[thatguy3339]

So let me start by saying that we were allowing Melanie to be the primary staff member responding as she was directly involved in the situation you mentioned, which seems to be a large part of your motivation to create this thread. As you are directly asking for other staff member responses, allow me to respond. We actually do have a public list of different types of punishments we issue, different offenses and the range of punishments assigned to those offenses. (https://hometownmc.com/forums/showthread...t=rulebook ) We prefer to keep the specifics more vague as there is no way that we can account for every situation. With grief for example, there's a big difference between somebody griefing 10-15 blocks of dirt, or 10-15 blocks of diamond. Same goes for most offenses, if somebody has a build that is borderline between inappropriate or alright it comes down to best judgement (often including input from multiple staff). The difference between a ban and a warning typically comes from a combination of basic guidelines given during training, personal judgement/experience, and the input of other staff members where possible/applicable. The fact of the matter is though that we absolutely cannot issue warnings rather than bans for a large majority of issues as there simply aren't enough hours in the day for us to wait around for a player that may never rejoin the server to come back online, warn them, then have to watch them to make sure that they don't go around causing further damage/breaking more rules. The ban/ban appeal system shows us that the players who have broken a rule big enough to get themselves banned are actually willing to put in the effort to continue playing on the server, and generally aren't just coming back to troll. As for not having every staff member able to ban, that is a decision that we made years ago and are not likely to change any time soon. The fact of the matter is that guardians are our first line of defense when it comes to rules violations, especially with grief/chat offenses/inappropriate builds.