Shattered Kingdoms

It appears to boil down to disruptive behavior and sharing of private communication. We should at least include the names of the people who left because of the abuse related to exactly which players, otherwise it looks like an assumption. There are many factors that contribute to why people discontinue playing a game. It seems unfair and doesn't shock me that the blame is still directed toward the general attitude of 'they would still be around if not for you' and it doesn't shock me that many of the people on the ban list were openly vocal about specific staff actions they didn't like, while other players involved in locate grief jloots and trolling drove away players but were never punished IMO.
Not trolling. Please don't delete this.

I apologize, but I personally haven't archived the entirety of complaints I've ever received, that is to say nothing of complaints made before I was a part of the staff. One of the reasons I pushed for a web form for complaints is so that kind of thing can be easily tracked moving forward. If a complaint is important enough to be lodged to the staff, it's important enough to at least have some kind of automatic and easily accessible record of the complaint.

With that said, even if I had that information at my fingertips there would be zero objective reason to share the names of people who already felt harassed or abused to the public. I personally don't put that much stock in whether or not someone actually left or not, mostly because the behavior in-question is unacceptable regardless of what the final outcome was. If someone tells me that they are never going to play again because of X, and they decide to play again tomorrow, that doesn't mean they weren't upset about whatever they were complaining about. It's entirely possible that some of the people who left just changed pseudonyms and continued to play, it IS the internet, and a new identity is just an IP away.

Not to be overly preachy, but you are what you represent yourself as. Most of those people listed are literally only known by a pseudonym, possibly some IP ranges, yet in the history of having bans more people have been found to be ban evading by repeating a negative behavior that gets noticed more than any kind of dedicated effort to locate them. It's not surprising really, it's hard to change a behavior pattern that you believe is perfectly acceptable. I pushed for the list of permanently banned users to provide people some closure as some of those users rightfully have friends in this community who wanted to play with them. But that's what the list is, a final decision. Everyone is free to do with that information what they will.

Bans should only be used in extreme cases where you want to eradicate the player from the playerbase. For situations like these, these players are deemed detrimental to other players OOCly and need to be removed. I think this has changed since the 90s when you look at bans nowadays because they were very rare back then. Bans nowadays are applied to players that have multiple offense over the course of many years regardless of the severity of the offense. So from day one, the moment you play, every action can be logged and be used against you. From the players point of view, all it takes is to anger someone and those logs are used against you if the case isn't strong enough. Is that fair? I dont think so.

Ardith - Disruptive Behavior - Thats not even that bad of an offense...
Grep - ToS Violations* - Thats not that bad either?
Opey - Disruptive Behavior* - Was being disruptive the worst of his offenses because thats a bit much.

There is a strong sentiment among vets that IMMS are cherry picking vets to get them banned due to their past transgression against them and that shows with these players. The way the rules are enforced is similar to the three-strikes law in Calfornia. An example would be a person gets caught dealing cannabis three sentence, and they get a life sentence. There is also a strong sentiment that IMMs are just cherry picking rules that they may or may not break after the fact of their crimes to strengthen the IMMs case against that player. So my point is because current crimes were not enough to merit a ban, more smaller past crimes were added to merit a ban? Multiple small crimes should NOT carry a life sentence of perma ban. It should be deletion of characters, slap on the wrist, or maybe the threat of a ban.

I can sort of empathize with these players because to be the best player in any game, you have to push the limits of the rules to gain an advantage.

To tell you the truth Algorab, the list just angers players and vets. Because we dont know if we'll be the target next. Will I get banned next? Whats the point of playing if I'm just going to get banned without any warning. I could be banned for making this post because its deemed "disruptive" because I do see myself being disruptive by disagreeing with you and that could only be the tip of the iceberg. I dont know what you guys have on me and or is it enough?

Can we at least change some of these bans to a time-based ban rather than a lifetime ban? Though I'm pretty sure they've already served their sentence unless they are to be put to death.

You can be angry if you want, that's why I said you can do what you want with the information. I can't control how you feel about it, I think all the bans are justified, and the only error in some of them is that they didn't happen years ago. Have you spent literal years of your life harassing other players? Been warned on multiple occasions that following the letter of the rules isn't following the spirit of the rules? Is your first response to having a staff member pull you aside to get super angry, start making wild accusations, and then log off so no one can speak with you? I doubt it, on all counts.

There seems to be a lot of identification with these people from people still playing, but as far as I know, no one still playing has had fun making false accusations about staff members for the better part of a decade. No one still playing was asked repeatedly to stop violating parts of the terms of service only to essentially tell the staff to shove off, be more disruptive, and continued to do the exact thing they were asked not to do repeatedly from a proxy account. No one still playing the game continually gets their jollies logging in other characters to kill people with no RP to cause problems when they got upset about something that happened on another character. No one still playing is actively encouraging people banned for multiple instances of sexual harassment, including helping them evade bans, to keep playing to annoy people. None of the people currently playing are going out of their way to specifically find rules that they know will get them banned, and then specifically violating them to prove some kind of weird point.

If you want to play with those people, feel free. It won't be here though. To that end, I'm going to be locking this thread in a day or two. I don't mind hearing from anyone on this, if you want to chat about how I enforce the rules feel free to contact me at my e-mail found in the wizlist. But, since these bans aren't going to be lifted, it doesn't really serve anything positive beyond giving everyone the opportunity to vent about it.

If it makes you feel any better at all, I won't be coming after you for disagreeing with me on this, or any other reason unless you're goofing something up. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to even say who you played at the moment. Either way, I can only think of one player currently playing who in the past has had some questionable behavior, but they've been great lately, so I don't think anyone is even remotely close to a temporary ban, let alone a permanent one.

Your points are mostly understandable, but you lost me here.

All the players listed in the permabans topic that did not perform an individually ban-worthy act (racism, hacking) displayed a disdain for the rules, the immstaff and other players for years. All of them were punished multiple times over the years before getting the final banhammer (With maybe one exception that I'm not sure of as he was before my time). None of them can complain that they didn't see it coming, and in some cases they unerringly set their course directly at getting a perma-ban.

Acting like all vets are just expecting to eat a smackdown is over-dramatic.