Should petty action requests / reports result in punishment?

[Bnjemann]

Let me start off by saying, I am in no way attempting to directly slander, belittle or target anyone in particular with this post. However, I feel as though this is an issue we should be addressing within our community. This has been a problem for awhile now, allow me to elaborate further on the problem, why it’s a problem, and other important notes.

At this point, a large number of reports, action requests, and fuck it, even IA’s are simple cases of Tattling. The fact of the matter is, in certain cases that I am referring to, there would be no real benefit to the reporter if the offending user got punished. To some people, reports have just simply become a way for users to “win” situations they really lost in, especially in the last few years.

Now, I am in no way saying “stop making reports, you pussy snitch bitch kid” because in many scenarios, the report functions are used appropriately to ensure users are handled by staff for breaking rules and negatively affecting other users. It also at times keeps repeat offenders who are generally displaying a toxic disregard to the rules in pursuit of “winning at the game”.Reports are good. We have rules, and the report functions bring incentive to play by these rules.

However, a common issue we have had on the server for awhile now, as corny as it is to say, is with officers. More so, the mentality of an embarrassingly sizeable portion of officers. Let me explain the thought process of these officers:
- Officer see’s crime
- Officer remembers 3.4 states people must follow gunpoint
- Officer draws their firearm to gun point the suspect climbing the escalation of force ladder whilst skipping enough steps like i skipped questions in my GCSE maths exam.
From this point, 2 things happen:
- Officer technically exploits a 3.4 loophole which forces the player to comply out of fear of a ban
OR
- The situation doesn’t go to plan at all, and they make a report to get said person banned because getting someone banned takes effort, and putting effort into having another player miss out = a victory Apparently???

Sure, if someone breaks gunpoint and kills you whilst you are an officer, or they kill you for an invalid reason, that’s a fine report. Despite the fact that you lost nothing of material value, you lost up to 5 mins of your game time + 5 minutes NLR to a rule break, and by allowing it to go unpunished, the offending player could well develop a habit out of that attitude and it could spread to become a normal thing in the community. It’s gotten to a point however, where players are making action requests for the dumbest of reasons. You have to ask yourself “are they making this report for the better of the community, or are they doing it for personal gratification?”.

Its obviously not just cops making these petty reports though, of course not. Plenty of reports made on other players are incredibly petty too.

An example of this from personal experience was when I played around with a voice changer for a few months. Sure, I occasionally switched to an unrealistic voice, such as the vocoders, extreme pitch raisers, voice filters with background noise, and voices that made me sound like a robot, or machine, and Yes, people did complain when I did, which I complied with and stopped doing because yeah it’s understandable dude, my voice changer was quite clearly being misused and users weren’t happy about it. However, there’s been instances where I used realistic voice effects and still had staff contact me saying I’ve been reported for using a voice changer. When I used a “male to female” voice effect, I was reported for using an “unrealistic squeaker voice” when all the filter did was raise the voice by about 2 and a half tones and make it softer. I wasnt that mad since staff seemed the voice effect to be fine however. On another occasion where I wasn’t even using a voice changer, but doing a Mickey Mouse impression with my vocal talents and got reported for “micspamming”

On numerous other occasions, I did busking roleplay, where I set myself up either in front of PD, Hospital, or another street where people walk past, built an amp out of props and played guitar over backing tracks with my mic in front of it. People reported me for “micspamming music” when in reality, if they didn’t want to hear it, they could just walk straight past me, i wasn’t in any intrusive places people would have to stand around at all. Only on 1 occasion was I asked to stop however, which I didn’t, I just moved somewhere else.

Its getting to a point where valid creative roleplay is suffering as a result.

Tl;dr:
Certain reports are petty, yet still resulting in players getting punishments, in some cases, disproportionately. How would you propose we fix it, and what Other input can you give?

So, what do you think about the reports people are making nowadays?




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[Creepis]

The thing here is that reports are to be treated as any other which you cannot simply ignore. The staff team has to handle these or else they'd get a beating for being a bunch of un-professionals. Imagine reports like customers complaining about a employee, you just cannot ignore them no matter how petty it may be.
Same thing resulted with some staff complaints on me, people complain about the smallest stuff. In my case it would be no-clipping to the PD to get a job after a server crash or just telling someone to shut its trap mouth on the shoutbox when he's instigating shitty behaviour. I may also sound petty in some cases but I usually try to not report people and try to get it resolved or just move on.

From here on there is not much you could do and I'd be against punishing people who make petty reports, I would be more for punishing the staff member if they give out a punishment against something petty . This will always be somewhat of a problem so we have to live with it and hope that staff members know what is petty and what's not.

People don't care , even if they lost nothing out of it. They just want to see the person go punished and fuel their hatred towards them.

 

[Double J]

From what I've seen, AR's are starting to become a way for players to report people they hate.
It can be anything petty.

I'm not going to go into lots of detail here as I don't want to seem to target or to harass players who do make AR's, but, If someone calls you an idiot, I don't see why you need to try to get them warned or banned.

The main reason I tend to make AR's is if the player has done it before, even after I or someone else has told them not to, yet they still carry on that behaviour. Let's take 3.4 As an example, Most bans are down to someone breaking 3.4. Whether it is a small little mistake or downright blatant breach and they don't care.

Honestly, the perp player base has dwindled recently, I remember the server being full, fighting over people to get a slot to enjoy some time on the server, but now, I can get a slot whenever. A lot of people are asking for the Queue server to be brought back, but that would just kill the server even more, as you can do whatever on there.

I think what people need to understand is, Petty rule breakages don't always need to end in an AR or report, if the person has genuinely done it to piss you or others off, then feel free, but if they did it by accident, Take it with a pinch of salt and brush it under the rug. At the end of the day, The server needs more players for it to be enjoyable, else It will just go through the phase it did nearly 2 years ago where the server barely hit 20 players.

 

[LEWIS 088]

Can I let you guys into a secret, when we say we're going to have a stern talking to with a player when we accept your petty action request, what we really mean is that we won't ever think about it again after we accept it.

Don't share this secret guys.

 

[Creepis]

Accepted

User will be talked to/Will be given a verbal warning






(Staff actually never talk to the person, I thought this was obvious)

 

[rogue]

wtf stop telling people!!!

 

[Collier]

Sometimes I'll drop a sentence or 2 in the reply and tag the accused player. At least that way I don't have to pretend like I am going to talk to the player

 

[Deleted member 5920]

I mean I would be okay with this but staff literally don’t understand what the warning feature is for. The amount of times people don’t give warnings because they don’t feel it was needed is ridiculous. Warnings do fuck all apart from stop people getting helper/enforcer. Why not just warn them so if they break rules in future other staff know.

It is so frustrating that staff view warnings as an actual punishment rather than just what it is, a warning.

 

[joey]

big ups to @Adrish for telling me PERP is not CS:GO on a revenge AR. https://perpheads.com/threads/ar-on-shadowjoey.27554/

 

[joey]

72 HoUrS @Dom_

 

[Sean]

I know this isn't the point you were trying to make but this in itself was such a petty AR. Legit killed you and lost nothing and still made an AR.

 

[joey]

On a serious note: this is actually something worth discussion. I partially agree with how the "severity" of warnings being decreased. A way to combat this could be to have something similar to the PD with 30-day "reprimands" and 6 month written warnings. These reprimands could be something only visible on a scam bans check for staff members for 30 days. This would allow for somewhat regular minor rule breaks not leading to ejection from the player base.

Make a server discussion about this brill idea @Ethan

 

[Collier]

We discussed this recently, the answer we gave was to just warn players

 

[CensoredExe]

While staff should obviously treat every report the same, it's getting out of hand the pettiness.

Though, I can't see a way this could change while preserving the current AR system.

I feel like more leniency should be given regarding stuff like voice changers (aslong as they arent obnoxiously loud and aids, and arent being used all the time) and others smaller things were people are just trying to have fun.

I've got a similar situation, while as a cop, I was playing with a friend, and we tased each other, a random civilian happened to see this, and IA'ed me because he didnt like me at the time. Stuff like this is so petty, theres no reason for it other than to try and punish people you dont like.