Nurse Mewi
Interesting point and I’ve been thinking about that. Logic dictates that those rare items are indeed rare and limited. Also, they are also the target of botters. Items like halos, katanas and kitties. So if a botter is successful in botting enough gold to acquire one of those items and then is banned, there’s one less item of those in the market.
Supply and demand, the price will rise. And this, in a weird sense, makes more bots…
Some people are complaining about inflation and the difficulty of getting certain high level items. I believe there’s some sort of way for Gaia to know how much of a certain item there is, and how much of those are “MIA”. My suggestion would be a new store item: “Lost and Found”. At random it would turn into a MIA item; even those starter ones and generally useless junk that tends to be left in a corner in must accounts that are deleted with the bots accounts.
And I also think that if Gaia has acknowledge that there was a mistake in their part in this blocking subject, all those unjustly blocked should get a “Thank you letter” of March or April. Yep, thank you for your patience.
Gaia Admins would never give you a thank you letter for being wrongfully banned. They might want to, but they would not because that would mean that it would be expected in the future by anyone who is or has been wrongly banned. This is a also a decision which might affect the value of collectible items and so Gaia Admins would never do something like that.
The problem with getting these (or any other accounts unbanned) is that the final decision to do so is made by the moderating team and not the Admins. The mods are not paid employees and I'm not sure how much oversight there actually is by actual paid employees on what mods do. Think about the number of reports which are filed. There is no way Gaia can afford enough paid employees to go through each report. There is also no way that Gaia can afford to pay enough people to go through how each filed report has been handled by the moderating team.
As a user, you basically only have one shot at getting your account back (regardless of whether it happened on March 10th or not). So when you fill out your report, you have to do everything you can think of to convince the omni mod who processes your report that you are innocent. Once an omni mod decides that your account should not be unbanned, it's pretty much impossible to reverse the process.
My niece had her account banned during the 420chan/subeta war. Basically, a bunch of Gaia accounts were banned to protect them from being hacked by the channers. She was first told to contact an omni mod and explain the situation and that her account would be restored. She was instructed by that omni mod to fill out a feedback form and that the feedback form would be her only chance at getting her account back.
She filled out a report and then received an e-mail stating that her account had been banned to protect it, but her account remained banned. She replied to that e-mail requesting to have her account unbanned. She received a reply stating that it had been proven that her account had botted or profited from botting and that the account was now perma banned.
I told her to contact an omni mod via PM (a different one than the one she had first contacted) and include with that PM any information which proves she actually owned the account - like the last few PMs she had sent, the screen name changes on the account, the last actual trade she had sent, etc. I also told her to include screenshots of the PMs from the first omni mod and the e-mails she had received from Gaia.
The second omni mod was nice enough to actually go through the PM. She reviewed the information and restored the account.
My niece was extremely fortunate. It is sad that this is not the case with all users who are unfairly banned, regardless of when it happened. From what I have heard, you cannot appeal a perma ban by PMing an omni mod anymore. All you can do is file another feedback form, but it is not very likely that a perma ban will be reversed if it is not done with the first feedback form you file.
@steeltornado - Gaia cares about the users when it affects their bottom line. It is obvious that the number of users banned on march 10th must not be enough to affect their bottom line, otherwise they would have performed a rollback. It is important to note, though, that it was not Gaia Admins who have been dealing with the unfair bannings. That is left to the moderating team and with the exception of two or three paid employees, the rest of the moderating team is made up of "volunteers". Not only that, those two or three paid employees do not actually process any of the reports. Processing the reports is left up to the discretion of the omni mods who handle them and it becomes a final decision once they have done that.
I would suggest that you guys organize yourselves and storm the next talk with the Admins session, which I believe is scheduled for sometime tonight. There is never a specific time, so you guys would have to hang out in the Gaia Community Forum and ask Lanzer once he opens up the thread there. Just watch how you conduct yourselves and bring the matter up to him respectfully. If you want his assistance or for him to look into the matter, you don't want to start off by pissing him off. Just remember that he was not personally involved in banning those accounts and that he likely has no real idea as to what the actual status of the matter is at this time. Be polite and keep in mind what you want to accomplish. It only takes one person attacking him on this matter to potentially undermine any hopes that you might have of enlisting his assistance.
Reply
