Prevent Admins from adminning while playing

[Armhulen]

I've found this to be a practice that nearly all admins disapprove of currently, and really that it's a vestige of old times kept around because in ye olde days a fair few old mins did it. Players who see drip fed information on who bombed the station and who released the virus and who looted the armory and whether the revolution is real and whether the cult is real and etc etc can NOT avoid using the information they learn from admin logs and tickets to their advantage, even if they aren't trying. Even if this doesn't get changed, it's nice to revisit this really really really old rule

A lot of people will say that this comes from a place of not TRUSTING other admins but that's not true. The issue was never that we have admins consciously abusing information they shouldn't have while playing, the issue is that it is ENTIRELY UNAVOIDABLE to act upon information you gained while adminning and dealing with tickets. Essentially in the very same vein of "Don't handle tickets involving yourself" in the sense that you have an unavoidable unconscious bias in tickets that you handle yourself. In that same vein, knowing information nobody else knows about the vitals of a round is doing the same thing but on the player side.

I suggest we draw a new line in the sand, one that is very simple and on about the same level as handling your own tickets:

If you want to deal with an admin issue as a deadminned admin, adminhelp. Or ping supportmin in the normal channels
If it is absolutely necessary to get an admin on the problem (OOC spamming locations of antagonists, or something like that) the admin can leave their body/position in the round for good.

[CoffeeDragon16]

I agree with this for the most part. If you admin while playing, you can not do either well and without interference. Whenever I see glaring rule breaks as a player with no admins on, I get by fine with ahelping and pinging supportmin. However, I am unsure about the last sentence. I feel it would be unreasonable to be kicked out of the round because of an immediate large issue detached from you, and I think it would be best to leave it up to discretion of the admin.

[PKPenguin321]

I disagree, you can act on that info in a positive way by just avoiding it. When I play as admin I would only get into fights or whatever when trouble came to me and it worked out every time. Very helpful for when I really wanted to just play the game but it was 3 AM and I was the only admin on.

Also, even if you know out of game shit, there is a way to ignore it even if you do know it: Role playing! If you've ever done a table top like D&D you've probably had to do this passively, IE the GM tells another player something you shouldn't know, and to avoid metagaming you don't act on it or go out of your way to learn about it in-character unless that happens naturally, in which case you take on the role of your character who does not have that out-of-game information. This is pretty much entry level role playing ability which I would hope all admins would have.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Local GM loses 2 arguments in a row and goes to policy discussion because he’s constitutionally incapable of minding his own business while flipping burgers.

I dont think its no sin to play janitor or chef or something similarly unimportant to round info on lowpop. Personally I think its a mindset coming from a hypercombatant who cant play the game in any way without constantly fretting about combat advantage and intent and whether they can currently kill anyone on screen who attacks them.

Then again maybe im just an overly passive player with extra practice at not giving a shit im interested to see what players think about the topic.

If something big and serious came up I did always used to jump in a locker and adminghost and usually didnt come back after handling the serious ticket though.

[Armhulen]

IE the GM tells another player something you shouldn't know, and to avoid metagaming you don't act on it or go out of your way to learn about it in-character unless that happens naturally, in which case you take on the role of your character who does not have that out-of-game information. This is pretty much entry level role playing ability which I would hope all admins would have.

As a D&D player i respect this but during our sessions we pass notes to avoid knowing what we shouldn't know, and I can't really say if it's better but we haven't had the issues of wondering if knowing dark secrets about another player's backstory is passively changing how they roleplay or not

[wesoda25]

I think it's just good form to not admin and play simultaneously. Bias will creep into your stance on a ticket based on your experience in the round, be it conscious or not.

That being said I'm not sure if forcing admins to observe is healthy from a burn out perspective? The only thing more boring than playing lowpop is adminning lowpop, and if a great deal of low pop admins prefer to play while adminning, I'm not sure this change would be for the best.

[Thunder11]

It’s pretty simple, if you have to readmin to deal with an issue you just readmin, deal with the issue, don’t go looking at other information that isn’t relevant to the issue at hand, then deadmin again and go about your life. You shouldn’t need to submit to round removal because you readminned for 2 seconds to click enable/disable OOC because people got too heated, or 30 seconds to bean obvious icky ocky.

[Farquaar]

I don't really see the harm in adminning while you're adopting a passive playstyle. If you put yourself in the position where you're just scrubbing floors, healing patients, or mixing drinks, you're not really at risk for the accidental use of meta-knowledge. I have some fond memories of playing chef while Wubli just chilled at a table in my renovated cafeteria while they answered tickets. Nothing wrong with that, right?

With more active roles like security or valid-hunting, however, it's a no-brainer that one shouldn't be adminning while doing that. Alarm bells should be ringing if an admin "discovers" or directs people to discover murder victims/xenos/cult bases during rounds they're adminning, but I think that's already the case.

[Tlaltecuhtli]

admins that play are better than admin ghosting and looking for ban valids

[MrStonedOne]

this all falls apart if you remember janitors exist and i can't see how admining while playing janitor has any risk

[Armhulen]

this all falls apart if you remember janitors exist and i can't see how admining while playing janitor has any risk

Good janitors get around, I actually think they're a lot more prone to bias decisions because of their need to be possibly anywhere instead of a job like xenobiology or virology where you don't move anywhere all round long

[iamgoofball]

this all falls apart if you remember janitors exist and i can't see how admining while playing janitor has any risk

"guess i better wipe the floors right near this chokepoint near the action, and forget to put down my wet floor sign "

[TheFinalPotato]

Imagine doing anything outside of slipping people as janitor

[Stickymayhem]

As someone who was one of these oldmins who would play something like assistant or janitor and muck around while waiting for tickets like five years ago, my method was to always skew towards losing. It was it's own kind of fun sometimes. Oh I'm alone in a room with the rogue borg who definitely wants to kill me, I'll let them get away with it and get brutally slaughtered.

Ultimately the way administration has changed over the years towards higher levels of accountability and fewer accepted soft rules, I do kind of agree this is a relic from the past that doesn't have enough of a benefit to outweigh the trust factor. I don't know that we need a hard rule other than for silicon/security/command or taking on equivalent roles (e.g. grabbing sec gear to fight the nukies while adminned shouldn't be acceptable) but it's never a bad thing to reduce the scope for plausibly deniable abuse.

I think a reasonable compromise would be the current 'rule' of no adminning in any important roles, and maybe adding that unless you are the only active admin online, you should deadmin for any role too. The only benefit this flexibility really allows is that admins can keep an eye on tickets while noodling about in the kitchen or botany or something during lowpop. But lack of admins is a much rarer problem than it was years ago. I don't think I'm ever the only admin on these days and that was pretty common a few years ago.

[Nabski]

I hate siding with Sticky, but as an ex-oldmin who almost always joined the round you just get used to losing any possible fight where you might have information on it. Turning off deadchat was always priority #1 to avoid that info. Priority 2 was don't touch the antags panel to get any info on that. Once I saw that panel the round was effectively over for me, anything after that could be considered tainted.

Security and heads of staff while adminning were no go.

Generic medbay or rp roles were great.

Things that decided how effective traitor actions(engineering, robotics) or who was in the round (like cloning) were very iffy.

If I wasn't playing, I would tab over for a ticket and have to start from scratch on context.
If I was playing then I would have an actual feel for the round. There's a big difference between "I know there is a revolution and these actions are valid" and "There isn't a revolution, but I agree you had good reason to think it from the amount of tiding going on". You don't get that as a ghost looking over things the same way you do going back to the bar for the third time in a round and each time it has gotten bloodier and bloodier.

All this said, Gene Ball Moving was still a deserved meme.

[wesoda25]

Yeah nabski no offense but you’re one of the examples of why this shouldn’t be allowed (or should at least be policed more), although tbf the problems from yours are different than those presented in the op

[RaveRadbury]

I've found this to be a practice that nearly all admins disapprove of currently.

Disagree. I was told by Coco and the admins around me that this was acceptable, and during the early days of Manuel I had to do it a lot because I was the only admin online. When I train new admins I communicate current policy to them. I have seen others say they don't approve of it, but I wouldn't call it a majority. Kinda an empty assertion without names or numbers attached to it. Gonna have to do a vote or something if you really want to claim a majority opinion, otherwise you're trying to assert a crowd that might not exist (and in my experience doesn't exist.)

As someone who was one of these oldmins who would play something like assistant or janitor and muck around while waiting for tickets like five years ago, my method was to always skew towards losing. It was it's own kind of fun sometimes. Oh I'm alone in a room with the rogue borg who definitely wants to kill me, I'll let them get away with it and get brutally slaughtered.

To me it's standard that if you're going to admin and play that you better be ready to be an NPC that will most likely die. If admins aren't playing with this kind of attitude/mentality while adminned, they should really evaluate how important the idea of "winning" is to them in this spaceman game.

I think a reasonable compromise would be the current 'rule' of no adminning in any important roles, and maybe adding that unless you are the only active admin online, you should deadmin for any role too. The only benefit this flexibility really allows is that admins can keep an eye on tickets while noodling about in the kitchen or botany or something during lowpop. But lack of admins is a much rarer problem than it was years ago. I don't think I'm ever the only admin on these days and that was pretty common a few years ago.

Agreed, however I would like to point out that admin candidates and trial admins stand to learn a lot from being able to have access to admin channels while they play in a way that is befitting of someone with admin information (as described here and in posts above).

The issue was never that we have admins consciously abusing information they shouldn't have while playing, the issue is that it is ENTIRELY UNAVOIDABLE to act upon information you gained while adminning and dealing with tickets.

If we were in a situation that involved money, or long-term impact that goes beyond the round, yeah sure I'd be concerned about the possibility of bias. But we're talking about a game where rounds last a few hours, tops. We let people who are in the same house/IP/are friends IRL play with the promise that they won't metacomm. What can we do to enforce that? Check to see if they are acting to benefit one another in a way that is unfair. Are you going to suggest next that we can't allow these situations?

tl;dr This is a solution looking for a problem, there haven't been any issues with admins abusing this stuff. Unavoidable unconscious bias isn't a big deal.

[Omega_DarkPotato]

player perspective, but I would much rather have an admin on during lowpop/times when there are no admins who gets a bit of meta knowledge, even if I was a tator, than no admins at all.

Sybil still has times where we have no admins on. Seeing a scientist hand out a maxcap that is then immediately detonated on the shuttle, a mime steal and waste every bit of iron in an ORM while crew is trying to fight a malf AI, or a non-antagonist miner break into the RD's room to kill the RD after they start defending themselves with no staff on to enforce a semblance of rules (and no one responding in #help) is disheartening.

I literally would not mind if the station's janitor might've heard I was a traitor if it means that tiders get their due punishment.

[Nabski]

Yeah nabski no offense but you’re one of the examples of why this shouldn’t be allowed (or should at least be policed more), although tbf the problems from yours are different than those presented in the op

Yeah I'm not saying there aren't downsides to playing while adminned.

But I don't agree with the original post that those are the reasons.

In what way do you think this should be policed?

Joining the poster above me, if it's the difference between not having an admin online and having an admin player, I'll take the admin player every single time. The admin complaints that I can think of related to people playing while admined have typically been related to either smiting or spawning things(typically but not always ghost roles/additional antags) after death. Even something simple like spawning an ERT on crew request is fishy. When playing you aren't acting as a GM to drive a story like you would while adminned, you're input to the round is that of a player and just answering tickets.

[Armhulen]

Op-ed: counterbias is just as bad as bias, and the stories I hear of people consciously choosing how to deal with antagonists differently so they dont accidentally gain an advantage is still bad for the game.

Though I think if everyone sees some value in deadpop admins existing, I suppose that could be fine, but I'm really only seeing any value at truly dead hours. Anything more than, say, 10 people and the one good reason, pure necessity for adminning whole playing, isn't a factor anymore. And I think the practice should be avoided as much as is reasonable

[Cobby]

I have really always been against admins playing while admin generally, and have even asked people to get off and cover for them so they felt like they could play.

My ideal policy would be the default is you deadmin. If you see there is a lack of admins you ping supportmin and give it a few (at least 5) minutes to see if someone responds to the ping. If not, you can readmin so long as you make an effort once every couple of rounds to see if someone can cover for you. If someone does respond to the ping, you continue playing without admin on. It should always be a last resort option, regardless of how likely you think an admin will arrive.

I dont like admins (or anyone really) being privvy to information they shouldnt know about while playing because it directs their gameplay and as such can butterfly effect to a point where it impacts the round. Who are you to say that the janitor or clown being an admin doesnt affect the game? What if the traitor is in engineering (box map) so the janitor/clown unintentionally place themselves near security to avoid interacting with the traitor and causes an officer to slip accidentally, which causes someone to be killed or the traitor to escape?

The same can be said for the loser mentality too. Would you be in a room with a naughty borg if you weren't an admin? Perhaps you would have normally been suspicious and not place yourself in a position where you were with the borg but because you're adminning you feel like you have to play dumb because you dont want to be pressed about using admin info.

The fact of the matter is these DO impact your decisions on how to play the game in a way that puts your integrity on the line and shifts the round in a way it wouldnt have otherwise gone, so I would HIGHLY PREFER that it is a last resort option.

I've never seen anyone argue about it because we are fairly respectful of each other but this would be something I would adminban over or force-deadmin if someone told me they would not deadmin while playing if I was on even currently.

[Armhulen]

That's kinda what I mean by deadpop only and if there is no other way, as it currently is for some people on the team it's seen as "just how I admin" and I'm pretty on the fence about that. And again to reiterate op: I believe that nobody on our team uses information for an advantage consciously. But I also believe there is no chance that admins are either using the information for their advantage subconsciously, or consciously using the information to counterbias, which still poisons the round.

Tl;dr realistically with lowpop we cannot full ban this but we should get close

[Stickymayhem]

I want to push back heavily against the idea that counterbias poisons the round or is detrimental. This is not a competitive environment with any long rasting effects for a traitor winning or losing. People don't even play for greentext, they play to have a fun round.

This is a roleplaying game, and a core conceit of positive roleplaying is acting based on less information than you actually have. We expect this of players constantly. Back when I played a lot I knew who was a traitor and who wasn't, and what gamemode it was, within ten minutes of playing a round. It's impossible not to feel the difference in vibe between extended, nuke ops, revolution and traitor/ling rounds. Dynamic made this better, but this is still pretty easy to do without thinking. Acting on this information would be what ruins the game, intentionally losing to make another player's round better is exactly the kind of behaviour we should encourage in a game that requires roleplaying to work and falls apart as we move towards the extremes of a powergaming play to win mentality.

This is a separate discussion and I don't want to derail the thread but do not use "Losing on purpose is bad" as a given in order to argue one way or the other about this policy. Losing on purpose is a critical and vital component of roleplaying. Don't discourage the opposing force to validhunting, metagaming and powergaming

[Exavere]

I think it's fine the way it is now.

[PKPenguin321]

Op-ed: counterbias is just as bad as bias, and the stories I hear of people consciously choosing how to deal with antagonists differently so they dont accidentally gain an advantage is still bad for the game.

hard disagree, it's not even remotely "just as bad." the case you are concerned about in your OP to this thread is an admin effectively metagaming to cheat and validhunt, which actively ruins the round for antags and the crew by proxy (it removes the driving sources of conflict from the round). the case you compare it to in your post would be a crewmember who is indistinguishable to an outsider with not nearly as negative a pull on the round as a whole. at the same time, if they're able to handle tickets as they play they will have a definite positive impact.

[saprasam]

for the longest time i remember adminning while playing being frowned upon unless you are the only admin so i don't see a reason to not outlaw it

[FloranOtten]

for the longest time i remember adminning while playing being frowned upon unless you are the only admin so i don't see a reason to not outlaw it

You said it yourself.

adminning while playing being frowned upon unless you are the only admin

This would effectively punish admins if someone breaks a rule on deadpop. Either you let the guy spam OOC with copypasta or IC info or whatever, potentially ruining the antag they're talking about's round, or you roundremove yourself. We dayban for round removing someone. It's just such a harsh measure against a nonexistent problem.

[NecromancerAnne]

If you want to stay in the round, act as you would as though you were not an admin. Ahelp or ping in discord.

[Vekter]

How would this affect if I put myself in a body during a round for an event/testing something?

[NecromancerAnne]

If you're testing stuff you're not actually playing the round.

If you're running an event that's really not playing the round either but there is also plenty of precedent for good and bad events anyway.

[FloranOtten]

If you want to stay in the round, act as you would as though you were not an admin. Ahelp or ping in discord.

Thus, you're putting the admin in a really shitty position. It can at times take 10 minutes (if at all) for a supportmin to show up. In those 10 minutes, someone could really fuck things up. You're now letting admins choose; Either you let the OOC spammer keep going, or you fuck yourself over for a round. Which are you going to let get fucked? The server overall, or yourself?

[Armhulen]

How would this affect if I put myself in a body during a round for an event/testing something?

I remember talked about this earlier not in here and my thoughts were that events are cool and fine, ditto for testing stuff on like, centcom or whatever. (though any role that has conflict with the station should really be given to a player, not an admin)

[legoscape]

I've been playing space station 13 for going 8-9 Years so I think what I have to say should be taken into consideration.

Admins bring fun into the game with their shenanigans and yet admins should understand to not do shenanigans to sneaky antags that are trying to kill a target and leave quietly.

But at the end of the day, these immortal words should be heard and understood.

ITS NOT ABOUT WINNING ITS ABOUT FUN

[Stickymayhem]

(though any role that has conflict with the station should really be given to a player, not an admin)

Disagree with this too. Running events is like DMing, and the reason the DM runs the monsters is because they can fiddle with stuff in the back end to help the players come out on top, and retain control of a complex situation. For some events player on player conflict can work, but so many situations absolutely require that an admin be the one in the role, specifically so they can manage the event and stop things going wonky.

Let's take a spooky worm event as an example. Big scary space worm is roaming around the outside of the stations chomping on stuff. Well to keep it reasonable, you only really want them attacking every once in a while, and hiding out the rest of the time. You want them to bite people and breach workplaces but you don't want them critting anyone who doesn't try to man up against it or just delete every wall in an area of the station, or try to murderbone. No player is going to take these considerations and even if you gave them these guidelines, they wouldn't understand them as well, execute them as well or can potentially just ignore them for the sake of their own fun. If they did adhere to them, they'd have long periods of boredom and probably feel heavily constrained. It would be like a DM handing a single goblin to be played by another person, who stops getting to play as soon as the goblin dies in the first encounter.

There is and should continue to be an understanding that "NPCs" in events and "Antags" are different things, and the latter is what should be avoided as an admin.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

(though any role that has conflict with the station should really be given to a player, not an admin)

Disagree with this too. Running events is like DMing, and the reason the DM runs the monsters is because they can fiddle with stuff in the back end to help the players come out on top, and retain control of a complex situation. For some events player on player conflict can work, but so many situations absolutely require that an admin be the one in the role, specifically so they can manage the event and stop things going wonky.

Let's take a spooky worm event as an example. Big scary space worm is roaming around the outside of the stations chomping on stuff. Well to keep it reasonable, you only really want them attacking every once in a while, and hiding out the rest of the time. You want them to bite people and breach workplaces but you don't want them critting anyone who doesn't try to man up against it or just delete every wall in an area of the station, or try to murderbone. No player is going to take these considerations and even if you gave them these guidelines, they wouldn't understand them as well, execute them as well or can potentially just ignore them for the sake of their own fun. If they did adhere to them, they'd have long periods of boredom and probably feel heavily constrained. It would be like a DM handing a single goblin to be played by another person, who stops getting to play as soon as the goblin dies in the first encounter.

There is and should continue to be an understanding that "NPCs" in events and "Antags" are different things, and the latter is what should be avoided as an admin.

Sticky is right, theres a clear difference between "Don't take one of the nuke op roles you pressed the button to spawn" and "Don't personally handle events yourself".


Also I'm still waiting for armhulen to explain how the round is being "poisoned"

[Cobby]

Let’s not get too in the weeds here, this should really just be about someone consistently staying on as admin while playing. If you have to pop on for something time-sensitive idt anyone is or should give you grief, but again it SHOULD be done only as needed.

I’ve seen admins on playing with other admins on and that really shouldn’t be happening.

As for loser mentality, I disagree with the disagreement because of the exact argument you made. If people aren’t playing to lose/win then it wouldn’t matter because the affected party (not admin) is always winning. Because people are NOT playing to win/lose but for situations to be created (in a perfect world), it becomes extremely difficult to fulfill that when one person feels like they have to provide a stock response because otherwise they get questioned oocly.

Again, I’m personally cool with someone staying online and playing to answer tickets if they have done the bare minimum of asking for an admin to babysit so they could play, that seems like the common sense option to me and I’m curious what would be contentious about that.

[Armhulen]

Nothing and I think that isn't unreasonable and anything more than we have now would be cool

[NecromancerAnne]

If you want to stay in the round, act as you would as though you were not an admin. Ahelp or ping in discord.

Thus, you're putting the admin in a really shitty position. It can at times take 10 minutes (if at all) for a supportmin to show up. In those 10 minutes, someone could really fuck things up. You're now letting admins choose; Either you let the OOC spammer keep going, or you fuck yourself over for a round. Which are you going to let get fucked? The server overall, or yourself?

You have a direct line with your fellow admins and eye witness account. If it's literally just spamming endlessly then whatever hop on and deal with it and hop off, who is going to blame you. The person has already breached the boundaries of the game to affect everyone in it negatively.

But if it's simply a normal admin matter, like mass grief or some other shit that isn't necessarily time sensitive, that could be handled by another admin and should be. You're in the round and events occuring in the context of the round now include you as possibly affected party in that incident. Which means those matters should absolutely be hands off for you. You shouldn't need to be playing with admin up 99% of the time.

[skoglol]

There are two sides to this, I think.

1: People who play adminned while there are one or more observed admins online.
Fuck you, stop. I have been vocal about this in the past as well, there is no reason to do this unless you are supporting a new trial admin or some shit. You are making me have to filter my asay communication because I KNOW you can read it, and that's dumb. This leads to the same shit as in 2.

2: Playing while adminned when there are no other admins on.
Depends. I have briefly adminned to fix round breaking issues like being unable to talk etc etc then deadminned once fixed, this is perfectly fine. Going admin to deal with some perceived (from your player characters POV) rulebreak, bad. From a rules perspective, I don't think you should be both an admin and a player in these cases. It will affect how you are able to play (e.g. playing in an unnatural way for instance by avoiding something or someone). Its not fair to you, or the players who want to interact with you. You are also going to be a less responsive admin, and you will be blocking ticket relay which might make other admins log on when they see a lack of admins.

Bottom line is either leave the round, or ideally get someone else to handle it. Tickets go without getting handled all the time, the server will not blow up because you werent around to deal with the griefy edgelord that was killed by sec 20 minutes ago.

[Omega_DarkPotato]

Tickets go without getting handled all the time, the server will not blow up because you werent around to deal with the griefy edgelord that was killed by sec 20 minutes ago.

are you saying to just ignore ahelps??????
I may be reading your post wrong but getting ahelps ignored because there's no staff online when I'm trying to get some sort of response as to why a non-antag thought it would be great to kill me and leave me in maint sucks

[MortoSasye]

Honestly, forbid it for people that play and admin when there are already other admins online.

[legality]

I've found this to be a practice that nearly all admins disapprove of currently, and really that it's a vestige of old times kept around because in ye olde days a fair few old mins did it.

Literally every original admin* you mean

Players who see drip fed information on who bombed the station and who released the virus and who looted the armory and whether the revolution is real and whether the cult is real and etc etc can NOT avoid using the information they learn from admin logs and tickets to their advantage, even if they aren't trying. Even if this doesn't get changed, it's nice to revisit this really really really old rule

A lot of people will say that this comes from a place of not TRUSTING other admins but that's not true. The issue was never that we have admins consciously abusing information they shouldn't have while playing, the issue is that it is ENTIRELY UNAVOIDABLE to act upon information you gained while adminning and dealing with tickets. Essentially in the very same vein of "Don't handle tickets involving yourself" in the sense that you have an unavoidable unconscious bias in tickets that you handle yourself. In that same vein, knowing information nobody else knows about the vitals of a round is doing the same thing but on the player side.

I suggest we draw a new line in the sand, one that is very simple and on about the same level as handling your own tickets:

If you want to deal with an admin issue as a deadminned admin, adminhelp. Or ping supportmin in the normal channels
If it is absolutely necessary to get an admin on the problem (OOC spamming locations of antagonists, or something like that) the admin can leave their body/position in the round for good.

I suppose you think that DMs should never under any circumstances play DMPCs because they can’t stop themselves from acting on information that their character doesn’t have access to and it’s unfair to the other players? You dimwit. The original admins had no issue with this because we came from /tg/ - traditional games, a community where it’s widely known that you can choose not to act on meta info using a skill called roleplaying.

The only reason an admin should deadmin themselves before playing is because they prefer not to admin at that moment or because they don’t like the constant feed of information.

An admin shouldn’t handle issues they were involved with IC. Debiasing yourself is infinitely harder than roleplaying and choosing not to meta game.

[BONERMASTER]

topic idea seems a bit excessive to me, first of all, jannies need all the help they can get, and second, you're making it super impractical for these jannies to deal with any issues that may come up, I think the game benefits more from jannies being able to switch in and out for a hot minute and press their buttons, than punishing them with round removal for doing so.

[skoglol]

Tickets go without getting handled all the time, the server will not blow up because you werent around to deal with the griefy edgelord that was killed by sec 20 minutes ago.

are you saying to just ignore ahelps??????
I may be reading your post wrong but getting ahelps ignored because there's no staff online when I'm trying to get some sort of response as to why a non-antag thought it would be great to kill me and leave me in maint sucks

Well the first thing that stands out to me is you've decided that whoever killed you MUST be a non antag and you demand an answer immediately. 99% of "why did this non antag kill me" ahelps are people getting killed by an antag. Investingating such an ahelp would mean pulling up this players status, and now that admin cannot naturally interact with the guy in game for the rest of the round. Besides, if that guy stayed adminned while playing, your ticket does not get relayed to discord or the other servers so another staff member could be made aware and investigate. While I understand that not getting a response to your ticket can feel bad, if whoever caused you to ahelp is a serial offender they will be dealt with eventually anyway. If it is an egregious case of some obvious rulebreak, you can always ping supportmin on discord.

The bottom line is, no admin is getting paid to admin. Our admins that currently play adminned are still players themselves, and they should feel free to deadmin whenever they feel like playing a round. We shouldn't have a situation where anyone feels forced or compelled to stay adminned while or instead of playing. The servers health does not hinge on any single admin. Some admins will say "but I want to", and to them I will say: "I dont want you to".

[cybersaber101]

I've found this to be a practice that nearly all admins disapprove of currently

got anything to back that up?

This is simply rocking the boat for the sake of rocking the boat, As a player I never had a problem nor noticed any negative effects and as an admin I never did it myself. If an admin breaks conduct doing this then we punish them, players waiting to be revived in dead chat or observers are expected to refrain from using meta knowledge so is the admin and admins that do this aren't doing it maliciously afaik.

[RaveRadbury]

I'm surprised at the number of players who I would expect to be for this coming out against it.

[wubli]

agree and disagree

don't admin while being security, silicon, head of staff, probably avoid important roles like medbay. sometimes i log in and i'm the only admin or there's only one other person, and we have our silly little chat in asay while i go to lavaland and get funny minerals, or get my silly plants while i am as uninvolved as possible with the round. i remove antag from myself if i get it, i pretend i do not know what is going on, and i avoid fights like the plague, much like i do normally.

i do get the point of not being adminned when there's like other 4 people on and it's highpop, but i feel like we can trust eachother enough for this to not be an issue. if an ahelp comes up that is related to me in ANY way, i will ask someone else to handle it. but i feel like i can respond to how to download research nodes while playing without abusing the fact i know there is a traitor. if i am converted to a group antag, i'll probably give myself away (this has never happened to me before though, not because i've avoided it but because i don't admin and play very often)

not to mention dying in this game gives you the time to learn information about the round before you are revived - which yeah, is not the same as being adminned since you get more information, but you still end up biased. you may know someone is a rev, but you were deconverted so you have to pretend you don't know. everyone has to roleplay not knowing what they truly do know, and i don't feel like there is a huge difference here if you are responsible.

i might post something more coherent tomorrow i am sleep deprived and i have work in like 4 hours bye bye!!!

[MrAlphonzo]

I'm not sure why this was brought up at a time when staff retention is terrible, we just lost an entire new litter of gameadmins to burnout already.

This won't help.

the issue is that it is ENTIRELY UNAVOIDABLE to act upon information you gained while adminning and dealing with tickets

Our entire job of handling tickets is considering each player's perspective of events. Given all that practice, playing the game and operating with a perspective that is separate from all the information you're privy to with admin permissions comes pretty easily. I don't have any trouble tuning out "So and so just killed me in x y z" in deadchat, when I'm just mopping up blood, cooking, or building some caveman assistant fort in aux tool storage. I haven't had trouble with this now, a year ago, or when I was first on the team 4 years ago.

I enjoy playing laid back roles or having unintrusive fun, cleaning up some messes, talking to people in dchat and, when other staff are around, joking around with them in asay. It is probably one of my favorite parts of admining, and I'm not alone.

Rave put it best.

This is a solution looking for a problem, there haven't been any issues with admins abusing this stuff. Unavoidable unconscious bias isn't a big deal.

edit: oh yeah there's nothing stopping us from opening discord lol

[FloranOtten]

If you want to stay in the round, act as you would as though you were not an admin. Ahelp or ping in discord.

Thus, you're putting the admin in a really shitty position. It can at times take 10 minutes (if at all) for a supportmin to show up. In those 10 minutes, someone could really fuck things up. You're now letting admins choose; Either you let the OOC spammer keep going, or you fuck yourself over for a round. Which are you going to let get fucked? The server overall, or yourself?

You have a direct line with your fellow admins and eye witness account. If it's literally just spamming endlessly then whatever hop on and deal with it and hop off, who is going to blame you. The person has already breached the boundaries of the game to affect everyone in it negatively.

But if it's simply a normal admin matter, like mass grief or some other shit that isn't necessarily time sensitive, that could be handled by another admin and should be. You're in the round and events occuring in the context of the round now include you as possibly affected party in that incident. Which means those matters should absolutely be hands off for you. You shouldn't need to be playing with admin up 99% of the time.

Why are you saying this like it's a counterargument? We agree. This is my viewpoint. This is excessive because it stops time sensitive, simple actions. If it can wait 10 minutes for a supportmin to show up, that's absolutely fine. Just don't forcibly round remove people every time they press readmin.

[Cobby]

We permaban or threaten to for people who we catch acting funny with OOC information, and I don’t buy the dm argument because you aren’t a dm when you are playing and adminning. You are a player who is strictly doing the non-dm aspect of adminning in these instances. I have zero problems with interacting with the world as a dmpc for the purpose of what you would classically do for a ttrpg, which in ss13 usually is called running events.

Even then, dmpcs like those exist usually because you are trying to pad out the party and you’re forgetting we have a great DM in the background already which are game mechanics. The game can run without an admin existing, which can’t be said really for a ttrpg’s version of a DM.

Again if I see admins on while I’m on I’m telling them to get off, even currently. If I get pressed on it I will just deadmin you myself and you can take it to complaints lol. You being an admin to me shouldn’t mean you constantly put yourself at a risk of using this information (not strictly for metagaming in the more obvious sense like knowing the bad guys when you shouldn’t).

“Just trust me” integrity is surpassed by making your integrity not even come into question in the first place. That’s not to say we have to be unreasonable about it, but again I’m not sure why we’re so insistent on allowing this opportunity so flippantly ESPECIALLY WHEN WE HAD ABUSE OF IT IN THE PAST.

Edit: also skog brought up a good point I’d like to imagine I alluded to thar people shouldn’t forget which is you going admin makes it so people are unaware they should get on and cover for you in the first place. This is why I personally would require people who do this also try to notify other admins to come on.