mushroomLavender - Ciapek: Unfair wavebans

Staff Complaints Public Accepted
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19

Thank you for your complaint, it has been accepted. This complaint is evaluated under policy at the time the complaint was made: Admin Policy Banning Policy

This is my 11th post on this complaint.

Personal Notes

I’m very sorry for how long it took to resolve this complaint. As you may be able to imagine, it was much more complex and difficult to handle than complaints typically are. In addition, mushroom’s inactivity deprioritized the complaint so that other issues, including some other complaints, could be handled.

I also apologize if anything here is confusing, or if there are any unnoticed mistakes. Multiple people will have reviewed this by the time it is posted, but there is a lot of information so it is possible that some of it was not presented as well as it could have been, or that some issue went unnoticed.

The investigation process of this complaint was extremely long. There are a significant amount of messages from various people, including mushroom, and it would not be reasonable to include everything from that here. There will be things that don’t appear in the findings, including claims made by mushroom that could be considered related to the complaint. For something to not appear, it will have to have gone forgotten or missed by everyone who reviewed this closing, or everyone who reviewed it will have to have come to the conclusion that it is not relevant enough to the complaint to include. As is typical with complaints, the subject, mushroomLavender, will have been given the opportunity to review this closing, and while they will not be required to agree with the conclusions made here, they will have the opportunity to point out inaccuracies, oversights, or omissions.

Executive Summary

During Lizard round 35746, mushroomLavender violated several long standing admin policies by indefinitely banning 13 players in relation to what appeared to be a riot or revolution, after having been themselves killed by participating players. Banned players included not just ones who mushroomLavender claimed participated in the riot, but also ones which mushroomLavender claimed were partly responsible for it, like the captain.

mushroomLavender placed many of these bans and took significant investigative steps related to them even after other game admins joined the server for the purpose of addressing the situation. Despite being aware of the presence of these admins, mushroomLavender did not defer to them to handle the situation and did not significantly coordinate with those admins.

When contacted about the bans and the fact that mushroomLavender was unilaterally handling appeals of the bans, mushroomLavender’s responses were not satisfactory, violated admin policy, and impeded investigation. Investigation by an uninvolved admin determined that at least some bans were not justifiable.

In the time since those bans were placed, several actions were taken to mitigate the negative impacts of mushroomLavender’s actions. These actions and others resulting from this complaint are detailed below in the Resulting Actions section.

Findings

  1. mushroomLavender was playing in Lizard 35746 as a warden before being killed by players who were taking actions that appeared to be part of a riot or revolution.
    1. A total of 7 players joined the round as a warden, including mushroomLavender.
  2. Some details about bans placed by mushroomLavender in connection to this incident are available in my 5th post on this thread.
  3. Three different players appear to have logs attacking mushroomLavender’s character, all three were banned by mushroomLavender with the ban reason indicating participation in a coup.
    1. One of the players was banned indefinitely, with the ban being reduced to a temporary ban by mushroomLavender on appeal without a vote or discussion.
    2. Two of the players were banned indefinitely, with the bans being modified or lifted by other members of the admin team.
    3. The placing of these bans violated admin policy 2.1 “Do not ever process a case you are/were a part of”.
  4. In addition to the bans referenced in finding 3, multiple other players were banned with the ban reasons indicating participation in a coup.
    1. The placing of these bans violated admin policy 2.1 “Do not ever process a case you are/were a part of”.
  5. In addition to the bans referenced in finding 3 and 4, the captain was temporarily game banned and indefinitely role banned. The information in my 7th post on this thread is related to the role bans placed on the captain.
    1. The reason provided for the captain’s game ban was “Ensured the tension was so poor between command and crew that several players went far enough to straight up start slaughtering security and command due to your extremely poor leadership and performance. Your role as Captain had completely derailed the players in terms of frustration.”
    2. The reason provided for the captain’s role bans was “After abusing the crew, it got so bad that the QM and several crew members violently couped the captain- killing several security.”
    3. The placing of the bans on the captain violated admin policy 2.1 “Do not ever process a case you are/were a part of”.
  6. During the round, mushroomLavender made a request for help in an admin channel on Discord. Multiple admins logged in to help prior to many of the bans being placed and prior to the round ending.
    1. Two of the admins who logged in to help were identified and contacted for information. Due to mushroomLavender’s response to the complaint, no other admins were identified.
    2. Both contacted admins indicated that mushroomLavender did not coordinate with them to ensure the bans mushroomLavender was placing were appropriate. Their accounts give the impression that there was little coordination between mushroomLavender and the other admins during the bans.
    3. One of the admins indicated that they felt their role was to ensure nothing was missed, rather than to do any sort of auditing.
    4. The ahelp described in the second to last paragraph of my 6th post on this thread, where two admins give a player a warning, supports the idea that mushroomLavender did not coordinate with the admins, as mushroomLavender later banned that player for what the two admins had decided to warn them for.
    5. A review of the replay began only after uninvolved admins were online, and mushroomLavender continued handling the situation and placing bans as a result of the replay review.
    6. During part of the complaint investigation, mushroomLavender indicated that they were aware other admins were in-game to handle the situation when the bans were placed.
  7. Though not within policy, the processing of the appeals by mushroomLavender will not be addressed as a policy violation because it is so insignificant compared to the surrounding details that it would not affect the outcome of this complaint.
    1. mushroomLavender claimed that a long standing precedent which allowed banning admins to handle their own appeals had been grandfathered in to the system at the time of the incident.
    2. Over 11 months prior to the incident, the head game admin at the time updated written admin policy to say that when processing appeals, you (admins) should “[n]ot process appeals that are your bans”. The update included multiple additions related to processing appeals. In the message announcing the update, they indicated that the changes were “pretty much all stuff we were already doing” and that the purpose was just to include them in policy.
    3. As early as September 2022, there is a message from a game admin indicating that Wizard’s Den practice was that game admins not process their own appeals.
  8. mushroomLavender’s response to this complaint delayed the complaint and prevented details from being investigated or confirmed.
    1. It is reasonably foreseeable that the response would have caused delays and impeded investigation and so drawing an adverse inference is reasonable where information is missing, incomplete, or inaccurate.
    2. The response violated admin policy 1.1 “Administrators will be held responsible for their actions.”
    3. The response violated admin policy 1.2 “Be professional, polite and welcoming.”
  9. In total, mushroomLavender placed bans affecting 13 players, each of which violated admin policy 2.1 “Do not ever process a case you are/were a part of”.
  10. In one instance, mushroomLavender explained that some bans were placed to get context from people involved, later saying that they thought this is what appeal (indefinite) bans were for.
    1. While there were bans that the player “may appeal this ban on the forums”, there was no reasonable indication in the ban reasons that the bans were placed to further an investigation.
    2. At least one player who had already been investigated was included in the bans. See finding 6.4.
    3. Prior to the introduction of message notes, which allow game admins to have a message displayed for a player the next time they log in, it was regular practice to indefinitely ban players to essentially allow an ahelp to be conducted through the appeal. I’m not aware of an instance where this was done to a player who was online, and therefore could have just been ahelped. Bans done for this purpose would typically include an instruction to appeal the ban, rather than simply saying that it could be appealed.
  11. A justification mushroomLavender provided for involving themselves in the situation as an admin after having been involved as a player was that there is a precedent allowing game admins to handle situations that they were involved in if no other admin is online and if the issue is severe or important.
    1. There have been instances where game admins re-adminned to handle a severe situation that they noticed while playing, not being directly involved with the case as a player, and while no other game admin was online. I am not aware of any situation where the admin was directly involved as a player and then chose to handle it as an admin when they were a part of the case, and mushroomLavender did not provide one.
    2. In most, if not all, situations where game admins re-adminned to handle a severe situation, the situation was so severe, unquestionable, and uncontroversial that an indefinite ban could be placed, that ban required no contact with the player to investigate, and no reasonable person could conclude that the ban was contrary to our banning practices.
    3. Admin policy 2.1 “Do not ever process a case you are/were a part of”. includes an exception that allows admins to get permission to handle a case they were involved in if no admins are online, but mushroomLavender neither sought nor received any such permission.
    4. mushroomLavender continued investigation, including starting the replay investigation, and placed multiple bans after other admins were online and able to handle the situation.
  12. Another justification mushroomLavender provided for involving themselves in the situation is that they had intended to join the round and AFK until something happened, arguing that this intent and the amount of time they spent in the round meant that they weren’t sufficiently involved for policy 2.1 to apply.
    1. Intent is not a factor in determining involvement.
    2. The time between joining a round and being killed is not a factor in regards to whether an admin would be considered involved in the situation as a player.
    3. mushroomLavender was involved sufficiently that the policy applied to all admin actions taken by mushroomLavender in this case. See findings 1, 3, and 5.1.
  13. mushroomLavender indicated that they attempt to avoid recognition in-game, saying that they don’t advertise their character names and have a specific one that they use for observing rounds. They also acknowledged that they’re unsure of how helpful that is in this case.
    1. This is in fact, not helpful in relation to policy 2.1.
    2. While game admins are not required to share their character names, even if they handle a situation which they were not involved in that occurred during a round they were playing in, attempting to hide or obscure that they were involved in a situation that they are handling is a violation of admin policy 1.1 “Administrators will be held responsible for their actions.”
    3. OOC messages provided in my 5th post on the complaint suggest that mushroomLavender was attempting to hide or obscure that they were involved in a situation that they were handling.
  14. In multiple instances, mushroomLavender references griefers, raiders in particular, using recent increased occurrences of them as a justification for the “harsh consistent response”.
    1. Around the time of the events, there had been an increase in raiders targeting Wizard’s Den servers. Raiders are people who join with the intention of disrupting a round to such a severe degree that they are almost always indefinitely banned. They have no intention of ever participating as a legitimate player, so their accounts do not have any substantial history on the servers that they raid.
    2. It is clear that multiple banned players were not raiders by their playtimes and roles alone.
    3. It is clear that mushroomLavender did not believe this to be a raid, based on finding 5.1.
    4. This seemingly contradicts the claims mushroomLavender made in finding 10.
  15. For a significant amount of time following this complaint, mushroom had been inactive in regards to in-game adminning.
  16. Sometime in the past several weeks or months, mushroomLavender began running in-game events and responding to ahelps. Details of this are only loosely relevant to this complaint, so significant detail won’t be included in subpoints.
    1. mushroomLavender was contacted by another head game admin about their low activity in admin tasks relative to the amount of events they were running, and a possible issue with one of the two ahelps they handled recently.
    2. mushroomLavender indicated that they do not want to be a game admin, and wanted to be “hands off with adminning as a whole.”
    3. mushroomLavender also seemed to say that they were not interested in doing anything that caused them to be affected by admin policies.
    4. The head game admin asked mushroomLavender to discontinue use of admin tools, including running events, answering ahelps, and taking admin actions like bans.

Resulting Actions

  1. Steps were taken to mitigate the impacts of finding 7, including the review of the bans by an uninvolved admin within a week of receiving the complaint, and the unbannings references in my 3rd post on this complaint.
  2. Due to findings 3.3, 4.1, 5.3, and 9, all placed bans were removed from the database at the time of my 10th post on this thread. All traces of the bans have not been erased, but they can no longer be found by using the standard methods to check ban histories, and none of the bans that were still active will prevent the players from joining.
  3. mushroomLavender was notified of resulting action 2 prior to it occurring.
  4. Actions that fit the categories of self antagging or incompetence in their role, broadly construed, taken by any player during Lizard 35746 may not be used against them in the future, nor can directly connected actions such as ban appeals or any of the ahelps in the next round on Lizard by those players. This amnesty does not extend to violations of any zero tolerance rules, including hate speech, sexual content, and ban evasion.
  5. mushroomLavender’s response to this complaint has been raised with higher staff within the project, but will be handled separately from this complaint.
  6. How these actions affect mushroomLavender’s position outside of the admin team will be raised and will be handled outside of this complaint.
  7. While it may be moot due to the subpoints of finding 16, mushroomLavender is prohibited by the headmin team from being a game admin. This prohibition includes the use of any in-game elevated permissions. It also includes acting as a game admin outside of the game in any way, including participation in appeals of game bans and role bans, except participation as an appellant.
  8. mushroomLavender was provided with a copy of this closing, and given the opportunity to identify inaccuracies or things they considered to be important missing details.
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