Meep's complete incompetence

Caleb and VKL should not be banned.

Backstory:
Legendcaleb and VKL were mining at the end of the world. They didn't glitch anywhere, they just walked or nether portaled to the world and mined. That's it. For clarification, these are two separate instances.

However, someone messed up and the world gen at the world borders was vanilla terrain. Did Legendcaleb cause the world gen to be messed up? No. Did VKL? No. They got there by legit means. Besides that, VKL was there for only 4 minutes.

You guys are banning people for your mistakes. They had every right to mine in the world as it was created, glitched or not. It is your fault for creating the world as it is. The burden should not be on players to report bugs, it should be on the staff to find those bugs or reward players that do come forward with reports of bugs. Players should not be punished for doing something as mundane as mining the world, whether they knew about it being a bug or not.

Did you guys know there is an amazing thing called talking to the players at fault? Do you think that Legendcaleb or VKL would have continued to mine had they been warned? The playerbase on this server has grown up. We are adults and just talk to us. Quit treating us like children and quit acting like ban happy mods. You have a very fragile playerbase and got lucky that a worldwide pandemic has people playing this server. I guarantee you guys keep acting like this the longtime players will stop playing, especially after this pandemic is over.

 

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Because of this global pandemic people are actually coming back to this server and rather than let stupid shit slide you guys choose to ban like 20 people in the first few weeks. If this kind of behavior doesn't change I'd be surprised to see most of the current players still active after the quarantine is over
+1.

 

These bug exploit bans are irrational. If you messed up the world and a player got to a vanilla mine totally within the legal parameters of the world you created then they shouldn't be banned. You can wipe their inventory, and then announce that this exploit is bannable from here on out if it isn't a bug you can fix, but it's ridiculous to ban players for initially discovering it. Give them a warning at the most. It's sad because players like LegendCaleb and VKL are super active and encourage players in their town to play and genuinely have a large impact on how active a good amount of the players on this server are. Not that certain people should get special treatment, it's just sad to see bad bans essentially kill the motivation to play for people in VoidGang and Exegol.

 

Very well put!!

 

This is hallmark MeepCraft behavior. I cannot count the times where a mistake on part of the server has ended in the ban of players. I'm probably pretty rusty at this staff thing but the optimal solution, I think, might have been to say "Hey! We screwed up. We have to take some of the gains because of the ripples it could case this early in an economy, we're sorry." then let everyone go on their way and fix the mistake.

 

We have taken ownership for our mistake, the first step was to reduce the permanent bans to seven days for the players that were banned for this whole bug.

However, it is perfectly expected for consequences to follow an exploit of a bug, whether or not it was a result of our mistake. Some of the banned players mined countless of illegal diamonds into the brand new Extreme gamemode, giving them an unfair advantage and an upper hand in PvP. As much as I enjoy the active presence of the banned players online, exploiting a server bug was and will always remain illegal.

VKL and Caleb are genuinely great players to have around, because they both bring in players and are fun to have around, but at the end of the day, I’d expect players so involved in the community like them to report a bug like that instead of abuse it.

 

Its your responsibility as a mod to use discretion and find an appropriate punishment for what they did. VKL spent 4 minutes outside the world map and mined 3 diamonds, a week ago. Putting him and Joe in the same basket of players that you said to have mined "countless" amounts of diamonds is irresponsible and disingenuous. They've reported other bugs before, which shows evidence that Frank wasn't actively trying to abuse a bug. Your response is mainly putting the burden on players to find the mistakes of staff members and your inconsistencies are causing players to be scared to report them.

 

I agree with the fact that putting both in the same basket would be disingenuous in terms of numbers, but no matter how much each of them mined they both knew about the bug, used it to their advantage in their own amounts and didn’t report it, and are as a result banned for the same amount of time.

While I appreciate previous bug reports, I have a hard time seing how these two very separate cases are connected. I don’t expect players to actively look for and report our mistakes, as you said, that’s our job. What I do expect is that when they do stumble upon a bug - which will necessarily happen once in a while - they report it, even if they’ve discovered it through using it too. Had VKL or Caleb actually told me or anyone else about it, even if they would have mined a bit of ores, I’m certain this would have had a whole other outcome.

 

First things first, I'm not just trying to absolutely flame y'all. For the most part y'all are levelheaded, and handle things pretty well, but this just doesn't make much sense to me and I have some counterpoints.

1. It doesn't make sense to blame players for mining diamonds that are within the world borders that you made. With that same logic, all of the players should be banned for a week who mined countless diamonds near spawn when y'all changed diamond ore generation and it unevenly distributed them around spawn.

2. It's pretty clear that world borders including vanilla mines isn't the players fault, it's the Tech's fault. Therefore, y'all should just wipe their inventories instead of banning them. With a wiped inventory, they no longer have an unfair pvp advantage, and banning them doesn't undo any damage that the "illegal" diamonds already created. If the fault of this issue rests on the Techs, and banning them brings no benefit to the server, why are they banned?

 

I understand that they may have done something wrong but why is there a need to punish these players, especially with a week long ban (feels much longer during this quarantine). As it has been said many of us are adults that can just be told not to do something and a simple slap on the wrists (inventory wipe and a stern talking to) should be enough. Instead of handing out bans why not talk to the players and resolve these issues in game.

 

I understand where you’re coming from, and that’s why I’m taking the time to respond to all this.

For your first point, the big difference for us was that players who mined on the world borders were actually pursuing a known bug for their own personal interests and gains, whereas players in the second case noticed a sudden increase in diamonds but were not aware of the mistake, and happened to be mining at the right time and the right place.

I realize we sometimes have some inconsistencies, but we aren’t malicious or biased against any particular player. I’d be more than willing to bring this up in staff chat to elaborate clear new rules in regards to bug abuse, so we are more consistent in how we take action in the future.

Regarding your second point, giving consequences like bans is a way to enforce an example of what is to be expected should the rules be broken. While we realize some did more damage than others, as consistency was previously mentioned, we try to stay consistent.

 

Appreciate the openness. I just don't understand the difference between:

"Hey there are a disproportionate amount of diamonds at this spot because the Techs accidentally misplaced a portion of the world border, so lets go mine over there."

and

"Hey there are a disproportionate amount of diamonds at this spot because the Techs accidentally made diamond ore gen crazy high near spawn, so lets go mine over there."

The only possible reasoning to consider these scenarios different would be if the person who first found the world border vanilla mines was actively searching around the border for an exploit. However, if this was the case, then only the original bug finder should be punished not people who were told " hey diamonds over here go get them" because they are just as innocent as people who mined near spawn because they were told ore gen was higher there.