Admin intervention with no ahelps

[NoH8OnlyLove]

Bottom post of the previous page:

My recent vacation has made me think about what had transpired and I'd like to know the consensus of admins intervening with an IC incident that is minor in nature with no prior ahelp simply because they're hunting for someone to ban. Should admins step in on an issue that is relatively minor if no one had sent an ahelp?

[Bawhoppennn]

People who wait until the end of the round to ahelp should be the ones encouraged to not do so, rather than admins jumping in and preemptively dealing with people in the round.

what is this even saying

i'm reading this as "people should be told not to ahelp at round end, and admins shouldn't deal with situations mid round"

so, what, admins should never do anything?

What I meant is basically that, 1: People consent by default, 2: People shouldn't wait until the END of the round if they do have a problem.

I personally think use of admins should be absolutely minimized, and people should be more willing to go the rule 10 route and just let things go. Only the most grievous problems should actually incur any administrative fury.

[NoH8OnlyLove]

I personally think use of admins should be absolutely minimized, and people should be more willing to go the rule 10 route and just let things go. Only the most grievous problems should actually incur any administrative fury.

If only

[Qbopper]

What I meant is basically that, 1: People consent by default, 2: People shouldn't wait until the END of the round if they do have a problem.

I personally think use of admins should be absolutely minimized, and people should be more willing to go the rule 10 route and just let things go. Only the most grievous problems should actually incur any administrative fury.

i'm not sure how you could possibly encourage/enforce that though

we can't force people to ahelp things/not ahelp things

[Bawhoppennn]

i'm not sure how you could possibly encourage/enforce that though

we can't force people to ahelp things/not ahelp things

Just generally don't accept ahelps if it's at the end of the round, and make this explicitly stated on the rules page?

[Bawhoppennn]

Now ethically that might not be the right solution, but that atleast answers the practical question of how to enforce it.

[Grazyn]

I was the object of ridicule for daring to suggest disabling ahelps 3-5 minutes before round end (i.e. shuttle beyond recalling, at least for modes that allow shuttle departure, or shuttle already in transit)

Beacuse apparently banning/noting someone because he made another player lose 3-5 minutes of play is worth making 80 people waste 5-10 minutes of play at centcomm while admins investigate

[Dax Dupont]

Problem is that you can only see antagonists at round end. If someone is killing 4norasin at large or other things people might consider them antagonists but then at round end they find out they were not.
If you disable round end ahelps people will ahelp more even where they previously assumed antag and didn't ahelp.

As for wasting players time? Just enable ctf.

[Bawhoppennn]

Problem is that you can only see antagonists at round end. If someone is killing 4norasin at large or other things people might consider them antagonists but then at round end they find out they were not.
If you disable round end ahelps people will ahelp more even where they previously assumed antag and didn't ahelp.

As for wasting players time? Just enable ctf.

That's why we encourage them to ahelp if they're not sure at all inside the round. Otherwise we just let it go and get on with your life. If they repeat what they've done again in future rounds, people will know better, and definitely ahelp at that point anyways.

[bandit]

If there is any shred of doubt in your mind as to whether someone's an antag, ahelp. We don't mind getting ahelps about people who are antags. They are the easiest ahelps to resolve and take like 15 seconds.

[captain sawrge]

If there is any shred of doubt in your mind as to whether someone's an antag, ahelp. We don't mind getting ahelps about people who are antags. They are the easiest ahelps to resolve and take like 15 seconds.

this pretty much

It generally just saves and lot of trouble if you ahelp when something happens rather than delaying yourself to try and confirm it personally

[cedarbridge]

If there is any shred of doubt in your mind as to whether someone's an antag, ahelp. We don't mind getting ahelps about people who are antags. They are the easiest ahelps to resolve and take like 15 seconds.

this pretty much

It generally just saves and lot of trouble if you ahelp when something happens rather than delaying yourself to try and confirm it personally

Delaying is even worse if whoever you're delaying to ask about as a changeling or some shit and you throw a fit that changeling-alter-ego-23251 wasn't an antag at the end of the round.

[Qbopper]

If there is any shred of doubt in your mind as to whether someone's an antag, ahelp. We don't mind getting ahelps about people who are antags. They are the easiest ahelps to resolve and take like 15 seconds.

this pretty much

It generally just saves and lot of trouble if you ahelp when something happens rather than delaying yourself to try and confirm it personally

Delaying is even worse if whoever you're delaying to ask about as a changeling or some shit and you throw a fit that changeling-alter-ego-23251 wasn't an antag at the end of the round.

like seriously worst case scenario is the admin says they'll look into it

if they're not an antag then the problem resolves itself

if they are it's handled

if the admin is low tier they outright say that it wasn't an antag

[Atlanta-Ned]

Unless I need information that's ephemeral, I tell the involved parties that I'll look into it after the server reboots.

[Pascal125]

Not accepting Ahelps if they're near the end of the round would not be a good solution.

There have been times where someone has done something nearer the end of the round that i had to Ahelp, and did warrant ahelping, and i'm sure others have had situations like that too.
The issue is people don't want to be "That guy" who Ahelps "every time". And i'm sure Admins do consider some people to be "That guy".
So they try to determine on their own if they are antags before ahelping. Or they wait until the end to know for sure. And by that point it's a little late.

And i don't know. Personally when i hear things about Admins making fun of people for A-helping, especially by an Admin. it can kind of discourage you from wanting to.

[Cobby]

If you ahelp at the end of the round and the situation happened [not at the end of the round] then you obviously weren't bothered too much or else you would have checked :^)

[kevinz000]

If you ahelp at the end of the round and the situation happened [not at the end of the round] then you obviously weren't bothered too much or else you would have checked :^)

literally this i dont know about anyone else but it doesnt take that long to resolve a clear cut antag/ic issue, so there's no harm in people ahelping when they get heavily griefed/killed imo [[[unless you're banbaiting lol]]].

[bandit]

And i don't know. Personally when i hear things about Admins making fun of people for A-helping, especially by an Admin. it can kind of discourage you from wanting to.

I hate this too, if you're not banbaiting, lying or otherwise being a cunt in an ahelp then no one should make fun of your ahelping

[onleavedontatme]

So again I ask is harmbatonning and general shitlery as sec ok now if you can word a situation as if you been inconvenienced? can I send people to red anytime they remotely I nconvenience me doing my job, even if they're just doing their job as well? Will these too be IC issues and if not then what mitigating factors besides the fleeting notion of Admins wanting people to handle everything, including stupid situations as these, should admins and players be aware of relative to this situation?

[/quote]

Every situation is its own, nobody on this planet can write a perfect ruleset to cover anything.

But the mitigating factors in that situation, which I would consider applicable to other situations, are

-It was not premeditated grief he went out of his way to do, he was genuinely annoyed by a mishap in a videogame

-The other player was not disrupted for a very significant period of time

-The results of the altercation were easily fixed IC (again, in a videogame, this is not an actual police officer beating someone, this is SS13 where you use a magic bruise pack and in 3 seconds all your injuries are gone)

Can a security officer beat someone a few times for impeding them or irritating them? When taken in a vacuum, sure

Can a security officer do this in every round in every situation? No. (And this doesn't mean to note the guy if he does an action once and then ban him if he ever does it again)

I don't think "just doing their job" is a good argument for why nobody can be annoyed with you either, because our game is set up that people have contradictory goals and objectives for exactly the purpose of getting people to fight.

Ultimately I think conflict between players is healthy for the environment SS13 is trying to create, and OOC micromanagement is unhealthy for the gameplay, roleplay, etc. The costs of eliminating all bad behavior are much higher than the costs of tolerating the janitor getting beat up every once in a while.

[onleavedontatme]

I mean imagine for a second we eliminate all grief and as soon as you see someone punching someone else, or hacking a door, you know that person is an antagonist. Imagine an entire playerbase of people who seek OOC resolution every time their meta round routine gets vaguely disrupted and how boring a sterile environment of everyone sitting in their departments while security and antags kill eachother would be (no admin events either, I promise you if the players are ahelping after getting smacked with a toolbox they won't find your event funny either).

Some of my most entertaining and memorable rounds have started with someone breaking the rules, and I wouldn't have gotten those stories if I'd asked admins to shut everything down and fix it. I don't want players who can't join in on something spontaneous or shrug and move on when things don't go exactly their way. I'd rather have people who understand that losing can be fun instead of going to github to get something removed.

Maybe I am in the minority or delusional or whatever in viewing/hoping for SS13 to be an interactive story generator but I don't think an ever shrinking definition of what is an IC issue will benefit the game or community. If I wanted to play a game with two clear sides and a predictable gameplay loop and no infighting I'd hop over to CM (or any other of the thousands of team death match multiplayer games in existence)

[onleavedontatme]

So the tl;dr for me is not so much "is an action okay" but "is an action so bad, and done in such poor faith, and so negatively impacting the experiences of our playerbase that I need to take OOC intervention or even eject people from our server"

I want to be referee/GM, not a cop

[Cobby]

good post(s)

[cedarbridge]

I'd add to that as an admin, I'd like to see issues resolved as quickly as possible. This is for several reasons and a few of them are fairly selfish. I don't want players waiting for ages while I sort out some complicated mess that was really just a perfectly normal player interaction. This disrupts the flow of the game for all sides involved except the one that is more interested in litigating nitpicks to get their OOC vengeance. I don't personally want to spend 10+ minutes log diving to figure out who hit who first and how hard. I want the game to operate in a way that interesting things can happen and at least some sort of story can be told out of the ever shrinking amount of legitimate roleplay that goes on in this supposed roleplaying game. The longer a case takes to resolve the more animosity it will generate for all involved (including myself as I slowly start to hate everyone involved, myself included.)

I have no qualms sharing with a victim of one of my ahelps the rational that leads to my final ruling. I rather like the idea that understanding why I came to the ruling I did will help the players to avoid needing to revisit the same conversation in the future. However, sharing that rationale is not really an invitation to relitigate the ruling. Admin rulings are final because the rules say so, but also because they need to be. The ruling is the resolution. It ends the argument. The sooner the ruling is accepted and incorporated the sooner all parties can go back to whatever they were doing and I can go back to playing cards or gibspawnering the clown or whatever I was doing that was frankly more interesting than the hurt feelings between two players that neither will remember 1-2 rounds later.

[onleavedontatme]

Everything you just said is why I just revive everyone involved in a fight and tell them to stop being dumb and ignore eachother for the rest of the round if it takes me longer than like a minute to sort out their stories

[bandit]

I agree with this but at the same time, it also makes me sad that the only time where "it's a story generator" and "rounds should be interesting" come up is in the context of griff/being a dick. There are plenty of stories that can be told without that. Conflict in the story sense =/= mindlessly toolboxing everyone you see

[onleavedontatme]

The mindless toolboxing isn't an interesting story, but your reaction to it can lead to one.

And more importantly if you are very strict rules wise against violence to stop the mindless toolboxing, you'll sweep up the other stuff that more often leads to interesting stories as well

[Grazyn]

I think we already experienced the situation Kor is talking about, I recall it was during the last part of SoS reign: basically whenever you arrested someone, you could instantly tell if they were an antag because you would always be bwoinked if they weren't. Needless to say, it was very dull