/tg/Station 13

My question is related to this ban appeal: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18603

tl;dr player gets jobbanned for running a dangerous engine setup that, despite his precautions, caused it to explode.

Should players honestly be punished with bans for experimenting with an engine that is practically made for experimentation? Of course I don't mean players who blow up the engine every single round.

I think there's more to the ban than just running an engine too hot. The explanation at the time was insufficient and probably sounded like trolling.
Delamming isn't hard or takes very long, shit going wrong just happens sometimes and if it was properly explained I really hope that's not something punishable.

Experimenting with the SM is like experimenting with toxins.

You're welcome to do it, but if you end up killing people or risking delamming a large section of the station you shouldn't be surprised if you end up catching a bwoink

A little more leniency is given for delams that happen out of lack of knowledge/negligence on normal set ups, since everyone has to learn somehow. But if you start trying to put the engine in a critical-adjacent state the expectation is that you will atleast know enough to recover the SM from that critical state should things go bad.

But also what Saeg said.

The whole reason the SME is exciting is that you might have to do damage control to avoid being blown up, and then might fail. Losing is part of the game. Bwoink fear preventing experimentation would be really unfortunate.

Without commenting on the specific ban (tl;dr), some advice to players who want a more sympathetic treatment on this: instruct the crew to leave the area, minimize the explosion radius (there is a strat to this), if it's gonna blow then fight to the last & go down with the ship.

It is sad that players can get away with delaminating the supermatter every round and claim (possibly feign) incompetence, and players who genuinely make a mistake get a ban thrown in their face. I personally think a short ban in ALL cases would be good incentive not to mess up, however this dumb inconsistency with admins is very disappointing.

By ban I mean job ban or even a note just to keep track in the case of a repeat offender (perhaps they're doing it on purpose at that point), or literally just talked to if it's a first time thing.

In that case in particular he got slam dunked by a shock and slime wombo combo so it's not like he even had the ability to save it despite being there and trying. I've been put into near crit just from a gravity anomaly spawning and lobbing an entire locker full of junk at me repeatedly.
Which is why I can't agree with:

zaracka wrote:I personally think a short ban in ALL cases would be good incentive not to mess up, however this dumb inconsistency with admins is very disappointing.

In that case in particular he got slam dunked by a shock and slime wombo combo so it's not like he even had the ability to save it despite being there and trying. I've been put into near crit just from a gravity anomaly spawning and lobbing an entire locker full of junk at me repeatedly.

Yes, critical SMs are a bitch to manage due to the constant anomalies. It's probably a good reason to not put the SM into a critical-adjacent state unless you're *really* certain about what you're doing.

I don't think a ban/note every time the SM delams is a good idea, both because blame can rarely be directly assigned (Is the absent CE who's been playing with the slot machines in the bar more to blame for a delammed SM then the engineer who bypassed the whole cooling loop accidentally/mistakenly? What about the AI who didn't turn off the emitters? Etc etc.) and because it misses the point (sometimes the SM delamming is no one's fault, in the case of antagonist action/random meteor KOing the cooling loop/etc)

To hearken back to the days of Tesla/Singulo engines, think of it like setting up an experimental Tesla set up on the bridge. By all means, go wild, but if you end up loosing a tesla in the middle of the station don't be shocked if you end up getting at least a cursory bwoink.

Noting people who delam the engine as a non-antag is probably the best bet instead of a hard and fast ban. Incompetence is part of the game and taking risks with experimental setups is the best part of being a non-antag engineer.

Use notes, establish a pattern before handing out bans when it comes to experimental engine setups.

Not a fan of punishing players for genuine experimentation, even if they fuck up. There are numerous reasons to encourage it because it's as a whole way more enjoyable for everyone, even if an accident happens.

If you DO want to go down this way though it's also very important to notice if there are genuine modifications to the engine vs just plain out sabotage, and if someone makes a genuine attempt I think they should be exempt from punishment unless there's heavily repeated obviously suspicious behaviour.

At the end of the day the game should be rewarding experimentation in the face of high risk. Toxins doesnt have as high of a risk unless you mess up with a tank transfer valve or overperssurize something until it blows due to the only real detonation method being the assemblies or opening the actual valve, which is an understandable mistake to a new player that generally gets forgiven with a note saying that they know better now anyways.

Don't take my suggestion as absolute, it's just a better rule of thumb than going halfway and punishing someone for a one-time thing when the supermatter is delaminating every round from some kind of non-antag mess up and nobody punished in the latter cases. You can make a billion edge case reasons for why the current rules are bad. Some admins discern the right action using common sense, others go by the book in relatively ridiculous circumstances. Maybe it's okay engineering is exploding every round because X player was too lazy to read the wiki. The first time I set up the engine, I did it thinking I'd get banned if I messed up, so I didn't mess up. In the very least, the ban in question should never have happened based on the severity and precedent that's already set.

The example Saegrimr gives is interesting. In cases like that, the engineer has no way to fix what went wrong, however that's not to say they couldn't have not done the actions that led to it happening. This is assuming there isn't any antagonist interference. However, it seems pretty obvious that it was an innocent mistake and not malicious.

"Critical-adjacent state" seems like some kind of buzzword with no real definition.

zaracka wrote: "Critical-adjacent state" seems like some kind of buzzword with no real definition.

You realize the SM has a literal, code defined critical point right?

zaracka wrote:Maybe it's okay engineering is exploding every round because X player was too lazy to read the wiki. The first time I set up the engine, I did it thinking I'd get banned if I messed up, so I didn't mess up.

And congrats, you made a perfectly safe boring engine that does nothing but supply enough power to keep the station going aside from cargo complaining they're last in line on the APC grid.
If that's the goal then anybody can and should be expected not to fuck up too badly. When you start wanting to do "fun" things like make cans of pluox or whatever else, or wank over voltages that could fry a conga line of assistants in a single wire snip, that's when the engine experimentation begins.

I mean shit back in the day there wasn't anything to do with the singularity, so we made two singularities. Or 4 in a 2x2 grid.
Then Tesla came around and it was the same shit, nothing to do so we tried to fit as many balls as possible into the containment grid for no reason other than to giggle at scientific notation on our multimeters.

Yeah, people are messing up the default "boring" setup and causing non-antag delam.

@Arianya please elaborate

And yet oranges refuses to add a perfectly good station map because it has the wrong engine in


edit: okay I didn't really read the thread having just gotten out of bed this will be edited when I'm awake

What we need is a hybrid setup where the crystal comes in a crate in secure storage and you can choose. Anomalies will be less of a problem that way and can be literally farmed.

it's more than the crystal, though
singulo and tesla are interchangeable because of minimal differences in setup
sm is a completely different beast

True, I have no idea how it could work, but if it somehow could it would be amazing.

Should have been weekbaned from the job instead of permabanned from it. Unless he has prior offenses.

Imagine being an admin and barely knowing atmos.

Back then, f I didn't talk to other admins that actually knew atmos then SM sabotage would've been impossible for me to investigate ESPECIALLY if the sm exploded and I was just left with logs that make me wonder what the fuck is even going on.

Personally I prefer if you just experiment on private servers because the explosion is a 99% chance of the shuttle being called. It's very rare where both the issue of power and reconstruction is handled without a massive amount of dead people. If you can't solve all three issues then the shuttle is the most appealing option than having no power/having a giant space hole/letting Wanker McCock murderbone more players.

Ayy Lemoh wrote:Imagine being an admin and barely knowing atmos.

If you can't figure out atmos... I don't know what to say. I mean.. the game pretty much spells it out what atmos is and what it does ect ect. Its really not hard to figure out. That's kinda like not knowing about what the AI can do. You just have to play the game. If you don't know about atmos and you are a admin then you probably should learn quickly... as this whole game is based around atmos.

Admins aren’t ever going to agree on this.

I’m of the personal opinion you’re SUPPOSE to run wacky setups. It wouldn’t be fun to have the option of mixing gasses of various compositions only for admins to say “no u have to use the wiki or ban”. Telling people to do it on private servers isn’t fun either. People are going to die in this game to dumb stuff like the sm blowing up, you need to deal with it as it’s part of the game.

That said if it heck’s up it’s you need to try to fix it.

And yes I know atmos enough to discern experimenting and griefing

We added anomaly neutralizers so engineering can experiment with it to get relatively valuable and rare anomaly cores.
Experimentation should be encouraged, but this is assuming hte person experimenting knows enough about the engine to fix it should they fuck shit up.
Things do happen that's out of our control. Spacedust could cut the loop while you're experimenting. You could miscalculate. A traitor could walk in and ebow you. Shit happens.
That should all be acceptable, but what shouldn't be acceptable is people who don't know enough about the engine and atmospherics(this is basically an atmospheric based engine.) doing it without a clue on how to operate it or to recover it. You need to learn to walk before you run, and if you fuck up running before you learn to walk, you fall (get bwoinked/punished).
If they do know how to do it, I'd say the minimal expectation is they try their best to fix it, but if they can't, well, science is science.

Speaking from a gameplay perspective, what is the best way to contain a delamination explosion so the damage is contained mainly to engineering and doesnt take out half of the dorms on Metastation or kills the botanists on Delta?

R-Wall ring? RCDing a regular wall barrier 3 tiles thick? I wish there were more ways to dampen explosions.

starmute wrote:If you can't figure out atmos... I don't know what to say. I mean.

let me rephrase that:

I don't know how a fucking SM engine works. EDIT: ish. I know what some things are but eh.

Bonus points during a time where ALLEGEDLY the supermatter guide page on the wiki was actually false and would make you delaminate the crystal. Not sure if that was ever changed.

EDIT:

Dr_bee wrote:R-Wall ring? RCDing a regular wall barrier 3 tiles thick? I wish there were more ways to dampen explosions.

You aren't going to stop the SM delamination explosion by just spamming walls ESPECIALLY if it's not even an explosion and is instead a tesla or singularity however I think that's really hard to make on pure accident.

A very large part of this game is having crazy stuff happen and things go wrong. Restricting that to antagonists only will make the game stale and boring. Players should be allowed to experiment with the SM engine as much as they'd like as long as they show a good faith effort to fix it when/if it fucks up. Sometimes things out of your control will happen and that's a part of the game.

A bwoink should be expected if you fuck it up but I don't think it should go any farther than a bwoink if it was truly experimentation.

BeeSting12 wrote:A bwoink should be expected if you fuck it up but I don't think it should go any farther than a bwoink if it was truly experimentation.

How do you tell if it's even experimentation at some point and not grief, though?

If you get there after the SM explodes then you are only left with atmospheric and supermatter logs. Can't remember what it would show normally but I don't think it was enough information for a clear answer of whether or not it was experimentation without really knowing what you're doing. EDIT: well it actually can be enough however I mean really complex shit and not just someone dumping hot plasma into the SM.

Think I remember Kor or someone saying that letting a griefer go is better than banning an innocent player however I still feel that this is fucky territory.

From what I can see, a player was banned for playing the game. Assuming they should "know what they're doing" when not following a wiki setup, but not scrutinizing those who mess up the default wiki setup is very weird. Either do something in the more detrimental case too so as to fix the actual problem plaguing round after round or have the common sense not to block a real IRL person from playing an awesome !!!!atmos!!!! simulation for a one-time mistake.

If it's somehow obvious it was grief, ban them. Can you really say it was that in this case though? Innocent before guilty, get the logs, onus is on the administration to prove that especially when griefers are using that principle to get away with things on the daily.

the player was banned because they said "I know what I'm doing dont worry" then immediately blew the engine in ways that would not have been possible had he known what he was doing as I understand it

the real question is do we let anyone delaminate the SM and claim incompetence when its apparently very easy to use the wiki and set it up properly, a wiki you can find through a button on the game, and multiple books inside the game.

Nilons wrote:the player was banned because they said "I know what I'm doing dont worry" then immediately blew the engine in ways that would not have been possible had he known what he was doing as I understand it

the real question is do we let anyone delaminate the SM and claim incompetence when its apparently very easy to use the wiki and set it up properly, a wiki you can find through a button on the game, and multiple books inside the game.

You let them do it once, if they start doing it more than once then there is a problem. Establish a pattern of behavior before hitting the ban hammer for griffing the engine.

Dr_bee wrote:

Nilons wrote:the player was banned because they said "I know what I'm doing dont worry" then immediately blew the engine in ways that would not have been possible had he known what he was doing as I understand it

the real question is do we let anyone delaminate the SM and claim incompetence when its apparently very easy to use the wiki and set it up properly, a wiki you can find through a button on the game, and multiple books inside the game.

You let them do it once, if they start doing it more than once then there is a problem. Establish a pattern of behavior before hitting the ban hammer for griffing the engine.

Hard rules like this where you give them 1 strike don't work and especially don't work if they do it when different admins are around assuming they go unnoted, which is in and of itself a punishment

Nilons wrote:

Dr_bee wrote:

Nilons wrote:the player was banned because they said "I know what I'm doing dont worry" then immediately blew the engine in ways that would not have been possible had he known what he was doing as I understand it

the real question is do we let anyone delaminate the SM and claim incompetence when its apparently very easy to use the wiki and set it up properly, a wiki you can find through a button on the game, and multiple books inside the game.

You let them do it once, if they start doing it more than once then there is a problem. Establish a pattern of behavior before hitting the ban hammer for griffing the engine.

Hard rules like this where you give them 1 strike don't work and especially don't work if they do it when different admins are around assuming they go unnoted, which is in and of itself a punishment

But the guy did know what he was doing. He just got fucked by a slime and an anomaly he had no way of controlling.

The ban is fucking stupid

No, it's not stupid, he was fucking stupid to attempt make the SM critical without a hotshot crew of engineers to back him and he's played long enough to understand that.

You don't make the SM critical by yourself because of this exact reason.

You want at least one other person, and ideally an engineering borg involved.

D&B wrote:

Nilons wrote:

Dr_bee wrote:

Nilons wrote:the player was banned because they said "I know what I'm doing dont worry" then immediately blew the engine in ways that would not have been possible had he known what he was doing as I understand it

the real question is do we let anyone delaminate the SM and claim incompetence when its apparently very easy to use the wiki and set it up properly, a wiki you can find through a button on the game, and multiple books inside the game.

You let them do it once, if they start doing it more than once then there is a problem. Establish a pattern of behavior before hitting the ban hammer for griffing the engine.

Hard rules like this where you give them 1 strike don't work and especially don't work if they do it when different admins are around assuming they go unnoted, which is in and of itself a punishment

But the guy did know what he was doing. He just got fucked by a slime and an anomaly he had no way of controlling.

The ban is fucking stupid

He literally didnt know that the SM can spawn slimes, Ive never tried to set it up and I know that

Use the NTR hut if you want to peanut post about that particular situation. When you're designing server policy you can't tailor a policy for one situation you need to look at all possible situations. (that's impossible by the way but you have to try).

Here's my recommended policy for experimentation. I don't think it should be put in the rules or anything, it should just be what admins keep in mind when dealing with situations similar to this.

"Experimentation with the supermatter engine or other similar dangerous engineering/science projects is allowed. The player should make a good faith effort to stop it when/if it fucks up and not be completely negligent when setting it up/operating it. (Obviously there are some risks.) Always err on the side of giving a note and ban when it becomes a common thing for that player."

BeeSting12 wrote:Use the NTR hut if you want to peanut post about that particular situation. When you're designing server policy you can't tailor a policy for one situation you need to look at all possible situations. (that's impossible by the way but you have to try).

yeah and you also shouldn't build it on the honour system of "but he said he didnt mean to"

how will admins know if its a constant thing unless they note him (a punishment)
providing he doesnt do it a lot when the same admin is online

I guess I didn't make it clear enough. GIVE THEM A FUCKING NOTE BEFORE YOU BAN THEM.

Policy that tries to dictate only issuing a note after repeated behaviour only are largely useless, since unless a player is doing something every single round then they'll most likely skate by on different admins at different times not knowing their name. In rare instances they may be caught out by players noting to admins/headmins their repeated issues, but these are the exceptions rather then the rule.

If we want to allow experimentation on pain of being scrutinized if your experimentation frequently goes wrong, then a note must be issued on every instance where the experimentation goes wrong and an admin is not satisfied that the player was well intentioned or thinks they were negligently underprepared. Obviously this may end up being a more harsh or a more benevolent evaluation depending on the administrator at the time, but you can't expect administrators spread out across basically every timezone to keep track of this kind of thing without noting.

And before the inevitable argument comes back up again, notes are not in and of themself a punishment.

A better policy would be:

Experimentation with the main engine of a station is allowed, though good faith efforts should be made to halt any loosing/meltdown, especially in cases where the player attempted a "dangerous"/"experimental" engine setup (i.e. stabilized low integrity SM, singularity contained at edge of maximum safe size constantly, teslas connected with minimal grounding rods). If an experimental engine ends up going out of control, admins should make an evaluation as to whether the player was malicious or negligent in their preparations. If it is believed that they were, a note should be left in the first instance, with escalating punishments for further infringements

If you would prefer to avoid admin oversight on this, we suggest hosting a local instance for your experimentation.

@oranges at what point did they make the engine "critical" or even allude to doing that? what does that even mean?

He wasn't banned because he was incompetent.
If I had been banning people for just screwing up the engine, we wouldn't have a playerbase right now.
Like I said in the appeal, he gave me the impression he was intentionally destabilizing the engine just so he could save it, for the giggles. That is not the same as experimenting with the engine to discover a more efficient way to power the station.
That's like putting a bomb on the other side of the station and seeing if you can get back to it in time to disarm it. Of course you're going to get the hammer if you fuck up.
His forum explanation wasn't an elaboration, but a contradiction to what he said before.

Plus, replying with "do you want to take this to discord?" didn't really bode well for him in the long run.

MrAlphonzo wrote:If I had been banning people for just screwing up the engine, we wouldn't have a playerbase right now.

Another based admin, god bless.

Arianya wrote: And before the inevitable argument comes back up again, notes are not in and of themself a punishment.

Ill just leave kors post here from a little while back

they are very clearly a punishment

onleavedontatme wrote:

A threat of permaban because "too many notes"



"Few notes means a good player" (which clearly carries the opposite implication)



Directly telling a player they will be viewed with suspicion in the future and judged more harshly because of the notes they have



Most good players don't get notes



I'll unban you because you don't have notes



Banned instead of warned because of a note. Once it was discovered that previous note should have been erased, the ban was lifted (as well as the note, because in the absence of history, it was no longer an OOC issue)



Notes, even from other servers, matter



Won't be unbanned because of notes



Notes listed in the ban reason



Not banned because of no prior notes



We have been, for years, using notes to determine if to ban, how long to ban, whether to unban, determine whether something is an OOC issue at all, determine whether to unban here or on other servers, and as a rough measure of how good/bad a player is.

These are all perfectly valid uses of notes, by the way. Many of the screenshots there had people that deserved to be banned.

But we can't both use the notes to heavily influence our decision making around which players to remove from the server and also tell players notes are nothing to be concerned about and expect no oversight/appeals allowed.

ExcessiveJMadison, what a lost soul.

I'm only going to make this post on it, because this topic has been debated to hell and high water, but stating "notes are a punishment" is asininely missing the point.

If you obtain 7 notes in a short time period all to do with poor escalation, it is entirely correct that these be taken into account when an admin is deciding what punishment to issue with relation to yet another poor escalation instance.

The notes are not a punishment, they are a record of your past behaviour. If you develop a pattern of behaviour that shows no signs of improvement you will be punished more harshly, but this doesn't make the notes a punishment any more then the admin's memory of your misbehaviour is a punishment.

I disagree with note numbers in general being used as justification, where the notes are only tangentially/not related, but I'm also not a headmin so that's not my purview.

The biggest issue with the mindset of "notes are a punishment" is that the reaction this ends up inciting is either "well lets start leaving secret notes so the player doesn't complain" or "well, I'll just bear it in mind that this player is bad and mention it to other admins if they come up in an adminbus discussion". Neither of these are good for players, from a transparency or a reliability point of view respectively.

Unless a note is factually incorrect/unfairly biased against the player in some way shape or form, it is representative of actual actions that happened during the round and which are worth noting in case they become repeat behaviour. Full stop. They aren't in themselves a punishment, but may make future punishments more strict if you show a pattern of misbehaviour with some specific element of the rules (i.e. several notes on escalation, or several notes on silicon policy, etc etc)

Arianya wrote: I disagree with note numbers in general being used as justification, where the notes are only tangentially/not related, but I'm also not a headmin so that's not my purview.

Okay when every single admin starts doing this they wont be a punishment

no matter how much you disagree with it or dont use it as a justification other admins will

Nilons wrote:

Arianya wrote: I disagree with note numbers in general being used as justification, where the notes are only tangentially/not related, but I'm also not a headmin so that's not my purview.

Okay when every single admin starts doing this they wont be a punishment

no matter how much you disagree with it or dont use it as a justification other admins will

Brilliant Nilons, you've cracked the code.

We'll just stop keeping records of players behavior, and rely on the memory of a dozen people to keep track of hundreds of players.

Why didn't I think of this?

MrAlphonzo wrote:

Nilons wrote:

Arianya wrote: I disagree with note numbers in general being used as justification, where the notes are only tangentially/not related, but I'm also not a headmin so that's not my purview.

Okay when every single admin starts doing this they wont be a punishment

no matter how much you disagree with it or dont use it as a justification other admins will

Brilliant Nilons, you've cracked the code.

We'll just stop keeping records of players behavior, and rely on the memory of a dozen people to keep track of hundreds of players.

Why didn't I think of this?

strawman

Ayy Lemoh wrote:

starmute wrote:If you can't figure out atmos... I don't know what to say. I mean.

let me rephrase that:

I don't know how a fucking SM engine works. EDIT: ish. I know what some things are but eh.

Bonus points during a time where ALLEGEDLY the supermatter guide page on the wiki was actually false and would make you delaminate the crystal. Not sure if that was ever changed.

Better. Also I prefered singularity but thats aside from the point. Its kinda funny that a actual nuclear engine is less accident prone than the supermatter engine.

It’s not when you look at it from a gameplay perspective rather than what it’s meant to be in a roleplay world :^)

Also please keep the note discussion to the appropriate containment thread, we all have varied opinions on that sucker

I'm going to state that I've not read every post in this thread but here's my take on it.


You can experiment with the Super Matter Engine. I do it all the time as CE. However if you are doing something that is more dangerous than the standard set up then you should take some (very easy to do) precautions.

This is an experimental, research station. You wouldn't experiment on Xenos without setting up shield projectors. If Xenos got out of containment because you did not set up adequate containment you would be the one at fault and you'd receive a bwoink, same goes for the SM. If I am experimenting with the SM I try to ensure I have a few to several canisters of supercooled N2O at the ready. I also try to upgrade the loop and install a hot gas dump before the filters (as hot gas severly slows the filtering process down and when the gas is REALLY hot the cooling loop isn't always enough to cool it prior to filtering).

You should always aim to experiment without delaminating the SM however as a non-antag. If you want to experiment delaminating save that for your antag rounds or for a private server, not here.

And if your experiment fucks up and the SM ends up delaminating because you didn't take enough precautions then just like a xenobiologist letting xenos escape you will be at fault and can expect to receive admin attention.