As you know, we had several instances now of players being banned for griefing in the darklands. The temptation – specially for new players – to be able to go through a portal and see all those ender chests, cauldrons etc etc and not to take them seems to be just too big. I have been banning people almost every 3 days.

People build really cool stuff in the darklands, and for it being only a temporary world (mind you – the next update around new year might cause a new darklands to be created already) does not seem to deter people to spend a lot of time building there.

While I do not mind having the darklands – as long as people do not complain when it’s replaced – it is becoming an issue with the griefing on two fronts:

1. Workload: This could be mitigated by giving the elders the commands to track block changes or even writing an interface to the website so  that anyone can track any block changed in the nether and darklands and thus finding all the issues themselves, reporting too heavy griefing and thus banning of users.
2. Judgement: This is more tricky. What is griefing? Destroying a plank? 2? 10? Where do we draw the line?

One solution would be simply to block settlers out of the darklands. They have their lot, why go to the darklands in the first 2 months on the server? It would give another perk to citizens (and donating settlers for example) to be allowed in there. This one would be my preference.

Another solution would be to make 100% strict rules and give a broader amount of people the right to track damage and to report it. However as we know, this also creates some anger among people. Some people will be annoyed by one plank missing and others do not care. Elders will have to discuss with users why a certain damage is worth a ban or not. It puts a lot of social pressure on the players which I do not think is a good thing.

A third solution as kevin proposed it below that we make a zone where settlers cannot build or whatever else. That would lock them out of the public farms etc. This would be good but cause them again to ask many questions and possibly complaints and whining.

As you guys know, I normally never publish names of people’s emails – unless they decide to drag the topic into the public themselves. Well, we are again at the point where someone could not leave an issue be where it was but decided to take it to the next level…

So here is the story: I was looking randomly at the console and see a guy spamming /give commands. So I think “If you think you can try to cheat, I can show you that this stuff does not go unnoticed” and ban him. 10 minutes later I get the first email. Here is the whole conversation:

• MichaelChopsWood: Why have I been banned from your server?
• Me:because of this:02:26:07 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 1 64 0
  02:26:08 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 1 64 0
  02:26:10 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 80 64 0
  02:26:12 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 266 64 0
  02:26:13 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 265 64 0
  02:26:14 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 264 64 0
  02:26:24 [INFO] MichaelChopsWood issued server command: /give MichaelChopsWood 373 64 8195

  Further questions?

• MichaelChopsWood:I thought you were aloud, I thought you wernt aloud the x-ray mod?Am I banned for ever?
• Me: You are allowed what is on the website.
  The system tells you that you are not allowed to use the /give command on top of that.Yes, you are banned forever.
• MichaelChopsWood: Can I make an appeal?
• Me: Let me lay it out to you:
  • You chose a survival lot, NOT a creative one. Still you tried to give yourself items with a command. You tried to cheat. That’s why you got banned.
  • If you thought this was allowed, it means you did not read the website. That’s another issue we ban people for.
  • I am the server owner. I banned you and told you that it is forever. There is no one you could appeal to except myself.
  • You also did not read the website regarding bans.

  So here is the answer to your question: http://uncovery.me/bans-appeals-second-chances/

• MichaelChopsWood:I have just read the webstie regarding bans, and im not aloud to appeal, but I am.
  My plan is to finsh my plan for what i was doing on my plot and send it to you, becuase in my opinoun it was a good plan.I understand if you have to deny my appeal because now I see what I did wrong. But im still going to send you the plan.Furthermore, when i was further into my plan I was going to film a minecraft lets build and put it on my youtube channel which has 212 subscribers
• Me: I do not care about your plan.
  I do not care about your Youtube Channel.
  Even if you had 10’000 subscribers. Even if you were notch himself.There are however 10’000 other servers out there.
  Go find one for you. Mine is closed for you.
• MichaelChopsWood: Im still going to send it to you.
• MichaelChopsWood: [Sends me a pic of some half-finished non-impressive castle]

Then he starts posting on Facebook. Here is the screenshot, just in case:

Just hilarious. This is the reason why I still answer those emails.

He griefed BOTH public enderchests in the darklands. Cya!

P.S.: When I said I will do random bans every day, I did not try to encourage you guys to do something stupid everyday. People are too much duty-bound here it seems.

Plugins alerted me, went over, confronted him, he goes “meh, just been digging”. Right:

Plugins complained about him, went there, confronted him, he admitted. Good riddance!

After some people hinted to me that Deej20 was a griefer, and we have been researching on his username, we found out that he poses on other servers as a blond, 17 year old canadian girl while he is clearly not a girl in teamspeak and has a different picture there, too.

So the picture here on teamspeak that he is using is this. Not sure which one of the two he is, though. Looks like two brothers to me. Same nose, same mouth.

On two other sites he is using those two images here:

He was was banned from several other servers already. Today he griefed some house in spawn right in front of my eyes (I was invisible). So he is banned from the server and team speak now.

Good Riddance!

I have now undone (almost) all of the transactions that Toohee executed when he abused a bug in the system. He did all over 80 transactions. I put the items back into the shop and took the money away from the sellers again – provided they had enough in their account. Those that did not have enough in their account were untouched.

Why did I do that?

This was a difficult decision. One might say on the one hand that the sellers did just do that: sell their stuff. Where the money comes from does not really matter. Also it cleans out the shop a bit, where it is debatable if it is good or not. However on the negative side, the items that were placed in the shop were lost. The user got banned and nobody could benefit from them. So there is a real damage to the market and the economy. This was the main reason why I finally undid the transactions.

There is a bug in the shop that gives out too much money. I already banned one user (Toohee) for exploiting this. Depending on the severity of other exploits, this will not be the only ban. I will go through the shop figures and try to find out what happened when.

In the meantime the shop will stay closed.

[Update] Found the issue. There was a bug when someone made a request for a 0 amount of items. You would not be charged then, but cancelling the item would refund the request. So the item is fixed. Also I found that toohee was the only user abusing the exploit. [/Update]

Today I banned a guy called rizzoli for Xraying, another called shadyxcop for building a death trap (with invitation signs) on his lot.

I also removed the walls and fences from lots B4, C4, B8 & A8. Please note that I will remove EVERY BLOCK a fence is made off from the surface of the lot in case there are no doors or gates in the walls/fences. No refunds!

I have since some days a cheat detection installed. It sends me warnings about people trying to use all kings of tricks to kill or mine faster, and all kinds of other stuff.

I observed the results for a few days and talked to a couple of users that showed up on the alerts. Some of the users admitted to using some form of cheat, such as a gamer mouse that clicks faster than normal. Most however said that they do not use that or do not even know what a hacked client was. Interestingly, ALL of those that said they had no idea, stopped showing up on the alerts – magically as it seems.

So I want to give now a warning to all users that I will be enforcing bans on such cheating. So you better get a vanilla client and switch off the speed features on your mouse or it’s been the longest time you have been on the server.

No comment!

Today I got this email:

Hi this is <username> well his older brother see i was playing on his account while he was gone and it was me and a friend and i was stupid and got his account banned. i am truly sorry for acting up on your server and believe it or not i am grounded from my computer except from this because i got him banned and he got VERY angry and mom and dad found out and seen how truly mad he was. I ask from you to allow him back on the server it was completely my fault and once again i am sorry.

This was my reply:

Hi there,
thanks for your email. See, there is are several issues here:

• He should have never let you play on his account. That alone is an insta-ban by the rule. We want to avoid people doing stupid stuff and then claim “my brother did it!”.
• I cannot verify what you say. I do not know you or your family. I am running a community of several hundred people and cannot spend time to worry about who lies and who tells the truth. We ban people who do stupid stuff and move on.
• I am not even supposed to send you THIS email. My principle is to spend time on the users who are NOT banned instead of those who are

The only solution is that your brother gets a new minecraft account and registers again on the server. If he does not have another email address he can delete his current account from the website (see link below) and register with the username of his new minecraft account and the same email. Maybe you want to buy him a new account then? Maybe that’s a good lesson to respect your brother’s property.
However, his lot and his inventory will be reset in any case. See this here for further explanations:

http://uncovery.me/bans-appeals-second-chances/

I post this here not to make fun at the user or to point fingers at people but to leave a message not to mess with other people’s minecraft user accounts. It’s bad for those people, bad for the server and in the end, bad for you. You are stealing someone’s identity and in every term that’s illegal. We had this issue several times before and the outcome was always more or less like that.

Got alerts by the dozen, went there, clear mining pattern, talked to them, banned them.

Since bruhn16 has been a master (!) I give you the courtesy of a logfile excerpt.

I have had several reports now about users logging in on the IRC server and impersonating others by assuming their username. Please note that I will insta-ban anyone who does this. If you see someone doing it, please send me an email with the username and time so I can check on the logfiles.

In case you try the following while I am watching the console, you will get banned:

07:12:19 [INFO] [PLAYER_COMMAND] Hammitime: /give Hammitime 383 64 95
07:12:19 [WARNING] Hammitime was denied access to command.
07:12:21 [INFO] [PLAYER_COMMAND] Hammitime: /give Hammitime 383 64 95
07:12:21 [WARNING] Hammitime was denied access to command.
07:12:22 [INFO] [PLAYER_COMMAND] Hammitime: /give Hammitime 383 64 95
07:12:22 [WARNING] Hammitime was denied access to command.
07:12:22 [INFO] [PLAYER_COMMAND] Hammitime: /give Hammitime 383 64 95
07:12:22 [WARNING] Hammitime was denied access to command.
07:12:23 [INFO] [PLAYER_COMMAND] Hammitime: /give Hammitime 383 64 95
07:12:23 [WARNING] Hammitime was denied access to command.

and so it happened:

07:12:46 [INFO] Whitelist: Player Hammitime is trying to join…
07:12:46 [INFO] allow!
07:12:46 [INFO] Disconnecting Hammitime [/71.8.91.182:50927]: Banned: The Ban Hammer has spoken!

Pretty obvious mining pattern. Oh, yeah please stop throwing around diamonds when you Xray, it becomes a bit too obvious.