The reason why our ToS needs to change

I've waited a lot to make this kind of thread. I was expecting someone to do that before me,
but it seems that most of our players, for being casual, have not yet faced problems related to this.

We all know that ML's Staff is very active in punishing players who break the rules. This is very good for us, especially when we compare our server to the old GMS or BMS servers, where there were several players using hacks, duping items, performing RWT and scamming people. But when we talk about harassment, I think our Staff overreact and punishes too hard the "offenses", which I don't even think is an offense in many cases.

Look, don't get me wrong. I don't want to mean that we shouldn't ban people who are offending the others. But what I've seen a lot, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, is that people are being banned for silly things that nowhere in the world would be considered offenses. After some years playing this server, you will be involved in some drama. You will see things you don't agree, you will see people being an ass with others, people spreading lies, people acting stupid.

Besides, sometimes these things don't happen inside the game or through Discord text messages, which are reportable. Sometimes, these things happens on WhatsApp or on discord voice channels, and you can't report those. There are conflicts between players that are impossible for the Staff to control or know, but still they gonna need to judge the whole situation and make a decision, which most likely won't be fair since they don't know the context. What happens now is that players bait the others they don't like through non-reportable channels or doing non-reportable things so there's an reportable offense afterwards in response. Example: I can spread some lies about something that you think is important. I won't get banned because that's not bannable, but I'll piss you out so you will feel the need to answer back.

With the latest changes on ToS, if you get 4 bans for anything included on the third topic related to Player Abuse (see Important - (OLD) MapleLegends Terms & Conditions | MapleLegends Forums - Old School MapleStory), you receive an Account Ban, meaning you lose all your accounts, needing to restart. Seriously, how fair do you guys think that is? Who's winning on that situation, like... how exactly that is helping our server? Is it to keep the community friendly? I SWEAR that's not working!

If the goal is to remove some kind of unfriendly person, why is the punishment is an Account Ban, according to the ToS? That literally means you can return to the server with another account and have the same behavior. There was someone who was account banned for harassing me, and this person created 2 more accounts to send offensive smegas after this (I got evidences about that if there's any Staff member interested). I mean, MapleLegends turned into a better place after his account ban? The answer is NO. People were watching all the drama on smegas (and guess what, I ofc couldn't answer back).

My point is there isn't any real advantage for the server by doing this. Actually, that's bad for the server for these 3 reasons (I also got evidences with everything I'm saying below if that's needed):

1. People are constantly reporting each other for foolish things (which means more work for the staff members);
2. The server will lose the players who got banned and lost their, let's say, 5 years of hard progress;
3. The server will lose both players who lost close friends and became discouraged to continue playing and also players who simply do not agree with these rules.

Another thing I want to discuss is that I know some cases about people who have been banned for harassment reasons that are still active on our community. In addition to being active people, they are people loved by the vast majority of players. My question is: do you think that someone who is loved by like 95% of the community deserves to disappear from the map due to some silly conflict with someone or with a small group that eventually had a disagreement in the past? I don't think so (and obviously I'm not talking about extreme cases like racism/homophobia/transphobia/nazism/etc here, or this person surely wouldn't be loved that much and also wouldn't be a silly thing).

So, I thought about this:

1. Remove the "Account Ban" as the 4th offense, so the most severe punishment would be 30 days ban in this case. I don't think anybody would be happy to get 30 days ban for idiot things, so that's more than enough in my opinion.
   
   OR
   
   
2. Forgive old offenses, returning to the previous strike after 3 months "clean", because it's not fair to account ban someone because he did a 4th offense in 2023 and his first offense was in 2017. It's clearly a non repetitive behavior which shouldn't be punished.

Maybe if my suggestions don't satisfy, I still want to hear other solutions, because it's clear these rules are destructive for the server's health.

I love MapleLegends