Warning system

[anatil]

This has been a source of constant irritation. Someone (either an old player who feel the need to be annoying or just a ) makes a new account, levels it up a bit and starts randomly warning people.

I particularly have been on the receiving end of these phases more than my share of times...my warning level on some of my accounts has already gone up to 90-110. And as gracious as some wizards are helping they can't always be there, nor are they able to remove the warning if the account is offline. Additionally the complain command is usually useless, I've used it at several times after getting warned, I have higher likelihood of getting a response by mailing a wizard (which rather defeats the whole purpose of the complain command).

There's also no way for players to view their own warnings...which makes it difficult to keep track of which are valid and which are abuse. Combine that with the fact that in order to appeal a warning you have to go through a going around asking for help and usually getting the cold shoulder or getting the old "its not really important" response...thats always fun. Letting some annoying pest do as he pleases, create chaos, annoy and distrupt the game for almost a dozen or more people, abuse the system and get away without so much as a slap on the wirst.

My suggestion to fix this would be making it so that only HoF players had the ability to use the system, or at the very least make the process of warning someone as difficult as appealing the warning. A simple command that allows you to warn anyone for any given reason with the possibility of silencing that person is a little too much power for players that have just barely started playing the game.

[Teshuvah]

Originally Posted by anatil

This has been a source of constant irritation. Someone (either an old player who feel the need to be annoying or just a ) makes a new account, levels it up a bit and starts randomly warning people.

I particularly have been on the receiving end of these phases more than my share of times...my warning level on some of my accounts has already gone up to 90-110. And as gracious as some wizards are helping they can't always be there, nor are they able to remove the warning if the account is offline. Additionally the complain command is usually useless, I've used it at several times after getting warned, I have higher likelihood of getting a response by mailing a wizard (which rather defeats the whole purpose of the complain command).

There's also no way for players to view their own warnings...which makes it difficult to keep track of which are valid and which are abuse. Combine that with the fact that in order to appeal a warning you have to go through a going around asking for help and usually getting the cold shoulder or getting the old "its not really important" response...thats always fun. Letting some annoying pest do as he pleases, create chaos, annoy and distrupt the game for almost a dozen or more people, abuse the system and get away without so much as a slap on the wirst.

My suggestion to fix this would be making it so that only HoF players had the ability to use the system, or at the very least make the process of warning someone as difficult as appealing the warning. A simple command that allows you to warn anyone for any given reason with the possibility of silencing that person is a little too much power for players that have just barely started playing the game.

We are looking into what to do about the abuses of the warning system, but HOF level isnt going to do much as most of the abusers have hof characters.

And that also defeats the purpose of players using it for its intended purpose.
But, we are looking into it.

It is also very important to realize though, that in all these years, other than the message coming up on your screen when falsely warned, no player has ever had their gaming time bothered by it via silencing, ban etc because of false warnings.

It wastes *our* time as Wizards while we remove them, nothing more.

[Arilou]

Additionally the complain command is usually useless, I've used it at several times after getting warned, I have higher likelihood of getting a response by mailing a wizard (which rather defeats the whole purpose of the complain command).

You're still better off getting in contact with a wizard, (and it's best if you find one who is online) but keep in mind that the complain log is something only accessible to arch wizards and all the arch wizards had been inactive for a long time. So that's why you weren't getting anywhere with it in the past, but as part of this whole revival kick we've been on, you will find that there are wizards keeping an eye on it again.

Letting some annoying pest do as he pleases, create chaos, annoy and distrupt the game for almost a dozen or more people, abuse the system and get away without so much as a slap on the wirst.

That's a bit dramatic - Mass abuse of the warning system is and always has been a banishable offense. Also, it's actually easier to deal with than minor abuses as we are quickly alerted to the problem and then we can type in one command that will pull up a list of players warned by the abuser. At which point we go through the list and remove the warning points for each player as we see them no matter if they reported it to us or not.

In the future we'd like to have the ability to go through the list and correct the warning points for all players at once, no matter if they are offline or not, and there are some other improvements that can be made to the system that we will look into (as teshuvah mentioned). But there are always going to be players who find some way or another to go crazy before/after getting banished. My suggestion to you if you don't see a wizard dealing with it is to mention it on the chatbox. We check the forums more than we take the time to login so you may find that you can get help that way and, if not, it will let us know there was a problem when we do get around to seeing it so that we can look into it.