[give me the gamemode]

At the end of the day, it's up to the staff member. Sometimes they let it slide and let it be dealt IC, others deal with it in OOC. It honestly just depends on the staff member.

Isn't this a fundamental issue? Surely all staff members should be dealing with the same scenario the same way, otherwise we, as players, know exactly where we stand in terms of some particular rules and grey areas.

Problem is, as much as people may say, this is a community not a business. 

I mean its not a business but it does have business advisers, is a registered business and provides a service in exchange for money provided by some of the users

[Soviethooves]

At the end of the day, it's up to the staff member. Sometimes they let it slide and let it be dealt IC, others deal with it in OOC. It honestly just depends on the staff member.

Isn't this a fundamental issue? Surely all staff members should be dealing with the same scenario the same way, otherwise we, as players, know exactly where we stand in terms of some particular rules and grey areas.

Problem is, as much as people may say, this is a community not a business. 

I mean its not a business but it does have business advisers, is a registered business and provides a service in exchange for money provided by some of the users

Yet we don't act like one internally is what I was poking at.

[Nev]

I've always been a fan of the idea of pre-determined punishments to avoid bias and opinions from shaping the length and cause of a suspension.

ie. Administrator would have options when it came to enforcing a punishment,
!ban <username> - opens UI with interface that has a selection list where you can select offenses relevant and it will place a set suspension based on each one.

There shouldn't be administrators placing different length suspensions on players for FearRP, NLR and things that don't depend on situational context. Hours shouldn't determine punishment. There's no need to punish someone longer because, "They should know better since they've been here longer!". A rule violation is a rule violation and should be the same across the board. If you as an administrator have to ask yourself if it's within the rules, it's not something you should enforce. Only clear violations of a standing rule should call for action to be taken.

[give me the gamemode]

At the end of the day, it's up to the staff member. Sometimes they let it slide and let it be dealt IC, others deal with it in OOC. It honestly just depends on the staff member.

Isn't this a fundamental issue? Surely all staff members should be dealing with the same scenario the same way, otherwise we, as players, know exactly where we stand in terms of some particular rules and grey areas.

Problem is, as much as people may say, this is a community not a business. 

I mean its not a business but it does have business advisers, is a registered business and provides a service in exchange for money provided by some of the users

Yet we don't act like one internally is what I was poking at.

Fair enough, but in certain aspects maybe it could be helpful if t was more business-oriented, I can't really give any accurate examples because of how """"""transparent"""""" the inner workings of the staff team is but maybe more policies on these gray areas, albeit very broad policy to cover as much of it as possible, would solve a lot of issues

[Soviethooves]

Isn't this a fundamental issue? Surely all staff members should be dealing with the same scenario the same way, otherwise we, as players, know exactly where we stand in terms of some particular rules and grey areas.

Problem is, as much as people may say, this is a community not a business. 

I mean its not a business but it does have business advisers, is a registered business and provides a service in exchange for money provided by some of the users

Yet we don't act like one internally is what I was poking at.

Fair enough, but in certain aspects maybe it could be helpful if t was more business-oriented, I can't really give any accurate examples because of how """"""transparent"""""" the inner workings of the staff team is but maybe more policies on these gray areas, albeit very broad policy to cover as much of it as possible, would solve a lot of issues

Trust me when I say this, the staff team is already in the process of doing so. It's just taking time.

[Night]

At the end of the day, it's up to the staff member. Sometimes they let it slide and let it be dealt IC, others deal with it in OOC. It honestly just depends on the staff member.

Isn't this a fundamental issue? Surely all staff members should be dealing with the same scenario the same way, otherwise we, as players, know exactly where we stand in terms of some particular rules and grey areas.

I can say with certainty that no one on the team handles a situation the same way. We all have different perspectives, as there can be many variables to a situation which may influence the outcome of the sit. For Soviet, as he indicated further up, it's mainly a matter of whether the player is experienced enough to know better however for me, it falls down to how the player handled the situation and if I then doubt the circumstance or fail to reach a conclusion, how another member of staff would view it so I could then get a second opinion on the case. I'd also consider previous violations that may of happened recently and etc.

There can't just be a guidebook which dictates what rule violation would equal what punishment, otherwise it'd end up with a flawed system which would lead to punishments being longer than they need to be - dragging away from the main point of a suspension/access restriction, which is to reinforce proper understanding of the rules.

To summarise, if you have any questions about the grey areas or "unwritten rules" as some like to call them, then I'd recommend posting in the community to staff Q&A thread, where HR may be able to start internal discussion to try and nail out the specifics and resolve the issues at hand.

[ForceGhost]

At the end of the day, it's up to the staff member. Sometimes they let it slide and let it be dealt IC, others deal with it in OOC. It honestly just depends on the staff member.

Isn't this a fundamental issue? Surely all staff members should be dealing with the same scenario the same way, otherwise we, as players, know exactly where we stand in terms of some particular rules and grey areas.

I can say with certainty that no one on the team handles a situation the same way. We all have different perspectives, as there can be many variables to a situation which may influence the outcome of the sit. For Soviet, as he indicated further up, it's mainly a matter of whether the player is experienced enough to know better however for me, it falls down to how the player handled the situation and if I then doubt the circumstance or fail to reach a conclusion, how another member of staff would view it so I could then get a second opinion on the case. I'd also consider previous violations that may of happened recently and etc.

There can't just be a guidebook which dictates what rule violation would equal what punishment, otherwise it'd end up with a flawed system which would lead to punishments being longer than they need to be - dragging away from the main point of a suspension/access restriction, which is to reinforce proper understanding of the rules.

To summarise, if you have any questions about the grey areas or "unwritten rules" as some like to call them, then I'd recommend posting in the community to staff Q&A thread, where HR may be able to start internal discussion to try and nail out the specifics and resolve the issues at hand.

Between my leaving and return none of the grey areas that were posted in the staff Q&A thread have been resolved or any progress been made other than "Behind the scenes stuff". I also posted in the staff Q&A about Staff Members activity but unsurprisingly only got a small handful of responses, primarily from the more active staff members.

[Enzyme]

Equal punishment for the same rulebreakage.

Has this been considered/discussed before? Oh yeah. Does it sound good on paper? Eh sure. It's kind of like communism though, works great in theory but fails in a practical sense. (fuckin' come after me commies)

*clears throat*

Handing out a fair punishment is no easy task. The truth of the matter is that no case really is the same. There are way too many variables to take into consideration for us to plop down a standard punishment for everyone. We have a somewhat uniform ban-time for rule-breakages but it really depends a lot on the situation, the player and his/her record.

We got Billy:
14 Hours
0 Bans
0 Blacklists 
Rule broken: Molotoved an RP store without a valid RP reason. 

Possible options:
1. Talking to the player, explaining what he did wrong, and what he should have done instead to avoid getting into trouble. Issue a written or verbal warning.
2. Talking to the player, explaining what he did wrong, and what he should have done instead to avoid getting into trouble. Issue a weapon blacklist.
3. Talking to the player, explaining what he did wrong, and what he should have done instead to avoid getting into trouble. Issue a ban. 

Billy is a fairly new player to Limelight. He's managed to avoid getting into any serious trouble so far and his actions seem to be caused by him not knowing/understanding the rules properly. He seems apologetic and understands what he did wrong and appears to be sincere. 

We issue punishment as an educational punishment, a slap on the wrist to ensure that there are consequences to breaking our rules. Which of these options will educate the player the best without being excessive? Will a blacklist serve the same use as a ban? What about a warning? In this case, a punishment/talk is done as a way of educating the player of our rules, and what is acceptable or not.
Most likely, option 1 or 2 is carried out with. We wish to focus on educating the player instead of punishing him. The small punishment that is issued is there to help us having his attention while we attempt to educate him. 


We got Peter:
351 hours
5 bans (RDM, CDM, failRP baiting police, propblocking himself farming contraband afk, RDM)
6 blacklists (W blacklist for RDM, V blacklist for CDM, PTE blacklist for messing around with props etc etc, W blacklist)
Rule broken: Molotoved an RP store without a valid RP reason. 

Possible options:
1. Talking to the player, explaining what he did wrong, and what he should have done instead to avoid getting into trouble. Issue a written or verbal warning.
2. Talking to the player, explaining what he did wrong, and what he should have done instead to avoid getting into trouble. Issue a weapon blacklist.
3. Talking to the player, explaining what he did wrong, and what he should have done instead to avoid getting into trouble. Issue a ban. 

Peter is not a new player to Limelight nor is he unfamiliar with the rules. He's gotten himself in trouble quite a few times and he's been punished several times for breaking the rules. He seems careless about consequences, and about following the rules because he felt he was in the right to molotov a shop as a citizen because he was bored. He doesn't seem to care about what he did wrong nor what he could have done differently. He wants to be done with the sit so he can go back to doing what he wants to do. 

Is the focus of the confrontation with the player to educate him on the rules, or punish him for him not caring about our rules?

Most likely, the player will be issued both a blacklist and a ban. This player has been given enough chances to read and learn the rules, and he has clearly accepted the consequences of not following them. 

Billy and Peter did the same thing, but they have very different backgrounds and they shouldn't be treated the same because the punishment is issued for different reasons. One of them is being educated on the rules after making a mistake (caused by ignorance, but not with malicious intent), and the other one is being punished for breaking them on purpose with malicious intent showing no care for the rules nor following them. 

There are way too many variables in a case to deal with every player the same. Players act very differently. They have different attitudes when it comes to the rules, they have different backgrounds and records when it comes to punishments. 

There shouldn't be administrators placing different length suspensions on players for FearRP, NLR and things that don't depend on situational context. Hours shouldn't determine punishment. There's no need to punish someone longer because, "They should know better since they've been here longer!". A rule violation is a rule violation and should be the same across the board. If you as an administrator have to ask yourself if it's within the rules, it's not something you should enforce. Only clear violations of a standing rule should call for action to be taken.

You and I have very different viewpoints about this. I believe that if a rule was broken on accident or if it was done on purpose with malicious intent should affect the length of the punishment issued. There's a big difference between a player not knowing that it was against the rules and a player knowing it was against the rules, knowing of the consequences if caught and still going through with said action.

Players can make mistakes. Why would they be punished the same as someone who has malicious intent?

I believe that we should focus on educating players. Punishments are a tool help educate. 
If the player doesn't care about being educated and following the rules, then the punishment is there to act as a deterrent. 

---

"Yo why the fuck are Admins involving themselves in IC situations? Let us be alone"

As it stands, Administrators are the consequences to poor decisions, to ignorance, to pure selfishness and to maliciousness.

I often throw around the following quote and the staff-team have heard it many times:
"What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right". 

We do what's unpopular, and we accept the role of being unpopular. We have to remain unbiased and we have to be a strict authority in situations when we're required to do so. As mentioned by other staff members in this thread, we involve ourselves in IC situations when there isn't a fitting IC consequence. We cannot draw comparisons between real life and our roleplay server because consequences are very different. If you die in real life then that's it. Game over...
 If you die on Limelight then meh, respawning in 30 seconds.

We have rules to enforce a sense of "realism" and "consequence". We have rules like FearRP to force people to act more realistically and act with fear as they would in real life, but fail to do ingame. 

If you have a Police Officer who's randomly shooting his gun around like a monkey on meth then clearly something is wrong RP wise. What is the consequence of his actions? A quick demotion where he can take another government-slot, arm himself with a gun and continue his failRP spree?

We involve ourselves because there isn't a realistic and big enough consequence to the wrong actions committed by said player. We have to be an Out of Character consequence to prevent people from disregarding smaller consequences as nothing. When a line is crossed, we have to step in and have a chat. 
If the player doesn't care about In Character consequences then what will prevent him from continuing this behaviour?
We step in. We're the deterrent for complete disregard of IC consequence. Why? Because our roleplay-system depends on people acting within a somewhat realistic manner. Otherwise we might as well run around in Sponge-bob costumes yelling "Hail Satan" while doing spontaneous abortions on male government officials. 

---

Grey zones

We the staff have to choose a direction when it come to our rules. Do we focus on having clearly defined rules where player creativeness is limited by our rules as we have to define every point. Do we want to have 300 rules covering every nook and cranny of a situation or do we open up for more lenient rules that allow for more diverse roleplays and ways of going around them.

We cannot possibly cover every greyzone in our rules, nor can we cover most of them. We can do our best, but there's a limit to how many rules we can have before it does more harm than good. We can't have a long ruleset that is intimidating towards new players, nor can we have rules that make it a "free-for-all" on our servers. We're trying the best we can to find a good middle-ground and we're trying to improve this issue the best we can. We're trying to go for a "best-of-both-worlds" alternative, but it will take is a short while to getting everything discussed published properly. 

---

Recap:

Equal punishment for the same rulebreakage:
Doesn't work well in practice. There are too many variables to take into consideration to issue a standardized punishment to all players for committing the same action. 
We punish players to educate them. If they do not wish to be educated then they are punished to make it clear that there are consequences to their actions and to their complete disregard for our rules.


"Yo why the fuck are Admins involving themselves in IC situations? Let us be alone"
There isn't a good IC consequence to someone who doesn't care about IC consequences. That's where we step in. We have to be the deterrent to prevent failRP from corrupting the average roleplay completely. It's not perfect, but we have to involve ourselves when people cross the line. 


Grey-zones
We can cover every grey-zone in our rules but we'd end up with an extremely long and intimidating rule-list that would be very hard for players to read, learn and follow. Roleplay would also suffer because of all of the restrictions made. Every situation has been defined in the rules but it's impossible to read and remember every answer to every situation. Both for players and staff.


Apologies for any rambling that might be in here. I hope I'm making sense. It's been a long day so I might not make a lot of sense. Might edit post to help clarify a point.

[Awestruck]

-snip-

Brilliant explanation.

[ForceGhost]

Grey-zones
We can cover every grey-zone in our rules but we'd end up with an extremely long and intimidating rule-list that would be very hard for players to read, learn and follow. Roleplay would also suffer because of all of the restrictions made. Every situation has been defined in the rules but it's impossible to read and remember every answer to every situation. Both for players and staff.

I just thought I'd reply to this one as a main point (I've also just posted on the staff Q&A).

This doesn't solve the problem, I understand that you'd need a lot more rules to cover every grey area but it still doesn't solve the grey areas that exist, because they do.

I brought up some specific points on the staff Q&A but stating why the team does or doesn't do certain things doesn't solve the problem, it just delays fixing it. Right now staff members seem to be making up and enforcing rules on the spot with no citing of the rulebook or reasoning as too why, leading to a confused and at time rather pissed off player base. 

Maybe the solution is having an in-game FAQ about the grey areas for the ones that don't come up all that often, but some of these grey areas are kind of a big deal which make the staff team look like a bunch of headless chickens at times with each member giving a different version of the non-rule and leading to a confusing situation.

[Enzyme]

Rules can always be interpreted differently depending on the staff-member.

We have 20 different staff-members from all over the world. Staff-members might view the rules a bit differently and interpret it a bit differently. We've always trying our best to reach a common understanding on all the rules, and on what is right and wrong. We try to do our best with being as equal as possible. We've had many discussions on the internal forum trying to clear up issues here. We're trying our best, but we're still far from perfect. Rules and in game situations can be interpreted differently. Some people are making decisions based on experience while some by basing their decision on following the "book" to a dot.

Will we ever reach a perfect state of harmony where staff-members are on the same page about everything? God no. We're a group if weird ass people doing manual labour as volunteers. Are we trying to act as fair as possible and with the best intent for Limelight? Absolutely. I really believe so. We can never be perfect, but we can try to get close. What I can tell you is that we're constantly discussing internally, we're going mental at each other at times, and we all can feel very strongly about different things. It's because we all care for Limelight and we wish what's best for it.

We can't all be on the same side on everything, but we try to be. I think it's important to put emphasis on that we try to keep our service as fair and equal as possible. It's just incredibly hard to have it be the same for every staff-member. Some staff are more lenient than others. More focus more on education than punishment and the other way around.

We're a bunch of silly tits trying our best. We can only apologize when we don't nail it every time, but we do try.

[ForceGhost]

Rules can always be interpreted differently depending on the staff-member.

We have 20 different staff-members from all over the world. Staff-members might view the rules a bit differently and interpret it a bit differently. We've always trying our best to reach a common understanding on all the rules, and on what is right and wrong. We try to do our best with being as equal as possible. We've had many discussions on the internal forum trying to clear up issues here. We're trying our best, but we're still far from perfect. Rules and in game situations can be interpreted differently. Some people are making decisions based on experience while some by basing their decision on following the "book" to a dot.

Will we ever reach a perfect state of harmony where staff-members are on the same page about everything? God no. We're a group if weird ass people doing manual labour as volunteers. Are we trying to act as fair as possible and with the best intent for Limelight? Absolutely. I really believe so. We can never be perfect, but we can try to get close. What I can tell you is that we're constantly discussing internally, we're going mental at each other at times, and we all can feel very strongly about different things. It's because we all care for Limelight and we wish what's best for it.

We can't all be on the same side on everything, but we try to be. I think it's important to put emphasis on that we try to keep our service as fair and equal as possible. It's just incredibly hard to have it be the same for every staff-member. Some staff are more lenient than others. More focus more on education than punishment and the other way around.

We're a bunch of silly tits trying our best. We can only apologize when we don't nail it every time, but we do try.

Not entirely sure if this was meant to answer the above point about grey areas but it didn't if it was intended to.

I'm not asking for every staff member to treat every situation exactly the same, I'm asking for staff members to get involved for the same thing.

[Enzyme]

Again, different staff-members read situations differently. Some staff-members might favour an IC solution to the issue while other staff-members might feel it's more right to step in and offer an OOC solution. It depends a lot on the situation and how much a staff-member knows about the situation. If the staff-member sits on little information/context then the staff-member might sit it out and supervise the situation until he deems it necessary to step in.

[ForceGhost]

Again, different staff-members read situations differently. Some staff-members might favour an IC solution to the issue while other staff-members might feel it's more right to step in and offer an OOC solution. It depends a lot on the situation and how much a staff-member knows about the situation. If the staff-member sits on little information/context then the staff-member might sit it out and supervise the situation until he deems it necessary to step in.

So how can I, as a player, decide how I want to RP if I don't know if it's going to get me a blacklist or a demotion?

Say I want to be a slightly more extreme President and suddenly outlaw all gun shops, I order my Government Forces to prioritise Gun Dealers to reduce gun crime. 1 Staff member approaches me and tells me there's a grace period before enforcing laws and that I will be receiving a blacklist for it, if I had actually known this to begin with I would not have chosen to RP the situation that way and may have been more forgiving with my laws.

A few of the grey areas which I think come up the most are here.

[Soviethooves]

Ask a staff member like the rest of the players do. Again, we can't define every grey area to explain to every staff member to get on the exact, same, page. If you want to do something iffy just ask before you do it. At the end, you're responsible for your actions. Go by this key piece of information, "If it feels like it will get me in trouble, I probably shouldn't do it."