Civilization is a unique experiment where players are dropped into a sandbox world and allowed to roam free, form nations, and exercise their own judgement over other players. This is something that the players expect the admins to uphold the sanctity of. This is the role that the admins are placed in, and why they are unable to play -- there is no way for players to directly apply leverage for or against the admins, and that is a good thing to ensure the admins' decisions are unbiased.
On the other side of the coin, admins have a difficult and somewhat fleeting connection to the server. They are volunteers with full time jobs, and have a limited view into the everyday goings on to the server; it is impossible to expect otherwise, as hundreds of people are on the server every day, and no one could possibly keep track of them all. Naturally, this does not excuse pernicious or negligent behaviour, and the admins do need to be held to a reasonable standard in order to uphold the sanctity of the 'experiment'.
Despite this, CivMC has become I think, more than anything else, a community server. It is the strong community that has held CivMC, and previous iterations, together, and kept them running for so long, even with the volunteer staff team, which for a long time now has consisted entirely of former players. Yet, that community is, and could not be, held together by a vanilla server. It is the experiment aspect that Civilization leans into which makes it so compelling. Civilization's mechanics are the embryo which grows into such strong communities. It lives in the unique balance between the anarchy of vanilla, and the structured protection of Towny.
Vanilla creates a very low-trust environment, where a single malicious player can destroy weeks of work in minutes. It forces players to either have a high degree of trust between each other, or simply live so far apart and in secret that damage from any single malicious player is minimised. Towny is antipodal to this; its structures encourage large groups of players, often strangers, to live together without fear of being griefed. Yet, Towny cripples many playstyles Civilization allows. Why PvP, when it is usually low stakes and almost always opt-in? Why bother protecting your valuables, when you are assured that, even if the protection system fails, the admins will intervene to ensure that protection? There is no outside force that actually forces the players to bring themselves together, unlike on Civiliation. Both Towny and Vanilla are capable of creating communities, sure, but they each subtract their own separate reasons for doing so.
Civilization, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. There is an endless struggle between the sanctity of the experiment, and the interests of the community, which is played into by both admins and players alike. When I first became admin, I gave an extreme levitation effect to a player, allowing them to glide in the skies from Icenia to Yoahtl. Unfortunately, they happened to glide above an Estalian vault where another player was alarmed by their presence. This, upon reflection, was a violation of the players' expectations towards admins, and it is something I deeply regret.
There have been other instances of possible abuse that I would think would be valuable to go over. One time, there was a mistaken configuration change that caused our Citadel plugin to break for a couple of hours, which is an essential part of the server. This was abused by some players who immediately used it to break into vaults and freed their friends. In doing so, this violated the vault owners' expectations toward the server, and the admins were forced to roll back the server and issue bans for those violations.
A slightly more grey area would be when the Estalians discovered a way to enter the End. They proceeeded to kill the ender dragon and gain illegal items, but importantly reported it to the admins immediately and placed all their End-obtained items in a single chest for the admins to destroy. Is this ban worthy? I would say no, since importantly the bug was reported immediately, and the Estalians ensured that a rollback would not be required by returning all items without even needing to be prompted to do so.
About a year ago, an admin placed water in the nether. This, by itself, is not entirely unusual; there are several groups who have received admin items, such as Allays, with the expectation that they are not to be used for any gameplay and are purely aesthetic. This was abused. The water was used to create a happy ghast in the nether, which in vanilla is possible by bringing a happy ghast through a portal from the overworld, is not possible in CivMC due to our portals working differently. A happy ghast in the nether is something that the players expect to be impossible. This was a violation of the admins' expectations towards players, in the sense that it should not have been abused, and the players' expectations towards admins, in the sense that they should not favour any particular individual or group unfairly.
This is regrettable, and as a result it is fair to issue a ban in such a situation. It is reasonable to expect a player to know that water in the nether is not legally obtainable, and only possible due to an admin. It is also reasonable to say that no individual or group should be unfairly advantaged over another. This differs from the Estalian situation by the fact that the happy ghast creation was not reported to the admins and they were not even inquired as to whether this was legal or not. The admins only discovered this after the happy ghast experiment went wrong and a player was trapped on the nether roof. It was only after further investigation that the full story was uncovered. This made it more difficult for the full implications to be assessed.
I find it difficult to agree with the statement that illegally obtained items are entirely the responsibility of the admins to manage. It is also the responsibility of the players to adhere to the premise of the experiment, and this is why bans exist; to ensure that adherance. Players are fully aware that if they used illegal items, however they might be obtained, the item will not only be removed from them, but they will also be banned for how it affects the experiment, and therefore, the server. This is an expectation that players hold of other players too. A warning is not sufficient for an action taken without regard for how it affects the server as a whole, and especially without reporting it to admins.
To conclude, while it is true admins sometimes place illegal items in game, the expectation is that players should act with great prudence towards it, as that is what both other players and the admins expect of them. Reporting anything that violates these expectations to the admins is also of great importance. A warning is private, for minor or accidental transgressions; a ban is a rebuke that encourages other players to uphold these values.
Okx