Civcraft started with a lot of radical beliefs behind it, the one that's probably coming to your mind is the idea that players can make and create order in their own world, that one was the source of much ridicule in the early days, although its been so long now it almost seems like a given, I am always caught off guard when I have to dust off my old arguments and try and explain to people outside of the Civcraft community that its possible.

But I had another belief, one that fueled most of my decisions in Civcraft administration and the creation of my administration philosophy. I made the assumption my players where smart, that they where capable of understanding my reasoning and because of that they deserved to be told what was going on inside of my head, I didn't understand treating a playing population as a group that would just go along with your decision, no justification or explanation needed. So I set out to explain my every decision, make a public defense of whatever was the argument of the day, because I could be wrong and my thoughts needed to be challenged so that I could remain honest with myself about why I was making decisions and so that the players could see why things where done the way they where.

Fast forward to today, its been a long time since I said that players deserve the understand whats going on without a hint of irony, I have slowly retreated from my position of explaining everything, not because I no longer believe that my players deserve it, but because I now understand through direct experience why honesty is not a tenable method of operating in a political climate.

In my experience at least when people encounter a situation and are asked to make a judgement about the decisions made they default to judging the situation in a vacuum, in short they judge what should happen if the world was fair and justice reigned and then believe that is what the outcome should be.

The above does not get into people with individual biases in a situation or really touch very much on how what a given person perceives as fair or understands about a situation colors that opinion, those play huge roles in practice but for today I will stick to a smaller example.

So this is where I tie into today's drama, its clear to see that Itaqi, in a world where all was just would get to keep his vault, there is enough investment of effort, enough cleverness, it all checks out that in a world where effort and cleverness should be rewarded there are no problems. This seems to be the natural way of thinking when it comes to situations like this.

But let say we apply this same method of thinking to another situation, a griefer comes online, armed with knowledge of how to exploit bedrock to make clever vaults, within a few hours of playing he has pearled some naked noobs and placed them in a vault that can only be accessed and broken using the same extensive glitch knowledge he has, so for a trivial investment he has just produced a vault far more secure than his investment would warrant, only a few people on the server can figure out how to crack it. If we apply our lenses of justice to this situation its clear most people would call this unfair to the pearled players and demand it not be allowed. The griefer in question may have been clever, but that cleverness alone should not allow instant permapearling at almost no cost.

Finally we reach the point where this all ties into me and the concept people have of fairness. You see up until this point in our little discussion fairness has been defined by what people think is ideal when judging the situation in a vacuum. I touched on how bias could affect that decision, so lets say that I tried to be just by that definition, what does that really mean? It means doing whatever I feel is right in whatever situation I encounter.

Spend a few seconds mulling over that idea, try thinking of the actions of all those moderators who seem to make random and unfair decisions and put them in this context. What they where trying to do is be fair in this context, but due to personal biases or ways of thinking fairness in this context can be nothing but a matter of perception, it just so happens that people often have the same perception of this fairness, but just because people agree in a given situation does not make it universally applicable.

In short, people often have strong feelings about what is right, and they want those feelings to be the reality that their society creates, because these feelings about what is right often agree people can get the false impression that these feelings about what is right can be used as a standard to decide what to do, but that could hardly be further from the truth.

Lets try applying this knowledge then, lets imagine a moderator, politician, ect applying this standard of fairness, its pretty easy to see how they could end up doing things that you see as totally unfair that they see as perfectly just from their position and opinion set. If you don't see that you missed the point of this post so far, start again from the top

So tl;dr up to this point, the standard of fairness people use instinctively is inherently impossible to apply in a consistent manner.

So then how do people in leadership positions make fair decisions? You have to extrapolate principles from that overlap in what people perceive as just and then apply those principles consistently.

So then whats the principle at play here? Its the idea that pearls must always be possible to free and that investment should correlate with results in a somewhat reasonable manner (one diamond or one bit of cleverness should neither be enough to permapearl someone).

So then lets apply it fairly in the sense of even application of a principle, if I am to not allow someone to use whatever clever glitch of the day to pearl innocents in very difficult to crack vaults, or even impossible to crack vaults, then I must also apply that reasoning to every use of these glitches to store pearls.

So that's it, that's the reasoning, from as close to first principles as Civcraft gets, to tie this into my intro, misunderstandings about how "fairness" works in an administrative context present a huge amount of the resistance that makes it difficult to publicly justify and explain decisions, people tend to walk in with their vacuum opinion of what would be fair in context and fail to abstract that in any useful way. Its a big part of why trying to explain every step of the administration is a losing battle, for every person who now understands another dozen have never heard of the idea before and will happily contradict that the administration should have done X, where x is whatever they perceive as fair in the specific circumstance.

This also makes for an interesting lesson in politics, its easy to rally outrage against a given action from the population, just take a situation that violates those premade perceptions of fairness and publicize it. "ttk2 didn't allow cleverness and effort!" is 5 words, this explanation is well over 1000. It takes 10 seconds to incite the anger and create the negative opinion, it will take several minutes per person to justify my actions. So do you want to try and do that on the campaign trail? Honest politicians lose, no conspiracy required.

I hope that if you took the time to read this you understand things better.

As always, thank you for your time.

-- ttk2