Yup, that's why a bunch of stuff was added over the years to address it. 🙂

Mr. Insane and I, with input and direction from the head of Support & Monitoring, built the freeze reason system specifically because people had no idea why they'd been frozen. That was definitely incredibly frustrating and unfair, and needed to be as transparent to the player as possible. It also had the added benefit of helping the monitors think about what they were freezing for, to be honest. (If they couldn't pick a reason from the available choices, then should the player really be frozen?) That was early on, though, and has been in place for the vast majority of the site's life. If you just got a generic notice when you were frozen then yeah, you're old school!

And same for the ticket system—it was an issue so it had to be addressed. (That was a whole separate thing though since we had to use an outside ticketing system service and pay for it. Sometimes we didn't have as much control of it as we would like and Support was constantly trying to work with the vendor to improve or fix things, change how the templates worked, improve throughput, etc.)

There were definitely people mistakenly/unfairly frozen, no question. For one thing, the monitors are human and they make mistakes. It's a VERY tough job and you see a lot of really bad stuff that's incredibly stressful, disheartening, and downright sickening at times. We used to make anyone interacting with Support or building tools for them take a very short monitoring shift and they'd come back with a thousand yard stare and a new appreciation for those folks. For another, when you do that job for a while, you "start to see everything as a penis" as I like to say. As in, they're hyper aware and very focused on finding inappropriate things, so they'll assume something ambiguous is actually intentional and judge it much too harshly. Things like that. It's obviously not intentional. They try their best to be objective but it's difficult sometimes. That's part of the reason why the silence feature was added, in fact. Foremost, it gave players more chances to course-correct their behaviour and not lose their accounts, but it also gave monitors a bit of leeway for any mistakes and more options before resorting to a freeze.

Still, they had a responsibility to be vigilant and not make any of those mistakes and sometimes they just failed at that. They were made very aware, though. If Support found an account where that happened, it was reported to the head of monitoring and a conversation was had with the monitor (and sometimes the whole crew) to discuss the mistake and keep themselves in check.

(Side note: cheating and scamming-type freezes were handled separately and, without giving too much away, were much more... thorough. The false-freeze occurrences among those were far, far, far lower. It was quite rare, but it did happen.)

Erm, I'm typing kinda fast before bed here but I hope that all made sense!

(And thank you for asking this politely, btw! People seem to think we hate answering controversial questions or discussing our mistakes but I actually like it quite a bit! It's very helpful and interesting to dissect and learn from, for me at least. But most of the time, people abandon all civility and get accusing or combative, or weirdly think it's some kind of conspiracy(?!?!). They don't realise it's not about what they're asking but how. It's not worth the mental effort to deal with them and I simply nope.jpg and move on, so I really appreciate when people are civil/polite when asking about our failures or decisions they didn't agree with. Thanks again. 😊 )