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Increase ban duration for ghosting
#1
I think that the staff guidelines with regards to ghosting could do with being updated.

Just for clarification, I am not referring to the instance whereby a player is stating the location of props/giving hints in chat or over voice chat, I think that the current guidelines for dealing with this behavior are absolutely fine.

Rather, I am referring to the instance where 2 or more players join opposite teams with the intent of using spectate to cheat.

I do not feel like the current guidelines reflect the negative impact that this has on the server and player experience, especially when you consider how severe the punishments for hacking are when the results of these two behaviors are very similar.


I think that a more appropriate approach for dealing with these players would be a 1 week ban followed by a permanent ban for a repeat offence.

https://www.dinklebergsgmod.com/site/sho...p?tid=9611
#2
An interesting proposition, if something like this is being posted, I am guessing that ghosting must still be a daily occurrence if not multiple times a day. The ghosting ban length has been adjusted multiple times throughout the years.

When it was first added, it was given the same treatment as hacking. Of course, that is back in 2016, if not before, where you really had to put a lot of work in to ghost. Ghosting was a pretty rare occurrence and the amount of work involved to do it had an understandable reaction. As technology communication for gameplay has improved over the years, the amount of people being banned for ghosting obviously increased and permabanning everyone who violated the ghosting rules seemed a bit harsh for a first time offense. When I joined the staff team in early 2018, a 2 week ban for first time offenses had been implemented followed by a permaban if the violation was repeated.

Somewhere during this a rule was added to forceswap them for an entire map first before proceeding with a two week ban. This may have been added to not immediately punish those for first time violations, there may not have been many staff with banning capabilities for the two week punishment, to stop clogging up the forums with ghosting ban requests back when even archived ban requests still showed on the front page making it so that topics were missed, or some other reasons that I do not remember. Remember, only moderators or above can ban for more than a day. Having to babysit ghosters, sometimes multiple groups, could be exhausting for a single staff member to handle, especially an inexperienced one.

In mid 2021, after discussing with staff and community members, adjustments were made to the ghosting rule to make the process easier. A test phase was done and the results can be found in the following links:

https://www.dinklebergsgmod.com/site/sho...?tid=14336
https://www.dinklebergsgmod.com/site/sho...?tid=14455

The banning for 24 hours section was added so that there would be an immediate response that did not have first time players banned for two weeks having them forget about the server in that time span, have tmods be involved in the first time banning process rather than just dumping all the work on the moderators and admins. Depending on the day, there could be multiple ban requests up for ghosting. I remember sometimes spending a couple hours on some days just looking through the evidence of ghosting ban requests.

I am not involved in the server so I do not know how bad ghosting has gotten or if it has improved. I was just providing the history of the ghosting punishment rules as I knew them. If you do increase the first time violation punishments, tmods will only be able to partially deal with the situation and have to do more work with uploading evidence and making ban threads. It should not hinder community members making ban requests seeing as how the process for them would not change. It would send a clearer statement to other ghosters on the server but I do not think it would have a significant impact on others that join wanting to ghost. It may have ghosters not come back on the server in a weeks time to ghost again since the time had been increased but that would be current staff to figure out those numbers.

I wish you all the best.
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#3
Something to consider is that you can't assume newer players even know what ghosting and that it's bad. Remember that the main reference in media to prophunt is YouTubers playing it to screw around with their buddies on private servers without rules, where they ghost all the time because it's funny, and not actual public prophunt servers. People usually join with a pack of buddies wanting to screw around too, and they assume ghosting isn't a bad thing. I think a day ban for first offense is a pretty good length.
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#4
A day ban for first offense is fine. Makes it easier for tmods and mods/admins. No one wants to make and go through that many ban requests when they can just be hit with a 24 hour ban.
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#5
New players lose all braincells the moment they decide to join a PH server.  While at this point players should know what ghosting is, it would be too harsh to ban a player too quick when they probably just installed Gmod a few minutes ago.  The 24 hr ban serves as the warning for new players to know that it is wrong and they shouldn't do it again.

But thats just me
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#6
As it stands from personal experience I believe our ghosting guidelines are in a good place. There are plenty of ghosting cases daily in handfuls and the forums already get cluttered with ban requests from time to time just because so many people are adopting it when they first join the server among other issues. 
If we were to increase it I don't believe it would balance out the newly needed effort for ban requests on every single ghosting case vs less ghosters.

I also can't say that I'd consider using third party cheating soft ware to be on the same ban level as being in voice chat with a friend and giving locations up. It's cheating but not as malicious as one might think. A lot of people don't really think about how it affects the server due to them just stopping in to mess around and do it once. Most of the time, the message is received fairly well that ghosting isn't allowed on server with just the day ban. We rarely see repeat offenders unless they purely come into mess up everyone's fun. There are few cases where we need to escalate but that's far and few. I can only think of 4 people that I've seen permanently banned over my time in Dinks for ghosting. 4 out of probably 500+ bans? Needless to say I will discuss it with the PH Admin Team but I don't believe we need to see a change anytime soon IMO.
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#7
I understand your frustration with ghosters, as it ruins the fun of the game, but all this change would do is give the staff team more headaches.
#8
eh, I think its ok. Day so that they know its against the rules, 2 weeks so they feel bad about doing it again, and perma if they wanna go again cuz they dont wanna learn to not do that.


seems reasonable imo
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