We see this suggestion brought up quite often within the staff itself. I even suggested it around this time last year.
The policy and ideological arguments were clean and about as you can expect.
- You can be around here for a short time and understand how things work if you're keen enough.
- Some players just play but don't care about the greater community, so they have a lot of time but little actual experience.
- Playing the game isn't necessary to doing your job (or is it?).
- You can have experience on an alternative account, but that won't reflect if you're using a different account.
- Since when does time equal moderation capability? A similar argument was made in favor of Age Exceptions.
Another technical argument that we never figured out: how should we gauge someone's time requirement for mod applications? In-game time played can be misrepresentative for the first two reasons stated above. Forum join dates might not be accurate, as some players make forum accounts weeks after they've been playing regularly with us. And there's no way for us to definitively know how long they've had their MC account. So even if the ideological argument was there, a valid technical implementation was not.
In general, the Sr. Staff shies away from age limits for mod apps, and so far we haven't had an issue yet; no one who has gotten mod has to ask us how to Minecraft just yet.
