[WaifuApple]

Not understanding your behaviour was wrong isn't a sign that a ban should be extended, because as has been touched upon in some of these posts 'hammering' the GMs, which has often been used as a way to tell people with valid criticisms not to question the GMs, communication is a very big issue with this community at large. In that sense, it is VERY much possible that the full extent of what they did wrong is not understood because it has been left far, far too vague. And is that the fault of the people accused? I don't really think so. I think we should be careful in trying to direct MORE blame on the accused in order to mitigate concerns about our own staff. People have the right to be concerned, and many are.

[Kyratio]

For all of the people hammering on the GM team for not providing complete logs of the entire situation, I think it's also important to note that not a single one of the ban appeals really shows any kind of contrition. In fact, some of them even go as far as throwing other members of the community under the bus.

Using excuses such as:
-The GMs were in the Discord and should have put a stop to it. (Already covered in Balthie's previous post.)
-Another ground (Hearth) was doing the same or worse.

Tells me that they either still don't understand their behavior was wrong or worse, simply don't care. It makes me think the bans should be extended until they've at least proven they won't be participating in the same behavior that got them banned initially.

It's also concerning to see the amount of people who say they have no idea what's really happening because of a lack of evidence while simultaneously saying the banned users are innocent. You can't have it both ways.

Absolutely. (To the bit about it being concerning.) The bans weren't unwarranted, at least for one. For the other three I can't speak whatsoever. I never really interacted with them much, or if I did, I didn't know I did. But, I imagine the admins at least had something to warrant such a response. The issue is while the admins are attempting to be transparent, even more so than usual in fact, a lot of these people who were banned are important figures in large groups of players in the community. So, rather than people just accepting the vaguely explained reasoning, people demand exact reason and proof because they are angry for their friends.

[Plunger]

Not understanding your behaviour was wrong isn't a sign that a ban should be extended, because as has been touched upon in some of these posts 'hammering' the GMs, which has often been used as a way to tell people with valid criticisms not to question the GMs, communication is a very big issue with this community at large. In that sense, it is VERY much possible that the full extent of what they did wrong is not understood because it has been left far, far too vague. And is that the fault of the people accused? I don't really think so. I think we should be careful in trying to direct MORE blame on the accused in order to mitigate concerns about our own staff. People have the right to be concerned, and many are.

An administrator may/may not reply to your unban request for any reason. Engaging in any sort of childish activity in this forum will be responded with very negatively. This is meant to be a venue for people who can show at least a little intelligence to plead their case and make amends. Please do not falsify any information you state. Especially, please be honest with why you were banned. If you cannot at least be honest about the reason you are banned, it is unlikely we can trust you to be honest about your pledge to change your ways. If your post has not been responded to within a certain amount of time (try to give the moderators a chance to at least READ your post) then you may bump your post -1- time, DO NOT constantly spam the thread with useless posts.

I respectfully disagree with you. Dev summarizes it pretty well in the stickied post of the unban subforum. If you can't admit your fault in something, even minutely, how can you be trusted going forward to respect the rules? I think it would go a long way if they could at least be honest with some of the charges in their bans. The GMs have a policy on not posting the logs they've collected to protect potential whistleblowers, but that doesn't mean the accused themselves can't shed this light, they obviously have access to those same logs.

For all the people saying the real issue is the lack of GM transparency, surely the real issue is a group of players in positions of power harassing and gatekeeping other players?

[WaifuApple]

This is under the presumption that the accused are always aware of the particular logs that they're expected to refer to as evidence of wrongdoing, and the ban appeals existed before the statement from the GMs, so I believe that it's a little shortsighted to come to an assumption. The GMs don't share these logs with the person, so when you're left with every server you're in and every set of DMs as a playing field for "well, you did this blanket thing", those shared 'logs' aren't exactly going to pop out. Especially when those logs could be, for all we know of the accused, one part of a conversation that was actively more mellow when you add proper context. There's a lot, in the vagueness of the situation, that can lead to a response of 'I don't get it', or 'But I didn't do anything out of line with the rest of the community'. In the latter part, presuming that the rest of the community is also displaying negative tendencies and you're one of the few to be pulled out and punished, the waters get incredibly muddy because you can genuinely not see what you've done wrong when it's mired in the fact that it was standard community behaviour, and seemingly normal.

[Kyratio]

Not understanding your behaviour was wrong isn't a sign that a ban should be extended, because as has been touched upon in some of these posts 'hammering' the GMs, which has often been used as a way to tell people with valid criticisms not to question the GMs, communication is a very big issue with this community at large. In that sense, it is VERY much possible that the full extent of what they did wrong is not understood because it has been left far, far too vague. And is that the fault of the people accused? I don't really think so. I think we should be careful in trying to direct MORE blame on the accused in order to mitigate concerns about our own staff. People have the right to be concerned, and many are.

An administrator may/may not reply to your unban request for any reason. Engaging in any sort of childish activity in this forum will be responded with very negatively. This is meant to be a venue for people who can show at least a little intelligence to plead their case and make amends. Please do not falsify any information you state. Especially, please be honest with why you were banned. If you cannot at least be honest about the reason you are banned, it is unlikely we can trust you to be honest about your pledge to change your ways. If your post has not been responded to within a certain amount of time (try to give the moderators a chance to at least READ your post) then you may bump your post -1- time, DO NOT constantly spam the thread with useless posts.

I respectfully disagree with you. Dev summarizes it pretty well in the stickied post of the unban subforum. If you can't admit your fault in something, even minutely, how can you be trusted going forward to respect the rules? I think it would go a long way if they could at least be honest with some of the charges in their bans. The GMs have a policy on not posting the logs they've collected to protect potential whistleblowers, but that doesn't mean the accused themselves can't shed this light, they obviously have access to those same logs.

For all the people saying the real issue is the lack of GM transparency, surely the real issue is a group of players in positions of power harassing and gatekeeping other players?

I guess I'll backtrack a bit. I agree that people acting as though the people who were banned are completely innocent is an issue, but that doesn't extend to this. This is part of the issue.

[Shadbase]

Regardless if the bans are warranted or not, the way they happened and were responded to were crude, disrespectful, and outright very clearly disagreeable. This is what the majority of people here are actually talking about given we have no say on a person's ban, regardless of true or false. It's only coming up because of how highly problematic this situation immediately was, and because the players are actually getting up in arms, not just sitting back and going "well I can't fight the GMs", which is what a majority of people actually do when they're banned, beyond making an appeal.
I quite literally barely know Lumi or Aegis, but if it was just them without the people and they still fought for it? Yeah, I'd be supporting their message of the GMs not giving them any information as to why they were banned. The GMs are the accuser, and they bear the weight of delivering the proof as much as the verdict.
And that goes for every single ban ever to happen. Everyone deserves an actual explanation of "you did this wrong, and this is why you're in trouble now", just as everyone deserves actual warnings before they're banned so they can actually correct their behavior. A post saying "well this is an explanation of what the ban messages mean" without expressly showing what was wrong is a nothing sandwich. Mewni, Lumi, Aegis, and Croakie were made examples of.
These things don't even have to be explained to the public. But they SHOULD be explained to the people being banned.

And it's exactly what I just said, too. Dismissing valid criticism of the way the GM team mishandles a situation because "omg the GMs are being harrassed!". Nobody in this thread wants to harass the GMs - hell a lot of people in this thread are -friends- with the GMs. If you see someone trying to do that you should beat them to death, quite frankly.
Bootlicking for either side does nothing for the situation, and nothing for the people involved.

[Plunger]

This is under the presumption that the accused are always aware of the particular logs that they're expected to refer to as evidence of wrongdoing, and the ban appeals existed before the statement from the GMs, so I believe that it's a little shortsighted to come to an assumption. The GMs don't share these logs with the person, so when you're left with every server you're in and every set of DMs as a playing field for "well, you did this blanket thing", those shared 'logs' aren't exactly going to pop out. Especially when those logs could be, for all we know of the accused, one part of a conversation that was actively more mellow when you add proper context. There's a lot, in the vagueness of the situation, that can lead to a response of 'I don't get it', or 'But I didn't do anything out of line with the rest of the community'. In the latter part, presuming that the rest of the community is also displaying negative tendencies and you're one of the few to be pulled out and punished, the waters get incredibly muddy because you can genuinely not see what you've done wrong when it's mired in the fact that it was standard community behaviour, and seemingly normal.

That is a interesting argument, and would make sense if that is the case, however, you ignored completely the existence of the Hearth discord group, which does all of that to a much higher degree, was a place used for TCBlade to do such, and is being used by the current Don to do the same.

. . .

Besides, It's strange how 4 people got banned when the group has... 19 people?

. . .

And I know for a fact, that three people here didn't go to others DM's to harass them, because as said, venting is the most harm that came out of this.
And again, a few months is hardly what I call early.

"Saying mean things to the person that is being mean to me" is not harassment.

It certainly reads like they know exactly which Discord server is being spoken about and even which comments they were making that could have led to their ban.

[WaifuApple]

Regarding the fact they know what discord this is, I can only presume it would be a discord centered around the Yakuza, which to my knowledge operates specifically under the Donna. I don't think when a discord was made it would have ever been under the pretense, "oh, who do we NOT invite?" but rather "who's part of the Yakuza by affliation?"

Once again, in telling others not to make assumptions, I believe you are making assumptions of your own about the context in the situation. For all we know, the absence of someone in this discord was no concerted effort to keep them out. Perhaps they never actually asked for an invite. Or perhaps they asked one person from the group, and only that one person told them no. When you get into this degree of speculation, it becomes unhealthy to start looking at ways to discredit other people's concerns while remaining speculative when saying "looks clear-cut to me". I don't really feel like it is. Just right here I've thrown out alternate assumptions of my own that in themselves are no less valid based on the same pretense of none of us having a clue of anything.

To come through and tell people not to call these people innocent while also offering an opinion of "I think they should be banned longer" feels like a can of worms, to me. To tell people thinking that way is not okay while also taking to the other extreme openly. I'd respectfully say that it's kind of biased. And this is coming from someone who hasn't deemed the people innocent in this thread, just mentioned of communication issues that have been rampant through ban after ban, regardless of innocence factor. And the innocence or guilt of the players involved doesn't suddenly make bad communication good.

[Plunger]

Regarding the fact they know what discord this is, I can only presume it would be a discord centered around the Yakuza, which to my knowledge operates specifically under the Donna. I don't think when a discord was made it would have ever been under the pretense, "oh, who do we NOT invite?" but rather "who's part of the Yakuza by affliation?"

Once again, in telling others not to make assumptions, I believe you are making assumptions of your own about the context in the situation. For all we know, the absence of someone in this discord was no concerted effort to keep them out. Perhaps they never actually asked for an invite. Or perhaps they asked one person from the group, and only that one person told them no. When you get into this degree of speculation, it becomes unhealthy to start looking at ways to discredit other people's concerns while remaining speculative when saying "looks clear-cut to me". I don't really feel like it is. Just right here I've thrown out alternate assumptions of my own that in themselves are no less valid based on the same pretense of none of us having a clue of anything.

To come through and tell people not to call these people innocent while also offering an opinion of "I think they should be banned longer" feels like a can of worms, to me. To tell people thinking that way is not okay while also taking to the other extreme openly. I'd respectfully say that it's kind of biased. And this is coming from someone who hasn't deemed the people innocent in this thread, just mentioned of communication issues that have been rampant through ban after ban, regardless of innocence factor. And the innocence or guilt of the players involved doesn't suddenly make bad communication good.

If they know the server the ban fall on and they know the conversation that led to it, they can post their own logs for people to judge. I'm asking why they don't in their defense. What exactly were the mean words they said that they mentioned in their post. What exactly were in the DMs they sent to people? Seems like they could shed a lot of light on this themselves.

[WaifuApple]

I presume that kind of "scorch the earth" tactic of dropping logs themselves for things that should have been communicated properly with them by the GMs as is probably isn't going to go well. If the GMs won't post them for harassment reasons, what do you think they'd make of the accused posting them?

I'd presume that it'd probably see them accused of further harassment.