9/23/2021 - New Game & Community Rules Released

[Alex]

Hi everyone,

I want to let you all know that I have officially released a new set of Game Rules. I would encourage you to review the new rules here: https://politicsandwar.com/rules/

These new rules have been in the works for many months now, with my proposed draft posted publicly for community feedback just over a month ago: https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/31931-8182021-proposal-for-new-game-community-rules/

Fundamentally, the rules themselves are the same as before with no major changes. However, we do have a new moderation system. Previously, nations received “strikes” and after 3 strikes you were out (permanently banned).

The new system has “Moderation Points”, and a player is only banned upon reaching 100 Moderation Points. You will see in the Game Rules that each rule violation listed has a guideline range of moderation points to be issued for that rule violation. For example, the War Slot Filling rule has a guideline of 25-75 points. This allows the moderator issuing the warning to use their discretion regarding the severity of the warn.

Additionally, Moderation Points (for most violations) will expire automatically after a set amount of time. For example, the War Slot Filling moderation points would expire automatically after 2 years. Some rules violations expire sooner than this, and there are a select few that never expire (such as buying and selling accounts.) Again, I would encourage you to review the new rules at the link above which cover these nuances.

You will also experience an upgraded moderation interface. Previously, players got a direct message from me (Alex) with information about the strike they received. Now, if you received Moderation Points, a popup will appear with all of the information about the warning and you will need to acknowledge it to make it stop popping up.

Warning history is still available on your Account page. Under the previous warning/strike system, warnings never expired or were removed. This update to our moderation policy is essentially serving as a one-time mass expiration for all strikes issued under the old system. This means that if you had a strike or two against your nation under the old system, it was not transferred to the new system and you essentially have a “clean slate”. NOTE: THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT WE HAVE UNDONE ANY BANS. ALL PLAYERS WHO WERE BANNED UNDER THE OLD SYSTEM ARE STILL BANNED.

The purpose of this system was to create a more transparent and fair moderation system that works better for you all (the players) as well as for me and the game staff. (We worked on a very improved backend UI for issuing moderation points as well.) These new rules and moderation points system are designed to allow me to bring on additional game moderators, with the ultimate goal of freeing up more of my time from moderation duty to development duty.

I know that many of you have concerns about new moderators and any potential abuses of power. I share your concerns, and I am taking many, many preventative measures and steps to prevent any instances of that happening. Should that fail, I have also setup extensive moderator action logging so that I can review all actions taken and at least catch and reverse any abuse should all preventative measures fail.

At this time I have only brought on two highly trusted game moderators who had extensive experience with existing moderation teams. Currently we are going through a feedback and improvement phase; I am still primarily taking all moderation actions but with guidance from these new moderators. All moderation actions are required to have bilateral agreement, meaning that at least two separate moderators are signing off on all decisions before any actions are taken. I am the only person who has authority to unilaterally make any moderation decision.

We will continue to refine our moderator training protocol and procedures based on experience and feedback under this new system here in the near future. At some point in the future (TBD) I will look at bringing on additional moderators to help out and may open up a public application process. I know in the past I have received many private messages from those of you who would love to help out. While I appreciate it, at this time I am taking things slowly to ensure that it’s all done correctly and that we build out a robust framework to ensure a high quality moderation system and experience for players. The future public application will be the best way to volunteer as a potential game moderator.

I hope that I have answered most, if not all questions you may have about this new system. As stated previously, fundamentally nothing major has changed, and I think overall these new rules and moderation system are both more transparent and fair and in favor of you all (the players).

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me or post them publicly in this announcement thread where I will answer them.

Thank you, and I am looking forward to the continued improvement of our community and development of the game 😊

-Alex

[MinesomeMC]

Time to break all the rules :serious:

[JadenStar10]

5 minutes ago, Alex said:

At this time I have only brought on two highly trusted game moderators who had extensive experience with existing moderation teams.

Time to play detective 🕵️‍♂️

[Kitschie]

Thanks for looking out for the player base and community.

[Velyni Vas]

Thanks for your continued efforts on improvement and your activity.

[Mega]

Nice.

Can't wait for the public application for mods. I've haven't been here too long and I'm straight up addicted to this game (I login daily lol).

[Emperor Adam]

20 minutes ago, Alex said:

I know that many of you have concerns about new moderators and any potential abuses of power.

Making moderator names public would go a long way to dissuade this. Faceless moderation inherently fosters a "us vs them" when there's disagreements, whereas each party knowing the other adds that level of humanity to it and makes things a lot less confrontational in the long run.

[darkblade]

hey @Alex you looking to have a memer join your moderation team? :serious:

[KindaEpicMoah]

Aww, now I can't make fun of all of my friends who had strikes :^) 

[Wingawoo]

May I speak to the manager pls

[YangMoment]

seems like the next GW strat is to go into your enemies discord servers and find them saying things that will get them striked

 

theres no way every case will be moderated i assume, else itd be incredibly easy to target people with this

[Sri Lanka 001]

Hi, I'd like to apply for mod mhm, I'm gonna be a good mod mhm, totally won't ban @mcm the first thing I become a mod mhm

[Joe Schmo]

now i can break the rules once every few years :evil:

[HARPER.txt]

balls

[Indger]

Nice

[Zevari]

I've never really paid to much attention to the rules, but has "Treasure Transfer Co-ordination" always been an offense? 

Seems kinda dumb to prevent alliances/players from trading relics between each other, especially when it would create more content for players in game and give the feature a bit more love.

[Ramona]

7 hours ago, Sri Lanka 001 said:

Hi, I'd like to apply for mod mhm, I'm gonna be a good mod mhm, totally won't ban @mcm the first thing I become a mod mhm

I'm gonna say it, Sri for PnW Moderator 2021.

[Alex]

18 hours ago, Emperor Adam said:

Making moderator names public would go a long way to dissuade this. Faceless moderation inherently fosters a "us vs them" when there's disagreements, whereas each party knowing the other adds that level of humanity to it and makes things a lot less confrontational in the long run.

You and I had a nice DM discussion about this on Discord, and I appreciate the feedback. At this time, my primary concern is biasing the moderators. It might sound counterintuitive, but having public moderators means that if they make a decision against another player they could get flak, either from opposing alliances or their own depending on who's receiving moderation points. I think the threat of being kicked out of your alliance, or having your alliance attacked by another alliance, etc. would weigh in on player's decisions. Anonymous moderating allows us to prevent that from occurring, and in theory with the right level-headed moderators lead to fairer and better moderation.

That said, if things don't go well I will certainly reconsider this position based on the feedback you gave me.

17 hours ago, YangMoment said:

seems like the next GW strat is to go into your enemies discord servers and find them saying things that will get them striked

 

theres no way every case will be moderated i assume, else itd be incredibly easy to target people with this

Yeah, I tried to be clear in the rules that we're not moderating everything that happens outside of our official channels. Only specific things (see screenshot below). But if we did not take any evidence from outside official channels, some things like coerced city deletion (imagine an alliance makes peace terms like you can only get peace if you delete all your cities) would be impossible to enforce. They could just only communicate that through other Discord servers, or Discord DMs, for example, and in-game their official stance could be that those aren't the real peace terms. It would be kind of silly to just look the other way and let them force a whole alliance to delete all their cities or w/e. There are other similar situations like with account buying/selling, etc. that are all explicitly listed below.

10 hours ago, Zevari said:

I've never really paid to much attention to the rules, but has "Treasure Transfer Co-ordination" always been an offense? 

Seems kinda dumb to prevent alliances/players from trading relics between each other, especially when it would create more content for players in game and give the feature a bit more love.

No, it hasn't always been against the rules. I think about a year ago we codified that. The purpose of the treasures was to get people to war over them, and the coordinated treasure transfers (i.e. buying treasures) was creating some war slot filling issues.

We're actually in the process of building out a new treasure trading interface where you will be able to buy/sell treasures directly (under certain conditions, like neither party is at war.) That should be ready to go by the end of the year, and will more-or-less eliminate the need for this rule.

[Artifex]

Mods and admins were banning people without evidence, valid reason, or good cause too often. Hopefully this helps.

 

Rules 6. Bounty Coordination and 7. Treasure Transfer Coordination are anti-emergent-gameplay and a band-aid fix for poor game design.

"we may expand the scope of our Community Rules to what we consider the entire Politics and War Community, including, but not limited to, private Discord servers" is a gross overreach of moderation that can and will result in the extortion of players: "Act how we deem acceptable, even when not playing PnW, or else."

Edited September 24, 2021 by Malleator

[Dusty]

@Alex why would city deletion forcing have half the severity of forcing someone to quit the game.... Just reading through the list seems off, you took a 3 strike ban, to what could be a 1-2 strike ban on issues that are based on undeterminable intentions, I see alot of glaring holes in the logic of some of the point values or length of time, alot of people 2 years is permanent. Dunno just feel like some of the point values were achieved by throwing a dart at a board almost

Edited September 24, 2021 by Dusty

[Alex]

49 minutes ago, Malleator said:

Mods and admins were banning people without evidence, valid reason, or good cause too often. Hopefully this helps.

 

Rules 6. Bounty Coordination and 7. Treasure Transfer Coordination are anti-emergent-gameplay and a band-aid fix for poor game design.

"we may expand the scope of our Community Rules to what we consider the entire Politics and War Community, including, but not limited to, private Discord servers" is a gross overreach of moderation that can and will result in the extortion of players: "Act how we deem acceptable, even when not playing PnW, or else."

As I stated above, we're actually working on a whole treasure buying/selling mechanic built into the game. As for preventing bounty coordination, I'd be happy to hear your game design solution for that problem.

To your second point, there are some rules that would just not be enforceable if we only looked at in-game actions. If someone was blatantly buying and selling accounts on Discord, and everyone knew about it, would you want me to refuse to take action just because it didn't happen in-game?

To reiterate an earlier point, the actual enforcement of the rules isn't really changing. I'm just being more clear and transparent about when I'm going outside the bounds of official game channels to moderate things.

2 minutes ago, Dusty said:

@Alex why would city deletion forcing half the severity of forcing someone to quit the game.... Just reading through the list seems off, you took a 3 strike ban, to what could be a 1-2 strike ban on issues that are based on undeterminable intentions, I see alot of glaring holes in the logic of some of the point values or length of time, alot of people 2 years is permanent. Dunno just feel like some of the point values were achieved by throwing a dart at a board almost

I know they're not perfect, which is why I had it open for public discussion and feedback for over a month. I never really got any feedback on point values, to be honest, I don't know why. I just assumed people were happy with what I came up with, but you're right I was just kind of going with my best estimate for what was appropriate based on experience.

[Dusty]

2 hours ago, Alex said:

 

I know they're not perfect, which is why I had it open for public discussion and feedback for over a month. I never really got any feedback on point values, to be honest, I don't know why. I just assumed people were happy with what I came up with, but you're right I was just kind of going with my best estimate for what was appropriate based on experience.

Cool glad to know ya recognize that, that's the biggest issue I see😬

[Arthur Wellington]

Why not payed non players as moderators? 

[Zei-Sakura Alsainn]

14 hours ago, Arthur Wellington said:

Why not payed non players as moderators? 

Because volunteer players are cheaper. 

Also, though this is a smaller factor, because players (especially veterans ones in other PW mod teams already) better understand the games mechanics and politics, knowledge which may be necessary in some cases dealing with, well, mechanics and politics. 

A payed non player could learn these with time of course, but obviously this is just easier and cheaper.

[Maleficent]

On 9/23/2021 at 2:23 PM, Emperor Adam said:

Making moderator names public would go a long way to dissuade this. Faceless moderation inherently fosters a "us vs them" when there's disagreements, whereas each party knowing the other adds that level of humanity to it and makes things a lot less confrontational in the long run.

Then people will know my true identity as Les Paul Supreme. . . Oh wait. . . 

On a more serious note, I didn't have the chance to read over the whole change of rules, but for players to have the chance to know what mod gave them a warning and so on would be a plus even if it's an alias. It allows for players to see if they're constantly being targeted by a certain mod, and compare said mod actions with other players with the similar offense. It would give the chance to single out issues like this of bias as the community, and make mods more identifiable even if it's just an alias. Just like me currently as a Forum Mod.