Regarding ban policies

[Etzanoa]

Hello.
The moment you decide to enter and play the Realm of RetroWoW, is the moment you accepted community guidelines and rules and regulations we run on. We aren't hard on the bans, we use the mute command first, but you also have to understand, that we won't ignore people that are breaking most underlined rules of our community, and let them insult the community, project and/or gamemasters. We unbanned people, gave them second, third chances, but they would break the same rule eventually.

If you also check our rules and regulations, you will see there are several notes before the rules itself, where it's clearly said we do not have to warn before the ban goes active. But it's not forbidden to contact us, and ask for further information about your ban.

Hey buddy ol pal.  I think the OP has a good point about depopulation. On the one end you cant have people like me spamming bg's with bad words all the time, but on the other end you make the game sterile if people and even eccentrics arent allowed participate too. Part of this game IS the chat box, and when you get involved for anything less than the N word, you are playing mommy and daddy. For the same reasons kids play games with other kids away from their parents is the same reason your server is failing and boring. You are too involved in the play of the game for the potential ferment of friendship to happen that MUST occur for people to have a good time.  All your remaining players are drones just like the ones on the actual blizzard servers you are leeching off of. And it makes sense that this is what you attract, look at all of the daily tasks you have programmed in, they are bare bone and insulting even compared to regular quests from wow, which atleast attempt to have a point. Everyone knows this game is a time dump, but you dont even try to hide it. To then sell items in your server for real money ontop of all of this is reprehensible as far as I'm concerned. 
You're point is that we automatically agree with your terms when we log into your server. I counter this point, acknowledging that you have a right to enforce your rules, but want you to realize that you still have to understand human nature, that people fight most often in ways that can be settled between the two, and that you need to tone down your hyperbolic sense of what abuse is, and give the personal agency of /muting to the player enough to settle things. Make it so that /muting prevents not only you from seeing what they say, but vice versa as well. I would add to that, try an account mute so that all chars the player someone wants to mute makes are automatically muted. Again i bring back the daily quests you set up, and compare to how you deal with your "community". Its designed with identical effort. Keep banning people and accusing them of doing it again to justify your rules, instead of letting the players figure it out themselves and actually retaining your player base. 
Unless you just want to continue to milking a few fellow mamzers for some change to pay your rent so that they can wait 5 hours to play an unpopulated AV match, you would heed my word.
its all out of love,
HH

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We unbanned people, gave them second, third chances, but they would break the same rule eventually.

In the case of the OP, where he had mentioned having bought gold elsewhere, I want to point out, that he is in no ways morally at fault for having done so. You too are selling gold on this server, which is ethically questionable to begin with. 
Banning this person and then statements like this one above show that all your rules and guidelines are not aimed at prividing community but rather insuring income.

[mentos987]

Whether GMs are to soft or too hard with the rules are up for debate, I think that they are fine and you think they are too hard. Perhaps GMs should do a vote on it in discord to gauge the general thought.
"Banning this person and then statements like this one above show that all your rules and guidelines are not aimed at prividing community but rather insuring income."
Oh I don't think they ever claimed that this rule was for the sake of the community, it is obviously to safeguard their own income. But this scenario is much akin to bringing snacks to cinemas. Many of them only allow you to eat snacks that you bought there and will not allow you to bring snacks that you bought elsewhere. Morally reprehensible?, nah, maybe somewhat greedy though.

[Etzanoa]

Whether GMs are to soft or too hard with the rules are up for debate, I think that they are fine and you think they are too hard. Perhaps GMs should do a vote on it in discord to gauge the general thought.
"Banning this person and then statements like this one above show that all your rules and guidelines are not aimed at prividing community but rather insuring income."
Oh I don't think they ever claimed that this rule was for the sake of the community, it is obviously to safeguard their own income. But this scenario is much akin to bringing snacks to cinemas. Many of them only allow you to eat snacks that you bought there and will not allow you to bring snacks that you bought elsewhere. Morally reprehensible?, nah, maybe somewhat greedy though.

"Perhaps GMs should do a vote on it in discord to gauge the general thought."
- yes, considering that the complaint is people leaving taking their game play else where post banning, lets do a vote amongst the remaining drones who have likely done all of the reporting and teacher tattling. 
"But this scenario is much akin to bringing snacks to cinemas."
- i liked this, this was a great metaphor. Very true and vindicates the people who do sneak stuff in. 
"Morally reprehensible?, nah, maybe somewhat greedy though."
- Both greedy and morally reprehensible. If i wanted to be ripped off i'd atleast go to the reigning champions (blizz) for the real thing. 
Its greedy because it has all the pretense of skipping the tediousness of wow like the leveling, but is still there just in other forms. Its all designed, like i mentioned the other day, to milk the mamzers so this guy can pay his rent and afford his ketchup sandwiches. This server is designed to frustrate and to lead you to the "pay your way out" option.   
Morally reprehensible because the dude is making money selling pixels, and doing it while ripping off someone elses work. Those people might even deserve it even, but that doesn't make this guy good. Its just shamelessness. Hes a bottom feeder, which is why his policys appear so offensive. For him to tell you you are guilty is backwards and clownish.

[mentos987]

You are acting as if though the players are entitled to rights while playing the game, we are not. I haven't paid for their service and as such they don't owe me anything. If they decided to ban me today for no reason at all I would be sad but I would not claim that they had stepped over some moral boundary.
And regarding a poll, what better suggestion do you have than asking the player base? Is it better to only ask the players that have been banned and are angry about it? Because I think they might be biased in the other direction.

[Etzanoa]

You are acting as if though the players are entitled to rights while playing the game, we are not. I haven't paid for their service and as such they don't owe me anything. If they decided to ban me today for no reason at all I would be sad but I would not claim that they had stepped over some moral boundary.
And regarding a poll, what better suggestion do you have than asking the player base? Is it better to only ask the players that have been banned and are angry about it? Because I think they might be biased in the other direction.

"Is it better to only ask the players that have been banned and are angry about it?"
You've got it backwards, I was pointing out that you accidentally exclude them. Bias is not erasable in a vote, and lets not pretend otherwise. 

"You are acting as if though the players are entitled to rights while playing the game, we are not."
im not commenting on the virutes of the players, i think they are often diluted zombies too, unless they can help it. The problem is with the sea urchin dev scam artists.

[Etzanoa]

You are acting as if though the players are entitled to rights while playing the game, we are not. I haven't paid for their service and as such they don't owe me anything. If they decided to ban me today for no reason at all I would be sad but I would not claim that they had stepped over some moral boundary.
And regarding a poll, what better suggestion do you have than asking the player base? Is it better to only ask the players that have been banned and are angry about it? Because I think they might be biased in the other direction.

One last thing. I have to point out to you that you keep missing the point.  This is a suggestion and currently a complaint section of the forums. I am not here to advocate players rights. I’m here to point out the bad job the people running the place are doing. Saying things like “If they decided to ban me today for no reason at all I would be sad but I would not claim that they had stepped over some moral boundary.” is what’s called in other circles boot licking. It’s not an admirable quality. I don’t mean to insult because you’ve been rather amicable.

[mentos987]

My bad, I had considered this a suggestion thread and got annoyed at only seeing complains with no constructive criticism on how to improve. But if you see this as more of a general complaint than that settles it.

[Etzanoa]

My bad, I had considered this a suggestion thread and got annoyed at only seeing complains with no constructive criticism on how to improve. But if you see this as more of a general complaint than that settles it.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/epic-handshake

[mithrim]

Hello.
The moment you decide to enter and play the Realm of RetroWoW, is the moment you accepted community guidelines and rules and regulations we run on. We aren't hard on the bans, we use the mute command first, but you also have to understand, that we won't ignore people that are breaking most underlined rules of our community, and let them insult the community, project and/or gamemasters. We unbanned people, gave them second, third chances, but they would break the same rule eventually.

If you also check our rules and regulations, you will see there are several notes before the rules itself, where it's clearly said we do not have to warn before the ban goes active. But it's not forbidden to contact us, and ask for further information about your ban.

Food for thought: The notion that people should be sanctioned in any way for merely insulting (i.e. causing the other person to hear or read something they do not wish to hear) any person or any thing is an insult upon logic, proportionality, reasonableness and is antithetical to a free and open society. Typical social pressures solve these problems on the vast majority of cases. Furthermore, a bit of trash talking (even extreme) enhances competition, which pays dividends.
This view (that people out to face sanction for offending others) is why in some countries we now have criminal offenses which essentially sanction people for merely subjectively offending others, such as the relatively recent charge of Malicious Communications in the UK. See example below.
Not only are such rules completely Orwellian to most right thinking people, they only ever expand and get worse, and absolutely beg to be misused. They also cause the enforcers to refocus their efforts on solving for these non-problems, rather than correctly refocusing on real substantive issues (e.g. bugs, stability, new content, advertising, account help). I've yet to come across a single player in my entire time playing WoW (since 2006) that quit the game because someone called them a bad name; in reality, they came back harder and became much better, and the server(s) were enhanced for it.
I personally would recommend re-thinking this in the broader context. Yes this is just a game, but are not MMOs in a way a microcosm of society at large?
https://www.hampshire-pcc.gov.uk/wp-cont...igator.pdf

[mentos987]

"I've yet to come across a single player in my entire time playing WoW (since 2006) that quit the game because someone called them a bad name; in reality, they came back harder and became much better, and the server(s) were enhanced for it."
I know of plenty of players that leave games because of what they call "toxicity". This is not a problem for Retro WoW but let us not pretend it is not a common problem for gaming communities in general.
And if a server is "enhanced" when players are called bad names you may as well program bots to constantly spam insults to everyone and everything. I wonder why the gaming industry haven't implemented this brilliant idea yet.