not only listen to those who agree with me, but also listen to those who don’t. Yes, I could just make the call and do whatever I want, but we all went for years without having our voices heard as players. There was a time when that included me.
I don’t intend to repeat the mistake of prior admins, so I aim to balance what I feel the game needs vs what the players say they want. When I did remove this rule game-wide, the backlash made it clear that players want to keep UAs out of at least MW, so the rule was re-instated there.
This may not always be the case, but for now, that’s what we have.
).
Hyperbole is helping nobody here, unless you actually believe you have proof that 116 other players did the same thing you did. Let’s keep this productive.
Ffs you guys are impossible sometimes. 
