Hello, /TG/! My name is DrAmazing343, better known to some for my character on Manuel, Jane Sierpenski. I've technically been around since 2017, but took several years off of Space Station 13 before it well and truly grabbed my attention during August of last year, when I began to play properly. In my time, I've come to know many, many people, even across the Sybil (my ancestral homeland) and Terry servers. While I'm most well-known on MRP, I do not want to necessarily let it define me or my candidacy, as I believe the role of the Headmin is one that walks the lines betwixt each servers to ensure that the constituents of each have the greatest experience that only Space Station 13 can bring. I'm currently a Trial Admin amongst the team, after having been invited to join a little over a month and a half ago, and in my time I've received a few compliments on my feedback page. While the grand majority are from fellow admins, I'd like to believe that I've still delivered to the rest of the community through personalized events, friendly conduct, and an absolute flood of djminning on Manuel, with a little bit on Sybil and Terry as well.
What Are Her Values?
Given my home server, it's easy to say that I value roleplay as the highest thing to strive towards and enjoy among the content of Space Station 13. I still do, however, quite enjoy a lot of the mechanical side, having swam deep into the pools of Chemistry and even quite a bit of Greytiding* in my time. While I would say I'm a good candidate for roleplayers, I still deeply respect and enjoy watching the antics of those mechanically-minded, and have relished in lots of the insane contraptions and dubious plots that I see more on LRP given the greater openness in the sandbox. I believe that fair play, good faith, and intent to have fun are the pillars of our community, and so I hold these higher amongst any more defined ideology I could come up with to describe my thoughts.
What Are Her Goals?
I believe that although we see quite a bit of strife within /TG/ today more than the past year, this is far from irreparable. Like a phoenix, this server can still stand to rise from the ashes of what came before, renewed and glowing furiously once more. That is not to say my predecessors have done poorly— moreso that because of a few poor decisions in particular and a lot of player outrage coming to a head, we've come to stand in a state of relative disarray. With my Campaign and the love I hold for this game, I hope to revitalize this server to go back to the roots of what we're all here for; that is, a wonderful game, full of depth and intrigue, that we've all one way or another come to love and enjoy. I believe that through this shared love, we can overcome any hardship within our community, and strengthen what binds us all together, regardless of individual server or player.
How Will Her Foul Schemes Be Accomplished?
As a demonstration of my love and dedication, I want to address something that's sort of bugged me ever since I've come to play regularly— in this case, the perceived inability to approach the Headmins as a lay-man. While technically possible via a ping, direct message, or through our #help-tickets channel in the Discord, I want to fully address and encourage the ability for the common man to come talk to us on the Big Red Phone via an
Open Door Policy!
The idea of the Open Door Policy is simple; ping @head admin in the #help-tickets channel, and receive a private thread with which to share your thoughts, concerns, and feedback directly with the men and women upstairs. As the biggest proponent, I will happily do my best to answer each and every Open Door ping I get, and attempt to satisfactorily help players with their concerns. Whether it's filing an appeal, a complaint, asking advice, or coming to us with concerns about our Headminship or the greater policy of the servers, I'd like to maintain an Open Door to help keep a finger on the pulse of the community and engender faith and trust between the playerbase and the Headmins.
Another one of my biggest concerns is one that is very relevant now that I've become an admin, and it's one that continually ebbs away at me, so I'll be happy to touch on it during my term, if I am elected. This is, of course, the endless debate and emotion-fraught state of
Notes As Notes, Not Punishment
It's very difficult to make a note not feel like a punishment- whether because it's the evil badmin out to get you, or you're getting flashbacks to a scolding from your parents. It NEVER feels nice to get a note, but within my term, I'd like to make strides in addressing the presentation of notes. While there's no easy ways to immediately better this situation, I believe that a concerted effort to ensure our admins conduct themselves with respect and empathy will eventually take a bit of the edge off. Personally, when I hand out a note, it's damn near agonizing— but still very, very important to maintaining a fair and free playing field when it comes to keeping out players who are not right for our servers, or for setting players who are making mistakes back onto the right path. Because of this, I try my hardest to empathize and support even problematic players when handing out my notes, assuring them that this does not make them a "marked man" or that I hold anything against them. I may not be a model, especially with my relative inexperience in adminning, but I believe fostering that empathy and compassion with concentrated effort among our team will yield greater results than we've seen yet.
As another step towards fighting the evil demon that lurks within the brain because of bad notes, I'd like to take another practice I hold, and try to expand it. That is, to...
Encourage More Positive Notes, and Canonize Antag Tokens
Currently, admins are allowed to create positive notes for players for good roleplay or significant accomplishments. They can even add little "tokens" to them, but by and large, we're restrained from handing out antagonist tokens straight-up barring total server failure or absolute event fuckup. As another step towards creating a positive give-and-take between admins and players, I'd like to use my position to encourage more admins to hand out positive notes, and educate admins that may not consider it much to do so more often. On top of that, I'd like to make antagonist tokens a legitimate option when handing out these tokens, as well. My current idea is to allow one antag token per admin per player every six months— that is, a player can only receive one admin token from a specific admin per each six months. Each admin can still hand out as many unique tokens as they'd like, and a player can likewise receive as many from unique admins as they can pull off with their impressive feats of roleplay or mechanics, but in the interest of fairness and transparency, I feel a six month "cooldown" will help to prevent concerns about favoritism as well as keeping an antagonist token as a very special thing to be given. Just the same, normal "tokens" of other miscellany will still be unlimited and more or less unrestricted as per current policy.
Adminning ideasguy aside, I'd also like to address and bring back a conversation had during the nearly previous Headmin term. As many of you may know, trawling Player's Club and Policy Discussion, there's been some debate and discussion in regards to bans and notes being handed out to players who are teaching their friends, and metacomming to do so. While I still believe streaming rules should be as they are, and metacomming rules should be by and large untouched, I do think there should absolutely be more leeway to allow you players to induct your friends to this wonderful game! To that end-
Creating and Expanding Rules on Mentorship and Metacomming
While flashy in name, I think this is likely to be one of the simpler things I wish to accomplish with my term, after much discussion with the community and my fellow Headmins. My current plans are to allow players to adminhelp and be given explicit permission by an admin willing to keep watch in order to metacomm when teaching players under a certain threshold of hours; initially, I'd like to propose fifteen hours of living time. While, again, this is something you can technically do, it's far from being given a proper place in policy, and I'd like to keep as many things above-board and written in policy as I can. I think it would be invasive to have an admin lurking in the voice chat or something like that, but I believe that as long as we allow reasonable leniency and there's good faith demonstrated by both players during the process, this should hardly be a super problematic thing despite very valid concerns of continued metacomming. More than that, I think this is an excellent way for us to grow our playerbase and engender an environment of learning for new players as well as letting them learn some of the zany, batshit things they can do in the game quicker, absolutely hooking them in to our DEVIOUSLY fun game. As for the another "mechanic" of this program, I'd like to add an expiring note to both the mentor and the mentee bearing the ckey of the other partner in order to keep track of who is with whom, and for accountability. These notes would not and should not have any other bearing on the players unless they act in bad faith and are kicked from the mentorship program or otherwise cause undue harm to the greater play experience of others, also resulting in expulsion from the program. This does not have to be a binary thing, but mentors should take care to be on their best behavior regarding rules when teaching newbies, as metacomming is an incredibly large advantage to have if one tries to use it to meta-game. If necessary for tracking purposes, we could also utilize the watchlist system, but I do worry about watchlist fatigue resulting from this. If any other administrators have input here, I'd love to hear it, since it'd be a weight for the whole team to bear.
Now, as for policy in a more meat-and-potatoes sense concerning the game, another thing I've always been at odds with on MRP has been Security's propriety to game-end antagonists and shut down any chance for a fun back-and-forth cat-and-mouse story to unfold, or even simply allowing antagonist gimmicks at all. While Security teams rise and fall, and each era has seen more or less leniency in this sense, I'd like to take a jab at helping these stories to unfold with less of the no-fun no-selling from stone-cold Security teams. I understand this will be wholly controversial, so I'm especially willing to budge and adjust as per the community's wishes as well as those of my fellow Headmins, but it is a serious problem I've seen. To help with this, I'd like to
Increase Antagonist Protections on MRP
Initial Idea:
Spoiler:
Sometimes, on Manuel, antagonists face a worrying propensity for Security to not "play ball" with their gimmicks or grandstanding, and find their rounds summarily cut short when they are caught unprepared or unwilling to fight as hard as Security does. While I do not mean to villainize players who enjoy Security, I do find myself disgruntled with how often I see antagonists field-executed and lockered after doing very little, or making a paltry attempt at violence and flopping hard. Part of this appears to be an enforcement issue, doubled-down by a lack of ahelps, but is also something I cannot currently find an easy way to solve via policy. Security players already step around a litany of little caltrop-shaped guidelines that bring pain when oft they just want to do the right thing and protect their station, but at the same time as I wish to allow these freedoms, so too do I wish to see interesting stories wherein both Security and antagonists see lengthy conflict, grandstanding, and roleplay above all else on our beloved MRP server. While I do not have a satisfying one-size-fits-all solution to this problem as of now, I will maintain a promise to take action against those that seek only to win, rather than to roleplay, and to find a way to make the Security-antagonist dynamic better for many terms to come. With this, I'd love to hear the thoughts and ideas of the community, as I strive to find solutions myself.
Now, with that out of the way... one last thing!
Enforce Human Authority: 0
I cannot promise that I will be able to get a Headmin majority vote for this, or that it is even in the cards for my term. Despite this, I'd still like to put it forward, and fight for it as hard as I can, because I believe that allowing nonhuman heads is exactly the sort of spice in the pot that could help to refresh the game for a lot of people. There have been endless debates over and over about lore justifications, or relative quality of Heads, but I'm hardly here for those. Instead, I'd like to campaign for this as a nod to all the players that I've seen excel in leading, who have a good head on their shoulders, and who deserve to enjoy at least some of the Head roles that are so oft cherished. Folks who will eagerly take the mantle from a Head of Personnel when their original Head fails to show to work, players who are an absolute joy to have at the head of the Departments— all denied because of what we've decided is right and wrong to be able to play here. I do not wish to make changes to roundstart Asimov, as I believe the push-and-pull friction between the AI and nonhuman Heads will still create a lot of good roleplay, but I do wish to permanently open the way for all players to enjoy at least a majority of the Head roles without having to awkwardly create a Human static or rename their Little Guy for the occasion. I know that this echoes Bmon's campaign sentiment in a lot of ways, but it is only because I agree ENTIRELY that I write it here.
How Do We Know She Isn't Full of Shit?
In short— you don't! I can one-hundred percent understand some anxiety or hesitation in giving me your vote at the polls. I do not have the grand repertoire of accomplishments and policy that the other Candidates have carved out during long tenures with the team or within the community. You do, however, have my unerring promise that I will do the very best I can for /TG/, and that I care very, very deeply for each server and its community. I will do my best to carry out each and every one of my campaign promises as far as I can take them, and I think that above all else, I hold a special love for this game that will not fade no matter what trials or tribulations the term will bring to my team. I hope that, if only a little, I've convinced you all that I am eager and willing to serve the community you love, and that I want to keep this place special for months and months to come.
No matter what bridges we may cross, or which rocky paths we must walk down, I have faith in this server and this community. Even if I am not elected, I intend to continue full steam on adminning now that my case of COVID from last week has settled down— after all, this is a place that has given me much, and all I can do is give back in the ways I am able. No matter what happens, hope does not ride alone, and I will stand in staunch support of this wonderful silly little pixel game we share.
