On the North American servers, people are building ladders into the sky. Big towers, little towers, forts, all sorts of things. I am one of those people. I don't do it all the time, I play regularly for the most part, and might take a couple maps to build ladder contraptions, especially right after retiring. I try my best not to delay a round, and will happily jump off and suicide if I'm the last player left.
Unfortunately, there's quite a few people that feel very strongly that building ladder towers is detrimental to their experience. They feel that because we level 8 peasants would better serve the team as sword fodder, meekly holding pikes in hopes of poking something for a half point of damage. These players were very vocal, but until today, mostly kept their discourse civil.
Today, however, I've been TK'd several times, had several kick/ban polls initiated against me, and the same was done to several of my friends who were participating in ladder construction. It should be noted that none of the polls passed, and quite a few people on the server commented on how they enjoyed watching us build and jump off. I've had people spend entire rounds doing nothing but attacking me or destroying my ladders, which contradicts their very reasoning. Why, if one believes that I am wasting time and team slots, would it be better to waste the whole round TKing and initiating poll bans?
Quite simply, it's not. Ladder building is not against the rules. Team killing and team damaging is, and poll spamming is very frowned upon. Three of the worst offenders were poll kicked or poll banned by other players on the server when they grew tired of the poll spam and TKs. I personally initiated no polls, though I was sorely tempted to. When I visited another server later, I was informed by a player (who had been poll banned) that we had poll banned an admin. After a couple minutes of back and forth, during which I mentioned I was looking for someone, he said, "Well, go look for him elsewhere." and kicked me from the server. I'm not terribly upset by this, but I am a bit disturbed that this kind of behavior by administrative staff is tolerated.
My question is, what proportion of the playerbase feels that ladder building is detrimental to the game and should be a ban-worthy offense?
Poll