General The atrocious state of Wynn moderation

This thread is gonna be a short rant about how rules are enforced by Wynn staff and how the publicly available rules very much differ from the jurisdiction the mod team seems to claim.

I've played on and off since 2013 and for the past ~ 3 years or so haven't been very involved with the general community, nor have I been that active in-game - I am pretty confined to my guild('s discord). Despite this I've had on two occassions a very negative experience with staff in the last month alone, in places I'd have not expected there to be any issue. I'll briefly detail what happened without mentioning any names and then talk about some more public cases.

Exhibit A, "Wynncraft for Developers" discord
- After seeing a thread showcasing someone's guild raid tracker (detecting raid completion in-game and broadcasting it to discord) I decided to make a custom version for my guild. I posted about it in this discord and was quickly told that it is illegal.
- I was privately messaged by a moderator asking me to take down the mod's public GitHub page as well as the relay server it used. I asked if they could refer me to the rule that banned such applications since I had checked the rule page beforehand (a lot of popular mods (Wynntils included) very much rely on chat scraping as well to provide features).
- I wasn't given any answer, instead the moderator in question mocked me for how I described the verdict:

- This had a happy ending as a head moderator later decided that it was in fact legal. Before that though we also had said moderator threaten to ban entire ranks of players when another player (in green) argued the same:

- One more highlight:


Exhibit B, DMs
- In a private channel of a private discord (my guild's), I mentioned that a lot of people accidentally expose their application tokens on GitHub and that it'd be easy to find them. I made a joke about how you could use this to hijack other guild's bots, immediately followed by me saying not to do this because it's a dick move. Unfortunately for me, this message (excluding the last part) was sent to moderation which then prompted a head mod to hand me a warning. To no avail did I try to argue that this was a private conversation completely out of context in a community that for a large part doesn't even play Wynn. Original message obscured because otherwise they may just get the idea to ban me:


Some Thoughts
Evidently there are rules which aren't communicated to the player. The relay being a grey zone I can understand (although threatening bans instead of explaining what rule this breaks is obviously insane) but last time I checked theoretical conversations in a 3rd party application were not subject to Wynn rules. The official rule page even goes out of its way to very nicely state exactly where e.g. the "no harassment" rule applies in terms of in-game chats, this is clearly not one of them.

Is this a one-off case? No! As especially the guild community knows, Wynn mods are no strangers to constantly taking sides in "he said she said" arguments happening in private DMs elsewhere. Enough pressure from people reporting it and some discord screenshots (which they make no effort to verify) can get absolutely anyone banned as long as the mod team judges it to be genuine. Many other servers I've played on have a "no 3rd party evidence" rule for this very reason. It can be okay to make exceptions for extreme cases, but as it stands there is no clear line. Players were once told that guild chat is not moderated, only for TheNelston to be banned over a slur he dropped there. Just yesterday someone operating an "exclusive" guild with a high LE entrance fee was banned. Was it a morally sound thing to do? Probably not, but it sure wasn't against the official Wynn rules either.

This feels a lot like Wynn staff just wants to play karma police. Making policy completely dependent on the moderators' judgement on top of eagerly wanting to handle every discord argument obviously introduces biases depending on the people involved and their relation to who they report it to. I'd love for Wynn staff to actually focus on writing down all the enforced rules in the actual rule thread and getting all their members in on it (as it stands, odds are every second mod will give you a different answer on some cases) instead of wasting their energy trying to be the moral center of the universe. Plenty of people I personally know to be assholes have been banned, but if their only crime was a harassement case that never took place on any Wynn platform then I do not believe this should be a valid reason just for the terrible precedent it establishes. It'd also help if Wynn mods were less cocky about all of this.

 

The Lari bot agrees with this post.

 

yes add poll on whether we need changes

 

I have only observed these interactions from afar, yet have seen several instances in suggestion threads. It is an extensive problem that needs correcting.

 

inb4 the flamewar that will almost definitely occur

 

I had an experience once where some dude was shouting nonsense about smashing wynncraft characters and as a joke i threatened him by claiming i would poop in his mailbox and asked him if he wanted it hard or soft and i got warned for that!

 

free all my guys

 

zonk y

 

The amount of moderator abuse & corruption that's been apparent on this server for the past 5 years I've been active is absolutely sickening and insane. I will never forgive Wynncraft Moderation for both directly causing me to be doxxed, then unbanning the player who committed it - years after I'd been told I'd never have to play the game with him again. They fail to keep their players safe, and they fail to properly enforce the rules in a sound manner.

 

"dawg i know the rules better than you do" with the skull emoji is crazy wtf

 

From what I've seen, the moderation team seems too unprofessional in handling such cases.
Too many of them are taking sides when they're supposed to be the objective third party that's here to resolve issues and problems within the community.
What kind of moderator would say "dawg i know the rules better than you do" and proceed to continue moderating? All it sounds like to me is a teenager on a power trip.

I'm not sure how Wynncraft have been recruiting their moderators, but it seems as if the bar is low enough for this type of corruption to continuously occur.
We obviously need more transparent rules to remove much of the grey area, but it doesn't seem like anything is being done.

 

This is what happens when you give a bunch of stupid ahh teenagers (and manchildren) any kind of power.

EDIT: There really needs to be a more extensive vetting process to prevent so many bad apples from becoming mods, and greater accountability for those that slip through the cracks.

 

hey guys do you think virdian will respond to my clarification as to whether a mod idea i had is allowed (i already tried to follow up before and decided to just wait)

 

unban mishka he aint do nun wrong

 

10 bucks say this gets taken down within a week

 

the day when mods swoop in and crush this will be true irony

also, if any decent mods get offended reading this; it's called collateral damage; if the mod who was featured as the premier guest in this thread swoops in and read this, it's called a big f-you.

 

There have been significant problems for quite some time but being warned for private discord convos is a whole different level of overreach.

 

sigma sigma on the wall

 

Hi i am selling a wynncraft guild #1 crown would u like to join my guild