Hi Thomas. I’m gonna give you a response addressing the points of your appeal since you clearly put some effort in to it. My response does not necessarily reflect a staff decision with regards to the appeal, it’s just my personal response (for now).
Let’s start by getting this out of the way: I appreciate you putting in the effort to make a longer more detailed appeal, and I understand why you want to return and play on ORE again. Additionally, I understand that you’re likely a very different person now; there’s a lot of room for maturing between 11 and 19, I know this quite well myself. (After all, I myself was banned many times on ORE when I was younger.)
That said, you seem to somehow believe that your current ban has anything at all to do with your ban 8 years ago- it does not. Your current ban is as a result of an egregious 5 year streak of ban evasion, during which time you were a problem member in the community with just about every single alt account you made. Your actions and behavior have shown a complete and utter disrespect for ORE’s rules and moderation and you have made no real attempt to apologize for that, and no indication that you will behave in the future if you are unbanned.
I think in order to fully understand the context of this appeal, first we need to look at your history. After that we can address what you have to say point by point.
Here’s a rough history of some of your evasion and misbehavior- I certainly missed some stuff since a lot of the stuff from back then isn’t documented very well.
2015
Current username: EllegaardReds
- November 15: You apply to the build server.
- November 16: You apply the the school server.
- November 17: Upset at your application not yet being accepted, you spam in chat, ignoring several warnings to stop- for which you receive a 2 week ban which is soon adjusted to indefinite (which you could still have made an appeal for).
2016
Current username: Steve_Carter
- March 18: With no attempt to make an appeal, 4 months later you apply to the school server with an alt account (
Steve_Carter) - and your application is accepted.
- July 16: Same account, but you have since changed your username to
JesseFrostMiner and then JesseRS. With a new forums account you apply for Builder, and are accepted. I assume you passed the trial, even. At this point your ban evasion would have worked but…
- October 20: You have since changed your name to
LoanLeyRS and then JesseCarter820 - you throw a tantrum and ask to be banned, to which you are obliged but are quickly pardoned.
- November 11: You throw another tantrum and ask to be permanently banned on all servers, and insist you will never appeal it. You submitted the appeal very shortly after, presumably because you calmed down and realized you didn’t actually want to be banned. In this case, the appeal was actually accepted.
- December 30: You create a new alt account
JesseGames418, which you get apply for builder with. (And I assume you got it.)
2017
Name changes: GLaDOS1998, TheTaxman91, TheLightning1995
- March 17: You get banned for some time (I think, documentation on this incident is a bit unclear) for repeatedly and aggressively using the N word toward another player who you were upset with (funny thing, that user was me). This incident prompted an internal staff discussion on alt accounts, evidently you had at least a few alt accounts with which you had gotten builder that staff knew of at the time, the only one I can find documented is the
JesseGames418 account.
- July 29: You apply for and get builder with a new alt,
LBSC_Thomas_70.
2020
Somewhat of a time skip, not much I can find about what you did during this time, but you definitely were active on the server as LBSC, ZZuse, MCSmally, Laruens_Weyn.
- March 25: You admit, as
Laurens_Weyn in game chat to being EllegaardReds, and in light of your nearly 5 years of ban evasion characterized by misbehavior, alt-making, and - at best - general volatility, you receive a permanent ban.
2023
In the Discord server, after I asked you about who you were since you played back in the day, you said this:
I had many I will tell u 2 of the 5
ZZuse and JesseFrostMiner
Technically they are the same account
But I have 4 other alts 3 of them got builder role and banned
The other 2 didn’t get banned but I gave them to my friends
So now u guys will ban me it’s ok idc I will be back as the redstone oracle
That last line, to me, reads as a promise to ban evade again, and does not inspire confidence in the sincerity of this appeal and your respect for ORE’s moderation.
Add to that the fact that you applied for builder with a new account and only after that was caught and you were banned did you make this appeal, despite acknowledging (as above) that you had an outstanding ban against you.
So between 2015 and 2020 you:
- Evaded a ban you could have just appealed in the first place and none of this would have had to happen.
- Created numerous alt accounts which you got builder on (including, apparently, for other people who didn’t even have the required skills and knowledge to earn it themselves).
- Were consistently problematic and emotionally volatile.
And coming back in 2023 you seemingly threatened to ban evade again.
Just some of your alts (current names first, notable prior names later):
So finally, let’s get to the contents of your appeal and see how you address all of that.
Why you were banned (if known): 1st time: being silly when I was 11, after that I was banned for evading bans multiple times
Your ban for spamming when you were 11 is irrelevant at this point. It’s entirely the incredible amount of ban evasion that’s the issue here.
Why you should be pardoned: I should be pardoned because this whole situation is very silly. I understand that you guys take ban evasions very seriously, but I think the reason for the original ban is also very silly. This server has changed a lot, and I’ve grown up since then.
Silly is one way to put it, stupid is another. You’re not still banned for spamming when you were 11, you’re banned for everything you did after that and never making any attempt to make a proper appeal, apologize, or change.
From what I remember, my first account was banned in 2015 because I was asking the admin to give me command blocks, and after some of the guys said that this is a redstone only server I started saying mean things to everyone, and got myself a very long ban. I can’t say for sure how long it was but I think it was permanent or atleast a 1 year ban. Again I don’t know for sure, but it was a long ban.
Your initial ban was due to spamming and acting extremely childish when your application wasn’t accepted immediately because you didn’t include enough detail. Not that it’s relevant since, again, this isn’t about that ban. If you hadn’t done what you did for the 5 years after that then this appeal would be accepted no question- but you did ban evade and misbehave over and over again for the next 5 years.
I think that the punishment was extremely unfair. If that ban had been a only a couple months or weeks long, none of this would be happening right now, I would’ve had no reason to evade the ban.
The punishment was definitely harsher than we would apply these days for spam, for sure. However, you cannot lay the blame on ORE for your subsequent behavior. Lots of people get banned and they don’t evade, they make an appeal. An unfair ban does not justify 5 years of repeated evasion.
Now I fully understand that that behaviour is completely unacceptable, but at that time being 11, I didn’t think a lot about what I said to strangers on the internet.
That’s great, a good apology for what you did to get banned in the first place, but that’s not what you need to apologize for.
I got banned another time while trying to pass a builder trial on an alt account. I was trying to get the builder rank for a friend who wanted to play on the server but knew nothing about redstone or computer engineering and I wanted to help him out. This was 100% my bad, nothing to be said about it. I’m just bringing it up before an admin does.
This is good, acknowledging something you did that was unacceptable and taking responsibility for it. That said, you also are still trying to justify it (“… I wanted to help him out”) and you make it clear that the only reason you brought it up is because you expected us to and wanted to get out ahead of it-- if you thought we wouldn’t remember it or bring it up would you have just stayed silent about it? Not confidence-inspiring.
I’m writing this because according to the admin, “A one-line reason like the one you’ve submitted is far from sufficient.” I believe this has nothing to do with the actual ban appeal, as I’ve read some accepted appeals written by other players, but their pardon reasons are about as weak as my original one. Their situation is most likely different from mine, but still.
Yes. Their situations are very different from yours.
I want to be pardoned because it’s been 8 years since I was first banned, I’m gonna be 19 in 12 days from now, and both the server and myself have changed a lot since I last played which was in late 2017/early 2018.
You were at least sporadically active up until 2020 when you were officially permanently banned.
I’m going to go to university for computer science, and playing would be very beneficial for me because this community is simply the best when it comes to redstone and computer architecture.
I’m sure it would be beneficial for you, and if we could be confident that you’ve actually changed I’d be happy to welcome you back to the community.
I’m very sorry for “mocking” the ban evasion system and for being generally very annoying when I was active. Again, it’s been years since then and I feel like I’ve changed and now I can actually understand the issue at hand.
… “"mocking"” … putting scare quotes[?] around the main and most serious offense you committed doesn’t exactly scream sincerity. I do sincerely hope that you have changed- but you do very little in this appeal to provide evidence of that. You say you can understand the issue at hand, but you dedicated several paragraphs to the circumstances of your initial ban, which is not the issue, and only a couple sentences to the actual issue at hand.
I think I can learn a lot from some of the guys who play here and that’s very motivating. I didn’t ban appeal earlier because I didn’t appreciate the community and understand it’s value, but that has changed now that I can see how it can potentially have a positive impact in my future career and what its players are capable of.
I hope for a future where you have changed, you are unbanned, and ORE does have a positive impact on your future. However, regardless of how positive an impact ORE may be able to have on you, the question remains whether you will have a positive impact on ORE. And on that front, I sadly don’t find this appeal very convincing. You don’t seem to understand what you really did wrong, you hardly apologize for it, you are defensive throughout, you focus entirely on the wrong thing, you seem very dismissive of the reasoning behind your ban, and your conclusion reads - to me - as “I should be unbanned because I want to play on the server”.
This is just my opinion, I don’t speak for all of ORE staff with it, but I just hope it gives you something to reflect on.
