peaceful solution to moderation disputes

[championcavalry]

Hi, I want to look for a peaceful way to solve the disputes between some users and moderators. Every day I see some new accounts joining the lobby and games to paste messages criticizing the moderators and it's annoying us. They always talk about unjust mutes / bans "without evidence" then calls the moderator (one in particular) a "dictator".  We can ban them but they always just come back with another account. They also rally for support and fans from players to support them and join spamming.

Having seen many of these spam complaints I think these banned players don't understand what they did wrong. Some even don't think they made a mistake at all and other clueless players start sympathizing with them. I think a transparent public announcement would help to solve the problem:

Player A infringed on these rules:
1.
2.
3. 

The evidence are these:
1.
2.
3.

Therefore the sanctions are these:
1.
2.
3.

At least players won't listen to their spam anymore and they will probably quit after getting bored. These santioned players would also know why they are being sanctioned, with evidence of their misconduct.  Maybe they will go away after embarrasing themselves.

 

p.s. I am not questioning any decisions of the moderators or WFG, the above are just my opinions. I am not appealing for anyone. Please don't retaliate on me.

[Grapjas]

They've been warned plenty of times, and most of them are doing this on purpose to seek drama and/or attention, and clearly they don't self-reflect from time to time. At some point you have to stop spending energy to pathological liars. Itms summed it up pretty well imo. I for one am happy that harold seem to have has his feet firm in the ground to do whatever he can with this @#$% situation where people are actively trying to bring the community/game down for no good reason at all.

But its also known they run a discord so they are probably fueling eachother with this kind of toxic behavior. I guess it's hard to see what you are doing wrong when you have the wrong/bad friends.

Edited July 25, 2023 by Grapjas

[championcavalry]

17 minutes ago, Grapjas said:

people are actively trying to bring the community/game down for no good reason at all.

Perhaps we can do something to stop them from thinking like this? I think some communication is good.

There must be a reason why they hate 0ad so much that they would spend their own time to organize discord groups to attack the game. They are not mentally insane people, I have played with most of them and they all started as friendly players until someone provoked them. If we find the reasons with each of them perhaps we can reach some agreement of ceasefire. Otherwise this eye for an eye battle between moderator and these people will continue forever and we always have the risk of being brought down. 

[rossenburg]

36 minutes ago, championcavalry said:

Hi, I want to look for a peaceful way to solve the disputes between some users and moderators. Every day I see some new accounts joining the lobby and games to paste messages criticizing the moderators and it's annoying us. They always talk about unjust mutes / bans "without evidence" then calls the moderator (one in particular) a "dictator".  We can ban them but they always just come back with another account. They also rally for support and fans from players to support them and join spamming.

Having seen many of these spam complaints I think these banned players don't understand what they did wrong. Some even don't think they made a mistake at all and other clueless players start sympathizing with them. I think a transparent public announcement would help to solve the problem:

Player A infringed on these rules:
1.
2.
3. 

The evidence are these:
1.
2.
3.

Therefore the sanctions are these:
1.
2.
3.

At least players won't listen to their spam anymore and they will probably quit after getting bored. These santioned players would also know why they are being sanctioned, with evidence of their misconduct.  Maybe they will go away after embarrasing themselves.

 

p.s. I am not questioning any decisions of the moderators or WFG, the above are just my opinions. I am not appealing for anyone. Please don't retaliate on me.

there's always a warning before actions are taken (either manually by a moderator or a bot) . Accountability demands integrity, those who break rules and blame moderators lack both.

19 minutes ago, championcavalry said:

There must be a reason why they hate 0ad so much that they would spend their own time to organize discord groups to attack the game.

hmm, "they" dont hate 0ad per say, they hate to be told " hey stop breaking a rule you agreed not to break in the first place". 

20 minutes ago, championcavalry said:

If we find the reasons with each of them perhaps we can reach some agreement of ceasefire. Otherwise this eye for an eye battle between moderator and these people will continue forever and we always have the risk of being brought down. 

You know, there's this saying, "Invisible in action, invincible in impact. Stealth is strength." But it's funny how when people realize you're the one addressing their bad behavior, they start pointing fingers at you. Lately, Norse_Harold has faced his share of accusations, but let's not be disheartened. Our goal remains to build a happy community together.

[Grapjas]

1 hour ago, championcavalry said:

They are not mentally insane people, I have played with most of them and they all started as friendly players until someone provoked them.

I believe it's simply bad influence and an inflated ego. Especially if you join those kind of discords.

1 hour ago, championcavalry said:

and we always have the risk of being brought down. 

By what/who?

1 hour ago, championcavalry said:

Maybe they will go away after embarrasing themselves.

They already do this btw, they don't care or don't realise it.

[ChronA]

A theory that might be totally off base:

There is a causal chain at work here, running from gameplay, to smurfing, to sock puppets and spamming. Here's how I think it goes:

1. The competitive gameplay of 0AD is not (in-itself) compelling to experienced, high skill players. The strategy space is too flat. There's no way for the high level players to get ahead with innovative play. Success depends entirely on how cleanly you can execute one of the few viable strategies which everyone already knows.

2. In that environment the meta shifts from playing-the-game to playing-the-players. If you know your opponent's style, you can blind counter them and get ahead that way. As a result the strategy space any individual player encounters shrinks even more.

3. Some skilled players get tired of being beaten up on by blind counters, or just become sick of the dull high-level scene as a whole, so they start smurfing. In their minds it is the only way to get a fair multiplayer experience.

4. Moderators start accusing people of smurfing; some rightly some wrongly. The accused begin to feel persecuted. Grudges are formed.

5. Some of those aggrieved people start using DOS, sock puppets, and spam to harass the targets of their ire. They do it because if they can't have fun, no one should. This is a classic tit-for-tat strategy in a repeating prisoners dilemma. They will not stop. Rehabilitation does not work because it doesn't offer them anything they want. The only condition where they will stop is if you change the rules of the game so they can get the fun experience they always wanted by mending their ways. Right now that is not happening. A toxic environment forms and the original problems of design-frustration and meta-shift only get worse. Its a catastrophic feedback loop.

Maybe I am wrong about this? I'm not active in the multiplayer scene, and based on stuff like the current kerfuffle I can't imagine wanting to be. But that is how it looks from the outside.

Even in healthy games there will always be a few bad eggs who grief and smurf just to feed their own damaged egos. What is going on here seems totally out of proportion. It's not the people but the system that's causing it. Until you rid the system of misaligned incentives, trying to rehabilitate offenders or even establish a just and transparent retributive apparatus is a fools errand. 

[alre]

a transparent process would be nice I guess, but mainly the moderator job should be to defuse and de-escalate. Norse-Harold knows the theory but how is it going in practice? is flame and problems really getting to new highs?

remember you can't really keep someone out of the game and community.

[Atrik]

6 hours ago, ChronA said:

A theory that might be totally off base:

It's sounding very smart to me.

 

6 hours ago, ChronA said:

The competitive gameplay of 0AD is not (in-itself) compelling to experienced, high skill players. The strategy space is too flat. There's no way for the high level players to get ahead with innovative play.

I especially think this is, sadly, maybe true. Starting with battle mechanics that are very poor right now (because the one thing to do is sniping). Unfortunately the desire to address this is inhibited by biases (because it has been named "sniping" then a feature that help with this is necessarily a "sniping aim-bot" right?, in reality would be just another attack/movement modifier or stance, witch the game has already have good ones like "call to arm").

I agree with all the rest too, but I don't have sufficient EQ to understand how @Norse_Harold and @Yekaterina came down to start playing mouse and cat so seriously.

[G.O.A.T]

9 hours ago, Atrik said:

I agree with all the rest too, but I don't have sufficient EQ to understand how @Norse_Harold and @Yekaterina came down to start playing mouse and cat so seriously.

The very basic question we need to answer is - How it all started? 
My understanding from observation is that there was multiple issues from @Yekaterina 

• public sharing of accounts on this forum
• multiple accounts in lobby
• flooding and spamming lobby. misusing lobby
• multiple accounts on forum and lying (includes supporting your own answers/responses to make feeling of full support)

Moderators come into play - it looks every discussion failed. Punishment did not have effect. @Norse_Harold came with idea of restorative justice (it looks there was some mutual agreement to get  @Yekaterinakarma back). 

It sounds very logical that when someone want to follow such path it will be under supervision with strict rules.  I feel all failure is in this point. @Yekaterinahad different point of view what is restorative justice vs @Norse_Harold opinion. 

There are also some good stuff @Yekaterina did for 0ad (a few mods) but it is not about it rightnow.

@Atrik that is my EQ hope it helps to see the things.... 

 

[Atrik]

46 minutes ago, G.O.A.T said:

It sounds very logical that when someone want to follow such path it will be under supervision with strict rules.  I feel all failure is in this point.

@Yekaterina is probably having fun since @Norse_Harold is putting effort into tracking him down. As @alre said it's really hard to enforce a perma-ban so he's picking a fight he can't win anyway. We can just call to Yeka's intelligence to stop doing assh0les things like spamming the lobby. What's the point of doing this anyway? He pretend to not want authority enforcement, but do things that make it more a necessity.

[ChronA]

Yekaterina and many other miscreants probably are having fun making people like Norse_Harold pull their hair out, but I don't think that is the primary motivation. That was my point with the talk of repeating prisoners dilemmas and game theory.

Based on their many contributions to mods, game improvement, and the community, doesn't it seem like their primary motivation is to enjoy the game and to see as many other people as possible enjoy the game? I honestly believe that is the case. So why not just follow the (unwritten) rules? Because by making mischief people like Yekaterina actually believe they are making the game better in the long run by forcing a reaction from people like Norse_Harold that will improve the game as a whole.

If Yek thinks the game design is flawed such that they are no longer having fun playing by the consensus rule set, smurfing looks to them like a reasonable means of protest. It draws attention to the issue, and allows Yek to remain active in the community even when playing the game is no longer fun for them. But then someone like Norse comes along and starts crusading against Yek's protest. What then?

From Yek's perspective someone like Norse is a bully on a power trip: someone who needs to be taken down a peg. Yek think if they can just make Norse miserable enough, at best Norse will realize the error of their ways, or at worse they will leave the community. Either way Yek thinks this is a win for everyone, even if their own reputation is irreparably besmirched, in the long run they think theya re making the game community a safer place for others to carry on their work.

Of course, the tremendous irony is that this is almost exactly the same way Norse_Harold views Yekaterina! That's one reason I find the proposal of using restorative justice incredibly tone deaf. The first step of restorative justice is to learn about all the parties who has been harmed, and how. But Norse doesn't want to hear that Yekaterina might rationally identify as a victim and see Norse as an aggressor. For them Yekaterina's guilt is beyond question, since after all even Yek admits some of the accusations are true. But that is not restorative justice. You don't get to skip the steps that make certain favored parties uncomfortable. Otherwise what you are doing is not rehabilitation, it is a show trial, and a futile one.

Edit: Admittedly that characterization of @Norse_Harold's restorative justice is reaching on my part. Perhaps they did give Yekaterina a fair hearing. However that's not what we are seeing from the outside. All the public discussion centers of Yek's refusal to make restitution, while the whole presentation of evidence and reconciliation discussions and are being done privately. That again is not in the spirit of restorative justice. Either do the whole thing in public, or arbitrate the dispute privately but then don't come crying to the mob when there is a dispute about enforcement.

Edited July 26, 2023 by ChronA
fairness

[MarcusAureliu#s]

Guys, demonizing people and speculating without much background information is not helpfull. If u want a non toxic 0 AD culture, as probably most people involved do in their own way, you serve the cause best if u personally interact respectfully and empathically with everyone else. Ty

[Norse_Harold]

Yekaterina as uitgezonderd attempted to post numerous lies and a one-sided assessment of the restorative justice process and our Element conversations. This is yet another reason that appeal of moderator action must be done privately instead of publicly. This thread is locked.

From the boilerplate Invision Community forum terms of use:

"You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law."

Edited July 26, 2023 by Norse_Harold