Was breaking into houses and chests in Commonwealth. Curious if this person done any more damage across the map.

I was trying to find my way out of commonwealth,im new to the server and i didnt knew breaking cobblestone underground was bad. i got the the place u killed me by mistake.

Since you killed me, tell me for fun, what did i had on me? Your telling i break into your house and chest, yet i had my armor, pickaxe, axe, sword (all diamond) 1 stack of wood, **few cobblestone stack and 1 hopper, wich i did take**. I must be one pretty bad thief if i did break into multiple house for that reward.

What Happened

I log in to the game and see snitch hits on a sensitive storage/xp production area. These snitches can’t be triggered casually or from surface level — you have to dig down into the area and break some blocks to get there. I head over and on the minimap see a diamond helmet — so this person is armored.

This is an important facet of the event. If the person had not been armored then it’s likely they are a newfriend doing silly newfriend things and normally we give them some food and a minecart and send them on their way. However, when you see a diamond armored person breaking into a valuable storage area your threat assessment goes up accordingly.

A few seconds after I get into minimap range they log out. Not a good sign of helpless newfriend. Snitches say this person has been poking around, breaking a few blocks and just did a hopper. I wait a few minutes and sure enough they log back in and are wearing enchanted diamond armor and swinging a Sharp V sword. I pearl them.

Some person from Icenia (whatever that is) messages me asking about the situation, I suppose Mal contacted them. At this point I don’t see any reason why this person is relevant to an internal CW process and eventually tell them that I’ll put a claims thread up and see if this person has been causing trouble anywhere else that’s been noticed. I do this.

In the claims thread not much happens other than Mal doing the denial twist and some sort of newfriend abuse narrative gets some traction.

I give them the benefit of the doubt and go with the standard ‘write the essay’ thing; there’s no reason they can’t be released the same day assuming they take an hour to do this. (More on this below)

The newfriend-abuse narrative that some people are trying to push here doesn’t fit. Some thoughts on that:

Only broke one block

That’s because I caught them in the middle of the act and they didn’t get very far. The snitch shows them breaking a hopper and then logging out as their next action. When they logged back in a few minutes later is when they were pearled. If you walk into a bank and pull out a gun but get subdued before you can actually pull of the robbery you’re still going to prison. The enchanted armor, sword and tools they were had indicates that they’d been doing some chest popping.

I don’t find the “I never broke one block” bit in the other thread believable at all.

Writing is hard

It’s better than the alternative. Mal did something wrong here — broke and/or stole from another person. Clearly this cannot be allowed in civil society. The entire point of CW’s ‘write an essay’ deal is that we want you to spend about an hour thinking about this, and then we let you go. We’ve done this with a lot of people. Some of them are released on the very same day they’re pearled if they get to it.

The other way to do it would be something like “two weeks in the end”. We don’t like doing that. If you want to be a good player then let’s get you back out there, but we want you to put a little effort into convincing us first. If you’re not willing to invest that hour then you’re the reason Prison Pearl exists — so that the players can police the server’s population and keep the bad apples out.

That being said, about an hour of labor is a pretty favorable deal.

Sovereignty goes in two directions

I don’t mind sharing what happened with all of you (here’s a thousand words — ha!), but on an academic level I don’t think that I should have to. This event occured on my turf, involving my property and how I handle it is my business. If cities on the server wish people to respect their sovreignty then you have to respect others as well, no matter how crappy they are.

No one invaded South Africa for keeping Nelson Mandela locked up for 30 years; the best they could do was decide to not trade with them — economic sanctions.

Final note — I do wish that the reddit mods could disable downvoting. It makes following discussions more difficult than it should be.

p.s. I’m not very good at reddit so the formatting is probably terrible.