State of Bans in EchoRP
To keep this brief the way that the rules are structured and staff conduct bans discourages roleplay and encourages people to interact only with their own bubble and people they know/trust.
The truth is the more you interact with other players and interact with the mechanics in the server the higher chance you have of getting banned. No one is perfect and people make mistakes, no one should be rewarded for avoiding people and sticking only to themselves and their community. This happens because the server is so large in size that staff rely on player reports compared to staff overview. The solution isn't to just eliminate player reports but it brings in to question the system that Echo uses both to select staff and to enforce punishments on members of the community.
Punishment: Ranking the quality of RP on the number of bans someone has received is inherently flawed. Someone with amazing RP that interacts more with the server, its mechanics, and its different people/communities has a higher chance of being ranked (RP Wise) below someone with worse RP that never has left their niche group and spends their entire time on the server basically VRChatting. That is why the system of bans NEEDS TO CHANGE. The current way the ban system is set-up means that if you have more prior bans than the length of the punishment you receive will scale up (depending on the situation). Based on the information above however this doesn't encourage higher standards of RP in fact it actually discourages them. Obviously someone that has been banned 3 times in a month should receive a harsher punishment than someone that has never been banned. But staff need to a put a time limit on bans where a few months after a ban has been issued it gets removed from the record. That leaves a window of time where if people really are hurting the integrity of RP enough they do receive harsher punishments, but it also means that if you go for 6 months without any rule breaks that when inevitably you break a rule in the future your not fucked. (Obviously its not inevitable but it is very unlikely)
Staff Picking: This system of bans and priors is especially relevant in staff decisions. A big portion of whether a staff member is brought on is based on how many bans they have received in total. This means that a lot of the times people with squeaky clean records get a much higher chance of becoming staff when in reality these people are out of touch with the server. That's because they don't spend nearly as much time interacting with the broad variety of groups and communities within the server. Meanwhile people that have spent countless time RP'ing and interacting with all sorts of people are way more likely to have more bans meaning less of a chance of becoming staff. This leads to a staff team that does not relate/understand nearly enough groups/communities that exist within the server.
Transparency: There has been multiple occasions within groups where staff notice a negative pattern within a group of people or a single person IE: Their plans are low quality, they shoot too much, they hit to many jobs, etc. Staff will then notice these patterns and hold onto them until eventually a ticket is opened, at which point they will use these reasons to enforce a harsher ban then would've originally been given for the one scenario the ticket is about. Almost 100% of the time people in the server don't want to break the rules, if staff notices a pattern or something wrong that a group is doing instead of holding onto that information they should be transparent with the party that what they're doing will lead to a ban and/or is hurting the integrity of RP on the server. Instead of waiting for a ticket to happen staff should take action to notify people before further rulebreaks/bans happen
Overall: Less RP and more time spent VRchatting with your friend group means you will almost never get banned. Interacting with the server and both cops, crims, gangs, etc means you will more than likely receive a ban. That means that less RP is encouraged by the ban system. The solution would be to eliminate priors after a set amount of time. It also means that staff should look more into the roleplay of people that aren't getting banned and less into the ones that are. (There are obviously exceptions)
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Comments6
Sass
Jul 9, 2024
PinnedWe think that there is some merit to some of the suggestions that you made, Jonah, and those will be taken under review by the upper-staff team for consideration. For instance, while we don’t think that it’s necessary to have a time limit where bans get “removed” from a record, we can bring the team back to analyzing the weight of previous issues and if they are comparable, or relevant, to the situation at hand.
It’s not easy to just enact immediate change for a community this large, as every minor change is met with a huge impact. There is simply no way to appease every single individual player, or even every group, that exists on our server- but we try to be as fair and compromising as we reasonably can be for a player-base this size. We are already currently reviewing our Ban Appeal process, among other things.
Anyways~ just wanted to mention that yes, of course, we have seen your post and have taken some points from it back for discussion. Thanks for taking the time to list some of these things out.
And while I appreciate the concerns that you took the time to write out ~and, Flawws, the team, and I do take all feedback seriously~ I do find it necessary to address some of the misinformed claims made in your message for transparency sake. I feel as though many of the statements you made are insulting and a disservice to both our community base and the staff.
Firstly, regarding the structure of rules and staff conduct- To state that "the way that the rules are structured and staff conduct bans discourages roleplay and encourages people to interact only with their own bubble and people they know/trust" is just a really broad and unfair generalization. The goal of the structures of the rules and the staff’s conduct in relation to the rules is literally just to maintain a fun, fair, and immersive roleplaying experience for everyone.
The rules are there to give an outline of the expectation of a person’s roleplay quality while on the server at the most basic level. It’s quite impossible to predict and cover every type of scenario that could possibly be against our standards, so it’s important for us to only highlight the umbrella issue or the core issue where the rule breaks will lie. And similarly, the staff’s conduct expectations are designed to ensure a level of consistency and fairness when enforcing the rules on the community overall. 🙏 I really feel that the assertion that you made that the rules “discourage roleplay” just totally disregards the majority of players who actively engage with the broader community and are able to do so without receiving punishments. There are plenty of players in our community who are able to adhere to our basic standards AND provide great roleplay to diverse groups of people. I just feel it really insults and undermines their efforts to say otherwise.
And to kind of touch on your note about player reports- yes, the team is small 🤏 in comparison to the amount of players that we allow on the server at a time, and we do rely partially on player reports to take action against poor roleplay. Player reports help us identify issues that staff might not catch in real-time, given the size and activity of the server. The system does work though. 👍 Each report is thoroughly investigated before any action is taken. I mean, honestly, the EchoRP team has been at this for a long time, and we’re quite aware of the fact that people weaponize player reports against their opposition. We can’t, and don’t, assume that the reporting party is always innocent of wrongdoing, or 100% truthful. Plenty of people have experienced this first hand when they’ve reported someone/something/a scenario, and in turn themselves received a punishment for their part of the scenario.
In addition to this, staff members can and do spectate groups of players, without having to have a player report active, and due to this plenty of people have found themselves at the receiving end of punishments. 🫡 We find that often when people get comfortable around a group of people, that they disregard the rule set entirely and the quality of the roleplay can drop. 😶 Some players will treat their little corner of the map as a lawless space where they can break rules in the safety net of their group- OOC conversations, targeted harassment and toxicity aimed at other players, and various other kinds of rule breaks. Unfortunately, sometimes those behaviors bleed out when around people who are not accustomed to how these groups roleplay, and they get reported by those other players. Until they do, the staff have to take their own action to ensure that all players in the server are actively roleplaying and minding the rules. We do our best. 🤲
In regards to your comments on Punishment; I am not sure where some of this misinformation comes from. 😅 Each type of rule has a minimum standard set by the administrative team and that is enforced by the entire team. No one is getting banned 3 times in a month 🤣 that’d be extremely concerning. Most people aren’t getting a ban every month, nor every other month.
In my experience here over the past four years, people make mistakes occasionally. That’s very human of them. It is not an issue unless they are consistently breaking rules.
For punishments, I think that it’s important to understand that you really have to look at it from the staff’s point of view as well. If you’re a staff member and you’re looking at concrete evidence that John Doe has participated in a very obvious GP>RP situation, then you take a look at his record and notice that this person has received multiple other GP>RP bans before in their lengthy career on EchoRP - that would be a huge red flag. And it should be. That happens. In these circumstances, the staff might increase the minimum standard for that type of ban - because clearly it’s not clicking that GP>RP is not acceptable on EchoRP, right?
➡ But, it doesn’t really need to be the same type of ban directly for us to do this. Some rule breaks are much heavier and more serious than others and should leave a pretty impactful “stain” of sorts on people’s records. Realistically, if we are consistently talking to a player about all kinds of different rule breaks and we are having to have these conversations often, then it shows a lack of care on their end for understanding our rules. We shouldn’t have any player in the community that is consistently breaking the same rule, or constantly breaking many rules which are specifically outlined to them- especially not when we provide the opportunity for players to communicate with staff if they have questions about the rules. 🤷♀
In regards to Staff Picking, you made the comment that "a lot of the times people with squeaky clean records get a much higher chance of becoming staff when in reality these people are out of touch with the server. That's because they don't spend nearly as much time interacting with the broad variety of groups and communities within the server". I find that statement to be really distasteful, 🫤 and not only inaccurate but also extremely dismissive of the dedication and hard work of our staff members.
I have been on the EchoRP staff team since July of 2020, where I started out as a normal player, long before I ever was brought up into the administrative or ownership roles of the server. I help create those standards now, so I promise I have a pretty good handle on what sort of people actually are looked at for the team- based on experience and actual knowledge.
Our staff selection process considers many varying factors, including:
The player’s roleplay experience
Their preferred types of roleplay while in the server
Their involvement with the community - both in and out of the server
Our understanding of their personality and view of the server
Their maturity and ability to be professional if needed
Their understanding of the server’s dynamics and goals, and, yes
Their understanding of the rules
Most of our staff are deeply involved in so many different aspects of the server - policing on the server, criminal activities, gang life interactions, business ventures, civilian activities, high and low level government structures - they’re the people who are interacting with a wide range of players and little sub-communities on the server every single day. To claim that they are “out of touch" is to ignore their own individual commitment and the countless hours that they choose to volunteer and dedicate to ensuring a positive experience for our community. 🤷♀
Not to mention that there are, and have been, plenty of staff members who joined the staff team with a history of punishments on their record, and plenty of them who have made mistakes and been banned while volunteering on the staff team. 🫥
To put it plainly, the number of bans a person has, or doesn't have, doesn’t correlate to how much they relate to or understand the needs, wants, and functions of the different kinds of groups that exist within the server. And it doesn’t inherently disqualify a person from being able to join the team.
The biggest expectation on the staff team is to understand what the overall goal and expectation is for the server, as set by Flawws (and myself), and then holding each individual player accountable to that expectation.
Anyways, like I stated before - thank you for taking the time to express your views. Our team is committed to listening to our community and making the necessary adjustments to enhance everyone's experience on the server, and that is easier done when people take the time to address concerns in the appropriate ways, with verifiable information and fact- and not assumptions or rumor.
We look forward to looking into some of these issues raised.
Jonah
Jul 11, 2024
My point in this post was never to discredit the staff team or attack any group or individuals, if it came across that way it’s my fault in wording that. The ultimate objective of my suggestion was hoping to improve 3 core things and that is Ban Length, how Bans Stack, and Staff Picks.
I want to start by addressing your point about facts/evidence and you are right a lot of the claims I make are generalizations and they don’t apply to everyone or the whole community. As a member of this community most of my “evidence” comes from personal anecdotes and I feel that directly citing those stories would only hurt my point and bring in other people that had no interest in being involved in the discussion, however, I have also spent over 3 years in this server and I have met and heard countless different perspectives on this issue but I admit that its impossible to not have some bias in some of my opinions.
Firstly, your point about the structure of rules and staff conduct, my claim that rules are structured to discourage roleplay is an over exaggeration and meant to cause a little bit of shock, I don’t think that the staff teams objective was ever to harm the roleplay experience, my point was more so to outline how certain tactics in enforcing rules and the way their written can lead to unnecessary consequences. One of those consequences being a decrease in quality roleplay.
Secondly, my point about player reports was never that they’re a bad system and I even stated that I think they are necessary, it was more so to point out that if you stick within a group your less likely to be player reported (because they’re your friends) opposed to people that interact with a broader variety of groups. My objective in saying that was just to add to my point that it’s a lot easier for people that don’t roleplay outside their group to get away with breaking rules. Never would I claim that staff don’t investigate player reports thoroughly or that we should eliminate player reports ever.
On your point about Punishment, I’m not sure exactly what your referring to when you talk about misinformation, if you’re referring to my point about people getting banned 3 times in a month that was more a generalization to show I agree that repeated offenses deserve extended punishment.
I also understand that their is a minimum standard punishment for certain rules and part of my argument is that the minimum punishment for some rulebreaks is too long. It’s hard to outline exactly which rulebreaks I believe should be reduced just because of the vast number of different rules but generally I feel besides, metagaming, unfit, GP>RP, RDM, VDM, exploiting, NVL, and cheating that a lot of punishments simply last too long. (I probably missed some). I already have heard staff response to this in that when a community becomes so large harsher punishments are needed to enforce a higher quality of roleplay. In my opinion however, I disagree with this on some level for instance someone that gets caught spam punching or spam jumping i have seen receive a week ban, to me that just seems like an unnecessarily long punishment, most of the time people aren’t trying to break rules and want to roleplay well. Super long punishments can just end up hurting roleplay in regards to minor mistakes and rulebreaks.
Also you go on to discuss how someone with repeated infractions deserves to receive harsher ban lengths and to that I 100% agree, I think where we disagree however is on how long between those infractions a harsher punishment should be enforced. I have seen servers implement a point system on bans where bans accumulate points and then after a certain amount of points have been accumulated a player receives harsher bans all the way up to a permanent ban. To me a system like this where points add up and then after 3-4 months your total points goes down by one seems like a good way to keep bans fair and also to create a clear system for players to understand about when they will receive harsher punishments and bans. Its about transparency too people would love some outline and standard on how long the punishment for certain rulebreaks are, how many rulebreaks in a row necesitates increased punishment, etc.
Lastly, on staff picking, I feel this area is where me and you disagree the most. I’d first like to point out that yes, I do not have the experience, knowledge, or understanding that you or other staff have, I have never been a staff member or participated in the process of trying to become one. My perspective comes completely from the outside and even if I may get some things wrong I do feel I represent a valuable point of view as someone outside the staff system that maybe could contribute to discussion or help staff understand how people outside that system see things. I can’t speak on how directly bans affect staff choices as I simply am not sure but I do know that I have met multiple people in this community that I think offer a unique and good perspective that have been denied from the staff team and the only thing I have found wrong with their application in comparison to people I do know that have gotten on the staff team is their ban count. I absolutely do not want the takeaway from this conversation to be that the staff team is bad and that any people on it don’t deserve to be there. I just feel that some people that do deserve to be there were left out because of their ban amount.
More than ANYTHING however I absolutely disagree with your point on the staff team being equally involved in different aspects of the server. From simply observing the staff team there is a clear unequal representation of Civs & Cops on the mod team. From observing the mod list by looking at both the EchoRP website and discord (Not including some mods that were removed). I counted a total of 2 mods that have active crim characters (Correct me if I’m wrong) and both of them are in the same gang. Knowing how large the criminal community is in echo it makes no sense to me how little of the staff team is represented by people with a crim understanding. There is at least 5x the cop representation and over 6x the civ representation. (Includes business owners/government). That doesn’t make sense to me and I don’t fully understand the reason and I again want to emphasize EVERYONE there deserves their place in staff its more about who could be in staff that isn’t.
As a whole I feel I agree with you on most of the points you make and that I might have done a poor job in explaining my perspective, my goal in writing this post has always been to hopefully improve the amount of “fun” that can be had on the server and reduce a stigma I have felt recently on roleplaying as a lot of people are very tired of jumping through hoops to avoid rulebreaks and punishments. No matter what points you make and how much you disagree with me it is an unavoidable fact that there is a significant amount of people that have felt the stigma around rules i mentioned above. Overall I understand that EchoRP aims to deliver quality roleplay and rules are absolutely necessary in that but I dont think they should impose upon the enjoyment people feel while playing the server. My goal is to hopefully maximize the enjoyment to rule ratio.
loaqki
Jul 7, 2024
Totally agree on this
I'd like to also had the "spooning" of bans which essentially is, banning a full group for the wrong doing of 1 or 2 individuals within that group.
I have had bad experiences with the bans, got banned twice for essentially being at the wrong place the wrong time, with the wrong people.
I've said my concerns to the staff explainning that their wrong doing wasn't mine, and got shut down and anwsered that it was their decision. Since only perma are appeal-able, I now have 2 temporary bans to my records that I believe aren't right, and cannot do anything about it. This is then 2 bans that are gonna be held against me in the future when I really make a mistake.
I agree that the staff struggles to know the whole situation since their knowledge of it is based on what the player report says, but I feel like the judgement of guilt are done sometime with a spoon instead of picking by looking into actual proofs.
fuckabe
Jul 1, 2024
Real asf
salty waffles
Jul 1, 2024
I do agree with this there have been so many times i have wanted to do something a little more creative but then i think if i do this will i get ban? then i just end up doing something that i know wont get me ban. I have been on this server for about a year and i can say i have slipped up a few times in rp it happens to most of us but yeah getting a 2 week ban becuse you started a crime 1 or 2 mins before the 30 min timer on crime or because u slipped up on a rp word is a little much imo. also i do agree there should be a time limmit on how long bans stay with you feel like a month or 2 is long enough.
Jonah
Jun 27, 2024
Also forgot to mention ban lengths. As echo has grown bigger over the years the lengths of bans for minor rulebreaks has increased. While in practice being stricter on bans will hold people to higher standards recently the extreme ban lengths has just made people scared to be creative and new in their roleplay. Sticking to the tried and true roleplay gurantees no ban but lets say you wanna try something new, well now if you mess up your not just looking at a few day punishment you could be gone for 2 weeks or more. If you take a look at the ban messages 2 weeks have become the standard for most bans. Obviously serious issues deserve serious punishment but what happened to 1 day, 3 day, and 7 days bans being more common than 2 weeks, 1 month, and perma's. It doesn't instill better roleplay it just creates fear and demotivates creativity in the server. Its part of the reason why people have felt Echo is so stale recently.