I could not agree with this more, I have had first hand with dealing with bad players while being a noob and I'll tell you my story.
So I joined Kreatious back well over a year ago, I had had only been playing minecraft for less than a month before that however my 'home' server was a skyblock server, if you have ever played one of those then you will know they are very hard to get a nice base going and are a little different in the way you play from on the server we know and love.
So joining minecraft was my first experience playing 'true' minecraft and being able to build stuff with no weird block/resource limits.
Anyway when I first logged in, I was at the /oc spawn when the rules were back there, I remember there was one or two players milling about but I did not take much notice of them at the time, I started by actually reading the rules and while I was, I got some strange message...
Mr_Badnick has stolen 101 of your Kcoins!
Or whatever the message was, anyway I immediately got on the defensive I was thinking that someone had walked up to me while reading the rules and stolen my money! On the skyblock server I was on before, money men't just about everything, it was the only way you survived as you could not go to some /mine world and grab everything you wanted.
So in panic I did /home tellyported away I said something in chat like "why would you steal from a new player like me ?" but all I got was seemingly sarcastic remarks like "Hahaha noob kcoins mean nothing haha ur so dumb" or whatever, frankly I still thought they were important and they were just saying that so they could come over and take more from me, or that I would give them my coins because they told me they were pointless.
So when I tellyported away I got another message, something like this:
Mr_Meaner_Robber_of_Kcoins it tellyporting to you type /notp to stop people tping to you
In panic I ran, quickly typed /notp and then did /home again to get away.
I found a nice spot that I thought I would be safe in, but I did not really trust the playerbase of kreatious anymore so I made a cave house hidden by a waterfall, I tried my best to make it hidden because the people on here did not seem very nice and I did not trust them with my stuff, anyway after that I got a bit hungry so I decided to make a farm on the surface and then I logged out for the night.
Next day I logged in and I found my farm had been griefed, some one had come over and broke like half the fences and killed my cow I tried saying something in chat to the mods about it but I just got laughed at "lol only 20 fences and one cow? Don't bug us about stupid things" Yeah, okey it was small, but when I had nothing and was still using stone tools and there was not another cow in sight my petty farm men't allot to me. if they had taken 2 mins to roll back my fences or given the guy a offline warning I would have been cool with it, but I just thought the staff did not give a dammn about new players.
So I decided to take matters into my own hands, and as I made my first house on the surface I made my first and only playertrap; people would go into my basement, pull a leaver and then fall and die and I made it so I would get their stuff.
Sadly I never saw another player in a long time and the only person the trap killed was my friend 6 months later when he came to visit me when I forgot to tell him about the trap... Lol
Remember kids, don't make traps to kill people, it's not nice and should be against the rules.
Frankly the only reason I stayed on was I guess the only other server I had ever played on was a skyblock one and so I was used to putting up with hard/annoying stuff, but I basically ignored chat for a good few weeks as I still thought most people were mean.
Then one day I was getting board and saw some people were teasing each-other and doing 'yo momma' jokes so I decided to join in however I made the mistake of saying one to
[[Vtn@Mean_Icefang]] he decided they would be funny and start a vote ban on me as well as some other people. Me, being new still had no clue they basically men't nothing and are pretty much seen as a vote kick, I thought they were seriously bad news, I was thinking "holy shit, how can this kid get so worked up about me calling his mum who I have never even met, fat?"
Thankfully Sxkfrvr I think it was (she was just a rsd/donor back then) told off that vtn and made people vote /no.
If she had not I probably would have left then and found a new server.
As it was all it made me turn off chat in multiplayer options, and I did not talk to another person on Kreatious for around 6 months.
So thats basically my first experiences on the server and it's why I get very pissed when I see people messing with new people and doing these same things.
Basically:
*Don't steal new players kcoins, they don't know that they mean nothing. Frankly I'm not sure why we still have Kcoins all they do is confuse and frustrate new players and it became a old joke a long time ago.
*If you get Vtn, don't 'joke' vote ban anyone who is below your rank. Firstly if they are new they will stress about it, not realise you are just messing with them and probably leave, secondly if a noob sees you vote ban someone who is a low rank, they might not realise you are friends with them or they they have been on the server for a long time, so they will think you are abusive and will in turn group you with staff and think all staff members are abusive.
*Don't /followsnow or bug new players with stuff like that, I have seen people leave in the first 5 mins on the server just because of a few nasty players. I have also seen zerg revoke someones ability to tp to new players just because they were nasty to them.
*Same goes for saying cruel/nasty things to people in chat, the other day we had a new player who decided he liked the server and he donated, only to get abuse in donor chat just because he was new, I have not seen or heard from him since.
*I can't speak for the mods, but frankly if you tp over to someone because of a grief, you see it's just small, at least act like you care and at least do the bare minimum about it and roll it back seriously if you can't handle and don't like being bugged constantly about fixing peoples petty problems maybe you should think twice about being a mod.
Kudos to Romedy about bringing this up, this should be a very serious thing, new players are the lifeblood of the server and the only thing that will keep it running in days to come.