Hey everyone,
For the last month or so I've been working on drafting out a new set of game rules. There are a number of reasons for this, and here are the main ones:
- I want to move away from a "3 strikes and you're out" moderation policy where strikes never expire. I think it does not make much sense to treat all offenses with the same punishment, and adopting a more nuanced set of rules where different offenses have different punishments makes more sense to me and I think ought to be better for you all (the players.)
- I want to bring on some game moderators to help ease my workload for relatively simple moderation cases. Daily, we get people signing up with some variation of the name "hitler", a nazi flag, use of slurs or other offensive language, etc. that could be easily handled by another moderator. My hope is that by transitioning some of this workload off of myself it will free up more of my time to work on the development of new mechanics, content, and overall improvements for the game.
- I also wanted to outline a new set of community guidelines to be as transparent as possible about our moderation practices. For example, in the past we have stepped outside of what has happened in "official" P&W channels (in-game, this forum, and our official P&W Discord server) to take moderation action against players. Examples of cases like these are the Guinea Pig Whaling Corps / NPO ordeal, previous instances of players trading real-life money for in-game money, instances of doxxing and sharing of other players' personal information and photos, instances of players engaging in predatory behavior toward other players, etc. This new draft of the rules includes a "Community Rules" section, which is broadly intended to serve as codified and transparent guidelines for how we expect members of our community to behave, and in what types of situations I might consider actions and evidence occurring outside of official P&W channels. Please note that this is not a big shift in moderation practices; I have essentially already been doing this for years in very limited, specific, and extraordinary circumstances, and that by including this in the rules I am only intending to be more open and transparent about what is happening.
I don't think that you will find anything that new or surprising in the content of the new rules. I did try to be more clear and specific about certain things, but largely they are a combination of the existing Game Rules and the Forum Rules integrated together comprehensively.
What Would Change in the New Rules Compared to the Current Rules?
The biggest change is to the actual moderation system itself. Instead of a "3 strikes and you're out" policy, I assigned a set of "Moderation Points" to each rule offense. Instead of going with a specific amount for any given offense, which does not leave much room for nuance, I have instead outlined a range of points to be issued at the moderator's discretion. I believe this is important; for example I hope that we can all agree that an otherwise innocuous nation with a Nazi flag is not behaving as badly as an all-out white supremacist nation showcasing the Nazi flag, Hitler, etc. and should not be punished equally under our "no Nazism" rule.
Each rule violation also includes a set expiration time. This means that you are not stuck with your moderation points forever. I know there are players that have strikes that are 3, 4, or even 5 years old now that they would like to see removed from their accounts. I agree that people can change, and by building in expiration times, which are different and related to the severity of the offense, we can accommodate for this better in this new proposed system.
A Note About In-Game Moderators
Something else important that I'd like to note is that the involvement of any additional in-game moderators is going to come with heavy supervision, logging of all actions taken (so any abuse can be caught and corrected after the fact if it does occur), along with a requirement that at least 2 moderators approve all moderation actions being taken which will help eliminate any individual biases. I have not gotten very far into looking at bringing on in-game moderators yet as I wanted to establish a framework of new rules to work with first.
Similar to the forum moderators, in-game mods would remain anonymous. This is to prevent other players or alliances taking in-game action against the mods for a decision that they disagree with. We have a long history now of this type of practice with forum moderation, and it has gone very well over the last several years, and I expect that would continue in-game. The only exception here would be that the player Dr. Rush, who is our Discord Team Lead, would be a public semi-mod. The reason for this is that he has access to our Discord support tickets and could serve as a really useful liaison to the in-game moderators about anything reported via Discord. But Dr. Rush would not be participating in any major game moderation decisions.
Appeals
I did include this explicitly in the draft of the new rules, but essentially if a player takes issue with any in-game moderator decision they would be able to appeal it to me.
What Now? Where Are the Proposed New Rules?
Thank you for reading this far. I hope that the above context will help clear up any misconceptions about this proposal. At this point, these rules are not going into effect, I am just opening them up for public feedback. I know that in the past couple of weeks people have leaked these rules and made all sorts of wild claims about how everything is going to change for the worse. I can assure you that that is not the case. However, I do want to take a thoughtful approach and see if there is anything that I am missing in these rules, as well as learn more about what the general community consensus is on these rules.
With all that said, you can read the draft I wrote of the new rules here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/149Owwee_ntvphR0j60BLl7vTVKvG1XRNP1VR6c1Oa7E/edit?usp=sharing
Please ask any questions you have or any feedback you have here in this forum post. Thank you for your time and your consideration.
