Waste griefer's time

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Hellenion
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Waste griefer's time

Post by Hellenion »

That's right! Another suggestion that claims it magically solves the griefer problem!

A lot of progress has been made in this field, since it is a problem of significance. Yet I believe some parts to be outdated, and that we're being too kind.

First off, I speak of griefers as disruptive or otherwise unwanted players given the server's current playstyle. I also assume that we cannot address the source of griefing as we cannot understand why some players grief. You may have ideas on this or disagree entirely but that's not the point of this suggestion.

What do we do against griefers?
  • Patrol
  • Spectate
  • Talk
  • BlockInfo
  • Mute
  • Freeze
  • Undo
  • Kick
  • (IP)Ban
These are what I will be calling our "current solutions" because they are what we do when faced with the problem of griefers. Let us examine some particular methods. We will skip Patrolling, Spectating and BlockInfo because they are highly advanced solutions aimed specifically against (part of) the problem. Talking is also not of interest here because I'm not going to suggest we should "talk to the griefers in manner Y or X" as a way to improve upon it. Mute, Freeze and Undo will be saved for later discussion.

Kick
Kicking forcefully removes a player from the server. I will assume the incentives of kicking to be:
Minimizing further disruption by quickly and completely removing the source of the problem. It serves as a penalty for the offender and optionally lets the offender know the reason for it too so that they may reflect on their actions. It can also buy you time to sort things out when there are other things to deal with. It leaves a mark on the player's record.
Unfortunately, there are some discrepancies between the actual effect and the incentive. First of all, in the default platform for minecraft classic, the browser, however quickly you may remove the source of the problem, recovering from a kick is much easier and faster than actually kicking a player: It takes a mere "Reload page" and you're back, whereas the moderator, for the sake of this example, has to type in "/k !incrediblycomplexusernamewithnumbers Could you give us a few minutes here?". Furthermore, it is hardly a penalty: Whatever the griefer was doing on the server is not lost at all. It is not like a match in a shooter where the kicked player doesn't get awarded their points and has to wait for the current match to end, only to have to start over again from scratch. Combining my previous two points: Quick recovery and no loss of work, makes it sound like hardly a penalty at all, with no penalty, the griefer would not be inclined to reconsider their actions. It does buy you some time, yes, but as the number of concurrent problems increases, this time bought is too little to be worth anything. Leaving a mark on the record of the player is nice and works really well.

Ban
Banning prevents a player from accessing the server again, it also kicks the player. Assumes incentives:
The griefer is believed never to correct their behaviour. Disallowing the user to access the server permanently removes the problem, one problem less means one step closer to a clean server. With the optional reason given for the ban, the user must surely rethink their actions, even though it is too late. It leaves a mark on the IP address of the offender.
Banning works! ... kinda. It achieves its goal, at the least, banned players generally don't come back and those that do can be IPBanned to solve the problem once and for all, dynamic IP addresses may circumvent this. Banning works well because it takes less time for a moderator to ban a griefer than for the griefer to switch accounts or even make a new account or even rotate IP address, this gives us the advantage and this is why most problematic players do not stop until banned. Sadly though, banning does not solve much in the larger scope of things. Although it is a real penalty to be banned from a server, there are many, many other servers out there and your record will still be completely clean on all of those. This, again, is where the griefers have an advantage over moderators. Attempts have been made for a centralised ban database but this will be largely ineffectual unless servers without global ban become scarce. (let it be known that I myself am not thrilled by the idea of such a database, but I digress) Banning, in the general case, is simply shoving the problem to your neighbour. The griefer will be shoved from neighbour to neigbour disrupting many a server. The only penalties the griefer gets are the occasional bans, confirming that the disruption was dealt, or the joining of a server where the griefer already was banned, both rather low penalties given the speed at which you can switch servers. When I was young, I wondered at the amount of griefers, now I believe that they are not that volumous: Regular players tend to stay in one place, and thus are seen less often, the griefer can have left an impact on multiple servers before a regular player even has so much as their first build done.

It is clear that we have to increase the penalty for griefing and at the same time decrease the amount of servers getting hit, but we are powerless, the griefers can come and go whenever they please and we cannot coordinate on large scale between the servers. Anything we can do right now to slow a griefer down takes a greater amount of work from the moderators. What we need is a way to make griefing more time consuming than moderating.

So, my suggestion is to completely change the way kick and ban work, instead of removing them from the game, let them stay in and let them grief, but only to their own eyes. For every player on the server, the griefer has effectively been removed, but the server continues to send the griefer block updates from both themself and everyone else. The block updates from the griefers will not be sent to anyone but the griefer. To the griefer, it would appear as if nothing had changed, except that maybe everyone is completely ignoring them, it could be seen as an enforced "Don't feed the trolls".

Now, the difference between kick and ban leave me with a troubled look on my face. I know Ban will be sortof... permanent and kick will just be waiting for the griefer to get bored or something. but I don't know where to draw the line.

And here's the important part, fragmer, MAKE THIS THE DEFAULT KICK/BAN DAMMIT. If every fCraft server out there is wasting the time of griefers then this will really make an impact. Oh and don't go complaining about "wasting bandwidth", we're not living in the 90s anymore and take some griefers for your neighbours. I can mod this and oh I will, but it should be default!

No, not a separate command, moderators kick and ban griefers, if we can leverage the existing actions to more effectively reach their goal, then we should

EDIT: k scoot I removed the three confusing words that were in here.
A = {x ∈ P(U) | x ∉ x}
Mods:
  1. /Su - Allows players to temporarily become a different rank
  2. /Snap - Like /Line but only draws straight or diagonal lines.
  3. pre-0.630 skip/none block

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fragmer
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Re: Waste griefer's time

Post by fragmer »

The current /kick command tries to provide immediate and informative feedback about why the user was kicked. The hope is that the kicked player will understand what they did wrong, and that there are repercussions for their actions. This of course assumes that the kicked players is not hopeless, and they can change for the worse. If the moderators know that a player is hopeless, they should just go ahead and ban them. I will therefore not change the /kick command in the way you suggested.

/ban is different. fCraft has no temporary bans, unlike other servers, so the assumption is that all bans are meant to be permanent. Your arguments work well for /ban, and I will seriously consider implementing your suggestions for /ban. I doubt it will have much of a global effect on griefers' effectiveness, but it should definitely help a bit.

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Hellenion
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Re: Waste griefer's time

Post by Hellenion »

Yay, thanks a lot for already considering this. In my mind it didn't look very hard to implement especially since no additional PlayerDB flags were needed.

I understand why you don't want to change kick, as I said, I was a bit unsure about kick vs. ban in this model. So maybe it's for the better.
A = {x ∈ P(U) | x ∉ x}
Mods:
  1. /Su - Allows players to temporarily become a different rank
  2. /Snap - Like /Line but only draws straight or diagonal lines.
  3. pre-0.630 skip/none block

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