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Dear MCME'ers,
I write on the behalf of the Admin team (that's @q220, @DynoDaring and me), as well as @Credoo who is my predecessor and supported us in the discussions. Thus we firstly apologize for the long time it took to release this statement. There were many discussions in the last days and still we do not wholly agree with each other. But it may be anyway beneficial to have different opinions around, surely for each of them there will be someone among you sharing it. As a profit from the time this statement took to come into being we now all know all facts connected to the recent events. We are very sorry to have left all of you in the unclear about what is going on and which rumours and accusations are now true. We regret that many of you have lost Faith in the MCME Enforcement team and especially we are saddened by the decision of some key members to turn their backs to MCME due to that. We are now finally starting to clear up all questions you may have had.
Additionally we would like to invite you to a public meeting taking place around next weekend, I still have to find the best date, where, among other topics, we will again address these events and offer the possibility to voice any remaining questions or suggestions.
In the past week, multiple MCME members have been banned from the server. In all cases it was the Enforcers's best intention to ensure MCME's strive for having a family-friendly vibe to it. Now as goes a german saying, well intended is not always good. While none of the bans have happened without a reason we have to admit that in multiple situations the bans were either spoken out too early and with not enough proof, and/or that after the bans not enough further investigation was undertaken to verify the reasonability of these bans.
Simply put: Mistakes were made, on both sides, some of which were very severe regarding the damage they caused. We want to apologise to the entire community as well as the affected players in special for these mistakes. Each case will be rolled up again individually, it's to the banned player's discretion whether this shall happen privately or publically, which is why I won't do that right here.
We would also like to address all the players that have decided to turn their backs on MCME due to this situation. We bid you to forgive us and the Enforcers for what has happened. In return we have also already discussed a great deal about solutions to avoid such situations in the future. The loss your leave-taking means to MCME is unbearably immense and we'll for long condemn the last couple days for the damage that was created during them.
As for how these solutions look like we have a couple of things we agreed on changing:
Now, @yomama629 has just posted his own analysis of the situation, which can be found here: Announcement on the Recent Events on MCME. As said, each specific case will be treated again individually, but I'd like to briefly correct some statements yomama made which I dare say are not wholly true, please note that these are only my personal observations and opinions.
Again, we are very sorry for the confusion, disappointment and any other bad feelings were caused by this series of incidences. We hope you can forgive us and the Enforcers for the mistakes that were made and that you can regain the trust into how MCME enforces infractions.
As mentioned above, every case will be treated in full length in order to find reasonable judgements.
I write on the behalf of the Admin team (that's @q220, @DynoDaring and me), as well as @Credoo who is my predecessor and supported us in the discussions. Thus we firstly apologize for the long time it took to release this statement. There were many discussions in the last days and still we do not wholly agree with each other. But it may be anyway beneficial to have different opinions around, surely for each of them there will be someone among you sharing it. As a profit from the time this statement took to come into being we now all know all facts connected to the recent events. We are very sorry to have left all of you in the unclear about what is going on and which rumours and accusations are now true. We regret that many of you have lost Faith in the MCME Enforcement team and especially we are saddened by the decision of some key members to turn their backs to MCME due to that. We are now finally starting to clear up all questions you may have had.
Additionally we would like to invite you to a public meeting taking place around next weekend, I still have to find the best date, where, among other topics, we will again address these events and offer the possibility to voice any remaining questions or suggestions.
In the past week, multiple MCME members have been banned from the server. In all cases it was the Enforcers's best intention to ensure MCME's strive for having a family-friendly vibe to it. Now as goes a german saying, well intended is not always good. While none of the bans have happened without a reason we have to admit that in multiple situations the bans were either spoken out too early and with not enough proof, and/or that after the bans not enough further investigation was undertaken to verify the reasonability of these bans.
Simply put: Mistakes were made, on both sides, some of which were very severe regarding the damage they caused. We want to apologise to the entire community as well as the affected players in special for these mistakes. Each case will be rolled up again individually, it's to the banned player's discretion whether this shall happen privately or publically, which is why I won't do that right here.
We would also like to address all the players that have decided to turn their backs on MCME due to this situation. We bid you to forgive us and the Enforcers for what has happened. In return we have also already discussed a great deal about solutions to avoid such situations in the future. The loss your leave-taking means to MCME is unbearably immense and we'll for long condemn the last couple days for the damage that was created during them.
As for how these solutions look like we have a couple of things we agreed on changing:
- While many of you claim the rules have gotten stricter over time, this is not the case. The ToS have not seen many changes, and all of them were minor and due to technical changes such as new ranks or features. What has changed though is the way the rules were enforced. For the future we want our Enforcers to try to punish bad intentions rather than bad actions. We cannot expect them to be clairvoyant, but with some effort, i.e. warning people that they're stepping over, having a talk with them or just by reading between the lines, the intention may be seen. We already let slip infractions of newer players, assuming they break rules unknowningly. This is a privilege older players should have as well.
- One step to achieve the above will be a new document that will be created. It may go by the name of "the ToS explained" or similar. In it every rule and term that can be found in our rulebook will be explained, and the intentions and ideas of each of them laid out. It will for example explain why we don't want people to advertise other servers or why we don't want non-staff to use certain mods. It will serve on one hand for the Enforcers to also realise the purpose of each rule as well as for all MCME members to explain some of the rules that may at first seem overly restrictive.
- A change to the ToS we will make will include that from now on Ban Appeals need to be reviewed by a different Enforcer than the one who issued the ban. This is to prevent unreasonate judgements which may especially be useful if the infractions got very personal for the Enforcer involved.
Now, @yomama629 has just posted his own analysis of the situation, which can be found here: Announcement on the Recent Events on MCME. As said, each specific case will be treated again individually, but I'd like to briefly correct some statements yomama made which I dare say are not wholly true, please note that these are only my personal observations and opinions.
- Glov was not banned due to the Twitter account, it was him being a bit "over-eager" about him applying for Commoner. As I see it it was not more than a play on words he made from Commoner to communism, accompanied by a few sentences in caps. This is a clear case where I want Enforcers to read between the lines whether the intentions are bad or not, as personally I would have read it as non-malevolent. The Twitter account however was the reason why his ban appeals got rejected. The confirmation from Fornad that the account was not made by Glov we have gotten after his last appeal. We need to pick this up again.
- For Commando it was somewhat similar. He had minor infractions prior to his "Ardacraft is way better" statement which reasoned a punishment. That statement itself I think was not malevolent either, but I also have to say that it was really unnecessary, and I claim he knew very well how much it would trigger Enforcers and that that was the main reason he wrote it. But take that the statement was not the only reason his ban was spoken out, just the trigger itself is debatable.
- Regarding Eag, yomama's and kis' ban: The main reason for these bans was not the leaked Discord convo. It was the Facebook picture. Given it is unclear who is responsible for said image it is a clear case of where the evidence was not sufficient for such a triple ban, respectively profound investigation would have had to be done right after the ban to find out whether the bans were rectified or not.
- Generally I disagree that players which contributed more to the server should be subjected to more lenient rules. What I however would state is that punishments invoked on them have to be treated with a lot more attention, means a lot more needs to be done on investigating the reasonability of the punishment and the admins really need to get talking with the banned player in order to find out the intentions behind the infractions. For the case of Eag I can say as much as that an admin was involved in the decision to ban him, it was not solely made by the Enforcers.
Again, we are very sorry for the confusion, disappointment and any other bad feelings were caused by this series of incidences. We hope you can forgive us and the Enforcers for the mistakes that were made and that you can regain the trust into how MCME enforces infractions.
As mentioned above, every case will be treated in full length in order to find reasonable judgements.
