Restart vote abuse concerns

[Vekter]

Alright, so I feel like this is covered under rule 1, but I've been asked by a few people to post a policy discussion because they want it clarified by the headmins. Plus, I'd like a sign I can tap at when people fuck around.

I've noticed an issue a few times now with low pop servers forcing through restart votes for really lame reasons. Basil has had a few issues where the map vote will automatically roll Birdshot and players will vote for a new map, then force through a restart vote at the beginning of next round. Map vote does this because it's set up so you can't play the same two maps three times in a row and only three maps are available to low pop, so Birdshot is forced every so often. The issue with this is that it's extremely inconsiderate of those who do want to play on Birdshot, since only a majority needs to vote to restart, and it's very clearly not the intended use of restart votes.

My primary goal here is to clarify why restart votes exist and to have a precedent that we can point to when people abuse them for inconsequential reasons. My goal is not to get rid of people running "i ded pls restart" votes on high pop. I don't personally find them funny (that horse died long ago) but it's soul so I guess we can keep it.

There's a couple of different options here that I think are valid ways to take care of the issue:

1) Explicitly make using restart votes to skip a map against the rules. I'm okay with this since it solves the main problem I'm concerned with, but there are other instances of people misusing it (ie: just last night someone started one on Terry low-pop because they'd died and a bunch of people who were observing voted yes despite the round being relatively active) and I think making it a bit more broad will be more helpful.

2) Explicitly state what restart votes are for and any use outside of those cases are subject to admin intervention. Restart votes are specifically for situations where the round cannot end gracefully, either due to everyone being dead and nobody being able to call the shuttle or due to the server being seriously fucked in a way that makes it impossible to play. I think this solves most issues but I understand that the headmins might find this too restrictive.

3) Just disable restart votes entirely. This would certainly fix the issue, but I think it's not necessary, since there are completely valid reasons to use restart votes, they're just few and far between. I don't hate the idea of us going back to just having to have people notify admins on Discord to fix the server, but others might.

A question you might have is, "Why not fix it so the map vote just lets you pick any map you want?". That's not an option here per oranges; the maptainers want people playing on all of the maps so we can fix whatever issues exist on them. This is a very rare instance where I agree with oranges, as I don't really see that any of our maps have issues that are so glaring that they're completely unplayable, but our culture around maps seems to be "pick one and bitch incessantly about it regardless of its quality", so I don't think anyone's going to be happy regardless of the outcome.

There's also the idea of making restart votes require more than a majority of votes, but that's a code solution, not a policy one.

[Nabski]

Restart votes should not be completely disabled. There are plenty of times where a station is not worth the effort to get back online. I am especially thinking of sub ten minute engine fuck ups and you've joined a round that no-one has been on in the last 6 hours.

I also enjoy seeing them when a traitor has murdered the rest of the crew (aka the other three people).

[Vekter]

Restart votes should not be completely disabled. There are plenty of times where a station is not worth the effort to get back online. I am especially thinking of sub ten minute engine fuck ups and you've joined a round that no-one has been on in the last 6 hours.

I also enjoy seeing them when a traitor has murdered the rest of the crew (aka the other three people).

I completely agree, but if I don't put it as an option, someone will ask why we can't do that and complain that I didn't put it up there.

[Critawakets]

Frankly, if a majority of people want to restart a round because of a specific map being rolled, I think you have a bigger problem than the restart votes. Probably still a good idea to have proper discussion on restart votes, but I feel like that one case isn't an issue with restarting.

[Vekter]

Frankly, if a majority of people want to restart a round because of a specific map being rolled, I think you have a bigger problem than the restart votes. Probably still a good idea to have proper discussion on restart votes, but I feel like that one case isn't an issue with restarting.

I really don't want this to turn into a discussion about why (map) is bad. Just forcing everyone to skip the map because you and your friends don't like it isn't the solution, either.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

Acceptable restart reasons:

1. There is some kind of major bug or glitch
2. Someone murderboned everyone on station except for the SSD Paramedic hiding in a closet in maintenance, and 12 ghosts do not want to just sit there and watch 1 person do nothing for 45 minutes
3. The station got completely fucked up early in the shift and frankly no one wants to/is capable of fixing it (Read as: Engineering was too incompetent to do the SM properly, so how could they possibly be competent enough to fix the station and get power up?) and no one wants to sit around in darkness with no power for 40 minutes until shuttle can be called, arrive, take off, and finally land at centcomm for a shift where they will actually be able to do whatever job they signed up for.

Having a hard time thinking of other acceptable use-cases.

[kinnebian]

2) Explicitly state what restart votes are for and any use outside of those cases are subject to admin intervention. Restart votes are specifically for situations where the round cannot end gracefully, either due to everyone being dead and nobody being able to call the shuttle or due to the server being seriously fucked in a way that makes it impossible to play. I think this solves most issues but I understand that the headmins might find this too restrictive.

This, and make restart votes more obvious in admin bot channels. Maybe a role for it, but I doubt it.

[iamgoofball]

restart votes should simply not switch the map, that'll fix it

[Jacquerel]

restart votes should simply not switch the map, that'll fix it

Obviously this is a code solution and not policy but I think it does pretty neatly deal with this issue.

[Vekter]

As an aside, I'm 100% in favor of anything that we can do to fix the issue that doesn't result in us having to ban people for doing these votes. If we can find a good code-based compromise, I'm fine with that. Contrary to popular belief, I do not enjoy banning people.

restart votes should simply not switch the map, that'll fix it

I'm not totally against this, but it would require having the restart vote somehow override the current "next map" setting, since players are calling and finishing a map vote first, then doing a restart vote. It could also result in issues where the server gets stuck if whatever problem is occurring because of the map in question, such as the massive lag issues we used to have on Ice Box.

This, and make restart votes more obvious in admin bot channels. Maybe a role for it, but I doubt it.

I already made the suggestion for it to notify Supportmin in Discord, but I worry about ping fatigue with how many things already do that.

[kieth4]

if it's lowpop who cares man. If 3/5 of the people don't want to play some dogshit map who cares why is it an issue. I'd rather play lowpop on a fun map than one everyone on the server hates and will just speedrun anyway (there are no admins)

[wesoda25]

A map means more on low/dead pop because you could end up there for hours. Power to the players; if the majority don’t want to play, for whatever reason, then so be it.

[Vekter]

if it's lowpop who cares man. If 3/5 of the people don't want to play some dogshit map who cares why is it an issue. I'd rather play lowpop on a fun map than one everyone on the server hates and will just speedrun anyway (there are no admins)

I care because the other 2 people don't want their round ruined by the other 3 who could easily go to play on another server until that round is over.

The real issue is that the maintainers don't want people skipping maps, so their options are either to play it or go do something else until the round ends. If you want to go try and change oranges' mind on the matter, you're more than welcome.

It's also completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, but none of our maps are so bad they can't be played on. You can stand to play a single Birdshot round every so often, it's not going to kill you.

[kieth4]

People do not want to play a map- it is the majority of people, I don't think ruining their fun is the way to go especially if they want to be stuck there for like 3 hrs or some shit. Some maps are largely hated by the community- forcing them to play on them will not force them to like them.

If oranges has an issue with it he will code a solution is his a very talented coder.

This is just my take anyhow. I don't play lowpop but have friends who do so that's my angle.

[datorangebottle]

This isn't an administrative issue. None of your proposed solutions are fits for the problem at hand.

► Show Spoiler

1) Explicitly make using restart votes to skip a map against the rules. I'm okay with this since it solves the main problem I'm concerned with, but there are other instances of people misusing it (ie: just last night someone started one on Terry low-pop because they'd died and a bunch of people who were observing voted yes despite the round being relatively active) and I think making it a bit more broad will be more helpful.

As brought up above, this restricts use of the restart vote when the map is bugged. Also, as far as I'm aware, votes don't currently log who voted for what; the only actionable person would be the one who specifically started the vote. Even if they did, it would put a significant burden on administrators to figure out who voted for what and what the appropriate action to take regarding each person would be. Finally, it relies heavily on administrators being online during low/deadpop hours, which are specifically when these problematic votes are getting through. I remember there being some sort of safety measure that automatically stops a successful restart vote from restarting the server if an admin is online.

2) Explicitly state what restart votes are for and any use outside of those cases are subject to admin intervention. Restart votes are specifically for situations where the round cannot end gracefully, either due to everyone being dead and nobody being able to call the shuttle or due to the server being seriously fucked in a way that makes it impossible to play. I think this solves most issues but I understand that the headmins might find this too restrictive.

This is probably the best solution of those proposed, but it runs into several of the same issues as solution 1: extra administrative work, no logging support, relies on administrators being online during low/deadpop hours.

3) Just disable restart votes entirely. This would certainly fix the issue, but I think it's not necessary, since there are completely valid reasons to use restart votes, they're just few and far between. I don't hate the idea of us going back to just having to have people notify admins on Discord to fix the server, but others might.

This prevents the players from restarting during catastrophic playability issues, and allows one asshole to hold the server hostage until an administrator comes online. This isn't an acceptable solution by any means.

This is a code issue with many possible code solutions that aren't proper to discuss here.

[warbluke]

I really don't see Birdshot restart voted too often on Bagil. Whenever I do (Which is admittedly more often than the other two maps) it's because someone fucked up the SM in the first five minutes for the umpteenth time.
Are there some stats out there about how frequent restarts are and on what maps?

[Vekter]

As brought up above, this restricts use of the restart vote when the map is bugged. Also, as far as I'm aware, votes don't currently log who voted for what; the only actionable person would be the one who specifically started the vote. Even if they did, it would put a significant burden on administrators to figure out who voted for what and what the appropriate action to take regarding each person would be. Finally, it relies heavily on administrators being online during low/deadpop hours, which are specifically when these problematic votes are getting through. I remember there being some sort of safety measure that automatically stops a successful restart vote from restarting the server if an admin is online.

It doesn't, because if the map is bugged to the point where it's impossible to play on, then that would be an acceptable use of the restart vote system. It would be as simple as asking those involved or looking at the logs to tell if there's an issue, namely in that someone would certainly say something about a problem at some point. I agree that there are code solutions for this issue, but many of them would be denied by the maintainer team as they would interfere with how they want to handle maps, which is, "We don't care if a handful of people don't want to play on a map".

I really don't see Birdshot restart voted too often on Bagil. Whenever I do (Which is admittedly more often than the other two maps) it's because someone fucked up the SM in the first five minutes for the umpteenth time.
Are there some stats out there about how frequent restarts are and on what maps?

Both times a restart vote was used yesterday on Basil were on Birdshot and were used in the manner that prompted me to create this thread.

E: lessthnthree is working on implementing a way to have restart votes force the current map to run again. They said they'd make a PR for it this weekend, but I'll leave this thread up for now in case that gets rejected by maintainers or it ends up being more complicated than expected.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Why is it unfair to the 2 players who want to play birdshot to skip, but not unfair to the 3 players who don't want to play birdshot to prevent them from skipping a map designed to be unpleasant to play on?

[Vekter]

Why is it unfair to the 2 players who want to play birdshot to skip, but not unfair to the 3 players who don't want to play birdshot to prevent them from skipping a map designed to be unpleasant to play on?

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them. Any solution that lets them skip that goes against that desire. It's also apparently A Thing that some people will tell others to join the server to swing the restart vote which is unacceptable.

Again, I'm not discussing a specific map here, nor the quality of those maps.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Why is it unfair to the 2 players who want to play birdshot to skip, but not unfair to the 3 players who don't want to play birdshot to prevent them from skipping a map designed to be unpleasant to play on?

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them. Any solution that lets them skip that goes against that desire. It's also apparently A Thing that some people will tell others to join the server to swing the restart vote which is unacceptable.

Thats fair, and a good reason to ask people not to do that.

[Vekter]

Here's the aforementioned PR. If this is merged, we can close this.

[sinfulbliss]

Why is it unfair to the 2 players who want to play birdshot to skip, but not unfair to the 3 players who don't want to play birdshot to prevent them from skipping a map designed to be unpleasant to play on?

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them. Any solution that lets them skip that goes against that desire. It's also apparently A Thing that some people will tell others to join the server to swing the restart vote which is unacceptable.

So you want to force players to play on a map they dislike, because "maptainers want people to play on them"? That just seems wild to me. The whole reason people play the game is for fun, not to bugfix maps. If they're not having fun on a map enough to win a majority vote to go somewhere else, that should be their prerogative since we are all in theory here to enjoy ourselves.

[kinnebian]

We're here to have the most fun possible, and I dont think making people play maps that the active majority of that shift doesnt like is very fun.
HOWEVER
I dont think thats at all fair to the people on the server who like the map, who roll antag or some other special role, or might be preparing a map-specific gimmick.

So really, I have no opinion and reading this was pointless.

[Nabski]

Here's the aforementioned PR. If this is merged, we can close this.

You realize that means that the server will just be rebooted while on metastation right as the shuttle is about to dock and the round end. I've seen this happen but don't remember the exact mechanics of it.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Cant help but feel that the real issue is that its hard to spot people calling in metabuddies to rig votes on ultra-low pop rounds, not people skipping maps with a restart. PR feels kinda "code overrides to enforcement problems" to me.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

Cant help but feel that the real issue is that its hard to spot people calling in metabuddies to rig votes on ultra-low pop rounds, not people skipping maps with a restart. PR feels kinda "code overrides to enforcement problems" to me.

I mean it cant be too hard. Just look at a suspicious restart, and then check for connections in the last 5-10 minutes, and see who joined. Then check/monitor those people for same behavior pattern.

[GPeckman]

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them.

I think this argument would be a lot stronger if feedback was at least acknowledged by the map creators. Allow me to give an example: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/75590

That is an issue report on Birdshot atmospherics. English isn't the author's first language, but the report is very detailed, including screenshots for each individual problem. It was written almost 4 months ago, and since then there's been... nothing. No response. Now, fixing major issues can of course take time, but I would at least expect a comment like "Hey, I'm working on improving this" from the map creator, to show that it isn't being completed ignored. But there's nothing.

If you want any chance of the feedback argument being taken seriously, then feedback has to actually be addressed.

[Jacquerel]

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them.

I think this argument would be a lot stronger if feedback was at least acknowledged by the map creators. Allow me to give an example: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/75590

There's an engineering rework literally in progress right now

[GPeckman]

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them.

I think this argument would be a lot stronger if feedback was at least acknowledged by the map creators. Allow me to give an example: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/75590

There's an engineering rework literally in progress right now

I don't see it.

[Vekter]

The maintainers explicitly want people to play on every map so they can get feedback to map creators on improving them.

I think this argument would be a lot stronger if feedback was at least acknowledged by the map creators. Allow me to give an example: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/75590

There's an engineering rework literally in progress right now

I don't see it.

My brother in Christ, it has to be finished before a PR is made for it

[GPeckman]

My brother in Christ, it has to be finished before a PR is made for it

I did acknowledge that.

Now, fixing major issues can of course take time, but I would at least expect a comment like "Hey, I'm working on improving this" from the map creator, to show that it isn't being completed ignored. But there's nothing.

I'm aware that it was mentioned on discord, but on a discord server as large and fast as TGcord its easy to miss messages, even if you do try to follow channels.

[zxaber]

Restart voting does not adequately serve any purpose;

• Voting to restart a dying server does not work if the server is dying to performance issues - We witnessed this several days ago on Sybil, where the vote itself also fell victim to time dilation hell, and an Ahelp was required to get an admin online for a fix.

• Voting to restart due to a stuck round does not reliably work because non-votes are considered as "Continue Playing" - We witnessed this a few days ago on either Sybil or Terry, where a blob on the middle layer of icebox had no way to reach critical mass but most of the crew were dead, resulting effectively in a stalemate. Again, the solution was an admin becoming involved.

Ironically, abusing voting to end a murderbone or skip maps is a constant concern. Every successful restart vote I've seen was salty ghosts voting to end a murderbone. This would be more common if non-voters were not counted as "Continue Playing" votes. That we have to cripple the functionality of the restart voting system this hard in an attempt to stop abuse is a hint that it probably is the wrong tool for the job.

We have a Discord full of pingable roles for server performance problems, and a bot to deliver ahelps for fixing softlocks. We do not benefit meaningfully from having a vote restart system, and it should be disabled. Alternatively, the caller of a restart vote should have to include a short reason why the vote is called, with the expectation that abuse of restart voting (and especially lying about why it's being called) will be met with administrative action.

[GPeckman]

Honestly, I see using restart votes against murderboner as a feature, not a bug. If someone has literally managed to murder half of the server or more, then that's their problem.

[Vekter]

PR got merged, we're done here