A creative Minecraft 1.20.4 server for transportation and city-building enthusiasts.
A creative Minecraft 1.20.4 server for transportation and city-building enthusiasts.

February 2021 GSM Results

Happy Valentine’s Day/Single’s Awareness Day! (be still, my beating heart). MRT staff and members spent the day going over a lot of things today so let’s get right to it!

Mod Nom Nom Nom

We had one candidate get 2 nominations, _cosmon. Discord channels were created and discussion occurred. For the voting, he didn’t receive enough votes to be promoted. Final tally was 0 For, 5 Neutral, and 7 Against for his promotion.

In addition to _cosmon’s nomination, we discussed changes to the Open Moderator Process. Over the course of the system since November, we’ve had problems such as:

  • Players providing their direct opinion about the candidate only (positive, neutral, or negative) without providing sufficient evidence or details.
  • Players intending on providing their opinion first, and then adding evidence later. (Include your evidence in your initial statement to prevent inevitable questions from others about where the evidence is)
  • Players providing “evidence” that is not relevant to moderator nomination criteria (ie: “nit-picking”)
  • Players providing “evidence” that is actually not based on factual information (ie: speculation, “what-ifs”, “could-haves”).
  • Players reacting impolitely and uncivilly to other players who do any of the above mentioned.

The intent of the system was to allow the public to discuss in civil fashion the candidates and give evidence to support their claims. Given the issues, many members and staff agreed that it would be a good idea to move nomination to e-mail only for feedback starting with the March GSM. Here’s how that flow will now work:

  • Up to the candidate accepting the nomination stays the same.
  • All comments will be added to the Moderator Nominations Document for people to see (similar to the GSM/ISM Agendas w/ comments)
  • Staff will be doing minimal vetting of comments. Mainly to make sure low-effort comments like what we saw in Discord don’t get posted on the agenda. Please don’t make it to where we have to fully vet comments.

Discussion of candidate(s) can happen in normal chat such as Discord/Minecraft however staff can/will issue warnings should discussion go out of hand.

Oh, and speaking of warnings…

Let Me Level with You

megascatterbomb put together a very thorough proposal (which was approved) to replace our current warning system with a new “warning level system” consisting of 7 levels. With the old system, staff faced multiple discussions of what punishment was appropriate and therefore impacting response time to the actual issue. Another problem was what punishments staff could use for any rule violation. At the current time, we had single, double, and verbal warnings. Verbal warnings were used for minor offenses but staff didn’t keep very good track of it (aside from messages in #staff in discord). Single and double warnings were our only other ways of dealing with issues. When we polled at the last GSM, 50% of members present thought double warnings were the “ceiling” of what we could give at any one time. While this isn’t the case, the rules page didn’t help either. When dealing with multiple incidents, we couldn’t stack punishments. Mega tried to keep all of this in mind with the redesign.

# of warningsPunishment# of weeks
1Ineligible for Moderator candidacy for 3 months.2
2Cannot rank up until all warnings expire.4
33 day temporary ban6
4Demoted to Member until all warnings expire and a reflection letter is accepted by admins.8
52 week temporary ban10
6Temporary ban until eligible to submit Offline reflection12
7Indefinite ban.26+
Warning Level Table

Some clarifications about the levels:

  • Each level would last for 2 weeks or 14 days.
  • Any level can be issued at once so our options have increased by 2x.
  • Warning times stack but temporary bans do not.
    • For example, if you are given a Level 5 warning, you would have a 2 week temporary ban but a warning level time of 10 weeks (2 * 5 = 10).

For level 6, offline reflection is a temporary ban that lasts until warning time expires (when member is able/eligible to submit a reflection letter). However, they are held at the level until the reflection letter is accepted by the admins. Essentially, they are “offline” from the server until they submit are within the time frame to submit a reflection letter.

With Level 3 being a 3 day temporary ban, staff increased the temp ban limit from 1 day to 3 days for mods to allow them to give out the ban, in the case that an admin may not be available.

Now, with all these levels, Mega gave staff some tips on when a certain level should be issued. These are “suggested” punishments. Bear in mind that staff are trying to learn the new system too.

No. of warningsInfringement
1 * Failure to file appropriate paperwork (e.g. missing 4k waiver).
* Failure to stop spamming, caps, other annoyances when instructed.
* Other technicalities like the 7500 block rule. 
2 * Anything that would comfortably constitute a single warning in the old system, such as:Jokes/remarks in poor taste.
* Obvious 300/500 block rule violations.
* Landscarring at non-trivial scales.
3 * Minor griefing e.g. building a small structure inside someone else’s town without permission. (as opposed to burning everything down)
* Plagiarism.
* Uncivil arguments.
4This is where the reflection letter is required, so whatever constitutes a double warning in the old system should incur 4 warnings here. Such infringements include:
* More blatant or widespread griefing.
* Disrespect or harassment.
* Unnecessary escalation of an argument.
5 / 6Generally reserved for extreme cases, or where a number of infringements are addressed at once.
7As above, or when Frumple uses his ban hammer in cases of sustained belligerent dissent.
Suggested level punishment for rule violations

We had a few other rule/policy changes from staff aside from the new warning level system…

Staff accepted a proposal from Chief that formalizes how staff deal with member requested bans (voluntary bans). Here’s the excerpt from the proposal:

Any member can request that their own account be temporarily or indefinitely banned by emailing the admins at any time and for any reason. These “voluntary bans” are treated just like the temporary or indefinite bans issued as a result of accumulating warnings, except:

  • Temporary voluntary bans can be issued for any duration up to six months and do not come with automatic loss of Discord access.
  • Any voluntary ban can be removed at any time by emailing the admins
  • When a voluntary ban expires or is removed, the member will maintain the rank they held at the time of their request.
  • Voluntary bans do not directly count against a member’s candidacy for moderator, however bans will be recorded for public viewing.

Members are asked to not excessively request voluntary ban placements or removals.

Given the approval of the new warning levels, voluntary bans are kept separate from warning levels. Staff will add a new tab on the Member List that displays all voluntary bans.

Staff accepted a proposal from Cynra requiring admin approval to regen entire towns. This proposal formalizes a process that members, who want to regen a town or area of significant development, have to submit an email to admins, detailing why and where they want the regen.

kyyl_ submitted a proposal to add on how we judge towns for ranks, mainly clarifying the how we count franchises in build counts. After lengthy discussion, staff settled on the following:

Franchises built by other people don’t count towards scale in town promotions.

Credit to KittyCat11231 for final wording

Franchises still count for town ranks in other areas such as ambience and other areas but we consider the town mayor’s builds when looking at the scale aspect of town promotions.

Asphalt Heaven

We had a handful of transport projects proposed this GSM. Glad to see members building up infrastructure around the server.

I got proposed a road (B805) between Jeb and Moleville and it was approved.

HarborRandom852 proposed a road between the A92 and their town of Miu Wan, designated B988, which was approved.

kyyl_ proposed a network of A/B roads through Oparia and other reaches of the MetroNorth. This was approved so kyyl_ will have a fun time of roads, roads, and more roads. These roads are the following:

  • A1 through Oparia will be re-designated as B185.
  • A “new” A1 will be constructed to bypass Oparia and then extend the A1 across the bay.
  • B180 will extend from the A1 bypass, through riskinus’s unnamed town and end at notshort925‘s town of Cardinal Bay.
  • B190 will go from A1 into New Mackinaw (owned by EliteNeon).

_fwis proposed the B921 and a canal to Lake 4. The road was accepted with slight modifications to the route. The updated routing has the road going around the bay (instead of across) and using the road near the unknown town.

The canal below was accepted but changed to follow the river. _fwis will be expanding the river to allow for vessels to traverse the river.

Sasha9076 proposed a small reroute of A980 to include Ada_Virus’s town along the Western Line. This was accepted.

AIX (Aurora International Airport) was proposed again by TeamAurora. From the last GSM, staff mentioned that they needed to finish:

  • B889 (completed)
  • A84 (still in progress)
  • Build a town in between Carnoustie, Skogheim, Kaloro City (Wallace and Augusta were founded but currently both unranked)

Given the status of the following above, staff denied AIX citing that the A84 needs to be completed (mainly within Aurora) and that Augusta should increase in size (roughly, councilor standard).

New Plugins!

We considered a few plugins at the GSM. Most are paid plugins but given the community support of getting them, donations will be used to pay for it. Head Database had overwhelming support from members and will be tested on Beta.

A discussion was held on whether we should consider plugins that require resource packs or other client-side modifications. Many of staff and community wanted a near-vanilla experience. This narrowed down the few vehicle plugin possibilities to Vehicles.

After installed and trialed for a bit on Beta, a survey question will be posted by Frumple accessing how the community feel on possibly moving those plugins to Main.

Events? No, The Events!

We had an event funding proposal from Wipeout111 to fund an asynchronous game show, The Events. Wipeout has said the main season will start after Dalt’s The Great MRT Build Off. For a glimpse of the format, Wipeout said this:

The Events will be split up into 1-week blocks of time known as “sections”. Each section will start with an assignment, move to a secondary assignment, and end with an elimination.

  • An assignment may be a challenge, puzzle, or set of instructions for participants to follow that can last anywhere from 1 day to the majority of the section. Each assignment will contain prizes and advantages for one or more participants outplaying their acquaintances.
  • Similar to assignments, secondary assignments may consist of a wide range of contents but will have more focus on social connections and games between contestants. While not guaranteed, prizes and advantages may be earned during secondary assignments as well.
  • Each section will end with an Elimination. This may be done through a challenge pulling strings from the section or a challenge and voting combination. In case of the latter, ties will be decided by another round of voting or from an advantage earned earlier in the section. Every elimination will eliminate at least 1 contestant from the season with the results being announced on the night of the last day of the section in ET.
  • Prizes & advantages may be earned in both assignments and secondary assignments and may be spent on secondary assignments and eliminations. Each advantage & prize will be announced before each assignment and/or secondary assignment when necessary detailing how it can be earned, and how it can be spent. They may serve a wide range of uses, such as progressing the plot, helping a player or group of players, or hurting a player or group of players.
  • To end off the season, a live race filled with puzzles and challenges will occur between the finalists, which may be 2 or 3 participants depending on cast size. The winner of this race will win the entire season. The Events will last 4 sections with 1 live finale.

Funding was fully approved so if you are interested, talk to Wipeout!

In addtion, Sasha9076 requested a warp hub exemption to help him set up Great MRT Riddle. Staff have increased his /homes temporarily to allow with his planning/setup.

Next staff meeting will be the February ISM on February 28th at 7PM UTC.

My cat has demanded more snuggles and to spend more time with him so I will go do that now.

– Sese