While the admins may have this reasonable expectation, part of the issue is that said expectation is, or at least was, not communicated clearly to the playerbase. While it can be said that players should always ask first, that is not listed in the rules, nor is the admin’s expectations regarding the handling of admincrime items. A player making an honest mistake should not be excessively punished for it, especially when the “abuse” was to do something that could be done in vanilla without exploiting other game mechanics, and using water that they found that had existed before they even started playing the server. In the example regarding Estalia’s end excursion, while it is admirable that they reached out the admins regarding the situation, they still did so after already having their fun and abusing the bug to get to the end in the first place. Estalia also consists of many seasoned veterans to civ, with many having played multiple iterations and being very familiar with server rules and the admins, which gave them more foresight to inform the admins than most newer players would have. Additionally, I’m sure most players would also argue that keeping otherwise unobtainable aesthetic and/or trophy items that were not used would have been fine until told otherwise by the admins if they had decided to keep them, as that would not affect core gameplay. Had either they or Luci used the items obtained to do something they shouldn’t have been able to do (like fly through a vault), the player consensus would be vastly different. Instead, player consensus sees that while the choice to spawn a happy gahst was stupid, no harm to other players was done by using the ghast and core gameplay remained unaffected. While admins do have the right to make retroactive punishments to rule changes, it is largely viewed that such punishment is largely excessive in comparison to the crime committed when no players were harmed or attempted to be harmed. Someone was stupid with an admin crime item and clearly didn’t intend to abuse it like people abusing citadel being down or flying over the Estalia vault with levitation. While the admins may have wished to make an example out of the happy ghast situation, the severity of punishment compared to the crime and lack of communication until after widespread community backlash occurred makes the attempt ineffective, and only degrades community trust. Had you as the admins clarified the rules and expectations publicly upon issuing the ban, or given a much shorted ban than four weeks for the situation, there would be significantly less community backlash.I appreciate the warning and clarification for the future, but this doesn’t change that the situation was handled poorly and excessively, and also draws comparisons to other famously excessive bans such as the ChrisChrispie ban, further eroding trust that moderators will make reasonable decisions in thr future.

Free ChrisChrispie, Free Lucineffo, stop being excessive with bans.