/tg/Station 13

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?

Some people don't ahelp since they think nothing will be done, or mistakenly think it's an antag, or are people who have unusually immense patience and tolerance. Some people forget they can ahelp. In all of these cases it's possible the server benefits from an admin noticing and intervening.

In other words someone not ahelping does not automatically equate to a free pass and never will.

I recall more than one incident of people getting salty after getting their knuckles rapped, not because they hadn't fucked up, but because the person they'd wronged was an admin they obviously called in another admin to shit on them - and what they took away wasn't "don't be a dick" but "don't be a dick to the wrong person".
Like literally people salting to each other like "ugh of COURSE they HAD to be someone who was buddies with the admins" as though it would have been perfectly fine for them to act like an asshole to any other player.

Some people have hangups about ahelping for whatever reason though, so sometimes this ends up ringing true that people can act like shits towards anyone who isn't inclined to speak up

Sometimes things aren't IC incidents or don't look like IC incidents, and they throw up red flags.

If you set off a welderbomb, for example, we get a big notification that you've done so, and what we typically do is check to see if you're an antag or not, and if you're not, it's not uncommon to throw you a quick message to let us know when you have a chance why you did that.

If we happen to see you doing something that looks shady, a lot of times there will be a quick Q&A to see if it's actually shady or not.

Very nearly all of these types of things go without anything happening because everything is just fine. While it's true that admins are primarily guided by ahelps from players, there are a lot of things that are visible to us and a lot of player behaviors that it's better to get verification about early on rather than allow to continue.

If you feel like this is 'admins getting involved in IC issues,' I'd argue that for the most part, the things that at least I ping people are about are things that don't look like IC issues from above. As I said, most of the time, however, they are in fact IC issues, and nothing happens.

tl;dr: We only reach out or even pay attention to you without an ahelp if something seems weird or you do something violent that gets logged and printed to the console as a non-antag, or if we randomly see you doing something shitty while zooming past. Most of the time we'll investigate a little bit before we even talk to you. If you didn't do anything stupid you either have nothing to worry about or you can file an admin complaint or appeal if you feel it was mishandled.

You're making an awful lot of posts that have ancillary relation to your weekban and your dumb arguments against it, dude, and it's completely obvious.

I think the situation he's talking about probably didn't warrant me bwoinking him for something, but people in deadchat were talking about it, so I figured I should at least take a look.

But yeah, there's literally zero problems with an admin seeing something shady and looking into it. Stop acting like being bwoinked is the end of the world.

feem wrote: your dumb arguments against it

Vekter wrote:Stop acting like being bwoinked is the end of the world.

I'm lovin' the "umad" and the "it's just a game" quips guys, but really I get enough attention and I don't need you referencing me in every single post I make when I'm asking actual questions.
Anyways thanks for the insight.

I think admins should largely not be involving themselves without ahelps unless the person in question is doing something catastrophic like bombing or destroying the engine.

OOC micromanaging and encouraging people to be aggrieved by every little slight is not healthy for the game long term.

From a personal standpoint it'd also actively make the game worse for me if an admin banned someone I was in a spat with rather than letting me have my insane IC revenge scheme or I was near AFK as security because the criminals had all gotten warned before I'd gotten a chance to solve a crime.

[quote="Kor"]I think admins should largely not be involving themselves without ahelps unless the person in question is doing something catastrophic like bombing or destroying the engine.
How do you feel about the hot fresh meme still running strong known as antag murderboning the entire station with the "Steal a mole of plasma" objective or variant thereof? Not like there's a rule unless they specifically keep the shuttle from being called with basically everyone dead or camping arrivals.

How do you feel about the hot fresh meme still running strong known as antag murderboning the entire station with the "Steal a mole of plasma" objective or variant thereof? Not like there's a rule unless they specifically keep the shuttle from being called with basically everyone dead or camping arrivals.

are you a newfag or some shit
they are antags, they can fuck up the station ALL THEY WANT. you will die, you will deal with it, you will play like the rest of us. if you hate murderbones that much then switch servers or leave ss13

I'm pretty sure the point is admins generally won't care without people ahelping unless you're seriously being shitty and or pulling the same dumb things over and over and over for multiple rounds/days/weeks.

kevinz000 wrote:I'm pretty sure the point is admins generally won't care without people ahelping unless you're seriously being shitty and or pulling the same dumb things over and over and over for multiple rounds/days/weeks.

This is the crux of it.

Don't be shit. If an admin is shit to you, admin complaint or appeal that shit.

naltronix wrote:

How do you feel about the hot fresh meme still running strong known as antag murderboning the entire station with the "Steal a mole of plasma" objective or variant thereof? Not like there's a rule unless they specifically keep the shuttle from being called with basically everyone dead or camping arrivals.

are you a newfag or some shit
they are antags, they can fuck up the station ALL THEY WANT. you will die, you will deal with it, you will play like the rest of us. if you hate murderbones that much then switch servers or leave ss13

>Joined: Wed Aug 02, 2017 10:33 pm

I mean, it is like this, it doesn't have to necessarily be. If someone murderbones with the same old shit like ebow esword, it's something everyone has seen a thousand times, it does get boring, and a ton of people don't get to play for the round OR spectate something interesting because one guy thinks that turning sprites horizontal is just the best.

kevinz000 wrote:I'm pretty sure the point is admins generally won't care without people ahelping unless you're seriously being shitty and or pulling the same dumb things over and over and over for multiple rounds/days/weeks.

Sometimes, they don't even seem to care when people do.
Just like everything else. It depends on the Admin, and free-forming it is really not a good way of going about it.
It just opens up a can of worms where one thing is shitty one day but not the next. It literally makes no sense.
And it breeds the feeling that admins are selectively choosing when to enforce things. Even if it's not the intention or true.

TL;DR Bring Saegrimr back. He may have been overly harsh but at-least he was consistent.

There are a few things that are missing from your analysis:

1) Sometimes admins fail to get back to the people who reported something if it's the kind of thing that can be investigated without asking too much of the first party (that's on the admins, and I've done this myself before -- sorry)
2) There are a lot of times where admins aren't on or have to leave in the middle of something, same as when a player has to leave in the middle of a round for whatever reason
3) Players get upset with admins if they DO intervene; players get upset with admins if they DON'T intervene; admins and headmins are constantly refining their process and learning from what players want, which, yes, can lead to some inconsistency, but it usually isn't done with the intent of being inconsistent or playing favorites, it's done with the intent of wanting to improve and take into account more players' playstyles (for example, I've become a LOT more lax with things since I've been an admin, even when I'm playing)
4) What you see as 'harsh but consistent' is essentially an admin who refused to listen to player stories or allow players to have their stories if they didn't fit the rules-based narrative. Is that really something you want? A lot of my favorite memories of this game as a player come from situations where the rules were allowed to be bent a little (e.g. emergent gameplay from letting a captain go a little wild, so long as they accepted the IC consequences of it, et al).

There is no win here. There's only an ongoing attempt to keep players' attempts to kill each other inside the round instead of everywhere else.

I expect basically three things from players:
* Don't intentionally violate the rules without consideration for the fact the people playing the game are real people
* Hold admins and other players accountable for taking the time to make the same consideration of you and others
* Use a modicum of sense and thought when interpreting others' actions and trying to decide what yours should be, or at least apply that sense and thought to understanding the outcome of a heated situation

Players are EMPOWERED to audit admin behavior, and WE WOULD BE BETTER OFF if they were more communicative with the admins as a collective body, and if admins were generally more receptive to that audit. That doesn't mean be a dick about it and open twenty threads about the same issue, or spend most of a day filing tickets about every admin that has ever done something that you didn't think ended up in your favor. But it does mean that if you think favoritism is in effect and have a specific example of it, speak up about it.

As has been discussed in numerous other threads, only some of our rules are cut and dry enough to be straight up enforced without some amount of consideration, and historically players have really preferred some amount of nuance and decorum to blanket application of an individual interpretation.

There are a number of problems with "don't do anything unless no one ahelps":

- The whole admin alert system exists to immediately draw admins' attention to potentially bad things, like bombings or releasing deadly gas (there was a bug with that resulting in false alarms, it has now been fixed). If admins aren't allowed to act on a situation without an ahelp, then you might as well not have the alert and leave the relevant info in round logs.

- There are things against the rules that people rarely ahelp, like IC in OOC/OOC in IC. No matter how often we tell players to ahelp this stuff, they rarely do. (Leading to, respectively, "OOC-shaming" and complaints that the admins let X get away with oocky in the icky when they just didn't have any way of seeing it.)

- Off of ausops' point, everyone's threshold for ahelping is much different and varies per person based on how salty they are at the moment, etc. Some people ahelp any time they get bumped in the hallways. Other people barely do it at all. You'd end up ignoring the latter and over-catering to the people who ahelp every sneeze, a massive waste of everyone's time.

- Specifically, it often takes new players a long time to realize they can ahelp at all (the adminhelp verb is hidden in BYOND's excellent UI of a tab system, a tab with the unintuitive-to-non-admins name "Admin"), and "new player gets griefed and doesn't get help for it" is more or less the worst case scenario for that player.

Counterpoint, if a player breaks a rule and everyone thinks it was fun/funny/innocent/nondisruptive enough to not bother ahelping, why should anyone be warned or punished?

Wyzack wrote:Counterpoint, if a player breaks a rule and everyone thinks it was fun/funny/innocent/nondisruptive enough to not bother ahelping, why should anyone be warned or punished?

There are many cases of this happening I'm sure. The admins who step in anyway have sticks up their asses or are trying to prove a point. Or maybe that's how they get their rocks off by asserting their Alpha Male dominance on a pixel game because they hold "power"

If a guy is being griefed and he's okay with it, then I'd just tell the griefer to fuck off with doing that so he knows it's not okay to do to someone who might get more easily offended. I agree with Wyzack- If at any point a rule breaker is being nondisruptive or it's funny, they definitely should not be banned because funny shit, even if it breaks a few rules, is the core of ss13 and without it what would we have?

Wyzack wrote:Counterpoint, if a player breaks a rule and everyone thinks it was fun/funny/innocent/nondisruptive enough to not bother ahelping, why should anyone be warned or punished?

Counter-counter point some people hold off on ahelping because they believe their aggressor to be an antag in the face of obvious antag-like behavior or otherwise behavior so blatantly against the rules that surely there must be an OOC reason for it
Admins can actually see the information players can't and can step in to intervene when a player just acts like a shithead and then outright admits to breaking the rules
Counter-counter-counter point if you tell an admin you're metagrudging when they try to ask you whats up and then make 5 different policy discussions trying to justify your actions afterwards does it still make a sound

lol fair. Maybe we should just make it more clear to players when they should and should not ahelp, perhaps in the MOTD or the rules page or something

remember the part where i said most of the time when we ask questions nothing happens?

a lot of those are situations where something looks fishy but it turns out to be hilarious and that's a-ok

Wyzack wrote:lol fair. Maybe we should just make it more clear to players when they should and should not ahelp, perhaps in the MOTD or the rules page or something

there's a worryingly high amount of the population (well, on sybil, I guess) that don't ahelp because "admins wont do anything anyways" or something similar

Qbopper wrote:there's a worryingly high amount of the population (well, on sybil, I guess) that don't ahelp because "admins wont do anything anyways" or something similar

and there's a similar subset of the population that says that admins do too much (see: this thread)

Qbopper wrote:

Wyzack wrote:lol fair. Maybe we should just make it more clear to players when they should and should not ahelp, perhaps in the MOTD or the rules page or something

there's a worryingly high amount of the population (well, on sybil, I guess) that don't ahelp because "admins wont do anything anyways" or something similar

and if they don't ahelp then that just ensures that the admins don't do anything

really makes you think

So admins are literally Hitlers who ban for slight grievances even when no one reports it but also Who always IC issue things to the point where people don't ahelp because nothing will be done?

ExcessiveJMadison wrote:So admins are literally Hitlers who ban for slight grievances even when no one reports it but also Who always IC issue things to the point where people don't ahelp because nothing will be done?

this is essentially the combined party line of the loudest players

the best part is when someone expresses those two sentiments in the same post/whatever

ExcessiveJMadison wrote:So admins are literally Hitlers who ban for slight grievances even when no one reports it but also Who always IC issue things to the point where people don't ahelp because nothing will be done?

Depends on whether you are ahelping or being ahelped about

Also our rules are so flexible that we can have two people like me and Sweaterkittens on the same admin team both enforcing the same ruleset and get completely opposite results for your ahelp depending on who is online

Kor wrote:Also our rules are so flexible that we can have two people like me and Sweaterkittens on the same admin team both enforcing the same ruleset and get completely opposite results for your ahelp depending on who is online

We should have a thread dedicated to good DM tips and tricks for admins in hopes they're more on your side of the fence :^).

I just did a quick google search and found this gem

TIP 3: PRIORITIZE THE GAMING EXPERIENCE OVER THE GAME’S RULES

A good DM has a solid footing in the rules. At the same time, while they are gods of the universe they’re in, they’re also humans in this universe and nobody should expect their DM to be all-knowing about the rules.

In fact, even Christopher Perkins—who has DM’d for decades and who wrote rules for and designed multiple editions of Dungeons and Dragons including the current edition—doesn’t always know how to apply the rules. In the situation when his players (Acquisitions Inc. at PAX 2014) wanted to impale a flying dragon with their zeppelin, he chose to prioritize the experience over the rules. His lack of knowledge didn’t hinder the players’ experiences.

A great DM says yes first and facilitates the actions and decisions of the players. Players can do what they want, but they may face future consequences for it. Such decisions in particular may make for great roleplaying hooks later on.

Perhaps one of Shap's best comments to me to which I will admit I have a hard time conveying to my trainees is that enforcing the rules is really secondary to being an admin. The single most important aspect is creating a fun experience for players where the code or the natural RNG "DM" lacks.

Okay but then practically this translates to borgs getting noted for building cool stuff that is potentially dangerous because someone got pushed into it by no fault of the borg which seems to be in direct conflict with this

Wyzack wrote:Okay but then practically this translates to borgs getting noted for building cool stuff that is potentially dangerous because someone got pushed into it by no fault of the borg which seems to be in direct conflict with this

this sounds like my note appeal

Wyzack wrote:Okay but then practically this translates to borgs getting noted for building cool stuff that is potentially dangerous because someone got pushed into it by no fault of the borg which seems to be in direct conflict with this

Please stop making notes scary. The note exists to inform other admins that he's been asked to be careful with building dangerous projects as an ASIMOV borg.

So long as he doesn't continue building dangerous projects as an ASIMOV borg, nothing will come of the note as with most other notes.

I am not talking about notes being scary, I am talking about them being used to discourage certain in-game acts. You say in one post that the rules should come secondary to facilitating an interesting game experience, and yet a borg not being able to safety his project followed by someone being negligently pushed in and killed which i personally think is kinda funny and certainly interesting is specifically forbade.

Everything is a learning experience.

A note indicates that something that happened has been talked about with admins and that the admin is now confident that you understand why that something should probably be handled a little differently next time.

Don't be afraid of notes, don't be afraid of learning, don't be afraid of changing your playstyles.

If you refuse to change your playstyle and what you've done the next time you're talked to has skirted the rules or been a straight-up violation of the rules, that's when the note becomes relevant, because it indicates that either you didn't actually understand what we talked about or that you're choosing to disregard the guidance.

Notes should only be scary if 1) they're poorly written -- in which case, file an appeal, 2) you're unwilling to modify behavior to fit the rules.

Notes are scary though. Negative notes impact whether a situation is an OOC one, whether you are gonna get banned, how long you will be banned, chances at getting admin, your chances in appeals, and even your chances on other servers.

You can play for hundreds of rounds without admin attention and you'll still get more negative treatment from the next admin when they see you got a note for similar behavior a month ago and assume its part of a pattern that warrants being ejected from the server

If you regularly come close to breaking the rules without actually breaking them, it will be treated as the rules being broken.
Repeated instances of the same rules being broken may be met with harsher consequences. Baiting people into escalations or situations where you can report them to admins will be dealt with harshly.

Rule 7 requires that we monitor for repeated behavior.

How is that done without notes?

I think players with a regularly detrimental style will make a name for themselves pretty quickly without having to note every little interaction they have. I realize most admins wont like that answer though so I am not sure.

It is just a mess to have general monitoring and notekeeping mixed with a "criminal record"

There is also zero definition of "regularly" so once you get a note for a behavior once its no longer about how often it is, but whether it (or something similar) ever happens again.

So we just not note people and expect to base our bans off of """"general notoriety""""? Is that what you /really/ want?

"Listen I can't really point to anything but you're not worth having on the server" is surely going to be a great time for everyone involved and will probably just end up with admins creating a secret note system anyways.

Kor wrote:Notes are scary though. Negative notes impact whether a situation is an OOC one, whether you are gonna get banned, how long you will be banned, chances at getting admin, your chances in appeals, and even your chances on other servers.

You can play for hundreds of rounds without admin attention and you'll still get more negative treatment from the next admin when they see you got a note for similar behavior a month ago and assume its part of a pattern that warrants being ejected from the server

Notes are only as scary as the admin being tasked with viewing them. I would hate Saeg looking at my notes if I was in trouble but I probably wouldn't mind MrAlphonzo looking at them, for instance.

When you paint admins as big scary nofunallowed individuals, notes are very scary. We should focus on changing the perception of admins [and part of that is how we as admins act] rather than the note system which works fine.

again, admins are expected to look at timestamps and roughly cross-check with connection dates

there also seems to be some confusion over the necessity of notes with excessive noting

It sounds bad when put like that, but "do something that isnt against the rules that one of 40 admins (who cant even agree on our actual rules) takes issue with and you will end up on indefinite probabtion" is also not fair.

Kor wrote:I think players ... will make a name for themselves pretty quickly

kor, this is probably just me because i have memory problems, but i honestly have a hard time remembering which players are which without looking at notes

My next post was gonna be how I personally just tell people to cut it out and start leaving notes later if they persist, feem is a mindreader.

the problem with "shitty players will become known" is that it is difficult to justify without concrete proof -- i.e. notes -- and also blows the door wide open to subjective judgment. some players bug the shit out of me, I actively dislike interacting with them, but it'd be terrible if I cited that alone as a reason to ban. even the most seemingly unambiguous Rule 0 cases end up drawing massive amounts of shit.

Well how do school teachers do it? They manage to keep notes and judge students fairly without relying only on notes given by a different teacher. What is their secret? Meetings. You hold periodic admin meetings where you discuss the behaviour of players who got most notes in the latest period, every admin who had experience with them shares his feedback and at the end a decision is reached to outright ban them or to replace all previous notes with a generic note which details his most common behaviour. That, and all notes are removed after a fixed period of time if the player was never named in a meeting.

Except in my experience different teachers have different rules for the classroom past obvious ones like no cheating on tests

This is exactly the same with admins, see adminshopping, that's what meetings should be for, to reach common ground and get everyone on the same level about problematic players

Grazyn wrote:Well how do school teachers do it? They manage to keep notes and judge students fairly without relying only on notes given by a different teacher. What is their secret? Meetings. You hold periodic admin meetings where you discuss the behaviour of players who got most notes in the latest period, every admin who had experience with them shares his feedback and at the end a decision is reached to outright ban them or to replace all previous notes with a generic note which details his most common behaviour. That, and all notes are removed after a fixed period of time if the player was never named in a meeting.

(Mr. Bone voice) it goes on their PEEEEEEEEEEEEERMANENT RECORD

EDIT: for people who are too young to play

Grazyn wrote:Well how do school teachers do it? They manage to keep notes and judge students fairly without relying only on notes given by a different teacher. What is their secret? Meetings. You hold periodic admin meetings where you discuss the behaviour of players who got most notes in the latest period, every admin who had experience with them shares his feedback and at the end a decision is reached to outright ban them or to replace all previous notes with a generic note which details his most common behaviour. That, and all notes are removed after a fixed period of time if the player was never named in a meeting.

I doubt most admins wants to start holding some scheduled meeting to discuss players. I know for myself being as mostly any meetings I've partaken in any previous iteration in other games and professionally usually result in nothing much different than what is already done.