h4rdc0r3 4 |1ph3

[Peter]

First of all, when you say the ban isn't solely about the flaming, I'd argue with that.
All those points (and many others made by the crew) have all been about flaming or related to flaming- as clearly none of them indicate cheating or bug abuse or many of the other rules I specified in my last post.
I'm not arguing that they shouldn't be banned because all they were doing was "flaming"- other people have had "permanent bans" from flaming- Terror and CrazieFurie just to name two.
I do realise its a large number of offenses, but from my perspective, if the harsher admins (or admins who put up with less crap than others) were online at the same time as many other users- Swifty, SoNiX, DMX- I can list 30- then these users would also have the same number of offenses (items on the log), if not more.

As I tried to emphasise, and already did more clearly in the private HC4L forum, it's not specifically the flaming, more the actions around the flaming. CF was a general ass who got banned from the normal SA-MP forums, from GTANet IRC for major racism and also bothered LVP Staff and players with both racism as discrimination, the flaming was pretty much ignored. Terror, assuming you mean the HC4L member in this case, actually is allowed to go on LVP again.

Flaming is one thing, as I said, other gangs and people do so a lot as well. It's considerably hard to stop all flaming, seeing there are more places to control than just in-game. In most cases, the flaming limits itself to the normal gameplay, whereas HC4L has been banned for flaming on pretty much all LVP services: IRC, the forums, TeamSpeak and evidently in-game as well. Of course this plays a role, bottom line is that it's not allowed on LVP, though not super-strictly moderated either. This has caused both members to be banned a total of three, perhaps more months in total, which does not equal a lifetime ban.

They got banned for their behaviour after the flaming. If they got muted in-game, they'd head to IRC and use !msg to continue flaming. That would cause them to be banned from #LVP.echo, after which they'd join #LVP and start being kick-ass there. Would they be banned there as well? No problem, there's #LVP.nl, and quite often the forums would follow after that. That's three of our services they'd be banned at already, where members of sK/BB/RT would just keep quiet until the mute ended (a few isolated occurances ignored).

It's this cool behaviour that got them permanently banned. Any ban would get follow ups with chats in #LVP about how cool they are, how the admins were abusing, how the Staff was pro or any other fitting description in their eyes. After they got banned, they'd join all other LVP services to make sure they'd get banned there as well. Now tell me, which of the other gangs is doing that? I can assure you that there is none.

This is one point I do not really understand- I'd jokingly offer $5000 to perm-ban four users at my discretion- it doesn't really seem like an offence to me. Perhaps you can elaborate on this point, unless it was thrown in to make the list look bigger.

Franky, it does make a difference. Not all administrators are equally experienced and some might even be considered slightly ignorant on some subjects. They certainly are not to blame for this: it's a young community and people have to grow in their roles. The offence here is that shoebox blatantly abused this ignorance, he made the Staffmember believe he'd get the money and made sure to remind him of the money multiple times, causing the Staffmember to get strongly enthusiastic over what he would do with the money.

Ban worthy? Probably not, but certainly worth a frown. It simply adds up to the number of offences he has committed. The reason isn't very solid; in a young community there will be less experienced and sometimes slightly ignorant people, however, I strongly believe it's bad to abuse this for your personal agenda. Compare it to promising twenty lollypops to a five-year-old if he jumps in some river mid winter: it's funny at the time, but on the long-term brings large health risks and you wouldn't give the lollypops anyway.

The "die from cancer and aids" part I'm not arguing with, however using the Nazis as a metaphor for any community or organisation with an extremely tightly-wound leadership is very common. I wouldn't call that part bannable- and I've personally seen many others (including myself) compare leadership of LVP to the Nazis (without refering specific members to specific Nazis), such as in one of my recent CSI posts, as the 'Nazi' or 'right-wing' metaphor is very strong and gets the point across like nothing else. Basically Nerd isn't the only one who's done that.

In most communities yes, I've seen it used that way, and frankly, have used it myself in that context. There also are occurances in which it's not used in this context, in which someone doesn't use it as a metaphor but rather to illustrate a connection. Regardless whether it's the nazi's, NSB'ers or specific people higher up in the nazi hierarchy, they're not always used as a metaphor.

If I had a nickel for every time I've seen or done that... heck I've also seen LVP Staff deal a decent load of crap onto other players (sure, not comparable with shoebox or Nerd- but in reference to this particular argument, more than enough).
Point is, shoe and nerd aren't the only ones doing this.

Agreed, there are however levels at which you can do this. You can pm some random IRC user saying estroe sucks, but you can also spread huge structural lies to groups of people. I do however agree with your reasoning, so let's drop this

I heard that shoebox was "perm-banned" before this incident took place, so the point has little relevance to his own actual ban. shoebox and Terror know each other very well in real life, so it's not so much like he's trying to get his overseas internet-bud to get banned by giving orders, but more like he's having fun with his mate/letting the ideas flow or whatever.
Even still, this is a game and not real life- if a soldier in real life kills on their superior's order, the superior can cop the blame as well- however in LVP, Terror has a good deal of independence (like the rest of us), so its his choice in the end- you can't blame this on shoe too.
Using the same train of thought, I could say that I gave shoebox and Nerd orders to act like this, and swap bans with the two of them...

Yes and no. It indeed happened after shoebox got informed of his lifetime ban, he opened up a second IRC client and joined with the nickname "Terrorstepelsonbeer" and started talking to himself. A log can be found by clicking here, do you truly believe friends do that to eachother? You get arrested for shoplifting and say [W]IDmad was in with you, even though he wasn't anywhere close to Australia at the time.

As I said earlier, it was and still is a very strong argument, but not flawless.
In the long run, I'm not arguing the fact that they got banned- I am merely arguing the length of the ban.
Perhaps a couple of weeks is necessary, a month max. However, a "perm ban" with a non-parole period of two months is rather over the top in my and many others' opinion.

Their ban is a minimum of 8 weeks, with no defined maximum timespan. They have both been banned for about three months a person already, and obviously did not learn from this. A month would be the absolute minimum, which I consider too low for the running circomstances. They were totally aware of their actions, the way they abused the lack of experience of a LVP Staffmember, the results of their actions and the way they meant their comments. I also believe they were not high at the time, seeing no chats about drugs happened in their gangchat earlier that night (which isn't that rare).

Nice response, but the ban still stands. I'm looking forward to seeing your response.