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Pandoram has left the building.
Long-time player Pandoram has been permanently banned from Vendetta Online, following a many-year spiralling refusal to adhere to simple, reasonable administrative instructions or established game rules.
This does not bring me any pleasure; contrary to Pandoram's stated beliefs, I had nothing personal against him. He seemed like a nice enough person, when he wasn't "going off the rails"; and he certainly was a big "fan" of the game, which I appreciated. But, whenever he was challenged by any situation he disliked (no matter how unreasonable his dislike), he became a major administrative burden, which has been an issue for some years (more on that later).
To be clear, Pandoram is only the second "long-term" player to ever have been perma-banned from VO, in over 20 years. He was also given dozens of warnings, and specific statements that his continued activity would result in banning. This was not some kind of "surprise", or reactionary event; if anything I've been excruciatingly restrained.
I place a lot of value on anyone who really likes the game and actively plays it (whether paid or free), and I have a long history of going wildly out of my way to try and convince dedicated players to alter their behaviour, rather than banning them. I don't claim this is always the best solution, sometimes I should probably just be banning people; but I never want to.
Pandoram has recently expressed to me, over multiple days, that he never wants to return to the game, so I am letting his existing bans stand indefinitely. To be clear, I was not aiming for this to be a permanent ban scenario: I have been (patiently) waiting for him to prove he was willing to adhere to administrative instructions (by actually following administrative instructions), as I had told him many different times. But, as of the last couple of days, he has made it clear that that will never occur.
I don't really want to go into a lot of dramatic specifics that led to this, over several years; but I know a lot of people are friends with him, and this is likely to be controversial, so I'll try to give some background:
- Pandoram has a long history of being banned for lengthy periods of time (a month or more), going back at least to 2018. Often repeatedly being banned for the same thing. We generally don't publicly disclose administrative actions we take on people, and he always kept it quiet himself (usually claiming he was "taking a break" from the game), so I don't think it's widely known. But, people should be aware that this kind of thing has been on-going for a long time.
- Pandoram created more tickets + responses than anyone else in VO history. Hundreds. Also, lengthier responses. He would open tickets like: (2019) "threatening to sue" if his existing stockpile of items was not sufficient to build some yet-unreleased capship (?!). He's the only person who has ever had administrative action for constantly spamming the developers with tickets (again, going back at least to 2018).
- Pandoram was the single largest exploiter of the infamous 2021 Latos Economy exploit, which required significant dev-time for forensics and an economy rollback. He was not the only person who benefited from the exploit, which is why I handled it as a "group", but he was the largest overall. He complained bitterly about his profits being reduced. (Also, this was not the first time we had to engage with him about an economic exploit).
- Following the exploit, he then went on the General Forum, using an alt account (which he knew was already against the rules, partly due to his prior abuse, circumventing his Suggestions ban), and "provocatively" defended his economy exploit under his Ghost998 alt.
- By May of 2022, after on-going ticket spam, circumvention of forum bans and other issues, he was told to never again open another ticket, or post on the forums.
- But, November 2022 he had decided to post a dramatically ranty (and very incorrect, and virally controversial) series of claims on General. Then, when I deleted his posts (and took no other action against his account), he chose to open a ticket to "tell me off".
- I tried to be restrained, I simply gave him a temporary ban for violating the "stop opening tickets" instruction, and told him it would become permanent if I heard from him again. He waited five days, then started sending us more tickets.
- Due to his non-compliance (again, after years of ticket-spamming and month-long bans that didn't ultimately change his behaviour), I perma-banned one of his four main accounts, exactly as I had warned him. This contained a lot of credits, but still left him with three accounts holding all his real gameplay characters/ships, his massive game-asset stockpile, and well over a billion in credits. I told him if he kept spamming us with tickets, I was going to start taking other content away from him.
- After that, everything spiralled further. He has proven unwilling to adhere to very simple administrative requirements (like "stop sending us messages"). He then targeted Ray on Discord with PMs, to try and get his credit-storage character back, which Ray briefly did out of confusion (Ray thought he was helping a user through some vague account problem, he didn't realize the account was banned. Ray doesn't do player-administration stuff).
- By January 1st of this year, Pandoram was emailing me ~20 times a day, across four email addresses. Ray abandoned Discord for a while, due to the PM spam, until I told him to simply mute Pandoram's accounts.
- Eventually, I started limiting my ticket responses to Pandoram's spam by simply stating single-lines of what the escalated results were of his on-going non-compliance with administrative instruction. So, he ended up with several months of bans and hundreds of millions in additional credits removed. I haven't counted how many tickets and responses he wrote on this, across various different accounts. It's a lot.
- Then, a few months ago, just as his bans were about to automatically expire, he opened a new ticket to claim that he "didn't want his stuff back" but asked if we could do some transfers of inventory to other players. I responded that his bans were expiring in mid-June, and he could do it himself at that time. He then started spamming us "to give his stuff back" (his credits, etc). Several times in a day.
- This then continued to spiral further and at great length. At which point, he went back to being banned again for on-going ticket spam.
- All I ever asked the guy to do was to stop sending us messages. Over, and over, and over again. The same request. And, again, I've been asking him to stop doing that for over five years.
How has he responded? Well, one ticket example of his has recently included:
06/10 - 8 ticket responses
06/11 - 4 ticket responses
06/12 - 18 ticket responses
07/15 - 2 ticket responses
07/17 - 2 ticket responses
07/18 - 1 ticket response
07/19 - 1 ticket response
08/09 - 5 ticket responses
08/16 - 3 ticket responses
08/17 - 2 ticket responses
That's just from ONE ticket. At any given time, he has many that he operates in parallel. He has had at least five different ticket-threads going on over the last month, including new tickets opened on: August 1st, 4th, 10th, 21st, 28th (today). They all have significant post counts, from him.
These are one-sided conversations, as I rarely respond, these days, and many tickets have no responses from me at all. His posts are lengthy missives, thousands of words of text punctuated by frequent image-links to things "that other people say", which he believes are relevant, even though they have nothing to do with the actual reason for his ban (ie: "Pandoram needs stop sending us messages, and never open tickets again").
He periodically creates new accounts to send us more tickets. Or historically, if we warn him of administrative action for opening tickets, we have seen him create alts via ToR just to open more tickets as "mysterious new users" (who write and behave exactly like him).
He occasionally threatens us, with vague legal action, or various potential attacks (like making thousands of accounts). Sometimes he'll quasi-apologize, but then he'll quickly start blaming everyone else for his situation, and he never actually STOPS sending us tickets/messages, which is really the one thing I've asked him to do.
- So, as of now, I'm moving on from this issue. I gave the guy dozens of chances, and I've been asking him to simply "stop opening tickets" for over five years.
At any time in the last eight freaking months, he could have simply stopped messaging us (like we kept asking him to do), waited for his bans to expire, and continued on playing with his accounts as they were. If he had stopped back in November, he never would have lost anything. Every repercussion was a direct result of him ignoring repeated and specific warnings, essentially forcing an escalation.
Again: In every single case where he lost content or received administrative action, he was explicitly warned in advance, and chose to ignore the warnings.
Pandoram is one of the biggest individual developer time-sinks in VO history, probably in the hundreds of hours. I probably should have banned him after the economy exploit in 2021, and I regret not doing so now, given the amount of time I've burned since then.
To anyone who believes greater empathy was deserved for some temporary "IRL" problem: understand that his bad behaviour in 2022 and 2023 was not meaningfully different, to me, than it was in, say, 2018 and 2019.
I don't ever want to remove anyone from our community, especially someone who clearly is a fan of the game, and tied into activities with a lot of other players. I had always hoped he would evolve.
But, ultimately, we don't have the resources to support players who consistently, intentionally and repeatedly refuse to adhere to the rules, or to administrative instruction (the latter is actually a requirement listed in the RoC, and perhaps the most important "rule" we have).
For anyone confused about why we have to escalate administrative responses, I wrote a guide here that gives some examples. It's always the last thing we want to do, but we have few options to get people to pay attention and stop burning up our time, or negatively impacting the community.
So, I think it's best that people understand, to some extent, what happened, and make up their own mind. Anyone who thinks I'm a terrible person for banning Pandoram, after the sheer amount of effort I put into trying to get him to change his behaviour.. well.. that's their prerogative. I did the best I could, and at this point I'm exhausted.
This does not bring me any pleasure; contrary to Pandoram's stated beliefs, I had nothing personal against him. He seemed like a nice enough person, when he wasn't "going off the rails"; and he certainly was a big "fan" of the game, which I appreciated. But, whenever he was challenged by any situation he disliked (no matter how unreasonable his dislike), he became a major administrative burden, which has been an issue for some years (more on that later).
To be clear, Pandoram is only the second "long-term" player to ever have been perma-banned from VO, in over 20 years. He was also given dozens of warnings, and specific statements that his continued activity would result in banning. This was not some kind of "surprise", or reactionary event; if anything I've been excruciatingly restrained.
I place a lot of value on anyone who really likes the game and actively plays it (whether paid or free), and I have a long history of going wildly out of my way to try and convince dedicated players to alter their behaviour, rather than banning them. I don't claim this is always the best solution, sometimes I should probably just be banning people; but I never want to.
Pandoram has recently expressed to me, over multiple days, that he never wants to return to the game, so I am letting his existing bans stand indefinitely. To be clear, I was not aiming for this to be a permanent ban scenario: I have been (patiently) waiting for him to prove he was willing to adhere to administrative instructions (by actually following administrative instructions), as I had told him many different times. But, as of the last couple of days, he has made it clear that that will never occur.
I don't really want to go into a lot of dramatic specifics that led to this, over several years; but I know a lot of people are friends with him, and this is likely to be controversial, so I'll try to give some background:
- Pandoram has a long history of being banned for lengthy periods of time (a month or more), going back at least to 2018. Often repeatedly being banned for the same thing. We generally don't publicly disclose administrative actions we take on people, and he always kept it quiet himself (usually claiming he was "taking a break" from the game), so I don't think it's widely known. But, people should be aware that this kind of thing has been on-going for a long time.
- Pandoram created more tickets + responses than anyone else in VO history. Hundreds. Also, lengthier responses. He would open tickets like: (2019) "threatening to sue" if his existing stockpile of items was not sufficient to build some yet-unreleased capship (?!). He's the only person who has ever had administrative action for constantly spamming the developers with tickets (again, going back at least to 2018).
- Pandoram was the single largest exploiter of the infamous 2021 Latos Economy exploit, which required significant dev-time for forensics and an economy rollback. He was not the only person who benefited from the exploit, which is why I handled it as a "group", but he was the largest overall. He complained bitterly about his profits being reduced. (Also, this was not the first time we had to engage with him about an economic exploit).
- Following the exploit, he then went on the General Forum, using an alt account (which he knew was already against the rules, partly due to his prior abuse, circumventing his Suggestions ban), and "provocatively" defended his economy exploit under his Ghost998 alt.
- By May of 2022, after on-going ticket spam, circumvention of forum bans and other issues, he was told to never again open another ticket, or post on the forums.
- But, November 2022 he had decided to post a dramatically ranty (and very incorrect, and virally controversial) series of claims on General. Then, when I deleted his posts (and took no other action against his account), he chose to open a ticket to "tell me off".
- I tried to be restrained, I simply gave him a temporary ban for violating the "stop opening tickets" instruction, and told him it would become permanent if I heard from him again. He waited five days, then started sending us more tickets.
- Due to his non-compliance (again, after years of ticket-spamming and month-long bans that didn't ultimately change his behaviour), I perma-banned one of his four main accounts, exactly as I had warned him. This contained a lot of credits, but still left him with three accounts holding all his real gameplay characters/ships, his massive game-asset stockpile, and well over a billion in credits. I told him if he kept spamming us with tickets, I was going to start taking other content away from him.
- After that, everything spiralled further. He has proven unwilling to adhere to very simple administrative requirements (like "stop sending us messages"). He then targeted Ray on Discord with PMs, to try and get his credit-storage character back, which Ray briefly did out of confusion (Ray thought he was helping a user through some vague account problem, he didn't realize the account was banned. Ray doesn't do player-administration stuff).
- By January 1st of this year, Pandoram was emailing me ~20 times a day, across four email addresses. Ray abandoned Discord for a while, due to the PM spam, until I told him to simply mute Pandoram's accounts.
- Eventually, I started limiting my ticket responses to Pandoram's spam by simply stating single-lines of what the escalated results were of his on-going non-compliance with administrative instruction. So, he ended up with several months of bans and hundreds of millions in additional credits removed. I haven't counted how many tickets and responses he wrote on this, across various different accounts. It's a lot.
- Then, a few months ago, just as his bans were about to automatically expire, he opened a new ticket to claim that he "didn't want his stuff back" but asked if we could do some transfers of inventory to other players. I responded that his bans were expiring in mid-June, and he could do it himself at that time. He then started spamming us "to give his stuff back" (his credits, etc). Several times in a day.
- This then continued to spiral further and at great length. At which point, he went back to being banned again for on-going ticket spam.
- All I ever asked the guy to do was to stop sending us messages. Over, and over, and over again. The same request. And, again, I've been asking him to stop doing that for over five years.
How has he responded? Well, one ticket example of his has recently included:
06/10 - 8 ticket responses
06/11 - 4 ticket responses
06/12 - 18 ticket responses
07/15 - 2 ticket responses
07/17 - 2 ticket responses
07/18 - 1 ticket response
07/19 - 1 ticket response
08/09 - 5 ticket responses
08/16 - 3 ticket responses
08/17 - 2 ticket responses
That's just from ONE ticket. At any given time, he has many that he operates in parallel. He has had at least five different ticket-threads going on over the last month, including new tickets opened on: August 1st, 4th, 10th, 21st, 28th (today). They all have significant post counts, from him.
These are one-sided conversations, as I rarely respond, these days, and many tickets have no responses from me at all. His posts are lengthy missives, thousands of words of text punctuated by frequent image-links to things "that other people say", which he believes are relevant, even though they have nothing to do with the actual reason for his ban (ie: "Pandoram needs stop sending us messages, and never open tickets again").
He periodically creates new accounts to send us more tickets. Or historically, if we warn him of administrative action for opening tickets, we have seen him create alts via ToR just to open more tickets as "mysterious new users" (who write and behave exactly like him).
He occasionally threatens us, with vague legal action, or various potential attacks (like making thousands of accounts). Sometimes he'll quasi-apologize, but then he'll quickly start blaming everyone else for his situation, and he never actually STOPS sending us tickets/messages, which is really the one thing I've asked him to do.
- So, as of now, I'm moving on from this issue. I gave the guy dozens of chances, and I've been asking him to simply "stop opening tickets" for over five years.
At any time in the last eight freaking months, he could have simply stopped messaging us (like we kept asking him to do), waited for his bans to expire, and continued on playing with his accounts as they were. If he had stopped back in November, he never would have lost anything. Every repercussion was a direct result of him ignoring repeated and specific warnings, essentially forcing an escalation.
Again: In every single case where he lost content or received administrative action, he was explicitly warned in advance, and chose to ignore the warnings.
Pandoram is one of the biggest individual developer time-sinks in VO history, probably in the hundreds of hours. I probably should have banned him after the economy exploit in 2021, and I regret not doing so now, given the amount of time I've burned since then.
To anyone who believes greater empathy was deserved for some temporary "IRL" problem: understand that his bad behaviour in 2022 and 2023 was not meaningfully different, to me, than it was in, say, 2018 and 2019.
I don't ever want to remove anyone from our community, especially someone who clearly is a fan of the game, and tied into activities with a lot of other players. I had always hoped he would evolve.
But, ultimately, we don't have the resources to support players who consistently, intentionally and repeatedly refuse to adhere to the rules, or to administrative instruction (the latter is actually a requirement listed in the RoC, and perhaps the most important "rule" we have).
For anyone confused about why we have to escalate administrative responses, I wrote a guide here that gives some examples. It's always the last thing we want to do, but we have few options to get people to pay attention and stop burning up our time, or negatively impacting the community.
So, I think it's best that people understand, to some extent, what happened, and make up their own mind. Anyone who thinks I'm a terrible person for banning Pandoram, after the sheer amount of effort I put into trying to get him to change his behaviour.. well.. that's their prerogative. I did the best I could, and at this point I'm exhausted.
Because this individual is continuing to spam us with new-account openings and new tickets, I want to make it crystal clear that his accounts were closed at his own behest. He asked us to permanently terminate his accounts on August 21st, 26th and 28th of this year.
This was not a one-off random request from him, this took place over several tickets, and over the course of a week. He clearly requested that his accounts be permanently closed, and we agreed.
There are a lot of reasons why we're "fine" with his request, stated above. But the fact remains, the player explicitly asked for the permanent closure of his accounts.
This was not a one-off random request from him, this took place over several tickets, and over the course of a week. He clearly requested that his accounts be permanently closed, and we agreed.
There are a lot of reasons why we're "fine" with his request, stated above. But the fact remains, the player explicitly asked for the permanent closure of his accounts.