RIP Public Ban Appeals

[jan.antilles]

Rather i'm hearing that it seems to me that the barrier to break the rules has lowered more then annything, and thus more rule breaking and thus there are more appeals.

And how has that barrier been lowered?

By the way i'm not advocating we should go back public, i'm just doubting the "more appeals" being the result of a purely positive developement.

Right, so my understanding is that, among many other parts one part of the reason the appeals were made private was because there was a concern of people being named and shamed and it was preventing people from appealing. Now i suppose those people are appealing, which is good but there's also little doubt in my mind that that there's going to be a portion of people that with their name now being safely hidden in a private forum feel like the barrier's gone down. I also feels like it's opening up the way for people to make up their own nerative, especially within their private friend groups.

Making sure I understand you correctly: people feel that we're more quick to ban people since they can privately appeal, and we're banning for things that would previously have been warnings?

If that's what you're referring to, then I can safely say that isn't true. I realize that the people who sit in private friend groups don't trust my just saying that, but if they've already decided that the admins are working against the playerbase for some reason, why would they trust anything I say?

People are always going to make up their own narrative. Nothing we say or do will ever stop them from that. If every single thing that admins said or did was public, they would still find something to criticize. This change was absolutely made to benefit players who want to admit their mistakes and come back without being publicly shamed by the people who treated ban appeals as a spectator sport, and to me that is worth any criticism I may receive.