In faf we have 4 public discussion channels:
- Ingame
- Aeolus
- Discord
- Forums
I think they should all be treated differently.
Ingame barely anyone should ever be banned, since this heavily affects search times / player population. Only clear cut cases should be banned and the bans should be relatively short. I would avoid permabans entirely. Ie. I would not ban people for anything verbal unless it's super egregious. If we had a feature to global mute people ingame (faf lobby tells the game to automatically mute people), that would be a really good solution for verbal harassment.
[Here's an example of what should grant you a few days cool down time ingame.]
(Edit: example/link removed by Moderator magge
In contrast that should be a permaban on aeolus/discord/forums.
In basically all other communication channels I would be way more trigger happy than ingame. If people enjoy dark humor, being edgy etc. that's fine, they can do it on their private discord servers (or twitch streams or whatever else). Not our global communication channels. And I don't just mean 'bad people' using 'bad words' or whatever, but simply ban anyone who is knowingly being difficult/annoying/malicious. Also, don't wait for a report. Just insta warn/ban. The ban is not for whoever is the 'victim' btw. It's for anyone who has to lose a few braincells scrolling past that stuff.
That being said I would have varying levels of strictness on the rest as well in the order that I listed them (aeolus, discord, forums) from least to most strict.
To be more concrete:
- Aeolus, Discord
- Ban people who are obviously trolling
- Ban for insults
- Ban for malicious intent
- Oh yea, actually ban for breaking the code of conduct (I'm serious btw, but coc jokes are welcome too)
- Use brain. If it would get you banned from twitter, twitch, other forums etc. it should get you banned here too
- Forums
- Ban people who are argumentative for no reason
I'm not gonna give any crazy conclusive argumentation for why this needs to happen, but I will say that faf forum & discord moderation is outlandishly lax. The shit that people "get away with" here would get them instabanned on any other public discord/forum. Arch tried, btw (and got banned for a rename).
Btw this post is not triggered by anything specific. I was just talking the other day about potential reasons for why people aren't motivated to work on faf related stuff. It'd be way more motivating to work on stuff for aoe2 or hell even aoe4 for example, simply because all the crap is hidden on some private discord servers (I assume, haven't seen any though, which is the point) instead of public facing channels.