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)