@SharpSerac As I'm not home, I typed this out very quickly and posted immediately. I encourage everyone to add their own grievances to this thread (before staff lock it) to share your side as well.

There's literally no reason to add grievances when every single time threads like these are made the thread gets locked, the 2 only active staff members say "who are you? you don't even play, get buhhlocked and deleted." I've aired my grievances already multiple times and just get told off because I don't play on this server anymore, it's almost like I don't play precisely because of the grievances I'm literally explaining in the post.

This server has been in a complete downward spiral ever since Dawn resigned.

KKona

> and free of individuals looking to seek advantages.

It's not advantage seeking if its readily and easily accessible to everyone on the vanilla client. If it really is an "advantage" the server should turn on reduced debug info since this shitty lego block game has a built-in xray in its debug menu and many other sources of obscure information that can be used to find bases, but that will never happen because "muh coordinates"

Gucci

Enable

Okay -- that still doesn't address that Phoenix emailed Crafty a ban appeal and was able to get the permaban from the server and suspension from the forums reverted.

> Everyone has to put their ban appeal in public.

So which of these appeals, then, was responsible for reverting the 14 Aug 2019 ban? Unless there is a hidden one I can't view, there are only these ones:

ThePhoenix's Discord Ban Appeal

ThePhoenix's Ban Appeal

Unban appeal

Ban Appeal

The Phoenix Discord Unban Request

Only the first one seems to be causally related to 14 Aug 2019, and that one implied that the server unban already happened.

If there isn't one then, again, I go back to my point about the whole inconsistency thing. If you've been banned from absolutely everywhere because you're excessively toxic to the staff and players, and all that's needed to revert that is a sad written email, that's not a good outlook for the moderation at all. The fact that even happened and it was quietly swept under the rug was always unsettling to me, to be honest.

@Tez1010 All players are welcome to message Crafty with complaints about their bans or treatment. At the end of the day it is his server and his final ruling.

I get many players messaging me about their various bans and complaints. In such cases these are always investigated and shared in admin and a collegiate decision made. Where consensus cannot be obtained this is passed to Crafty.

I do not see how this can be made public.

We always endeavour to be as fair as possible.

So to clarify, you're stating that it's possible to privately appeal outside of the forums ("messaging me") despite the FAQ stating otherwise?

What happens if I get banned?
... You do have the right to appeal your ban on the website (http://forum.craftymynes.com/conversations/ban-appeals). Start a new thread under the Ban Appeals section. Do not post your ban appeal at the bottom of someone else's ban appeal.

Can you unban ___?
The forums are the only place you could address your ban. In-Game-Chat nor Discord are the places for ban appeals. ...

If that is the case, that just goes back to my point about inconsistency. There are apparently two methods to appeal a ban: one is clearly documented and the most transparent for the community; the other one is secret, can happen literally anywhere like email or Discord, and blatantly contradicts what was publicly stated.

@Th3GreenGamer (I cut out everything I'm not responding to for simplicity)
For the part I bolded: This is an easy one. We are trying to come to a more reasonable approach to somebody seen to be using Lunar, schematic mods or hud mods etc. that are not cheating mods. We won't be unbanning all previous accounts banned for these things because we don't recall the specific circumstance of every single ban in the past 10 years. Not to mention that it's a monumental task for almost no returns. Maybe if they specifically appeal it would be considered, I don't know. And don't take that previous sentence as gospel, it's just my thought personally.

Thank you for the clarification. It helps if these decisions made using rules that aren't yet written down can specify that "there are planned changes to the rules which would lead to this corrected decision." As it stands, "the admins have decided to revert this decision" doesn't clarify that at all, and just makes the decision making look inconsistent.

@Th3GreenGamer (I cut out everything I'm not responding to for simplicity)
Also there was no exchange between any staff and Phoenix about the ban. I don't believe Crafty and Phoenix had ever even spoken to eachother.

This wasn't necessarily what I was getting at. I can understand that the decision for the "schematica ban" was made behind closed doors between the admins and Crafty, without the input of any other normal player, using the knowledge that the rules will be changing in the future. However, during the "portal grief ban" in 2019, let's call it that -- Phoenix was, notably, egregiously toxic to staff members in response to his punishment, in such a way that his ban was elevated to a permanent one , and the only form of recourse given to him was to email an appeal to owner@craftymynes.com.

Unless he privately messaged another high-ranking staff member to unban him much later, it is reasonable to assume that he took that only measure to appeal the permaban by directly emailing CraftyMyner. Either way, both scenarios are not particularly good for transparency since the appeal process happened entirely behind closed doors. To this day, it is unknown to the general playerbase how Phoenix was unbanned, because no ban appeal can be found on the forums for it.

Privately messaging or emailing a staff member to circumvent the ban appeal process is not a good thing for the community in general. Coupled with the decision to correct the punishment for the "schematica ban" it really doesn't look good.

@Slainte_Alainn At the end of the day, CraftyMynes is owned by CraftyMyner.
If he decides to unban everyone then he has that right, if he decides to ban everyone, he has that right.

"It's crafty's server and he can do whatever he wants" is a thinly veiled euphemism for "we don't have any way to hold staff accountable." All major communities nowadays have a code of conduct which applies to everyone in the community, which includes both the members and moderators/staff of the community.

Everyone has a reasonable expectation of how moderators will act based on the CoC, and they are given an outline of a mechanism to follow when the moderation team acts out of line, usually via some kind of community management team that acts independently of the moderators or admins. This ensures that everyone will act in line and enforce community guidelines fairly.

As it stands, CM has no CoC or any mechanism that holds everyone (including the staff) accountable. The rules are applied to just member infractions, whilst inconsistencies in how those rules are enforced are brushed off as "the staff can do whatever they want," which you are doing right now with this very hollow-worded PR/ChatGPT-esque response. This builds absolutely no assurance in anyone that the staff will act consistently in a way the playerbase would expect.

Again, this is not a positive sign for a community that is struggling to retain players.

Crafty does own the server -- but, he, and you, and the rest of the admins, since Green said the "admins and Crafty" came to the decision, should be able to explain why Phoenix was pardoned for using schematic mods, and how that logic doesn't also exempt the actions of previously banned "cheaters" -- for example, the countless number of people using Lunar Client for minimaps (which have been accepted recently) and the armor hud (which is being replicated by other client side mods).

Here's some questions that I hope will illustrate the problem:

• What is wrong with armor hud? Does it provide an advantage over vanilla players? Surely, minimaps and schematics do too because they make the lives of their users easier?
• If they provide an advantage but it's an "acceptable" advantage like schematic supposedly brings, would armor hud be okay now? If so, given that Lunar client is used for its minimap and armor hud, if we accept both of these features then there's no real reason to ban people for using Lunar client and keep them banned, right?
• If we can't allow Lunar client, why do we allow these other mods? Doesn't that make this an inconsistent enforcement of the rules? Shouldn't the rules be changed to reflect this?

If there is a change to the rules that relaxes the punishments for what mods can and can not be used, this needs to be codified in a rule. It can not be decided by staff secretly making a decision in a private Discord channel that nobody from the outside can scrutinize. That's just a sheer lack of transparency, and again casts doubt on whether the staff can consistently enforce rules in this community in the first place.

Anyways, I don't care how Phoenix acts nowadays because I don't actively play on CM anymore, and all of that drama between him and me and Team Eye and the staff was all pretty much half a decade ago. This isn't some attempt to revive a grudge against someone I've previously had beef with.

What bothers me is the fact that staff is selecting one particular person and giving them so many chances excusing bannable behavior, without any clear reasoning behind it. Meanwhile, others were left permanently banned for using a minimap on Lunar Client with no second chances.

There's also gnomechild who would just say dumb shit in chat, and then got himself permanently banned and exiled from the community for typing ".crash," with absolutely no second chances. How does it make any sense that a bunch of chat infractions would be treated harsher than portal griefing spawn, disrespecting staff's authority in Discord, making sexist remarks on International Women's Day, and using unapproved mods? Those are all four different infractions that would all warrant lengthy bans on their own.