Im out for as long as SoCOol 21 is staff

It is a shame that you feel the way you do. However, I find it very difficult to believe that there's any truly rational reason behind your anger towards me. I was the staff member that made your second Xray ban, which you claim to be false, but was not (as I will explain below). You are a very active member and have been for a very long time. However, that doesn't allow you to get away with breaking the rules or treat staff members like animals.

This is a perfectly good reason to not want to play the game anymore, but what are you trying to achieve by flaming staff members because of this? Every staff member knows that the staff team has messed up in the past and will actively admit to it. However, most staff members on the staff team right now weren't around back when Brawl had 3,000 players, and therefore can't be blamed for Brawl's death. You may blame those who were around when Brawl was very popular, but flaming these staff members isn't going to encourage anyone to change.

It is clear that you are passionate about Brawl and want it to do well, but the way you behave and treat our staff has meant you have done far more harm than good to us.

These 2 statements seem very contradictory. You're scared of getting false banned, but also get annoyed at Eil for confirming details with you before deciding on whether to ban or not. Doing so will allow his judgement to be more accurate, reducing the number of false bans.

Regardless, after so many years of you playing this game actively, you have only been falsely banned once. You have admitted to your first ban, and your second ban was correct (as I will explain when I get to your explanation of the ban). Your third ban was false, but we unbanned you in less than 24 hours. This is despite you making handling your appeal as tricky as possible, by flaming us and making it impossible to discuss your ban civilly. We strive to make as little false bans as possible, but we will inevitably make mistakes. False bans will happen on every server.

I first claimed that advertising Raid would not bring players back over 2 and a half years ago, as I have told you before. I have said that recent events have proven my claim correct after a member of one of the biggest eSports team in the world streamed Party. We saw no increase in player counts after he stopped playing. Even though this is a Fortnite streamer, the audience for Minecraft and Fortnite are typically younger people, so both games appeal to the same market segment.

Also, we cannot afford larger streamers. We have attempted to reach out to large streamers, and some of them have asked for tens of thousands of dollars. Even the smallest YouTuber who has participated in Minecraft Monday wanted sole ownership of our YouTube channel. The eSports streamer we had on Brawl had over 15 times the viewers as this YouTuber had during his Minecraft Monday stream. As a result, we can only pay for smaller YouTubers and streamers. It is that or nothing.

Tell me, who do you think genuinely escalated this situation here? You posted passive-aggressive messages to begin this conversation - if you can call it that - and I responded in a level-headed and professional manner. You then responded by calling me r*tarded and a c*nt. I attempted to discuss the point you were trying to make, but you threw your toys out of the pram and had a tantrum instead of being civil about it.

In no way did I pretend not to understand what you were saying. I asked counter-questions because asking questions is an excellent technique to make people see flaws in their logic.

In the company I work for, if a customer were to act the way you act, they would be escorted out by security. Police would be contacted, an internal investigation would be conducted to figure out why they were on the premises in the first place. There would likely be a lawsuit against the company they would be representing.

In this thread alone, you have used homophobic and ableist slurs and have threatened me. You are not entitled to be treated well if you act like this in any company. I can assure you that almost any company would kick you out if you were to act like this.

Your inability to convince me that you're right does not make me egotistical or stubborn. I only participate in discussions with players to see their perspective and to see if there are any flaws in my opinions. If someone is unable to point out a flaw in my opinion, obviously I do not change my opinion. If someone is unwilling to have a civil conversation with me, there is no way they'll be able to convince me to change my mind.

When it comes to rule enforcement, we do not treat players who have donated tons of money differently to those who have never donated before. Doing otherwise would be incredibly biased. I didn't make your false ban, so I don't know exactly what the process was to get to the decision made. However, I do know that your appeal was handled very quickly - far quicker than most servers handle their appeals.

The only people who have access to chatlogs are the devs. Other staff members do not read these chatlogs anymore, as it has been determined to be too invasive.

The staff member who is in charge of contacting YouTubers has contacted dozens of people over the past few months and has successfully gotten several streamers on the server. We are also looking into getting regulars making videos on our server, so it makes sense that we contacted you. Your staff app was denied for obvious reasons, but suitability for staff has nothing to do with being suitable for making videos.

If I didn't care about your suggestions or feedback, I would ignore you. Instead, I gave you another opportunity to attempt to discuss your stance on advertising, despite prior attempts proving to be pointless.

Reporting bugs is useful but does not make you entitled to any better treatment. All bug reports are very appreciated, and I am in support of giving rewards to people for reporting bugs. However, reporting bugs does not give you the right to treat staff like animals or expect us to follow your opinion 100% of the time.

We had more than enough proof to show that Hockey could see when staff members were in /poof. He claimed he was using a glitch, so we were prepared to unban him if he was able to explain what the glitch was. This was to verify that he wasn't lying. He failed to do this, and the glitch he used was only reported to us about 2 weeks ago (to my knowledge). If players abuse glitches that look like hacks, then refuse to explain how they did the glitch, it is unreasonable for them to expect us to unban them.

Go for it. Post them here, in this thread.

Giving us criticism won't get your posts removed. However, breaking the rules will get your posts removed. Instead of removing your posts that broke the rules, I edited them to remove the rule violations from them. I could have just deleted them if I wanted to - it would have been fully according to protocol.

I made your second ban, after seeing several instances of you mining through the walls of a naturally generated cave to ores. Your explanation of getting lucky is fabricated and doesn't make any sense. The only appeal you submitted for this ban was this:


In this appeal, you did not request proof for your ban. You did not make any attempt to explain how you managed to find ores that were not visible. This was the only appeal you made for the ban.

I calmed the situation very well last time. I diffused the heated situation in just 8 minutes.

As I said before, I was asking counter questions to attempt to make you identify flaws in your logic. The questions I asked last time were "Disagreeing with someone makes them unknowledgeable?" - An attempt to make you elaborate on your stance that I was unknowledgeable for disagreeing with you, as I believed there was no logic behind that statement. This question would have allowed you to see that. And doing so worked.

Another question I asked was "Does Barbie actually advertise at all?", to make the point that companies with outstanding brand recognition do not need to do advertising. Perhaps, Barbie does advertise with the intent to inform potential customers that they've released a new product. However, it's improbable that they advertise in an attempt to reach new customers because almost everyone on the planet knows what Barbie is. This applies to Brawl because we are already getting a substantial number of new players. Advertising to reach new players seems pointless when we're already getting a considerable amount compared to our player base. We're not growing that quickly due to inferior player retention, not because we're not getting enough new players.

If you want my plan for Brawl, I will gladly give it to you. All you have to do is ask.

 

I want to preface this by explaining why I'm responding to this thread in the first place. My intent here is not to try and make you look bad. Frankly, I have no interest in harming your reputation. My intent here also is not to try and defend myself against someone over Minecraft. I am not insecure enough to feel the need to write thousands of words to defend myself over Minecraft. The reason why I am putting so much effort into responding to these threads is that constructive criticism is essential. As someone who gave a lot of criticism to the staff team many years ago, I understand how frustrating it is to be on your end when you feel ignored.

I also want to address the toxicity in this thread correctly, in a non-automated message that comes alongside warnings. As I said before, constructive criticism is essential. However, criticism delivered in a toxic and non-constructive manner is nothing more than demoralising, and paying attention to such criticism is not beneficial to me or Brawl. Your most recent post was not toxic at all, so I commend you for that. But, I want to make it clear that unless such behaviour continues, I will no longer be responding to this thread for purposes other than moderation.

Finally, I want to make this very clear - I wholeheartedly encourage anyone who has feedback or criticism on the staff team to post it here. Paying attention to such criticism is the only way for the staff team to improve, and I can only do that if you send it to me.

Handling of Your Bans

These are the 2 bans that you are unhappy with:

(I have removed the names of staff members who banned and unbanned you for your most recent ban, as I am not allowed to tell you who they are)

My Ban
To begin with - the ban I was personally responsible for. The ban was over a year ago now, and I do not keep evidence for bans that long, especially as the ban is no longer relevant (you were unbanned from this after you purchased an unban). I can no longer say for sure that the ban was correct, as I do not remember the specifics of the ban. Any evidence I had is no longer available. I can't go back on the map to check as the map has been reset several times since the ban. Arguing whether or not the ban was correct seems futile.

However, I can comment on how we handled the ban.

Spoiler: Communications regarding my ban

Our Discord message history:


Our forums conversation history (only shows convos you've sent to me, not vice versa):


And, as said before, the only appeal given at the time was an empty one.

I can no longer prove that the ban I made on you was correct. That doesn't automatically mean the ban was false, but for argument's sake, let's assume the ban genuinely was false. It's entirely possible, as I do make mistakes. I also don't believe it is an indication of incompetence, as I have made over 2,500 bans since the ban wipe, and only 1 of them has been proven false. This 1 false ban was on a ban for malicious links, not a hacking ban.

Obviously, I would have thought my ban was correct. Otherwise, I would not have made it. I would only be able to reasonably change my mind regarding a ban if any evidence against the ban was shown, and this was not the case here. Given the communication we had regarding the ban, how would you suggest I could have handled this better?

The Other Ban

To begin - I did not make the ban, nor do I know what you were banned for. I know very little detail about the ban itself, so I am commenting on this from an outside perspective.

Brawl's official stance on the ban is that it is false. False bans are inevitable - the only way we can stop false bans from happening would be to stop banning people altogether. There are a considerable number of factors we need to take into consideration when banning someone for base Xray. 1 of which is very difficult for moderators to see. Unless watching the raid as it happens, it is hard for us to detect if a player is in a base during the raid. For moderators to see this, they would need to check all chests in the base for any interactions made by the person who made the base. It often takes anywhere between a few months and a year to be experienced enough to consider all factors. Newer staff members are inevitably more likely to make mistakes.

The factor I mentioned above is the factor you said to try and prove your innocence. Again, I do not know the details of how the ban and the appeal were handled, but it certainly seems like this is where we went wrong here. Also, it is worth mentioning that we unbanned you in less than 24 hours, which is a very quick response time.

All of this is while you were not very co-operative with us regarding your appeal.

Spoiler: Rule violations following the false ban

Understandably, you are frustrated after being falsely banned, but you handled yourself very immaturely and made it impossible for Versions or any other staff members to help you get unbanned. In the screenshots above, you:

• Posted disrespectful messages many times, including comparing a staff member's intelligence to a horse and a cow
• Spam-tagged Versions and chickenputty, both of whom had nothing to do with your ban
• Called for the demotion of a staff member for 1 mistake
• Used ableist slurs several times
• Threatened staff members

As I said in my post before - in the company I work at, such behaviour would've resulted in being escorted out by security. Online communities are generally much laxer regarding stuff like this, but this does not excuse such abhorrent behaviour.

Keeping all this in mind, how would you rather us have handled your ban? We can't stop all false bans, but if there are any suggestions you have to help us avoid making a false ban in a similar situation in the future, please let me know.

Staff Apps

I agree that we should be realistic with staff apps and that we should stop having standards as high as a large server with a large application pool. This has been a huge issue in the past, but I feel like it has been addressed recently by giving more opportunities to applicants we are not entirely sure about, revamping the trial stage to accommodate this.

That being said, us lowering our requirements for staff to be accepted contradicts your stance shown in the handling of your bans. Your standards are that:

• False bans are unacceptable, and staff members should be demoted for making them
• All staff members should be fully familiar with all game modes before being promoted to Mod
• Response times of 18 hours for a complicated ban appeal is not good enough
• For disagreeing with you on the matter of advertising and taking 8 minutes to defuse a heated situation, I am so bad as a staff member that you are willing to quit solely because of me

These standards are considerably higher than the standards that we have for our staff. This is a common contradiction I see among complaints - often players want us to lower requirements so that we're getting more staff, but also to hold our staff members to higher requirements when they are already promoted.

Regarding specific instances you mentioned:

I do not know the details of Jeenss' departure from the staff team. I was told that he resigned, but for argument's sake, I will assume you are correct. Abusing perms because of someone trying to provoke them is a sign of immaturity. Staff members have their perms to enforce the rules and benefit the community - by using them to get revenge on someone for trying to provoke them, they are untrustworthy.

Again, I do not know the details of Jeenss' departure from the staff team. I'm not claiming that you're correct, nor that he is immature or untrustworthy - as far as I have been told, he resigned.

I think it is a waste of time to discuss hypotheticals like this. If pool is denied and he is willing to make his denial reason public, I will discuss it with you.

(From a previous post)
Your application was denied for recent instances of flaming players. I brought up 2 cases on your staff app: where you called someone a "f*cking r*tard", and compared someone to testicular cancer. The basic role of a staff member is to enforce the rules, and before we trust people with these perms, we need to ensure they will not be breaking the rules themselves first. We are not the only server which does this.

Hypixel's requirements regarding rule violations:

Wynncraft's requirements regarding rule violations:

The ability to not break our rules is one of the most basic and lowest standards we hold our staff and staff applicants to - if someone is unable to do this, it is highly likely that they are not suited for staff.

McTeams is a considerably more toxic server than ours. It exists purely to make money, not to host a good community (and also to get itsjhalt in contact with little kids to groom). McTeams and Brawl's communities are very different, as is what we are trying to achieve, so the standards we set for our staff differ. That being said, we have similar systems for promoting people we aren't sure about. If we aren't sure about a staff applicant, we put them through an extended trial stage, and will demote them if they do not meet our standards.

With all this kept in mind:

• What specific standards do you think should be reduced or removed?
• How can we mitigate the issues caused by reducing or removing these standards?
• How can we ensure our staff meet the standards you hold them to without increasing our standards for being accepted in the first place?

Your Raging

It is none of my concern why you are raging. The point is, you are consistently treating staff members like dirt, and you cannot expect to go without consequences. Your raging has got you banned from Raid's community discord and Brawl's community discord, and you have received countless warnings and a final warning on the forums. If it does not stop, you will not be unbanned from the discords, and you will be banned from the forums.

If you are only toxic while it is late, then do not play while it is late. There are no excuses for the constant homophobic and ableist slurs, flame, harassment and threats that you are continually giving us. Any other company would have barred you ages ago for it, and I do not have a single good reason to justify you not being permanently banned from everywhere on Brawl. You need to stop raging before I remove your platform to rage. Is that understood?

Advertisement

I have said this so many times - a lot of people know Brawl exists. We are getting tens of thousands of players every month, and most players who play hardcore game modes are aware we exist and actively chose not to play our game modes. Raid's most significant issue is it is not hardcore enough, and to fix this we need to make a large assortment of changes, including finally supporting 1.7. That being said, Raid is just 1 of our game modes - if we have to spend most of our time, money and effort into advertising the game mode just for it to have a sustainable player base, then that is a major issue with the game mode that needs to be addressed properly.

That being said, you highly overestimate the impact I'm having on advertising. While I am against advertising right now, I am not trying to stop higher-ups from doing so. My focus at the moment is releasing Party 2.0, then reviving WarZ and Wild West. Other staff members are focusing on advertising, and my involvement is limited to suggesting some YouTubers to contact, and coming up with video ideas that we can make. I don't think advertising is worth it, but most people do think advertising is worth it. That isn't going to stop me from saying my opinion, but it is going to stop me from steering Brawl away from advertising, as doing so would be incredibly stubborn.

Finally, you need to understand that people will disagree with things you think. You haven't been able to convince me that advertising Brawl in its current state is worth it, and that is okay - not everyone will agree with you. If you are getting this wound up over someone simply disagreeing with you, then you need to step back and take a break from Brawl, as you are taking it far too seriously.

To Summarise...

It is clear you are passionate about Brawl, but this passion seems to be driving you to insanity. Brawl is a Minecraft server. We're not even "just a video game", we are less than a video game. You are taking Brawl far too seriously, and I highly encourage you to take a break and distance yourself from us for a bit. I have had to do that several times in the past, and there is no shame in doing so.

Overall I do not think we have done anything wrong here. Every time we potentially false banned you, we handled this mistake as well as we possibly could have done. We will make mistakes, and that will never change. Other than that, I don't see any rational reason for you to be so angered at us. I am sorry you feel the way you do, but the is nothing I can do to help you other than advise you to distance yourself from Brawl for a bit.



Now I'm finished as planned - it was just 11 minutes, so it wasn't that bad. I've just got 1 more question to ask you, is there anything more we could do to make you feel good on Brawl? @Admiral_Munson

 

The vast majority of the time when I'm deciding on banning someone or not, I take less than 10 seconds to come to a conclusion. No point in us wasting time if we think the hacking is blatant.

Charlie's a new Mod. He may not know of every single factor that he needs to take into consideration before banning for a complicated type of hack, especially considering he's not even a Raid Mod. (And before you say it: yes, he should be moderating Raid - staff members are expected to moderate every game mode). Give him a break.

Also, I question if you actually know how long it took him to come to a conclusion, or if you're just assuming the worst in us.

The problem is determining whether something is too complicated to ban for or not. If Charlie has some experience with detecting base Xray then it'd be easy for him to think that he's aware of enough factors to make the ban. I've made this mistake a very long time ago with fly hacks on Party, as there was a glitch which lets players fly on one of the mini-games. It's impossible for staff members to know if they're truly competent enough to ban for a particular hack. And that's okay, as long as we mitigate this risk appropriately - and considering we unbanned you after 18 hours despite doing everything you possibly could to be uncooperative, I think that's mitigating the risk pretty well.

Versions and I monitor all appeals. I know for sure that Eil and Carno are more than good enough at detecting base Xray - if I see a player appeal for base Xray made by anyone other than these staff, I make sure input from these guys are taken into consideration before the appeal is resolved.

I didn't do that for your appeal, as I was away on holiday. Despite this, your appeal still had input from other staff, which is why you were unbanned. Stop complaining about hypotheticals (first a guess about whether or not Pool's app will be denied, now this) - it is a waste of time, and it is just complaining for the sake of complaining.

You're not entitled to a staff discussion about everything you say. If you want that entitlement, prove yourself to be valuable enough to the Brawl by applying for staff and getting accepted. In the meantime, it's up to each individual staff member to decide if it's worth bringing up what you're saying in staff chat. If I disagree with what you're saying, ask another staff member to bring it up instead. If you can't find a staff member who agrees with what you're saying, then you've found your answer.

I've done nothing to stop staff from bringing your idea up in staff chat, other than refuse to do it myself. Ask someone who agrees with you to bring it up instead.

Forums activity is no longer an important requirement. It looks good if an applicant has high forum activity, but if they check all the other boxes, we're likely to still accept them. (Recent examples - Swit2427, Foodcourt, Lceman502, yairster - in fact, all 4 of the 5 most recently accepted staff had low forum activity).

Some staff value forum activity more than others. I think it's relatively important because it's the main form of communication with the community regarding ideas and suggestions, and it is very easy for us to see if someone is performing well on the forums compared to performing well on Discord. For some staff, they couldn't care less about forum activity. For others, forum activity is a mandatory requirement for their +1. All these opinions are looked at by the staff manager, and she makes the final decision based on our low standards for forum activity.

Our activity requirements for existing staff are very lax at the moment. As long as you're able to pull in 10 hours a month in-game (equivalent to 20 minutes a day), you won't be demoted for inactivity. If you can't do that for a few months, file an inactivity report and you'll be fine. If you can't do that for more than a few months, resign and re-apply when you can be active again.

There are many instances of players act very poorly on Brawl but very well on other servers. Seeing staff do well on other servers is good (we've recently had an ex-Munchy staff member apply, and I got into contact with one of their admins to ask how well they were), but if someone cannot act well on Brawl, they are likely unsuitable for staff.

And yet our player retention was still terrible. I don't know what initially caused our player retention to be so bad as I wasn't on the staff team when we started losing players, but since then, we've been seeing declining player counts. There's no point in having a high player count if it'll only go down.