How to appeal a ban effectively
Posted on Tue 22 April 2014 in Vipers
Introduction¶
In last week's post, I showed three ways that appealing bans on the Vipers forums would fail. Everyone makes mistakes and we try to recognize that when someone comes to the forums and makes a good appeal. We usually offer an unadvertised "last chance". This is the chance to prove you've changed. If you fail, you are gone for good. If, however, you have changed behaviors, this allows you to play on the Vipers servers again. To get this chance though, you have to make an appeal.
Super secret formula for getting unbanned¶
The secret to a successful appeal is to do all of the following in your appeal thread:
- Post in complete sentences, using mostly correct english. I'm not going to mark you off for simple spelling mistakes, but I'm not going to read your post if it looks like you typed it from your phone to your teenage buddy.
- Stay polite. If you lose your cool, it's much less likely we are going to want to work with you. Remember, this is a game. You not being able to play on one server is not the end of the world.
- Explain why you think your ban was inappropriate. Make this short and to the point.
- Don't lie. I have logs. I know how to read logs. I even have ways of quickly searching through the logs for specific times, if you provide that information. If your story doesn't match what I see in the logs, I'm not going to engage with you.
- Answer questions from the admins. It's entirely possible you didn't provide a crucial bit of information or we need to wait for input from the banning admin. In either case, if an administrator asks you a question, you should probably answer it. When you do so, follow the first two bullet points above.
Summary¶
The sad thing is most of the appeals fail at step 1. These posts are to facilitate communication between the admin team and the player that wants to return to the server. In these appeals I try to educate a player on why they were banned in the first place. If it's difficult to understand what is being said, it's very hard to have this conversation.