[nhil] - [Abuse of service on our forums]

nhil · June 17, 2022

SS14 account: nhil
Character name: Clayton Sheets
Type of Ban: Game ban
Date of Ban and Duration: Applied on: 6/7/2022. Ban duration: Permanent
Reason for Ban: "Abuse of service on our forums"
Server you were playing on when banned: Wizard's Den Lizard [US West]
Your side of the story: On 6/6 at 9:52 PM (PST) my friend Jooce posted a link to his account on these forums telling me to look at it because of the funny pfp and banner he had chosen. I looked, had a chuckle, then went to the ban appeals section to see if there was any new interesting appeals that had been submitted until 10 PM. It was then that my friend and I launched SS14 to play a few rounds, and while it was launching, I went back to my browser to open the chemistry and map pages on the SS14 wiki for easier access while playing later, in that moment I unconsciously chose to leave the ban appeals tab open in my browser. I then played SS14 until I was ahelped at 12:30 AM and had a quick uninformative back and forth that left me quite flabbergasted. About an hour before that though, my friend sent a picture of the active users on the forum having several users with christmas in their names, followed by gibberish. I don't recall any discussion about it, rather it just being a little moment of "oh look at this, wonder what's going on" and just continuing to play the game. After I posted my initial appeal, I did look at the active user list and saw that there were still christmas accounts in the active users list, which I screenshotted to show my friend that I had also seen them even after almost 2 hours had passed, at the time though, I didn't believe that they were actually relevant to my case.

Why you think you should be unbanned: I believe that I was unfairly banned, and though I cannot confirm this, I presume that moderation took a scorched earth approach to the situation rather than actually investigating the situation, which resulted in me getting banned in the crossfire. Moderation claimed that they had "pretty strong evidence" that suggested people at fault, though this is almost certainly a lie, the most they'd possibly have in the form of evidence, in at least my case, would be that I've been banned once before (suggesting possible motive, though it was only a 24 hour long ban) and that I was on the ban appeals section of the forums while everything took place. Paper thin is much more applicable than "pretty strong" in this case. And while I don't know any of the details of logging info on the server, I know that there are some sort of logs showing me actively playing from around 10 PM - 12:31 AM which is a decent alibi.

Anything else we should know: My initial appeal for this ban was relatively all speculation for what I had done wrong, moderation seemed to not even bother putting in any effort to detail to me what I had done wrong, having to get any information regarding the situation from my friend conversing with moderation through discord DMs after several days had passed, but I can't put too much fault considering mods were probably thrown off balance with having to settle everything, it's just unfortunate that I was not given anything to go off of, especially considering I did not even know what had happened in the first place. It's a whole guilty until proven innocent and wrong place at the wrong time situation. In the end, all I'd like is just to be able to play on the server again, at the very least I'd prefer if I'm banned off the forums permanently instead of the server, should you for some reason still believe that I'm some culprit.
Also something relevant but unrelated directly to the ban, about a week ago/day after I was banned, I went on the server to get another screenshot of the ban message and after doing that could not resist the urge to keep clicking the retry button at the bottom of the message, I genuinely did not realize that each time I clicked the retry button that it was logged, I figured that since it said failed to connect that nothing was even going through, so I am sorry for flooding the logs. Doing that resulted in my former appeal becoming void and I was told to appeal again in a week, so here we are.