Hello all, I trust your weekend finds you well. I have an idea I want to float out there.

I noticed that about once a month the convicted will appeal their judgment a second and third time.

By the third appeal the outcome is a constant - Appeal Denied and forum permissions removed.

I wonder though, has all the juice been squeezed from this tangy apricot? Or is there more?

I propose the following:

Only in the rare case someone chooses to appeal three times, they be given the option, but not the obligation, to have a community appeal.

It would proceed such that they create one last appeal from scratch, and the community as a whole are allowed to bring evidence against them. If some mild castigation occurs in the process, that is very unfortunate. 

The accused may pick one individual to advocate on their behalf, if they have no such person a public defender will be assigned to them.

The public defender may present any evidence they feel would further their client's cause, including tangible acts of repentance on their part should they be able to convince the client to do so. 

After a period of 48 hours, the case rests and an admin will deliver a final verdict.

Although this is unlikely to change the final outcome of their appeal, it perhaps gives better optics to those who are determined to appeal serially. They may see that the ruling of the administrators was not an idiosyncratic opinion, but one held by the community as a whole and that they got as fair of a shake as can be hoped for. BF4DB will continue to be seen as an open and transparent body. 

See my signature for a loose idea of how it might work. I admit I was drinking heavily at the time, so perhaps a more rigorous defense could be mounted in the future. 

Think of it as a trial by combat as in Game of Thrones, a last ditch effort from the desperate that is guaranteed to entertain everyone. 

I hope you consider this thoughtfully, and if a trial run could be done I think that could give a better idea of if this is practical and worthwhile. 

Please feel free to post your thoughts below, both critical and supportive. 

Thank you all for your time and attention. 

Good idea. But why wait for the third. 

I also think we should be able to jump on the obvious ones straight away. There is an appeal at the moment “I haven’t a multihack I only get xx kills per round” but all you need to do is look at just 1 of the 2 battle reports supplied you can see that the “I haven’t a multihack I only get xx kills per round” is just someone that thinks everyone is as dumb as him. 

Posted twice  

I agree with this idea

Party pooper Sov here.

I love memes, and we have no shortage of them. Besides the obvious that our policy clearly states but one appeal may be created. Let’s put that aside for the sake of this conversation for a moment.

By this idea of yours, the community would decide the fate of the individual in question by some form of voting. You mentioned that BF4DB would still be viewed as an “open and transparent” body.

We have had a number of instances where a player (I’ll make one up, we’ll call him, idk, Shadow) sees a report made against one of his accounts. He’d then go in and create numerous accounts under burner emails and post on “his” behalf, how he’s a great player and would never cheat, etc. These same bogus accounts could be used to vote in favor of the account being unbanned under your idea.

Yes, we could go through each account and see if they’re all unique, deleting the ones that are not. But apart from saying “take our word for it” the public would have no way of knowing we’re really being honest, or just trying to circumvent the vote system to re-implement the ban. Obviously we wouldn’t be able to release the details that we’d use to link the various accounts together. It would create a slippery slope.

We’re all aware of the memes, but we are still trying to run a respectable service that’s reputation is built on the solid background of our bans.

If they’re so desperate to play again, they have the same 3 options we give to everyone:

1. Play on Official servers.

2. Play on servers not running BF4DB.

3. Buy another account and hope we don’t find it.

I appreciate the feedback and the idea, but at this time we have no plans to implement this sort of idea. Thanks for the support, though!