Step Three

[philu]

I'd support that, there is always the option of banning them again if they failed to wise up.

Indeed. I agree an amnesty would be a good idea and a great gesture from the new owners.

[dakhound]

cant even remember what Zahan did, might have to look it up,

edit: oh I remember now

[komissar]

It was something rather innocent in fact...
All in all Zahan is a great fellow - Intelligent, mature, polite and a great RPer to boot.

Amnesty for him certainly would be a good idea.

[d29565]

I support unbanning people. Gameforge, for instance, really ticked a lot of people off, and they ended up getting banned. There are quite a few that deserve account reinstatement. And as said, if they mess it up, well banning them seems to have worked before =).

[ajsuk]

Jena don't do it!

At least not the people who've been banned multiple times or have records as long as your arm. They have had too many 'second' chances already.

[iphdrunk]

Tricky

First thought that came to mind was "no, sorry, but no... if they were banned, they were banned for a good reason, usually after a few warnings coming from GMs and Senior GMs, due to clear breaches of CoC, etc..". We've had our fair deal of rtards, recurrent botters and offenders that do not care about other players. We've had some real obscure cases of (evil, mean) account sharing / stealing, with prejudice for all parties [note that I am not referring to minor, casual account sharing amongst friends, which, although should be frowned upon, are imho quite harmless ] that are a thread to our praised community. Bans, at least for most public and notorious cases, were not given lightly. This is without even mentioning that, in some cases, "oh mighty permabans" could in fact have been traded by "I will transfer you to a new shard" or even "we will rename your character" or "this is a permanent ban of 3 days"...

However, we've also had our share of "wth"-bans, e.g. when Xavier went postal on the forums, and I understand that there may be cases where bans were for what some could considere minor things, which also makes me tend to think that some bans, given the status of the game, could be re-considered.

In short: I am against the "new governor has decided to lift the ban for all previous offenders", but I would agree on a "case by case" basis, with logs if needed.

Yours,
Ani

[iceaxe68]

I'm a very forgiving person. I love to think of people seeing the error of their ways, reforming, and returning to the community they had to leave.

I think it would be pretty difficult, though, to approach "un-bans" in anything like a fair and impartial way. Trying to second-guess the actions and intentions of now-gone GMs is a tall order.

Given the arrival of "Step Four", perhaps those previously banned individuals could just start over, and try to avoid a repeat of mistakes. Not the "perfect world" solution, but possible.

Of course, having never been personally involved with any such situation, even peripherally, I may be missing something.