[TheUltraFish]

One concern that I have with the immediate jump to the ban is that there is inherently a higher evidentiary burden required to conduct a ban rather than a mere team swap.

It is true that staff members should always be trying to get a plethora of evidence before conducting any action against swapping, but that is not always easy to do. No one wants to ban someone by mistake, so staff members may end up being overly cautious when the initial punishment is an immediate jump to a ban. That could leave more ghosting players on the server and reduce staff responsiveness to the issue. The simpler team swap option, however, could have potentially little to no impact on the alleged ghosters in the event that it was done so by mistake. If the forceswap is done after the alleged ghosters are already dead, then they will miss no rounds, but will just be stuck "doubling up" on either a prop round or hunter round. Not that big of a deal.

I know that when the alleged ghosters then try to argue or swap themselves back onto the other team, my suspicion raises significantly. These actions are highly suggestive of ghosting, and could make a ban more warranted as they would then be directly disobeying staff actions.

Anyways, just my initial thoughts while I was reading through this.

Theoretically, the amount of evidence would not change very much if at all. One thing that has been taught on gathering evidence is, if there is an unban request, will the evidence I gathered hold up? The other being, if they would submit an abuse thread against me, would my evidence hold up? If the evidence gathered does not hold up to these standards, the staff member(s) should not proceed with a punishment/ban.

As far as I know, we do not swap people who are allegedly ghosting, we have swapped people in the past that we know are ghosting. Sometimes you only need a round of evidence to make it obvious while others, it takes several if not over a map to collect convincing evidence. Catching ghosters is a by case basis and that should never change. However, something that has not altered is the amount that is needed. If a staff member cannot collect or provide proper evidence then the user would not be banned anyways, how would that change from what currently do? If a staff member cannot collect proper evidence users should not be punished for what they might be doing.

This method is similar to the older way of punishing users. At first, ghosters were permanently banned for ghosting from the beginning of the server to early 2018. When it became more common, the upper staff lowered the initial ban to a 2 week ban in early 2018. The only reason why the forceswap was added to the ban requests clogging up the forums on a near daily basis similar to how TTT rdm has occasionally been known to do. With how the forums are set up now, as long as someone properly archives the ban requests, they should no longer clog up the forums.

Annoyingly, ghosting is a daily issue on Prop Hunt with tools like or similar to Discord being a popular way of doing so. I do not suspect it to change continuing forward.