Just another few comments from our standpoint, although Pulsar hit the major ones.
About mods being friendly. When modding we are to be Professional about our responses to tickets etc. but like everyone else we are human. We have our bad days and our good days. I can say some mods do try to be friendly to a degree and I would actually use the word sociable to best fit the situation. The reason being, the friendlier we act, the harder it becomes to completely remove all bias.
Also like pulsar said, how we mod has nothing to do with how our personalities are as players or even as people.
The other post I would like to address is Simon Yeuan's post. You say there are a lot of issues that have popped up that you know about as well as push accounts etc... Most of the bans we do are from tickets that people have sent in for push accounts and the like. We do what we can to find them, but there are just way too many players on a world for us to investigate all of them. We do not have the manpower, nor is that something that they are asking us to do every day as volunteers. We do get a small amount of compensation and yes there is an application/hiring process, but the best way to put it is that we volunteer ourselves to give back to the community of the game we have enjoyed/still enjoy. Just because you know of some cases that dont get caught or reported, doesn't we are sitting on our butts twiddling our fingers. As has been stated many times before, the majority of the work we do goes on behind the scenes and you as players will never hear of or know about. We as moderators understand and accept that 1 negative response or situation will always carry more weight to people than the 10+ good situations that happen and we don't really complain. You might have a rant here or there from a mod who had a bad day, but thats about it. We accept most people are going to look at us in disdain and move on as we know the worlds would be much worse of if we did nothing at all.
I apologize that the post approaches a rant, but its a sore subject atm. Meaning I probably should keep my peace about it, but I'm just not that type of person.
Finally, the biggest answer I have towards all the complaints about "bad modding" and how "we miss so many" is that the only way we will get a lot of them is if you report them. At the worst your going to get a response that there was nothing there, and in most cases it wont take but a few minutes for us to check even if we are just given a name. Granted sometimes one ticket can give a few hours + just in investigating and countless headaches :icon_confused: but most of the time its a simple matter for us. Now by saying this I'm not saying when you go to war you should report every player in the opposing tribe if you suspect that chances are one of them has had some illegal sitting commands as that just gets annoying for the mod and yeah, you can imagine.
Finally, sometimes when you report something and we tell you there isnt anything illegal, it is because there just isnt enough proof to justify it. I.E. If someone has had 3 villages internally nobled (when they have 100+, and then nobles 1 village), we dont have enough info to immediately declare the account a push account. We try to check back on cases like this but sometimes we forget, in which case if you see in the next week or 2 that person has lost another 15 villages to tribe mates and nobled 2 more in the midst of it, then report it again the week later. Sometimes more evidence is revealed after the case is done.
To bullet point the above since thats too large of a read for some people to bother with.
*Mods are supposed to be professional in demeanor
*Mods cant catch a lot of things as there are too few of us and too many of you
*If you suspect it, send in a ticket
*Sometimes there just isnt enough evidence
I think this is long enough as is, and I hope it helps a little. We aren't perfect by any point of the imagination, or at least I'm not (Jirki... well I wont touch that one), but we do what we can to keep everything running smoothly