Undo the hacking punishment revert

I am going to be completely honest and say that hacking is one of those things where bias and blind speculation will often times lead to unjustifiable bans where a little bit of fishy evidence is portrayed as being the smoking gun. The problem here is that other factors exist, and they make it incredibly hard to spot hackers. If you believe that someone is a hacker, you are going to take every little second of their game play as an example of them hacking and run with it. If I desired to watch you play for long enough I bet I could scrape together a few out of context snap shots to put you out of the game for a long time. The level of false positives in gmod is way too high to conceptualize. Oh, he bhops pretty good, must be running a script. Oh, he is pretty decent with the rifle, he must be hacking. Oh, I really can't tell if he has no recoil or if my ping is just high, he must be hacking. A good admin or mod can look at this with reasonable skepticism and say "hey, you know what? I am not comfortable banning this person on the evidence I have", but others may be gung ho and ready to go. This reveals a huge problem: Bias. Some admins and mods get so committed to putting away specific people for hacking that you start to wonder if the person could reasonably called a hacker, or if the staff member just doesn't like them for their skill or other reasons. The more willingly you are to believe that someone is a rule breaker, the more willingly you are to accept when an example presents itself. Admins are not immune to this kind of behavior, and experience really does no good to prevent this. Imagine seeing an admin in spectator all the time watching you while you play. I wonder what they could possibly be wanting to do.

Now imagine giving that admin the power to perma ban.

 

I think that leads and owners are susceptible to the same bias and it may be even worse leaving permanent hacking bans up to the bias of 2 or 3 people. My next solution is either more leads or finding a way to mitigate that bias. The only thing I can think of to deal with admin bias is requiring a majority agreement between admins on hacking 2nd permas. Make a channel in discord for admins to post hacking evidence and require at least 4/7 admins to agree it is sufficient for a permaban. No majority rule? Unban them. The biggest issue I see with this solution is it would take all of the workload away from 1 or 2 people and instead place that same amount on every admin at once even if it does solve the bias problem.

I understand if it is too much workload to have hacking 2nd permas and there is no way to solve that that the upper administration would be happy with but I really do think allowing hackers more than 1 chance at changing their ways is a detriment to the community for reasons I already stated. Sometimes we just have to swallow our poison.

 

If a lead can't handle that "strain" then they shouldn't be lead. Shit doesn't take that much time at all to review. It took me about 15-20 minutes once every two weeks to review everything and to clear them out.

The only thing I see in this thread that is really telling is that over 75% of the community would like to see 1 or 2nd offense to be perma'd; yet there has still been no action from @Teroxa or @Highwon . I guess listening to the community has fallen down in it's priorities along with updates.

 

2nd offense should be permanent global ban. Also, the people that blindly aimbot mass rdm should be receive a global perma ban as they have made their intentions clear. Other than that, 2nd offense global perma ban. 1st offense can stay 1 month local ban in case of a false positive.

 

Imo hackers have only one goal: to havk and cause chaos. With the exception of a handleful of people here, they arent apart of the community and have no attachment to it either.

With that being said, people do deserve second chances, regardless if they decide to take it, and regardless of the hacks they used. The first hacking offense should be a global ban too. I have seen players hop from server to server just bc the ban was local. A second hacking offense however shows they have no intention of changing.

 

Think about the current protocol with this setup. Someone hacks on one server, gets a local ban for 4 weeks. They get one chance to play legit and if they hop and hack again, they're banned on all for 8 weeks. It's a simple, double-edged sword that gives some players a second chance and, for the ones that don't want that chance, it punishes them even harsher.

 

That's the problem though. The community has decided that they don't want to give these players beyond a second chance. With the current protocol, you're allowing third, fourth, etc., chances. This is why people are advocating the first offense to be global-- give them a harsh first chance, for a first offense. If they fuck up their second chance, they're out.

Nearly 100 people have voted in this poll, which, is actually pretty incredible and only around 10% agree with the current setup. The length this has gone without any change is honestly as much as a spit in the face to the community as reverting the previous rule was-- especially seeing as the previous rule was implemented after a long discussion with the current staff team and voted within the staff team after hearing some community feedback on the current structure.

 

Why even give them the chance to hop and cause more chaos on another server? A simple 4 week global is enough to get the point across to players that we dont tolerate hackers.

 

In my experience when players are banned locally for hacking they jump to another server upset about the ban and just continue disrupting an entire server.

Giving a global ban for the first offense allows them a fair amount of time to cool down and either delete their hacks or at least not have them loaded up into memory.