PB accountability

I still have a PB accountability question that OP mentioned when he referenced to a chaos scroll scenario that’s happened before.

How will staff assure us that host-staff would not have any pb change knowledge in future patches that would give their run an advantage over others? As the host you can make all the changes and take precautions without technically having to leak to anybody.

 

What about hosts that mass hog items (e.g dozens of items such as Rock of Time). Is that considered mass griefing then?

 

Is there a clause in the TOS that explicitly prevents staff from insider trading, with actionable consequences? I think something to that effect would be useful particularly in egregious cases like the one mentioned here.

As for PB staff-hosting, I don't really think it's that big of an issue. Perhaps an informal rule that if there are significant changes to PB on the horizon, that staff should not be making any advantageous adjustments to their runs until that information is public would be good enough. I actually don't see any other way of handling it besides not allowing staff to host bossing expeditions, which is not reasonable or fair to them.

 

How can staff (or anyone) infer that splits are being used and that the host is not receiving loans from other members of the bank?
Call it a difference in bookkeeping methods whether or not the bank owner wants to explicitly transfer funds back and forth.

Another concern of mine is just cause. You mentions that if someone reports something the staff HAS to look into it. Does that mean we should be reporting any bank owner for any small accounting mistake and they should get banned? I’m of the opinion that as long as the bank is “behaving well” (ie splits are paid in full whenever anyone requests) that the behind the scenes book keeping is none of anyone’s business.

Finally regarding insider trading it’s quite strange and unusual timing that the banks (none of which have had any problems in the past years) are all scrutinized at the same time 1 week before a staff member opens their own bank. I’m sure you guys will deny this as coincidence but we are not morons.

In the spirit of equality id expect any bank run by the staff to be publicly available so we the public can regularly audit it and prevent any insider trading and/or abuses

 

There should be no problems with staff auditing banks. Why should this be a problem and breach of trust? If you're audited and there are no wrong doing, then you should be fine with the staff (or even your own runners) combing through every entry and ensuring that tax is filed properly and all transactions are lawful and correct.

Auditing does not indicate any wrong doing. Only if the audit indicates that such banker/players have been allocating funds inappropriately then it will be a problem.

If as you said, the bank's trust is at risk, then it's the bank's fault. Just as staff can audit your bank, go audit theirs. If you deem it to be incorrect, bring it up with a GA/GM/Supervisor.

As for insider information, do what Nise say. Report to proper authority with evidence.


On a side note, if everyone (and i mean everyone since y'all friends) on your run really don't care that the bank is misappropriately allocating/"sharing" funds. Then make that clear to all the runners and staff.

 

maybe they're just auditing Pasta First

 

It was explained in OP post but I will make it easier to digest.

Auditing by staff puts a stain on host rep unless it's a collective mass audit but Nise has stated this was not a mass audit which then implies staff can choose anybody's bank to audit for no reason whatsoever. If nobody requested splits, how can there be misconduct? Who is reporting? Situations like this damage the reputation on certain banks and it implies that the safest bank would be a staff-hosted bank which can affect runners decisions in which run to join. Why? Because let's be honest if people didn't intentionally want to save on tax mesos, they would not be leaving their mesos in the bank for so long. Therefore the players who want to continue saving on mesos, in their best interest, would continue to find a "bank" = run and choose the safest one to continue building a balance. The banks that get audited but not the others will be at a disadvantage at recruiting/keeping players.

Your sidenote is a prime example of what I'm saying by the way. Nobody here mentioned any bank misappropriating/sharing funds or people not caring, but it was automatically assumed. Because why? Because it was audited.

 

Building off the above two posts, the bank “audits” have been executed much more like smear campaigns against the banks owners in feeble attempts to cause distrust / destabilize the runs.

These have all been received very poorly by both the hosts and the runners and it feels like staff is grasping at straws to somehow justify their actions.

And again the timing of all of this is very interesting

 

Just to clarify, this means that if staff reaches out, publicly or privately, in discord with regards to a staff matter that we should assume that they are acting only as an individual and that if they wish to discuss it further with us they should make a forum post?

 

I think we have to distinguish here between a runner seeking clarification on certain transaction(s) and a formal staff bank audit (of which it sounds like there has only been 1 due to a player report on the forums).

 

Do you believe then this type of stuff should be handled through a report? Because I have too always been under the impression that this Server likes to handle stuff under a more laissez faire system. Additionally, I was always under the impression that if a player caught wrongdoing happening or believed to be so, this should have been handled through a report directly to the staff, and not under a public callout where misunderstandings or the simple callout could affect a player or group of player's reputation. We have repeatedly seen this in every area of the game, e.g., if you get scammed during a leech session, other than smegaing the name of the leecher doing it, you're invited to directly report them instead of letting everyone else know beforehand in the interest that "the public should know".

I ask all of this because you established that there has only been ONE (1) bank investigated by staff. However, in the previous days, we have had one member of staff auditing and investigating at least 4 separate banks in 4 separate discord servers, establishing that some of the money in the bank has been mishandled. They also established that the only reason they were doing this in public instead of privately through DMs or through a report was that they thought it best for "the public to know". That awfully sounds like a public callout to me. However, you could even establish this was an objective callout, yet in some instances, we saw some references to ill-intentioned practices like "money laundering" or "pocketing runners mesos".

I think that is why most in this thread were under the impression that more than one bank was investigated, as we assumed these cases were also part of an investigation and not one member of staff acting privately as a runner.