STAFF MESSAGE An Open Letter Regarding Bans

Hello everyone,

Many of you have been asking for a response to the Open Letter to the Meepcraft Staff by The Sith Coalition. Due to the nature of the changes which are being made internally on the staff team, I feel it is better to make this a public announcement rather than a reply in a thread which may later be lost or archived. To break things down, I will be first explaining the inciting incident and the details surrounding it, then detail the response to that directly, and then closing with how things are changing moving forward.

With the launch of Meepcraft Reimagined and namely Towny Extreme, an exploit was discovered which caused a portion of the world at the border (approximately 1/32nd of the total land at the world border) to generate incorrectly with disproportionately higher rates of rare minerals which do provide direct gameplay advantages. This issue was promptly fixed by decreasing the world border by three hundred blocks from a radius of 10,000 blocks to 9,700. Upon investigation, several players were discovered to have used this error to their advantage by mining in this region. After conducting our investigation, we determined three players who had knowingly used this to their advantage in some form. It is easily understandable that someone might stumble into this region on accident if coming from underground, and as a result those who showed no knowledge or intent of using this region to gain an advantage were not punished in any way, shape, or form. These bans were deemed as "bug abuse" because players would exploit these server errors without reporting the issue in any way possible while obtaining an advantage over other players. To clarify, this error was a fault on the part of the server and especially myself for missing this. Additionally, with the increased rarity of ores within the world, some many long standing members and veterans of the server took to x-raying.

Many members of the community took issue with the approach taken by the moderation staff team in regards to the bans. A number of them were upset at such a large number of people banned for x-raying while a majority of the issues taken were regarding VKL’s ban due to him mining an incredibly small amount of resources as well as only visiting the region once for a very short period of time. Most of the underlying issues from the playerbase’s perspective are summed up here. After this was posted, we spent a considerable amount of time discussing it as a high staff team to determine the best course of action. The conclusion we reached was that simply responding to the thread would not alleviate the concerns the community has. We opted to meet with the authors directly, which led to LordInateur and myself to hop over to a voice call on Discord to discuss the group’s concerns. Afterwards, the high staff met again to discuss the best possible course of action moving forward, then called in the rest of the moderation staff for a meeting to discuss how to best adapt to a returning playerbase and respond to the issues brought up by the community.

The moderation team has reached the conclusion that drastic changes are needed in our ban policy. When dealing with cases of longer temporary bans and permanent bans, moderation staff will reach out to banned players directly to discuss the matter with them rather than simply waiting for an appeal. We recognize the community as a whole is more mature than it was perhaps five years ago, and MeepCraft is in a very different place as well. The purpose of the rules have always been to create a fair playing field and retain high community standards. However it has become abundantly obvious that merely skipping straight to the “banhammer,” so to speak, is not the best path for encouraging a community to grow and develop except in an emergency (or if they happen to be named AdrianBFaust). As a result of changing these policies, we also felt it was an appropriate time to review the list of every permanently banned player from MeepCraft and have decided to unban a vast majority of them. Blacklisted players will not be considered for an unban while others may contact a high staff member to discuss the possibility of returning to the server and its community. This will not change our approach to short temporary bans and mutes, which will still be enforced. The new policy will mostly apply to hacking and cheating offenses which historically resulted in an instant permanent ban.

We hope that this change in policy will further encourage the MeepCraft community’s growth and maintain its integrity. If you happen to be currently banned and wish to discuss your ban, feel free to contact a SuperMod or Administrator to arrange a time to meet on Discord.


Sincerely,
The MeepCraft Staff Team