For those of you not familiar with me, I'm an AdminTrainer, I've been (mostly) actively adminning for around 10 months now. I mostly admin on Basil however I also show up sometimes on Sybil and occasionally Terry.
My primary motivation for running for headmin is that a couple of people I trust convinced me that I should do it. That being said, I will edit more information into this thread about my intentions and goals in a short time, I wanted to get this out there first. I'll also reply to every question asked of me in this thread and probably collect them in this OP post under a spoiler or something so it's easy to read through.
What I bring to the table
- ~10 months of active, recent admin experience, with no large gaps, adminning for hours almost every day for pretty much every week.
- Experience in suggesting new admins, selecting them, raising concerns about other people's suggestions, and training new admins.
- A level-headed and logical perspective on the game, balancing the concerns of all parties involved and trying to reach solutions that leave everyone content.
- Experience interacting with the community and making controversial changes from a coding perspective.
- Not being afraid to voice any concerns I have with other admins, and to do so in a respectful manner.
Let me preface this by saying that anything I'd like to do is subject to the wills of the other people involved. As a headmin you can't just autonomously decide things and act on them yourself, you're part of a team, and that team is part of a larger team. That being said.
Find a solution, one way or another, to the killbaiting issue of escalation policy.
While it's still somewhat controversial, the general consensus that I've seen on escalation policy in its' current state, as well as my own opinion on how it goes down is that it goes something like this:
People who are bored start conflicts with people who are doing their own thing for the purpose of entertainment. This can be a lot of things, most commonly I'd say it's normally stealing things or breaking in to steal things. If the former group wins this conflict, then it's functionally just minor unprompted IC grief that the admins will ignore as not big enough an issue to deal with. If the latter group wins, the former retaliates, escalating the conflict usually to the point of violence. At this point, someone will end up dead. Under current escalation policy there is basically a rationale of "violence begets violence" regardless of why a conflict starts. If you're not comfortable with this your options are basically to beg for other people to help you, roll over and take whatever abuse you're given until it maybe reaches a point where you can ahelp it, or to never lose any IC fight. This is frustrating for people who don't play the game to primarily seek conflict with others.
Additionally, there are some somewhat nebulous distinctions to the current way that escalation policy is enforced that while of sound reason can be hard for a player to understand and I think could be improved on even if escalation policy doesn't see sweeping changes. I would say the primary culprit for this is the obligation to not permanently remove someone from the round via spacing or gibbing. Also, the idea of de-escalation is something that is completely ignored by the current escalation policy but is actually very important to how the rule is enforced. A lot of times two people who both enter a conflict will have a perception that the other person is the instigator or the one in the wrong, and they're justified in everything they'd do. And they don't understand that when people are split up, or a lot of time passes, or someone makes an attempt to mediate, the conflict does not always just continue as normal. So you will have people killing someone basically unprompted 30 minutes later even though the conflict is long over. There is also the concept of over-escalation which is really something that primarily exists in the heads of admins and will require a rewrite of parts of the existing policy to explain why this isn't okay. In general, I'd like to see a policy that is less lenient towards people who start shit for no reason (including stupid shit like "I wanted that thing I don't need").
Nobody wants to make the rules longer or more confusing or more lawyerable. But if nothing else, they should serve as a concise explanation of an admin's expectations for players on the server. The safety net for this is that we don't usually ban on the first offense, we make an effort to educate people about how they're breaking the rules and usually start with warnings so that they can learn from their mistakes more easily. This works really well, but I think that there's still value in improving the rules in these regards, and I still think that it's possible to fix without making the rules much longer or complex.
Edit: I wrote some more about escalation policy in the comments so I'm pasting it in here where it belongs.
I also think that the stupid examples from it like "If you think x killed you for taking your ID card, don't steal next round" should be removed because people just use these as an excuse to kill people. The other specifc thing is this line:
If you choose to retaliate with violence, you in turn have opened yourself up to violence. If you choose this route, do not expect admins to help you out if you die, even if you were not the original instigator.
It's very nebulous, yes, but if you are the actual instigator in a conflict that exists for no reason beyond your own entertainment, I don't believe you should have the protection that "if you choose to retaliate with violence" grants. If you are being an asshole people should be empowered to deal with you themselves, and at that point your "right to self defense" becomes sort of forfeit as far as I'm concerned.
I'm mostly focused on editing the existing policy as I believe it's a more attainable goal than starting from the ground up entirely. I've not seen anyone produce a result from the ground-up approach either.
Respectful enforcement of FNR rules.
This is an issue that I and others brought up with the current headmins at a few points in time and to their credit I think they have improved this compared to the state it was in around 3 ish months ago. I'd like to continue to enforce the FNR rules as they have. There are always individual circumstances where people are going to get burned on this and be upset, but it's important for both the people appealing and the admin being appealed to that FNR remains a respectful space where people can make their case and discuss it without threads being full of drama or insults. Policy threads are also relevant here. Mostly with policy threads I want to keep hostility out of them. The current headmins and other people with mod powers in FNR (Game Masters) have done an alright job of enforcing this in the past few months as far as I'm concerned, and again, I'd like to continue this.
I think those are the main things that I wanted to put emphasis on for a prospective headmin term. I could go into more detail about how I'd precisely like to change escalation policy, but it becomes a game of semantics, and in this sort of space I can't balance the concerns of other headmins or of the admins who enforce the rules as well, or particularly of the people who play the game frequently and don't read the forums.
A more consistent, straightforward way to get headmin input on policy threads.
This was an idea proposed by other candidates and I'm not going to pretend to own it, but I think this is important and it's something I'd very much like to see. Like a lot of players, I've made a number of policy threads, and I know exactly how frustrating it is when a policy thread basically just dies down and fades away even though the actual issue is still readily apparent. The only way I've ever gotten headmins to answer my policy threads is to ask them directly about it, usually repeatedly. Even now I find out that head admins had opinions on policy threads that I made and never decided to reply for reasons that are unknown to me. At the same time, policy threads can go on for a long ass time and often see a lot of developing discussion. With that in mind, the goal I'd like to set here is that every new policy thread gets a headmin opinion in it if not a consensus within 1 month of being made. Policy encompasses a wide variety of threads so it's not appropriate for everything, but where appropriate I'd also like to make sure to keep the Headmin Rulings wiki page up to date as an easily referable document. That potentially includes culling old rulings that have been made irrelevant by code changes or policy shifts.
I will try to keep this thread up-to-date as I write more things.
Replies to Candidate Debates
Choosing to deal with issues ICly or OOCly. viewtopic.php?f=52&t=21742