terranaut wrote: ↑Sat Apr 09, 2022 3:26 pm
YBS wrote: ↑Sat Apr 09, 2022 3:21 pm
As a player who started back when AI/Silicon were a true third party for all intents and purposes, I'd like to know what issues came up that caused these changed so silicon policy to make the 'perpetual passive rule 1' a ruling.
I'm going to assume it was along a series of bad-faith play by silicon players, followed by some rules lawyering that called for policies that brought us to our current destination.
I'd definitely like to read, in this thread, someones perspective on WHY silicon/AI policy is in it's current state versus old since I think most of the playerbase who have joined (or rejoined) in the last year are missing the history that got us here.
Basically this could use some devils advocate responses to measure what changes should really be made.
What happened is a perpetual, ongoing process of de-clawing and de-fanging everything and turning the "paranoia-laden deathtrap" we are supposed to inhabit into a kiddy bouncy castle instead. This trend is visible in all aspects of gameplay and policy, silicons being no exception.
This is half the story. I believe the process is a product of administrative issues, the server has expanded beyond the ability for "culture" to be a directed effort by the core of the community, and it's now driven primarily by systemic incentives (
Stickymayhem et al. 2022). We as an administration have not figured out a way to deal with this yet, or rather, the problematic sociological issues are so overwhelming that we've failed. We then enter the following cycle:
A mechanic that can be abused is introduced or discovered by players
A small group of highly active players begin to repeatedly abuse the mechanic
We fail to stop the behaviour from this small group of highly active players.
We are left with the only alternative to curb the disruptive behaviour: Destroy the mechanic with policy or code
Another sharp edge gets filed off /tg/station and we wait until the next mechanic abusable is introduced or discovered.
This takes administrative and code effort, holding back new directions for policy and mechanics, and any new work produced is quickly filed down to avoid it being abusable, making it less interesting.
If we could find a way to just stop these small groups of active players ruining everything, we could break this cycle. Our options are:
A system for tracking abuse of these mechanics and restricting these players ability to do them. For example: A note saying "X player can no longer abuse Y mechanic"
Some system of tracking how often people do certain things and restricting them based on this. Probably impossible.
Simply banning these players, but I don't think their abuse of mechanics is inherently bad, they just spam it too often and this would probably cause an outcry. The Purge option.
Accepting that some rounds will just be ruined by wacky mechanics, and introducing enough wacky mechanics that they all kind of balance out. If everything is overpowered, nothing is. The Dota 2 option.
Literally just letting rounds be ruined by these annoying players. It's not the end of the world, especially since we already have policy things that stop non-antags being too disruptive.
Embracing IC solutions for these problems, like factional balancing. The silicon issues I talk about here are one subset of this solution. I am not smart enough to come up with other ways to build opposition into the game. This can be done with policy and code (e.g. bad idea do not do this but this hypothetical explains the KIND of thing I mean: Security is allowed to be totally antagonistic, but passing some threshold of this makes them valid to the whole station)
It's a complex problem that we've never solved before, but I think we need to look at the foundation of this game, understand the behaviours we want to incentivize, and build it back up.