first of all, I have absolutely no respect for people that claim that everything needs to be written in rules for it not to be allowed. No one told me I can't hit or abuse my parents, but I still don't do it. It shows a lack of maturity as many of you are exploring the real world.
If you really want to compare real life violence to people not knowing about a rule that is hardly if ever enforced, then okay. No violence is a rule in society that is preached to us quite a bit. Hit another kid on the playground? A teacher gets involved and tells you it's not a good thing. You hear about people going to jail for being violent. As you get older, maybe you even hear about other kids getting kicked out of school for being violent. It's a widely enforced rule to the point where everybody knows about it. Something obscure like "do not abuse !fire" has probably never had anybody actually reported for breaking it, and I honestly kind of doubt anybody has actually been punished for it. I agree with the judgement of it being against the rules, but it wasn't common sense. Two people didn't know about it. Jim's answer made sense, and it easily could have ended there. It is exploiting, explicitly stated in the rules. But then common sense was thrown into the mix. So which rule does it violate exactly? Apparently admins can't even agree on
how it's a violation of a rule.
We can't possibly write rules for every single scenario as people will keep digging further to find some kind of "loophole" or something that is not explicitly stated in the rules.
You can easily add a rule such as "Attempting to find loopholes will get you nowhere." It's pretty blunt, and the second somebody says, "this specific action that falls under the umbrella of exploiting but is not mentioned by name" is brought up, you can just point them to the "no loopholes" rule.
We have to rely on our common sense that we have developed over the years to overcome many situations in life.
Common sense, as you have said yourself, is developed over life. If you see a rule broken and a user is punished, you can assume that doing what the person punished did or something very similar to it is against the rules. Here's the thing, though, you see people randomly using !fire all the time. So you can assume that people don't get in trouble for randomly doing !fire. Again, I agree with the ruling, but the reasoning of common sense was not common sense here.
Just to elaborate what rule would you even propose for the scenario? Don't abuse !fire command? How is that defined, ah wait it is in the end common sense that tells us what is !fire abuse and what isn't. We can also say: Don't use !fire if the warden is playing normally. "What about a warden with a bad mic?" Got to add that to the rule set. "Warden can't give us commands properly because he's lagging" Got to add that to the rule set. Who in the end will even want to read the rules?
I liked Jim's answer of "do not exploit." You don't even need to specifically write out each and every scenario, you just need it to fall under the umbrella of one of our bigger rules. People are a lot more likely to accept, "abusing our firing system to get free freedays." as an exploit than, "oh it's just common sense." All the admins have been interpreting this thread as, "write down more rules forever," when in reality you don't really need to do that. If you can just come up for reasons why something is against the rules given our current ruleset, then it's against the rules, and when somebody is banned you can just point to the rule.
Here's an easy example right here.
Oh wait, this guy is discriminating me after having played with me on the servers and is now spamming me everywhere.
In the end, I wrote all of this for nothing because it appears everybody has already made up their mind ten minutes ago
and then Hank gets shot and I don't play the game enough to care much anymore, but I hope I presented a decent enough argument here for people to consider my side.
And frankly, this thread is the most I've gotten to use the forums in quite some time.