Worried about Nostalrius policy on banning accounts

[Sharax]

I find it interesting that people get surprised when they push the boundaries to manipulate poorly designed game mechanics and get penalized by a staff that has shown that they have a very low tolerance for that kind of stuff.

I am totally fine having players getting banned that exploit or push along the boundaries of "grey" areas. Maybe Nost isn't the place for you guys looking to get an unintended edge. Worried about that Nost policy? Who cares? Go play on a "fun" server rofl.

[Codeine]

This whole whipper root / songflower is pretty dumb, if Blizzard didn't want multiple people looting them, they could've changed it to how herbs work in the world, but they didn't so it was possible to have multiple people loot at once, not because of lag, but because the way they're looted on Nost is not blizzlike. Where's the dialogue box that comes up when you're looting them? There isn't one, it's just the loot cogwheel. Blizzard made a few changes to whippers/songflowers in a few patches, But never changed how they were looted. Guess that means they didn't care.

I believe the way that these herbs were designed was to allow people to multi-loot these plants. Otherwise blizzard wouldn't have allowed it. They're also bugged and missing their dialogue options, I remember our whole guild going out there and looting whippers and a songflower at once.

Where is the evidence that suggests this is a bug that blizzard would have banned for? ZERO. unblizzlike, unban, community should stop giving money to this server until these GM's stop banning people for such minor things. Things like legitimately having to afk in a bg for real life and coming back and being told you received a warning for afking out of a bg. Things like being warned for 'safespotting' by simply out ranging guards, Seriously the GM's need to get on the same page as the community if they seriously expect us to pay for this server.

[Kel’Thuzad]

Hello again, children. I am Kel'Thuzad, and I've come to deliver a warning: leave #TuberGate alone.

Your curiosity will be the death of you!

[Darkwinjax]

I find it interesting that people get surprised when they push the boundaries to manipulate poorly designed game mechanics and get penalized by a staff that has shown that they have a very low tolerance for that kind of stuff.

I am totally fine having players getting banned that exploit or push along the boundaries of "grey" areas. Maybe Nost isn't the place for you guys looking to get an unintended edge. Worried about that Nost policy? Who cares? Go play on a "fun" server rofl.

When will the people saying this realize that nobody who picks songflowers thought this was punishable or an exploit, firstly because it was blizzlike (Sure there have been people banned for blizzlike things here before) however, the simple fact that after 1 year of server time, and you can believe me that during this year the same people who "dupped" felwood nodes were the same who were doing it 3 weeks ago before ANYONE got banned, nobody ever got either warned, told about, or punished for doing this.

I didn't even know that having multiple people picking songflower was considered "Dupping" I simply thought that it was lag and that's just how the server worked, I had no idea that this behaviour was also blizzlike (To my surprise it actually was!) but since NEVER had anyone been warned or punished for it, I never saw anything wrong with it.

Another thing we have to consider here is that after speaking with a GM about this issue, I got the following answer : "Organized dupping of felwood nodes be it, buffs (Songflower) or items (tubbers) is considered a MINOR bug exploit and will be met out with a warning or a ban if your account has previours warnings".

This raises a very simple question, what the hell is "Organized Duping", is there any objective criteria by which one evaluates which kind of duping is organized and which kind is not? Cause one can easily claim to NOT be organized while being the opposite and vice-versa (Even possible to grief-report others for "Organized" when in reality it's pretty common to have multiple people waiting for the same node spawn).

The answer I had gotten to this by the GM was the following screenshot :



This answer from the GM is completly useless, the answer he gives me is "Being in a raid group is an example of Organized Dupping" and then he even adds "You will be warned before any actions are taken against your account so YOU would know".

Notice how NONE of the players who got banned, and NO OTHER players before who was part of either organized or unorganized dupping of songflowers was WARNED before. The 3 players who were perma banned (2 of which had no warnings on their account) were simply perma banned, none of them (Or anyone for that matter) were warned that what they were doing was considered "Organized Dupping" and that they would be punished, they were simply perma banned after someone looked through Monkeynews VoDs from 3 weeks in order to get them banned, which is even more funny because you need only go to felwood prior to these 3 days to notice atleast 1 act of dupping per songflower node, wether you consider it organized or not, but these players were not warned, they were punished for major exploitation which goes against what this GM told me yesthurday.

This also means another thing, are we supposed to believe that according to this GMs answer NOT being in a raid group means that the dupping is unorganized and thus NOT a (Minor or Major, which one is it afterall nostalrius?) Exploitation. I for one, will not risk by account on the words of this GM.

The fact is, THERE ARE NO OBJECTIVE CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU CAN EVALUATE WETHER THE DUPPING WAS ORGANIZED OR UNORGANIZED. And I can guarantee you, noone will let their accounts fate reside on the subjective and personal opinion of what the investigator considers is organized or not, example, I go to felwood and see a guildie waiting at songflower spawn, I decide to wait by him and the flower is dupped, was this organized because we are in the same guild? You see where I'm going with this.. It's the same reason why the GMs answer about being in a raid group means nothing and is of no value.

And even if you want objective criteria, the only fair one that I see, even though it is completly unreasonable and unfair since multiple people wait at the node spawn points to get them, would be reading the combat log and banning those who dupped the node (Effectivly the ones who weren't first to either receive the songflower buff or the item being gathered), ANYONE can surely see how unpractical / unfair / unreasonable this is.

There are only few facts here that we should not forget:
- The dupping of felwood nodes was blizzlike, and it's existance has been practiced on this server since the start by several guilds and players, be it organized or unorganized dupping.
- Nostalrius had never presented any complaints about this being a major or minor exploitation
- Nostalrius has been giving contradictory answers regarding the scale of the abuse, daemon claimed these players were major abusing, while the GM in the screenshot told me that organized dupping was minor exploitation.
- Until 3 days ago nobody knew this was even an exploit, and 3 players were permanently banned for Major exploitation aka Item dupping, even though I was told the organized collective gathering of felwood nodes was a minor exploitation and if you were caught doing it and the GMs considered it organized (By which criteria?) you would be WARNED, these players were NOT warned and 2 of them had no warnings prior to this event which makes the permanent ban even more nonesensical.
- Nostalrius is yet to present an objective criteria by which they judge if the dupping of nodes is organized or not, and since the dupping of nodes in the current patch is an innevitable fate, anyone can claim to be doing part of one of the other.


This whole situation is terrible and even more terrible than the chinese wintrader fiasco (The ones that you unbanned and then banned again for the same reasons that we all know) even though the administration knew they were selling accounts and br1 spots for IRL money, but I do not wish to derail the thread and I do not wish to give the Staff ANY reason for it to be censored like the others.

Maybe it's time to act on the right for once in matters pertaining to account bans and infractions, communication with your community for once instead of handing out permanent bans for infractions nobody knew were actually exploits and censoring discussion about said controversial bans, would be the first step in the right direction.

[Imbaslap]

can we move this to suggestions thread and mark it as a reform of policy suggestion for certain things on the ToU. given the history and data some players posted in here (that is constructive and not shit post), this is a good thread to move towards possible policy change.

Sethzer put up good examples for possible policy change as well for promoting suspensions instead of permabanned from blizzard.

[Grave]

Surely the gravity of the action does not call for such a harsh punishment? This hardly seems malicious enough, if at all, to warrant a permanent closure.

[Kurise]

I
And why would Monkeynews, Slipry and Ranalape, who got about 100 /played days, risk a ban because of some stupid 700-900hp flowers that can't even be sold on AH. I don't think a single person knew that this was banable. I don't think anyone else beside the Staff have anything against three people "abusing" some bugged songflowers. It has absolutely 0% influence on the gameplay experience for the rest of the population.

Dear Staff of Nostalrius, i hope you will realize your mistake or expect to lose your respect from your community and some of your most loyal players. You are really nothing without us.

I'll assume antonhagerup is a member of NOPE. Because I see no reason why anyone else would care about those 3 individuals. Sure teh reason behind the ban can be something to be concerned about, but those people have no importance to the server as a whole. They are not driving development of the game, they simply have no lifed the game for a long time.

Bugs/Exploits are not in game to be abused. The existence of these bugs in original Vanilla WoW does not equate to them being perfectly fine to abuse. The difference between the Blizzard servers and this server, is Blizzard had to moderate MILLIONS of people on MANY servers. On Nostalrius, while the Devs and GMs have a ton of people, the scope of moderation is significantly smaller, which results in the abuse of these bugs/exploits being punished more often than not.

[Kurise]

A permaban for something so minor is unwarranted, especially against high profile members of the community. Duplicating gold is one thing, but farming tubers is another. Just as the staff unbanned Chinese wintraders (for really no logical reason) we must urge the staff to unban the nope members.

Ahh. So the GMs should let them exploit bugs because they are members of guilds clearing dungeons that were obliterated over 10 years ago?

They are not important. At all.

If the entire guild of NOPE was banned, absolutely nothing would happen. People would continue playing Vanilla WoW.

Some of these guys think their status of a raider somehow makes them impervious to the rules.

[Kurise]

The only people that call this an exploit are level 20 and have never been to felwood. There is nothing more weird in multiple people getting felwood flowers than multiple people getting Ony buff.

Are you going to tell people to please leave before you pop the Onyxia buff? No? Okay, debate settled then.

You have no way to not let other people take your Onyxia buff. We have no way to not let other people click our Songflower buff.

Ony is purposely designed to give everyone in Stormwind the buff.

Songflower buff was intended for one person. Not everyone in Felwood.

Either this server is filled with 12 year olds that are incapable of critical thinking or this server just attracts the lowest common denominator.

[Sharax]

If people have to lawyer up a long defence post, it pretty much tells you that the issue is, at a minimum, a grey issue...but these guys still decided to take advantage of it. Their calculated risk.

I can certainly look at the game and see behaviour that abuses game mechanics and not take advantage of it EVEN if I knew Blizzard didn't actively enforce it back in the day.

I think people need to realize that "Blizzlike" is trying to maintain true to the original game but NOT to replicate the shoddy oversight of Blizzard. Retail is rife with bots, fly-hacking, kick-botting, piloted crap. I'm very glad the Nost team is very hardline against those pushing the line.