Stickymayhem - Stability or Novelty?

[Stickymayhem]

https://streamable.com/2i74fh

As usual I'll try to keep this readable and focused on what I'd be doing outside of the usual headmin work I've done successfully in the past (in an alternate timeline obviously I've never been headmin before).

The Anarchy Server

My current pet project: A low rules server designed as a mixing pot for all the other servers to get some grief out or do wacky semi-antagonistic shit with lesser consequences. RP will be maintained and enforced at the "/tg/ classic" level but antagonistic behaviour will be much less restricted for non-antags. We'll dial up dynamic, it'll be chaotic as fuck and the intention will be for players to join and have a bit of a pallette cleanse once in a while. Maybe it'll build a core population, but I think short, fun rounds will get some of the violence out of everyone's system in a controlled space. Now you don't have to wait for an antag roll to reroute disposals into space, or spray acid in people's faces as a funny clown prank!

It's an experiment, I've had loads of fun and great results in the past by relaxing rules. You end up with a tentative balance as the factions size each other up. Yes you can fuck with security freely, but they can beat you to death and hang you up in the bar if you do.

The Marathon Server

Marathon rounds are real fun, but a lot of effort to run. Campbell lends itself naturally to marathoning because no one fucking plays on it, but I think we could add just a tiny bit of structure and get a lot out of it. With some minor config/ruleset changes and using the community server that's already been set up for the revival, we could get some new, interesting scenarios out of the server that we rarely get to enjoy on /tg/station outside of the yearly marathon round. We could even put together a leaderboard for crews that kept it running the longest. I think there's a lot of fun potential there.

The Admin Team

I think we have a decent team at the moment, and I'd like to continue that. Accountability is at an all time high, with hard but important decisions still being made when it comes to admin's misusing tools. One issue is that enforcement varies widely and many players have begun to notice this, to the extent that it's becoming common practice to adminwho and change your behaviour based on who is online. I think this causes a lot of problems for both sides. For players, it means they feel like they have to use OOC knowledge to dictate their in game behaviour to avoid punishment. In part and from some players this is a deliberate exercise in toeing different lines depending on who's online, but I think this inconsistency is just less fun to play around in. We have so many admins and so much coverage, yet people will get away with doing the same thing a dozen times before they get called out on it, and then it feels like bullshit for all parties involved.

On the admin side, it makes those conversations way more difficult, and makes it really hard to stick bans to people who consistently toe the line and make the game less fun for others. If I'm elected, I'll be working to set some firmer standards, not in expanding rules, but in improving noting standards and structuring some clearer guidelines for expired notes. We need to keep better track of conversations, but we don't want to unfairly build up records on players, so a smart compromise is using expiring notes more effectively. I'm happy to discuss this further but don't want to bulk up the main post with lengthy guidelines.

Headmin Terms

We've been, for some years now, experiencing headmin dynasties. While not necessarily bad, I don't think I'm the only one who has felt that the stability has resulted in stagnation in many aspects of the role. Headmins seem to come in, get about 75% of what they wanted to do done in term one, then stick around for a couple more terms not really pushing for any other tangible changes.

I would propose that no headmin can have two terms back to back, but can still run with a term gap inbetween each term. Obviously this would require the agreement of other headmins, but I think it'd be an ultimately beneficial policy. To avoid any accusations that this is a self serving policy designed to make it more likely for me to win in the future, should I be elected and this policy be enacted, I will never run for headmin again. Ever. I'm that committed to this policy being an ultimately positive one for the health of the server.

The Community

I hope that my time in the community has shown you can be a hostile asshole without resorting to the kind of behaviour that makes our community inaccessible to potential players too close to the mainstream. We've had a particularly high profile case recently of a headmin treating a player from another community badly for no real reason. Frankly I think it's a shame to be represented like that, and I appreciate there's a portion of the community, particularly present on the forums, that embraces that exclusionary behaviour because it's probably what they enjoyed about the internet ten years ago, but it's bad for our future. I want us to have good working relationships with other communities, I want us to continue to grow and gain more players excited about SS13 and curious about the weird shit we do here, and I don't want that to be barred behind a "You must be this toxic to enter" sign. I'm disappointed that the headmin team as a whole has implicitly endorsed this behaviour by allowing it to continue and escalate unchallenged.

I'm not intending on a purge, but gradually dialling back the toxicity, exclusivity and hostility would be nice. I think moving more discussions to involving players in discord might be better than relying so heavily on the forums for some topics, and with the introduction of threads and their automatic archiving I think this may be an easier way to communicate. In the same way that talking to someone on a call tends to be less hostile than over text, I think there's a similar effect by moving some discourse from the forums to discord.

We're all human, we're all real people, and we should treat each other with some charitability because being shitty to other people doesn't make you feel better long term and it certainly doesn't make other people feel better. We're in a community based on a video game. We're here for entertainment and because we all like the same weird ass fucking space game. I'd really like us to be a little more positive to each other and I think that starts from the top.

Events

I'm talking about the smaller scale, ad-hoc improvised stuff here, but I've noticed that despite a large influx of admins, the art of eventing is becoming rarer and rarer. Planning is nice, but the longevity of the game relies on some gamemaster style manipulation and interacting with the playerbase to make the world alive, dynamic and endless. It's the greatest value of having a roleplaying system in the first place, and I believe SS13 reaches the greatest heights as a story generator.

This is a relatively minor change, but event training should be part of the admin candidate and trialmin process. Not only will this give them these skills to use, but it'll also establish a better sense across the team for what a good event looks like. Just as an aside, I'm keen on putting together some resources for event running, but more on that outside of the headmin elections.

TL;DR

- A low rules anarchy server where you can reliably experiment with more antagonistic behaviour
- Officialise Campbell as a marathon server with a special ruleset and community backing to achieve long rounds and novel station states
- Improve consistent enforcement through a refreshed noting structure with heavier emphasis on expired notes to avoid the "notes as a punishment" problem
- Prevent back to back headmin terms to reduce the "headmin dynasty" problem
- Bring more discourse to discord and promote a more positive community atmosphere both internally and with other SS13 communities. Aim for growth and a more welcoming community.
- We should train admins on events to avoid the events being shit and to maintain event running as part of our culture

[MortoSasye]

Not a personal fan, I feel like some of your objectives are too grand and cannot be achieved in just 6 months. I do agree with the fact that back-to-back headmin terms suck though.

[sinfulbliss]

I completely agree event-running and admins steering the round in a meaningful way, or running some novel event, creates really memorable moments and spices the experience up so much it's impossible to understate. Even when gamemasters simply throw in a small little gimmicky item it allows players to build off of it, and it makes the objective of creating a cool story so much easier for players. A little goes a long way. That said the best events are those that involve everyone playing. Why do you think events have become rarer, and how do you plan to solve it?

I'll be working to set some firmer standards, not in expanding rules, but in improving noting standards and structuring some clearer guidelines for expired notes. We need to keep better track of conversations, but we don't want to unfairly build up records on players, so a smart compromise is using expiring notes more effectively.

Could you elaborate on this? How do you plan to use expired notes more effectively while also avoiding the problem of notes being punishments? It seems to me notes are inherently punishments in that they will always make it easier for a player to get banned for an offense that might not ordinarily be bannable. Do you believe that line-toeing itself is wrong to do, or do you think it may improve the overall player experience?

[Stickymayhem]

Not a personal fan, I feel like some of your objectives are too grand and cannot be achieved in just 6 months. I do agree with the fact that back-to-back headmin terms suck though.

What do you think isn't achievable?

I completely agree event-running and admins steering the round in a meaningful way, or running some novel event, creates really memorable moments and spices the experience up so much it's impossible to understate. Even when gamemasters simply throw in a small little gimmicky item it allows players to build off of it, and it makes the objective of creating a cool story so much easier for players. A little goes a long way. That said the best events are those that involve everyone playing. Why do you think events have become rarer, and how do you plan to solve it?

I'll be working to set some firmer standards, not in expanding rules, but in improving noting standards and structuring some clearer guidelines for expired notes. We need to keep better track of conversations, but we don't want to unfairly build up records on players, so a smart compromise is using expiring notes more effectively.

Could you elaborate on this? How do you plan to use expired notes more effectively while also avoiding the problem of notes being punishments? It seems to me notes are inherently punishments in that they will always make it easier for a player to get banned for an offense that might not ordinarily be bannable. Do you believe that line-toeing itself is wrong to do, or do you think it may improve the overall player experience?

I think events are becoming rarer for a few reasons. It hasn't been on the agenda for literally years (the last person to have any kind of event focus was citrusgender when they revolutionised big events into huge community spectacles) and headmins have tended not to encourage it. It doesn't form much of trialmin training which means not only do they lack the skills to run events making them afraid to do so, but if they do try to run something they'll probably fuck up and get negative feedback and stop trying. Also there's a kind of spiralling effect where the playerbase becomes less used to them and more used to the formulaic experience of the gamemodes and dynamic to the point where anything that deviates from them is ruining their competitive SS13 experience because they dont play for roleplay they play to make people horizontal. This loud minority probably discourages a lot of admins from doing events too because even if the vast majority of the server are happy with an event, as I've checked previous with polling, there will be 5 loud people in OOC screaming that you ruined their round by introducing a talking cat

As for notes, the problem is we do need a way to mark that a conversation occurred. If someone accidentally fucks up the supermatter and they never get noted about it in any conversations, then they can get away with ruining a dozen rounds before the same admin happens to catch them twice and also remember that specific players previous behaviour. This is why notes are important, but similarly we dont want to build up huge note histories. The fading system we have now is good, but I think using conversational notes with an explicit lack of bearing on unrelated behaviour that expire in 30 days would be a way to both mark these conversations effectively for the relevant time period, while also avoiding vast note histories. The notes become inaccessible after 30 days, and so if you're a player that only needs to be spoken to about something once (and this is kind of our minimum expectation for behaviour) they shouldn't accumulate notes.

I think that line toeing is fine, but the problem is that there tend to be players who do nothing but line toe, and those that rarely get close to it. A more even distribution would result in a better game experience for most, and one way I think this can be achieved is by making admin enforcement more consistent with short term notes serving as a greater level of communication between admins on a specific players behaviour. There's a rule I wrote years ago called "The Secret Rule" at the bottom of the page which I think expresses the positive aspect of that kind of line toeing, and it relies on admin permission or handwaving. I think it would be cool if we had fewer exploitative players and more scope for admins to allow players to do riskier, more antagonistic things on occasion to spice up the round with a really cool gimmick. We don't see much creative antagonism because antag itself is so valuable that you'll probably play very efficiently to try to stay alive and enjoy more of it and this results in boring, safe, murderous behaviour or total stealth. I think the anarchy server will help with that, but I think the secret rule being used more frequently would also allow that kind of creative, positive line toeing.

[MortoSasye]

I think setting up both of your server ideas would be too hard to do in 6 months, considering they may be attached to special rules, specifically the anarchy server

It's not that they're impossible, but that both would be difficult to accomplish on your own- do you have an idea of how to get the other two headmins on board for such a big project?

[Stickymayhem]

I think setting up both of your server ideas would be too hard to do in 6 months, considering they may be attached to special rules, specifically the anarchy server

It's not that they're impossible, but that both would be difficult to accomplish on your own- do you have an idea of how to get the other two headmins on board for such a big project?

For the anarchy server, I've run experiments for around 6 years with low rule rounds using different rulesets and levels of administration. I think this would make actually crafting a ruleset a lot easier.

I'm fairly confident I could convince the other headmins to try it on an experimental basis, maybe on an existing lower population server, just to see what that looks like. Given I've been able to do this before without permission as an event on high pop, I don't see this being particularly difficult. It's effectively just an event as wacky as something like giving everyone traitor, which has enough precedent.

We have multiple servers with no population, and two event servers that are generally underutilised, so it really just requires the experimental run for a few weeks, a ruleset and some adjustment here or there, and applying it to an existing server.

If it's a catstrophic failure that no one enjoys then we bail on the idea. I have a sneaking suspicion it'd be a great variation on our existing servers but if it fails it fails and that's cool too, at least we tried something new.

[MortoSasye]

Pretty solid, changes my views. Thanks!

[Flatulent]

Your anarchy server requires a dedicated server slot. Do you plan to take over the empty isometric alt codebase server we have today and replace it with an anarchy server? Will MSO support such a decision? How do you plan to convince him?
I also wish to know where it would be located geographically. As a player located much closer to the EU server than to East Coast, what do I gain from having one of the American servers become anarchic?

[Stickymayhem]

Your anarchy server requires a dedicated server slot. Do you plan to take over the empty isometric alt codebase server we have today and replace it with an anarchy server? Will MSO support such a decision? How do you plan to convince him?
I also wish to know where it would be located geographically. As a player located much closer to the EU server than to East Coast, what do I gain from having one of the American servers become anarchic?

We could potentially use that slot given that it's completely empty, or use one of the two event hall servers.

One possible scenario is running both event hall servers as anarchy servers in their off periods, then using them for events as appropriate. At the moment they're on downtime outside of any big ball events so I think it'd be perfectly reasonable to utilise them (assuming the anarchy experiment is successful) and I'd happily shut them down for the occasional big ticket tournaments.

I don't really intend for them to have a continuous core playerbase of people who do nothing but anarchy (though I'm sure there will be some people who do this), but I'd like to encourage it to be a melting pot for all the server's playerbases to interact with each other (violently) and use it as a palette cleanse. You have a shitty round on Terry where you got dunked so you hop on Anarchy EU and start a big ass bar fight to have some more relaxed fun. I think it'll make people less obsessed with rolling antag or line-toe griefing on other servers to get their kicks.

When it comes to MSO supporting the decision, he's a reasonable guy and we have precedent for Manuel forming so I'm confident he'd defer the decisions to the headmins. The genuine challenge would of course be convincing the other headmins, but I'm sure they'd at least be fine with an experimental launch to assess the results and decide based on those. Who knows, maybe an anarchy server will make everyone everywhere act shittier, maybe it'll serve as some light hearted stress relief and people will behave better elsewhere because they know they can go to anarchy if they get antsy. We'll all find out together

[wesoda25]

I think events are becoming rarer for a few reasons. It hasn't been on the agenda for literally years (the last person to have any kind of event focus was citrusgender when they revolutionised big events into huge community spectacles) and headmins have tended not to encourage it. It doesn't form much of trialmin training which means not only do they lack the skills to run events making them afraid to do so, but if they do try to run something they'll probably fuck up and get negative feedback and stop trying. Also there's a kind of spiralling effect where the playerbase becomes less used to them and more used to the formulaic experience of the gamemodes and dynamic to the point where anything that deviates from them is ruining their competitive SS13 experience because they dont play for roleplay they play to make people horizontal. This loud minority probably discourages a lot of admins from doing events too because even if the vast majority of the server are happy with an event, as I've checked previous with polling, there will be 5 loud people in OOC screaming that you ruined their round by introducing a talking cat

I don’t really agree with most of the other stuff you want, but I think this is a oft neglected talking point and a really nice thing to focus on.

[NikNakFlak]

no strong opinions. Sticky and I are so old and know each other a bit, we are like brothers who annoy each other here and there and besides that just see each other at holidays.

- Prevent back to back headmin terms to reduce the "headmin dynasty" problem
Interesting take. Headmin term limits might not be a bad idea as an alternative.

- We should train admins on events to avoid the events being shit and to maintain event running as part of our culture
been tried. they said it couldn't be done. If you have a plan or method that you think will finally work, I will applaud you

[Pandarsenic]

Heya, Sticky, been a while. A few questions for your platform...

Anarchy: How high of a population do you expect it to have? How long of a typical roundtime? Will "i ded" restart votes be permitted? What administrative standards will you try to establish for it?

Marathon: How will it handle round types? Dynamic or always greenshift? How will self-antagging be handled? Sabotage during administrative gaps? etc.

Inconsistent Enforcement: How do you plan to standardize the enforcement, when nominally the rules themselves are already what's being standardized to?

Events: What do you think makes an event shit or not-shit?

[Stickymayhem]

no strong opinions. Sticky and I are so old and know each other a bit, we are like brothers who annoy each other here and there and besides that just see each other at holidays.

- Prevent back to back headmin terms to reduce the "headmin dynasty" problem
Interesting take. Headmin term limits might not be a bad idea as an alternative.

- We should train admins on events to avoid the events being shit and to maintain event running as part of our culture
been tried. they said it couldn't be done. If you have a plan or method that you think will finally work, I will applaud you

I've recently had the benefit of pouring my entire event philosophy into dms with a few people, and I think I have settled on a format of explaining how to do it well. Over the last couple weeks I've been recording myself preparing and running events with the intent of showing the thought process, tools and resulting successes or failures as examples to new admins. Obviously these need to be edited and cut down but I think it'd be a good start and fairly future proof since my philosophy on running events hasn't changed all that much in the last 4-5 years (since I stopped slamming meteors basically).

I've considered putting together some reliably fun (to the extent this exists) "example events" that are easy for anyone to run with a bit of guidance and are likely to garner a positive reaction from the server they're run on. If trialmins could successfully run these as part of their training, it of course wouldn't be make or break for their candidacy, but it should give them a place to start and build confidence. As a teaser, I tend to break events down into Personal, Departmental and Station-wide categories, each requiring very different attention, guidelines and outcomes.

Here's a rough draft of how I'd format an example event for a Trialmin

Spoiler:

Departmental Event: Xenobiology SCPs

This is a simple department wide event that's extremely easy to adjust the threat level for to scale with the chaos (or lack of chaos) in a round, and a great way to safely play with some advanced and unusual admin tools. I like events to have lessons, and these are a great lesson in consequences and treating things with some amount of seriousness for their power level. It also gives you ample opportunity to roleplay as whatever kind of centcom researcher you want, with plenty of room for interesting personalities, conspiracy or incompetence.

Prepare your SCPs in the droppod area on Centcom (You can teleport to the droppod bays from the admin droppod panels) and decide what you want them to be. Ensure that if they have hostile AI, they can't break windows. You can do this by going into their vv panel and adjusting their structure damage and damage properties. Each SCP should ideally invoke curiosity just from their appearance (Either by being spooky, an object that doesn't get seen very often in SS13, or being curiously mundane), have some kind of maintenance procedure (feeding is a basic one) and a consequence for either interacting with it badly (Be entirely willing to round remove people for running straight into SCP chambers that they've been warned are deadly) or not following that maintenance procedure. Depending on how you scale the threat, this can be dangerous to an individual, xenobiology, science or the entire station.

The following is an example of a reliably threatening and interesting SCP to give you an idea:

Wheelchair Psychic
Take a zombie or spooky species of choice, remove all their limbs to restrict mobility, then restrain them to a wheelchair. If you want them to be have telekinesis, leave one arm. If you want them to use telepathy, leave their mouth uncovered (You can change their language or remove their tongue).

Finally, give them mindswap. The goal of the creature, whether you play them sporadically (Conveniently they're immobile so you can hop in only when they're relevant to increase the spook level and otherwise manage the rest of the SCPs/event) or put someone in to play them continouously (make sure you set expectations for players about the role you're giving them carefully. I'd always be brutally honest and say they're going to be sitting in a chair immobile for ten minutes being spooky with telepathy) is to lure someone into the chamber with them, then mindswap them into the useless body. From here, you can do fun stuff like live their life, try to destroy the creature alongside the last evidence of the mindswap occurring, or even commit suicide and return back to the Wheelchair Psychic to have a spooky inexplicable SCP style consequence to spending time in the chamber with the creature.

I'd recommend relying on one or two active people in the department to be the managers and educators for the event. Give them plenty of centcom attention (Through visits from personnel or headset messages/droppod supplies) to reward them for their effort since they're focusing on your scps instead of the job that would normally be giving them material rewards. Experiment heavily with the admin tools, try out sdql spells (with some help if you don't understand it) or try vv editing existing spells (e.g. see if you can make a soulstone conjuring spell create a different object in the game instead) to create endless unique SCPs!

So basically, I'm putting a video series together, as well as some text guides like the above to try to get this knowledge out there to new admins.

[Stickymayhem]

Heya, Sticky, been a while. A few questions for your platform...

Anarchy: How high of a population do you expect it to have? How long of a typical roundtime? Will "i ded" restart votes be permitted? What administrative standards will you try to establish for it?

Marathon: How will it handle round types? Dynamic or always greenshift? How will self-antagging be handled? Sabotage during administrative gaps? etc.

Inconsistent Enforcement: How do you plan to standardize the enforcement, when nominally the rules themselves are already what's being standardized to?

Events: What do you think makes an event shit or not-shit?

I'd expect a population of between 20-30 but I could be surprised. Given the higher death toll expected, I might look at enabling occasional respawns. This would actually help with the marathon round type as well. Typical roundtype I'd expect to be similar to Terry's lower end, but frankly when running previous low rule experiments I've been surprised. You do actually achieve a certain balance between security, greytiders and AI where they all restrict each other to some extent and often end up in a weird kind of equilibrium. The greytiders know if they push too far they'll just be beaten to death, security know if they go too far enough people on station will be ready to riot and if they're openly violent the AI is probably going to lock them down or happily help people depose them. This does result in an uneasy balance that I've seen kind of form their own basic ruleset IC rather than OOC.

The administrative standards I'd set would probably be a bit looser, and especially initially I doubt we'll ban people at all, but rely on guiding conversations to try to keep things somewhat balanced and fun. The really egregious stuff like outright murderbone from non-antags, delaying rounds infinitely with everyone dead, as well as any OOCly terrible behaviour breaking Rule 8/11 etc will be handled like anywhere else, but I want to leave room for people to experiment, fuck up and get corrected without major consequence. I'm thinking that the MRP antag (e.g. you can kill people who fuck with you, you can't murderbone but you can make cool creative supervillain shit that does kill people) rules would serve a decent baseline for non-antags on this server, with antags of course being allowed to murderbone to their hearts content and being exactly as unrestricted as on any other server.

As for marathon:
Part of the fun will be how long it can be extended for, and I think part of that fun could come in trying to keep the station alive against threats like nuke ops. I don't expect a massive population at all times so the big station enders are less likely to roll anyway, but the probability of round enders will probably be lowered in the config. I definitely want to keep dynamic, just with lower threat levels which thankfully are easy to adjust in config. Self-antagging will be handled the same way as it would be anywhere else. If we were to do this with campbell then it would be under the MRP ruleset which I think would lend itself nicely to marathon shifts, but we have to see what the population of campbell looks like when it's stable and make sure that we aren't booting out a potential community of EU MRPers that aren't interested in 8 hour rounds (though I suspect they might find that a cool change of pace).

Sabotage during admin gaps is going to happen, and it's a shame, but we have logs for a reason and a specific rule with higher consequences for stuff like this might be reasonable.

When it comes to inconsistent enforcement, I think a lot of it comes down to when to enforce the rules we have, and a lack of communication between admins. If you can rely on more notes (communication) that expire quickly, you basically have the possibility for more back and forth short term communication between admins on a particular player. This helps with players reform process and makes sure admins aren't seeing the same thing 3 other admins did and not noting it because it doesn't quite reach the level of permanent note punishment.

It's very hard to say what makes an Event shit or not shit. I'd apply similar standards I'd apply to whether a D&D session I ran was shit. Did the players have fun? Did they get to make choices and feel autonomous? Did one person have lots of fun but at the expense of everyone else? Are they excited for more?

At the end of the day it's running a ttrpg for 50 people and you'll make 10-20% of them unhappy by default because SS13 does not distribute fun evenly or fairly, by design. If players got some cool stories out if it and got to do stuff that wouldn't be available in a normal round I tend to be happy, but there are no objective measures for a good event really.

[WineAllWine]

Sticky those event ideas are dope, can you please do the video idea even if you don't end up becoming headmin?

I think that post bumped you up a few spots in my vote

[damneddog]

I hope that my time in the community has shown you can be a hostile asshole without resorting to the kind of behaviour that makes our community inaccessible to potential players too close to the mainstream.

What would you consider behaviour that makes us inaccessible to new players and what do you plan on doing to change said behaviour?

I'm disappointed that the headmin team as a whole has implicitly endorsed this behaviour by allowing it to continue and escalate unchallenged.

Could you list examples? I am a rather new player, so I wasn't around to experience this.

I want us to continue to grow and gain more players excited about SS13 and curious about the weird shit we do here, and I don't want that to be barred behind a "You must be this toxic to enter" sign.

What would you consider toxic behaviour? (This might be answered in my first question. If so I apologize for asking again)

[Stickymayhem]

What would you consider behaviour that makes us inaccessible to new players and what do you plan on doing to change said behaviour?

I think most obviously, the casual use of slurs immediately filters a more mainstream group of potential participants. SS13 has a lot of filters already, it's a niche game that's hard to get into with communities fairly isolated from any real pipelines towards it, so further filtering potential players by their willingness to tolerate slurs skews the population in a certain direction. This has improved with Rule 11 dealing with open bigotry (gas the jews type shit) and generally lessening the proliferation of the kind of exclusionary behaviour that can make people grossed out by the game. I literally can't let anyone in real life other than my girlfriend know (thankfully she's italian and therefore fascist) I play this game because of the toxic community.

Even without explicit bigotry, the hostility towards outsiders and internal vitriol moves far beyond banter very often. I'm happy to fuck with people and be hostile, but I think we can dial it back. We should be assholes to each other and welcoming to new players like yourself. Like a group of friends that brutalizes everyone in the group they're familiar with the comfort for, but eases in new people.

Could you list examples? I am a rather new player, so I wasn't around to experience this.

Closely related to the above, a player from a russian server recently joined having written a good faith, though partly misinformed, review of /tg/station from the perspective of a higher roleplay community. They experienced open bigotry (literally the phrase "kill all n-words, rape all n-words") and when they ahelped were told it wasn't really fixable (down to a code issue). They, with good english but poor recognition of the cultural implication of certain phrasing, ineptly asked for comment from a headmin, and a headmin told them to "fuck off retard". Twice. This is how we interact with other servers. In speaking to the player, it's clear to me it was a mistranslation and misunderstanding but the headmins didn't really care. Personally I think it sucks that we're insular, hostile and just straight up cunts to players engaging in good faith. Even in the most cynical interpretation of this situation, if a player came to stir shit so they could record it and bring it back to laugh about it, playing back into it is the worst possible outcome.

What would you consider toxic behaviour? (This might be answered in my first question. If so I apologize for asking again)

Yeah I think I've mostly covered this above, thanks for the questions though

[damneddog]

Thank you for answering my questions

[Arcanemusic]

I have a handful of questions, feel free to answer at your own discretion.

Do you feel that by implementing a 2b2t "anarchy" style server that you would be shifting players from inside our player base into lower RP standards than what we already consider to be pretty low for LRP like sybil or bagil? Is the intent to bring in players from other LRP servers in the community like Fulp, or Bee? In addition, by adding a server where explicitly "rules are relaxed and matter less", how do feel that will effect players ban appeals for players who may have been banned on MRP or LRP, then ask for a ban appeal but ONLY on a less policed server?

As you plan on adding 2 different styles of servers, and we only have one currently open for use, would you plan on making these servers homes the event servers, or the alt codebase server (You've already partially answered this.)?

Thank you.

[Stickymayhem]

Do you feel that by implementing a 2b2t "anarchy" style server that you would be shifting players from inside our player base into lower RP standards than what we already consider to be pretty low for LRP like sybil or bagil?

No, the roleplay standards will stay the same, it'll only be the non-antag restrictions that are reduced. Antagonists on LRP or MRP don't get to break roleplay anymore extensively than anyone else and people will still be held to the same standards as Sybil or Terry (With enforcement remaining consistent).

Is the intent to bring in players from other LRP servers in the community like Fulp, or Bee?

No absolutely not, it's for our existing playerbase, I wouldn't put the server on the hub and while I wouldn't begrudge anyone who wanted to main the anarchy server, I'd prefer it as a mixing pot for all of the servers to blow off some steam.

In addition, by adding a server where explicitly "rules are relaxed and matter less", how do feel that will effect players ban appeals for players who may have been banned on MRP or LRP, then ask for a ban appeal but ONLY on a less policed server?


If you can't follow the rules on one server, you don't get to play on any of them. We aren't trying to cater by providing a broad range of servers where people who can't control themselves fit in. I would want any member of /tg/ to BE ABLE to play on manuel without getting banned, but I'm fine with them preferring the environment of LRP or the anarchy server. I do not want to cater to people who cannot physically restrain themselves from breaking rules in other rulesets. This is a bad indicator for their general behaviour and participation in the community.

As you plan on adding 2 different styles of servers, and we only have one currently open for use, would you plan on making these servers homes the event servers, or the alt codebase server (You've already partially answered this.)?

The practicalities of exactly which server should be used for this are probably more of a discussion for implementation, but with the event hall servers having 98% downtime I think we can use them for at least one anarchy server to gauge the experience, with an expansion to two servers if it's successful longer term.