[Deleted] Ambassador Magikarp -The guy who just third party the election battle royale

[Karp]

Hey hey people, this is karp. Due to an unknown brain condition and tumor suddenly emerging I have decided to genuinely take a real shot at running despite realising the issues associated with running.

Ideally, these are the main things I'd want done/believe in:

1: A tightening around escalation policy to remove edge case scenarios that might still exist.
1.1: Ideally, this would mean the first thing I'd like to see done would be a logical expansion to the sec rules which may already be in escalation policy (You can't kill heads for demoting you for a good reason. Yes, the head of personnel giving you access without giving the head any warning is not a good reason to kill the chief engineer/CMO/rd over because they don't want you to potentially harm the crystal, ruin chemistry, or make bombs over but i can see the negative downsides to this so I'd be wary of adding onto escalation policy as is)
1.2: Said protections could extend to departmental defense within reason(e.g., you can't go to lethals when you've broken into a department unless someone in that department tries lethalling you. Stuns are fine and asking them to leave is fine but the second you do any sort of harm to them you give up any protections you get, the intruder can still disarm and stun though.), but I don't feel too strongly about that myself and even my first suggestion could backfire on our current escalation policy so I'm sorta spitballing ideas, as it is our escalation policy is nearly perfect and ideal short of a few fringe cases which REALLY showcase the issues.

2: Roleplay - Roleplay TENDS to be used as a buzzword for shutting down or countering discussions and an impossible thing to achieve to cry about, but I can genuinely see enough of a community appeal that it might be worth considering testing/debating it out on another server IF the other headmins/players vote in favour of it. I'm not sure what the foundations might be, but again, if it gets voted it likely will be moreso community oriented. I can see the issues with the server lacking population/administration/appeal and dying, which is why I might seem disconnected with the idea unless there's genuine community appeal towards it.
2.1: Yes, the server test thread I ran about did include the /vg/ roleplay test as an example and it may be the best way of gauging if people would give a shit(Poll it, craft slightly tighter rules that anyone can comment/give feedback on, and work with the playerbase's interests to see if people actually give a shit or if it's just a bad meme droned and whined on about by forums warriors and to end that argument)

3: Abuse - This is something that I've personally been irritated by and there is a policy thread about. Short of actual practical ingame abuse, we don't have any method of dealing with and reacting to the conduct of people with any other power(s), even if they may or may not be as bad or even potentially worse than ingame admin abuse. This has targeted and fucked over a lot of people. I'd like practical oversight in subcategories with forum admins/mods/maintainers/discord admins.
3.1: Before seperation memers start screaming at me or MSO starts questioning what i mean by that above: I'd practically assume MSO would be involved with any serious forum admin complaints with genuine power abuse(I'd assume MSO is already on this so it's probably practically useless and will only enable whiners to cry and waste his time... That's kinda because forum admins have so much power and only really trusted people have that rank), forum mods/discord mods being dealt by the headmins with forum mods giving MSO a potential override if he believes something is wrong with how it was dealt with, and maintainer complaints being dealt by our head coder oranges(No, a maintainer deleting your comment/denying your pr is not abuse). I have issues with the forum admin/maintainer sections primarily because it lacks any practical abuse examples outside of a small handful, but adding a public way to genuinely complain may be necessary if oranges/MSO believe it to not be a gigantic waste of time. I can only actually remember one or two incidents of maintainer complaints ever being posted to admin complaints, so I'm not sure if it's a major issue which is why I'd let oranges decide.

4:Administration and bans - This may be a popular or unpopular opinion, but I'd wager we'd have a lot less repeat bad behaviour players if admins helped set people towards a positive direction and acted more towards reforming rather than punishing people, though this is probably more an "What's my opinion on administration" Than practical policy change as any change is likely to have negative consequences that would dissuade it, maybe just encouraging a slight attitude shift in the admin team would be enough
4.1: Ironically, I'm the one in the admin forums who created a thread about revolving door permabans being an issue, I feel like that is just as much an issue as excessively brutal punishments that negatively impact players to the point of quitting/antagonizing the server and the adminstaff. I think we're too kind sometimes on some extreme case players who have multiple permabans due to the nature of said behaviour leading to them ruining the server for a while before they get banned again over breaking the rules. Optimally, if anything happened with either of said points we'd need to slightly encourage a mild alignment of belief within the admin team, which is both a good and a bad thing, we can avoid creating a disaster. Again, musings and not actual policy unless there's genuine appeal for it within the admin/server staff.

addendum:
I think the biggest issues with escalation policy come from enforcement 7/10, and the rest from edge case scenarios.

On the roleplay extra server argument: the biggest killer of any form of public test or new server is actual genuine appeal to both players and administrators.

I think the biggest accomplishment within the admin team over the last few years, which may or may not be hard to grasp without being within it, is the friendliness cooperativeness within the team. A more cooperative team functions better, produces better results, and is more likely to root out abuse. I agree there may be concerns of a friendly team fostering defensive attitudes towards admin abuse, but the alternative is a cutthroat team that is more hostile and willing to do actions that are likely going to be a net negative on the server(if a friend gets complainted zero action will be taken due to the more tribal mentality rather than a softer friendlier punishment, admins will either be really hostile to valid ban appeals by the players or hostile to the admin on valid bans, more general admin-admin misconduct and admin-player abuse happening and being ignored due to them being buddy buddy with the leads).

[Karp]

Thanks for coming to my ted talk, remember to subscribe to my channel and to wait for 15 minutes for me to take Q&A's

[Darkgenerallord]

karp is the most worthy heir to the throne

[Malkraz]

No mention of bringing back suicide wizard. Campaign dead in the water

[subject217]

Hello fish, I had some questions about some of the things you say in this post.

4:Administration and bans - This may be a popular or unpopular opinion, but I'd wager we'd have a lot less repeat bad behaviour players if admins helped set people towards a positive direction and acted more towards reforming rather than punishing people, though this is probably more an "What's my opinion on administration" Than practical policy change as any change is likely to have negative consequences that would dissuade it, maybe just encouraging a slight attitude shift in the admin team would be enough
4.1: Ironically, I'm the one in the admin forums who created a thread about revolving door permabans being an issue, I feel like that is just as much an issue as excessively brutal punishments that negatively impact players to the point of quitting/antagonizing the server and the adminstaff. I think we're too kind sometimes on some extreme case players who have multiple permabans due to the nature of said behaviour leading to them ruining the server for a while before they get banned again over breaking the rules. Optimally, if anything happened with either of said points we'd need to slightly encourage a mild alignment of belief within the admin team, which is both a good and a bad thing, we can avoid creating a disaster. Again, musings and not actual policy unless there's genuine appeal for it within the admin/server staff.

This is a somewhat surprising perspective to me, because if you look in the general SS13 community, /tg/ station is irrefutably on the lenient side of punishment. An easy comparison would be something like Colonial Marines, where if you break the rules as they are written, you get banned, whereas on /tg/ station, we care far more about your intent and rationale than we do explicitly your actions. It's not substantiated but I would say if anything we are too lenient on repeat offenders doing the same sort of stuff that got them banned before. Personally, I always try to explain to a player what they did wrong and what they should do or should have done instead, and that's how I trained every admin that I candidated too.

So, I guess what I'm asking is could you go into more detail on the individual circumstances in which you think we are too harsh. Do you disagree with the few cases where we usually will almost always ban people like murdering others for poor justification or repeated IC in OOC/OOC in IC? Because I feel like the circumstances in which we use this sort of thing are cases where the player has already had what they've done wrong explained to them quite well and they knowingly understand why what they are doing is wrong.

Also I'd like to say that regarding the "revolving door permaban" and repeat offenders I think an important and totally reasonable solution to this is just to try and make permabanned players get positive vouches from other servers before being allowed to return, especially repeat permabanned players. We've used this a bunch in the past and I think we're better for it.

[TehSteveo]

Karp is a good boy.

[gum disease]

This lad is the kind of magikarp that uses splash (and it actually does something good).

I believe.

[Zarniwoop]

A good choice. I think this community benefits from the lack of restrictions RP necessitates, though. People still RP and it's actually pretty nice what kind of absurd crap they come up with in this loose setting.

[Karp]

Hello fish, I had some questions about some of the things you say in this post.

4:Administration and bans - This may be a popular or unpopular opinion, but I'd wager we'd have a lot less repeat bad behaviour players if admins helped set people towards a positive direction and acted more towards reforming rather than punishing people, though this is probably more an "What's my opinion on administration" Than practical policy change as any change is likely to have negative consequences that would dissuade it, maybe just encouraging a slight attitude shift in the admin team would be enough
4.1: Ironically, I'm the one in the admin forums who created a thread about revolving door permabans being an issue, I feel like that is just as much an issue as excessively brutal punishments that negatively impact players to the point of quitting/antagonizing the server and the adminstaff. I think we're too kind sometimes on some extreme case players who have multiple permabans due to the nature of said behaviour leading to them ruining the server for a while before they get banned again over breaking the rules. Optimally, if anything happened with either of said points we'd need to slightly encourage a mild alignment of belief within the admin team, which is both a good and a bad thing, we can avoid creating a disaster. Again, musings and not actual policy unless there's genuine appeal for it within the admin/server staff.

This is a somewhat surprising perspective to me, because if you look in the general SS13 community, /tg/ station is irrefutably on the lenient side of punishment. An easy comparison would be something like Colonial Marines, where if you break the rules as they are written, you get banned, whereas on /tg/ station, we care far more about your intent and rationale than we do explicitly your actions. It's not substantiated but I would say if anything we are too lenient on repeat offenders doing the same sort of stuff that got them banned before. Personally, I always try to explain to a player what they did wrong and what they should do or should have done instead, and that's how I trained every admin that I candidated too.

So, I guess what I'm asking is could you go into more detail on the individual circumstances in which you think we are too harsh. Do you disagree with the few cases where we usually will almost always ban people like murdering others for poor justification or repeated IC in OOC/OOC in IC? Because I feel like the circumstances in which we use this sort of thing are cases where the player has already had what they've done wrong explained to them quite well and they knowingly understand why what they are doing is wrong.

Also I'd like to say that regarding the "revolving door permaban" and repeat offenders I think an important and totally reasonable solution to this is just to try and make permabanned players get positive vouches from other servers before being allowed to return, especially repeat permabanned players. We've used this a bunch in the past and I think we're better for it.

I guess I made a mistake in wording, I should've said admin harassment of players, but one of my points does relate towards an example so it's still fitting, but needs information. I feel as if a lot of our most infamous and noted players may change if we give them a more hospitable environment and genuine chance to change their behavior. A lot of them didn't start out being constantly warned and noted, and likely were less hostile to the admin team in the past before they felt someone wronged them. I'm not referencing any rules intentionally as I don't feel like making them lighter/harsher without a genuine community outcry or seriously good point being made.

I can't discuss ckeys so I'll discuss an example you can publically see and dig up on (PM me if you want me to remove it btw limi) limi, look at their history before on tgdb and after. They went from a consistently noted/warned/punished player into someone who got admin candidated and became more of a model player while still doing hilarious stuff. There are a decent chunk of players with bad histories who aren't bad players, they just haven't been given any chance to act good and they feel or may have been mistreated by the admin team being unnecessarily harsh due to their past history.

I dislike the revolving door permaban system we have where people get unbanned after 6 months just to get permabanned in 2-3 months, but I think one of the hardest things the admin team would have to do on that end would be to have more unified ideals when it comes to punishments, primarily attempting to reforming players rather than punishing them, so people who just ruin the game experience when they're unbanned before they trip up can actually stay banned until they personally change as a person. The vouch thing happens under our current system where we ask people with 3-4 permas under their belt to get a vouch, but a lot can fall back into their old behaviour that got them banned due to no serious changes happening(Or their past history trips them up and even though they act like any other player they still get banned!).

A good choice. I think this community benefits from the lack of restrictions RP necessitates, though. People still RP and it's actually pretty nice what kind of absurd crap they come up with in this loose setting.

I agree that it makes it a unique gem on station, but my suggestion purely relates to making another server that acts in this way if popular. It's a way to both add new and old players who might be burnt out of some action or might want to dip their feet in /tg/ and allow them to just relax. My plan would be player poll+admin poll>community discussion on rules>1-2 week advanced warning and notice before the test goes up>test goes up for 1 week. Ideally the plan shouldn't impact bagil/sybil/terry and instead bring in more burnt out players and newer ones but it might pull some of the people on bagil or sybil that add spice with their rp/gimmick, which is a good point I haven't fully considered until now. Thank you.