Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

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bandit
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Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by bandit » #375949

In this clusterfuck of a thread: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 23&t=15126

some admins/headmins indicated they would be OK with a policy preventing admins from pressing buttons in rounds they're active in or were active in (if they died, etc). However the thread is a clusterfuck and this is really more of a policy discussion topic. As far as I can tell the suggestions were:

- Admins can't press buttons at all in rounds they were involved in
- Admins can press buttons but only after 30 minutes have passed since they died/left the round
- Admins can press buttons as they see fit as long as it isn't obviously to benefit themselves/get revenge/otherwise abuse shit
- Admins shouldn't admin and play the same round at all (I don't think anyone actually wants this, but it's another possibility)

For the record, I'm in favor of there being some sort of set policy on this so in future threads might have less of a chance of turning into massive clusterfucks. I really don't care either way what it is, but it's caused confusion among admins/trialmins in the past.

(also please don't turn this thread into a place to re-litigate the admin complaint, this is about the policy suggestions brought up)
Last edited by bandit on Sat Jan 27, 2018 7:19 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by CitrusGender » #375952

Is it an admins place to interfere with a round in the first place?

We have agreed that yes, an admin is allowed to do events even with there being huge consequences on the round with few liabilities.

If an admin does an event out of spite or malice, this is problematic but difficult to prove.

However, is it possible for an admin to do an event during the round they died out of pure care for the game? Of course.

I believe it should be taken on a case by case basis, as it currently is with the complaint.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Nilons » #375953

This feels like one of those things that shouldn't be strictly disallowed but should have the express implication that if you over do it it's full on admin abuse. That it should only be done using very minor buttons or with really good reasoning because straight up banning it seems super lame and will just end up with less admins trying to spice up rounds or even playing in them. Certain cases like wizard rounds should probably be off limits however because as stated previously in the complaint fucking with a wizard round may as well be fucking with the wizard.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by PKPenguin321 » #375960

It's literally fine and you should be able to see the difference between just pushing a button while playing and outright abuse

I admin while playing somewhat frequently and it has its moments. One time I was the lawyer and the clown came to me and confided that he may or may not have been an agent of an enemy organization and wanted legal council as to what to do, as the target he may or may not have had may or may not have committed suicide. I told him I had connections to a higher up organization that could give him fun toys if he had anything to trade and ended up doing an in-character TC trade.

Since this is obviously a thinly veiled peanut thread about the sticky thread, I'll also say that a lot of buttons will be pushed regardless of whether or not you're playing. Very, very rarely will you only push a button only because you happened to be playing in that round. This is especially true if you're the only admin on the server and still want to play.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by bandit » #375961

PKPenguin321 wrote:Since this is obviously a thinly veiled peanut thread about the sticky thread, I'll also say that a lot of buttons will be pushed regardless of whether or not you're playing. Very, very rarely will you only push a button only because you happened to be playing in that round. This is especially true if you're the only admin on the server and still want to play.
No it's not. I don't give a shit about the sticky thread either way. I just would like a ruling on this because there has been confusion about this in the past, as well as about staying adminned while playing, as well as about related things like ghost roles buttons.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by PKPenguin321 » #375962

bandit wrote:
PKPenguin321 wrote:Since this is obviously a thinly veiled peanut thread about the sticky thread, I'll also say that a lot of buttons will be pushed regardless of whether or not you're playing. Very, very rarely will you only push a button only because you happened to be playing in that round. This is especially true if you're the only admin on the server and still want to play.
No it's not. I don't give a shit about the sticky thread either way. I just would like a ruling on this because there has been confusion about this in the past, as well as about staying adminned while playing, as well as about related things like ghost roles buttons.
My mistake then. The rest of my post still stands though.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Limski » #375965

I think admins should be able to press buttons in rounds they are playing in because the game is boring without it but please be wise about it because its very easy to misinterpret as abuse if done wrong
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by BeeSting12 » #375970

Personally, I try to wait a bit before pressing buttons because it can be misinterpreted as abuse. I think making a set-in-stone policy on this isn't a good idea, but I do think that the admins we pick should have the discretion to know that throwing meteors 3 times at a station after they get killed by a wizard doesn't look good.

I guess if I had to choose one of them, I'd do "Admins can press buttons as they see fit as long as it isn't obviously to benefit themselves/get revenge/otherwise abuse shit."
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by feem » #375999

I always deadmin if I'm gonna play

when I readmin after dying I just handle tickets usually
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Stickymayhem » #376019

This is a totally fair thread to have and let's not mention my garbage.

Honestly, I have a really high regard for the admin team today. Two years ago we were much worse, more disparate, more disconnected and in-fighty while appearing more metaclubby. I'm really impressed with how far the team came in the last two years.

This is to say, I think this is a policy that depends on the team. Two years ago I would probably have had a similar stance, but criticisms about some people abusing the privilege would have had some merit. These days I genuinely can't think of an admin who is immature enough to allow an IC round to affect their OOC admin behaviour in any meaningful way.

In the past, admin burnout has been a huge problem, and the things that contributed to it were stricter and stricter admin oversight, restrictons on events, and the bloated IC ruleset creating more ahelps with less player satisfaction. This is a game, and admins deserve to have fun too. When you reduce their role to that of a call center employee, they're going to tire of it. While I'm not calling slippery slope, discouraging admins (who truly care about SS13) from playing the game and treating them as if they cannot separate OOC from IC, which even our playerbase is mostly capable of doing, is definitely going to make administrating far less pleasant.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by oranges » #376029

it's a useless policy, if you can't trust an admin not to abuse their buttons to settle a grudge you can't trust them to administrate anyway.

Setting some arbitrary line for when it goes from abuse -> normal administrative events is not helpful in anyway other than making a badmin wait for next round to do their badmin grudging.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by EagleWiz » #376043

My preferred solution would be for admins participating in a round to not

1. Press buttons that cause events designed to end the round (i.e. meteors, swarmers, a multitude of rods) edit: I could see some leniency here for shuttle calls during interminable rounds, like if there's murderboners who took over the station and wont let it be called, or if all the heads and their IDs are practically impossible for the crew to retrieve and the station went to shit.
2. Press buttons that are designed to screw over antags (i.e. don't summon an ERT to deal with the ling who killed you, even if he did also kill most of sec)
3. Press buttons that help the admin get greentext (i.e. in a recent round I was in there was a clock cult with a few braindead members, and at one point the admin offered them up to ghosts. This is fine, but had the admin doing that also been a clock cult member this would seem a little odd)
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Stickymayhem » #376044

EagleWiz wrote:My preferred solution would be for admins participating in a round to not

1. Press buttons that cause events designed to end the round (i.e. meteors, swarmers, a multitude of rods)
2. Press buttons that are designed to screw over antags (i.e. don't summon an ERT to deal with the ling who killed you, even if he did also kill most of sec)
3. Press buttons that help the admin get greentext (i.e. in a recent round I was in there was a clock cult with a few braindead members, and at one point the admin offered them up to ghosts. This is fine, but had the admin doing that also been a clock cult member this would seem a little odd)
None of these really make sense in context.

1. An admin should and should want to do what's best for the round. Ending the round is needed on occasion. Would you, in deadchat, really be frustrated at an admin ending a recall spam round just because they were in it? Every admin has dozens of opportunities every day to be poorly influenced by personal investment in a round.

2. Again, antags should have their fun, but there comes a point where this is at the expense of everyone else. RNG should not be so blindly relied upon that a traitor who murderbones and kills everyone should be allowed to essentially hold the round hostage. I've been the traitor who does this in the past. Admin intervention is absolutely necessary. Not every player is going to choose to end the round at an appropriate time.

3. This one is the most insane. Imagine being one of the cultists and an admin tells you "Sorry I'm also a cultist, I can't replace the the afk or ghosted guy". On a pointless technicality that serves no purpose, you ruin the round for antags, and give every other player a boring round as a result. You cause so much damage and what do you gain from it? You haven't even made that clear.

Really bad ideas honestly.

Not to be rude, but you seem completely fixated on solving a problem that doesn't exist, at the expense of everything else. Any of your suggestions being implemented would solve nothing, and be detrimental to the server.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Lazengann » #376053

Just don't dunk someone for dunking you and its okay
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Stickymayhem » #376058

Lazengann wrote:Just don't dunk someone for dunking you and its okay
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Rustledjimm » #376098

There is a small, similar, precedent set however.

We deadmin during Head roles or security because we get a lot of meta information and we can be accused of metagaming if we do not. I know for a fact I was once accused of metagaming during a detective round despite being deadminned, if I wasn't deadminned I can fully see why the player would have accused me of this. This is policy to prevent opening ourselves to the accusation.

As Kor said in the other thread, this is a grey area. Because it is a grey area it has now opened up two possibilities, that players think something malicious is up or that their concerns have just been swept or shitposted under the carpet. Or both.

I'm not advocating for having a policy but I think it's good to have a discussion on this. It's possible this will be another case-by-case basis but without a set policy it does mean this issue and discussion will crop up again in future.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by imblyings » #376143

"it's a useless policy, if you can't trust an admin not to abuse their buttons to settle a grudge you can't trust them to administrate anyway." - citrus
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by onleavedontatme » #376185

Except the way we figure out whether an admin is trustworthy or not is by watching their actions in game. If we have a category of actions that are impossible to judge trustworthiness on without knowing if the admin is trustworthy, and we cant know if an admin is trustworthy unless we judge their actions, we're stuck in a catch 22.

Same dumb argument was put forward when I wanted to add logging to antag checking and surprise a bunch of admins were doing it after all
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by iamgoofball » #376194

Kor wrote:Except the way we figure out whether an admin is trustworthy or not is by watching their actions in game. If we have a category of actions that are impossible to judge trustworthiness on without knowing if the admin is trustworthy, and we cant know if an admin is trustworthy unless we judge their actions, we're stuck in a catch 22.

Same dumb argument was put forward when I wanted to add logging to antag checking and surprise a bunch of admins were doing it after all
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by EagleWiz » #376199

imblyings wrote:"it's a useless policy, if you can't trust an admin not to abuse their buttons to settle a grudge you can't trust them to administrate anyway." - citrus
If you can't trust an admin not to abuse their power to settle a grudge, why are admins not supposed to answer their own ahelps? If you can't trust an admin not to press stupid buttons to ruin a round why are admins either not supposed to or are heavily discouraged from spawning megafauna on the station? If you can't trust admins not to abuse buttons to gain an advantage in a round why are admins supposed to deadmin before playing sec? The reason is because either there were admins that abused this in the past, or because it erodes trust in the admin team.

It's fairly clear from the other thread that although citrus may have the upmost faith in the integrity of the admin team there are a number of players who can't trust everyone in the admin team to not abuse their buttons to settle a grudge. Even sticky admits that he wouldn't have had the same level of trust in some previous admin teams.
The thing is with a lot of admin actions its pretty easy to tell if power is being misused - if someone decides to ban people for little reason it's going to be immediately apparent to both the other admins and the player banned. On the other hand, if admins are allowed to send in ERTs after a ling murders them its not going to be obvious that's what happened unless the admin uses a static name you recognize, and on the flip side whenever admins do send in an ERT some players will react with "oh, what admin got killed this time" even if this is only rarely the cause of ERTs - because that will occasionally be what causes an ERT to be summoned.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Nilons » #376202

imblyings wrote:"it's a useless policy, if you can't trust an admin not to abuse their buttons to settle a grudge you can't trust them to administrate anyway." - citrus
Admins aren't perfect, they get mad and they make mistakes, if you could trust admins to never make the wrong call there would be no successful complaints
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Stickymayhem » #376210

EagleWiz wrote:
imblyings wrote:"it's a useless policy, if you can't trust an admin not to abuse their buttons to settle a grudge you can't trust them to administrate anyway." - citrus
If you can't trust an admin not to abuse their power to settle a grudge, why are admins not supposed to answer their own ahelps? If you can't trust an admin not to press stupid buttons to ruin a round why are admins either not supposed to or are heavily discouraged from spawning megafauna on the station? If you can't trust admins not to abuse buttons to gain an advantage in a round why are admins supposed to deadmin before playing sec? The reason is because either there were admins that abused this in the past, or because it erodes trust in the admin team.

It's fairly clear from the other thread that although citrus may have the upmost faith in the integrity of the admin team there are a number of players who can't trust everyone in the admin team to not abuse their buttons to settle a grudge. Even sticky admits that he wouldn't have had the same level of trust in some previous admin teams.
The thing is with a lot of admin actions its pretty easy to tell if power is being misused - if someone decides to ban people for little reason it's going to be immediately apparent to both the other admins and the player banned. On the other hand, if admins are allowed to send in ERTs after a ling murders them its not going to be obvious that's what happened unless the admin uses a static name you recognize, and on the flip side whenever admins do send in an ERT some players will react with "oh, what admin got killed this time" even if this is only rarely the cause of ERTs - because that will occasionally be what causes an ERT to be summoned.
The important thing to remember here, is that at the absolute worst case scenario, one round is ruined. It's not a kick, or a ban or a record on a player. No one is really harmed, and rounds can easily be ruined by players in any number of ways. So you have a low-tier consequence, that provides the useful demonstration of an admin's lack of administrative capabilities which would suggest faults in other areas.

Ahelps are directly involving a player and have OOC consequences.

Megafauna is completely unrelated. That is purely an effort by Kor to keep megafauna something special and interesting for as long as possible. I think he's succeeded as best as anyone could in a game where dissecting the mechanical worth out of everything for combat value is commonplace.

As for the "obviousness", that's not really relevant. The only time it becomes obvious is when people make complaints. If no one is complaining (in deadchat, OOC or otherwise), then there isn't really a problem is there?
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by EagleWiz » #376215

Stickymayhem wrote: The important thing to remember here, is that at the absolute worst case scenario, one round is ruined. It's not a kick, or a ban or a record on a player. No one is really harmed, and rounds can easily be ruined by players in any number of ways. So you have a low-tier consequence, that provides the useful demonstration of an admin's lack of administrative capabilities which would suggest faults in other areas.
Except that if its considered acceptable behavior its not just going to be one round, nor will it be seen as a useful demonstration of a lack of administrative capabilities - it will be seen as part of normal admin behavior unless it happens with great frequency AND someone decides to go through the effort of checking a lot of logs in order to find a pattern.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by feem » #376222

I'm not speaking as an admin here right now, but as a gamerunner in general. I've run a lot of online games with much heavier IC/OOC separation than we have here, and in all of those, there were a couple things expected of admins:

* It will be impossible to completely eliminate the bias that comes from being able to see how the world runs, so in every instance possible, the admin should divorce themselves from their characters both through behavior and scope of impact. On most games, we prevented admin PCs from holding positions of power, or allowed those positions of power only to be handled by NPC characters or non-admin PCs.
* Whenever possible, admin tools should not be available to admin players when they are playing their PCs. In the games I ran, this involved basically having separate player objects, or 'accounts.'

Obviously these aren't entirely tenable here, and I'm not suggesting that they should be made so or expected to be so. But the core principle is: as much as possible, remove temptation and ability for IC/OOC boundaries to be crossed.

This is why I deadmin when I play: the background I come from trained me to separate myself from administration as much as possible when I was actually playing, both for my own sake, the sake of the perception of the administration, and for the sake of the players.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by leibniz » #376224

It is more important that buttons are pressed in a tasteful manner, this is independent from the admin being involved with the round.
Do we really want more restrictions at the cost of potential dullness?

Do we have any specific examples of the abuse we are trying to combat here?
In the latest wizard contra sticky case the complaint is that the antag was robbed of their round by events, but the antag was actually not upset, rendering the complaint somewhat pointless.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by kevinz000 » #376235

i think the current case-by-case basis thing is good. intent is important here, if an admin did it out of personal upset/whatnot it'd be unacceptable, but many times admins intervene while they're personally in the game to make it better.
i recall someone saying that it should make everyone's experience more fun, and not be just for your personal enjoyment.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Cobby » #376252

tfw my post got referenced by a headmin but #literallyhitler admins deleted it.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Okand37 » #376257

Be excellent to each other and act in good faith towards the betterment and enjoyment of others and the rest will follow!
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Krusvik » #376265

oranges wrote:it's a useless policy, if you can't trust an admin not to abuse their buttons to settle a grudge you can't trust them to administrate anyway.

Setting some arbitrary line for when it goes from abuse -> normal administrative events is not helpful in anyway other than making a badmin wait for next round to do their badmin grudging.
Kor wrote:Except the way we figure out whether an admin is trustworthy or not is by watching their actions in game. If we have a category of actions that are impossible to judge trustworthiness on without knowing if the admin is trustworthy, and we cant know if an admin is trustworthy unless we judge their actions, we're stuck in a catch 22.
Mehki wrote:i think the current case-by-case basis thing is good. intent is important here, if an admin did it out of personal upset/whatnot it'd be unacceptable, but many times admins intervene while they're personally in the game to make it better.
i recall someone saying that it should make everyone's experience more fun, and not be just for your personal enjoyment.
As usual I have nothing to add that hasn't already been said, and agree with my peers.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by imblyings » #376277

@nilons and eagle

Schrodingers trust. Implicit trust keeps adminning more tolerable, since it's nice to piss your time away on a 2d atmosphere simulator if you are at least treated without constant suspicion and as an adult who wants the best for this place. At the same time, older admins have seen enough deadmins to know that checks and balances are needed and that the trust is not absolute.

The rest of it is to put it bluntly so we don't have to spend our time responding to threads like this. Cobby apparently got deleted so to reiterate it's simply 'cover your own ass'. No one sane or smart likes posting here, don't think it's anything other than admins who just want to reduce workload and therefore set in policy to achieve that.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by onleavedontatme » #376291

Not entering into situations where an admin acting in poor faith and an admin acting in good faith are indistinguishable to an outside observer is how we avoid the "constant suspicion" though. You're right it'd be fucking awful if trust broke down with the admins, it's why we deadmin when we play and we don't answer our own ahelps and we shouldn't run events or whatever after an antag kills us, whether its related in our own minds or not.

And yes I'd like less workload with dumb internet government threads, that is why I don't want to be obligated to play pretend mind reader and guess at admin motives when they can just avoid such situations all together.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by bandit » #376295

imblyings wrote:The rest of it is to put it bluntly so we don't have to spend our time responding to threads like this. Cobby apparently got deleted so to reiterate it's simply 'cover your own ass'. No one sane or smart likes posting here, don't think it's anything other than admins who just want to reduce workload and therefore set in policy to achieve that.
[quote="Kor"And yes I'd like less workload with dumb internet government threads, that is why I don't want to be obligated to play pretend mind reader and guess at admin motives when they can just avoid such situations all together.[/quote]

ding ding ding

as I see it the options are:

a) have no set policy besides "well it's OK if they're trustworthy and not if they're not :^)" and then have 100-post drama threads and 100-post babbies of drama threads fighting over how trustworthy people are, which is inherently impossible to know for certain outside extreme fuckups

b) have a policy, and hopefully kill the 100-post cancer before it metastasizes
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by oranges » #376313

I didn't say admins didn't abuse, what I was trying to illustrate is drawing arbitrary line about where it becomes abuse won't help catch them and just provides complaintees with more rules to throw at an admin
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by imblyings » #376342

bandit wrote:
imblyings wrote:The rest of it is to put it bluntly so we don't have to spend our time responding to threads like this. Cobby apparently got deleted so to reiterate it's simply 'cover your own ass'. No one sane or smart likes posting here, don't think it's anything other than admins who just want to reduce workload and therefore set in policy to achieve that.
[quote="Kor"And yes I'd like less workload with dumb internet government threads, that is why I don't want to be obligated to play pretend mind reader and guess at admin motives when they can just avoid such situations all together.
ding ding ding

as I see it the options are:

a) have no set policy besides "well it's OK if they're trustworthy and not if they're not :^)" and then have 100-post drama threads and 100-post babbies of drama threads fighting over how trustworthy people are, which is inherently impossible to know for certain outside extreme fuckups

b) have a policy, and hopefully kill the 100-post cancer before it metastasizes[/quote]

simple fucking answer if i cant trust an admin enough to the level where i trust myself with buttons they are on my fucking shit list anyway and are fucking gone

therefore we dont need a policy

i'll kill admins all day bro but i would rather start off with giving trust to the guys who volunteer their precious time to fucking arbitrate between grown adults being pissy over a 2d spessmen game than just tell them no i cant trust you here's a policy
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by MrStonedOne » #376640

At some point, avoiding situations that could look bad gets to be too much, and too limiting, and only serves to encourage drama, rather than avoid it. I strongly caution against blindly leaning to that direction.

What ends up happening is you get admin complaints based entirely on rather or not the admin could have abused, rather than if they actually abused. And trust me, that is not a can of worms you want to open kor.

You can't be soft with that kind of thing, it has to be hard lines in the sand. "Don't cross these lines, even in good faith." Handling ahelps about you is a hard line. Admins know not to cross this line, so its ok if we have admin complaints that are based around rather or not an admin could have abused their powers by crossing the line, because the act of crossing it is abuse.

But when you have fuzzy lines like "maybe don't get too involve in the round if you got killed" all of the sudden you've opened us up to an admin complaint any time any button big or small gets pressed by any admin who was killed in the round, by an antag or not. "did he answer that traitor's telecrystle prey because he was hoping making the antag more powerful would cause the guy who killed him to get killed by the traitor?"

Do you really want to have to handle that kind of AC kor? Do you?

Make it a hard line in the sand, all buttons or no buttons. Anything in the middle is just going to create more admin complaints than it would prevent.

The only reason the "no handling ahelps you were involved in" rule works is because the line is so clear that crossing it, even in good faith, is itself a bad faith action, so you can avoid the entire need to judge bad faith vs good faith.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by iamgoofball » #376660

CosmicScientist wrote:
How many complaints about admemes playing and then pressing bootons have there been so far?
many, you werent around for the old guard abuse days
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by onleavedontatme » #376686

MrStonedOne wrote:
Do you really want to have to handle that kind of AC kor? Do you?
No, I don't, which is why I don't want admins to do it. All these posts about admins being reasonable people that we trust just glosses over the fact that Saeg was one of the people who burned his free time babysitting our servers, and we trusted him to do it for three years. He's not some random drama stirrer. If admins are reasonable people, it means a reasonable person (Saeg) can perceive these things as unfair.

I don't want make this all about Sticky but there were two other admins online in that case. Our role in the game as admins would not have been limited had he been required not to touch things. Blowing up the entire station after you die looks moronic to someone on the outside, and if the station really needed to be blown up there were other people who could have done it.

We just had a headmin, with remote access, one of the highest trust positions in the community, get permabanned for abuse, so no I don't want a massive grey area that admins can exploit to take revenge on a round when they're mad/bored that we're not even allowed to scrutinize for fear of "drama"

Our rules are full of grey areas about what is or isn't reasonable in any given situation. I feel like we can say "let other admins online handle things first, run your plans by the antag in question if your'e the only one on, minimize the potential impact on them if you still need to keep the round going" and have some loose framework of rules without it being a can of worms.

The real can of worms is going to be if players are suspicious of my actions (like earlier today, when I was deadminned, getting accused of answering my own ahelps) because other admins have no sense of tact or optics.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by onleavedontatme » #376687

There has got to be some reasonable middle ground between "the deadmin button is irreversible" and "if you wait 15 minutes you can do whatever the hell you want"

We managed a rule around antag spawning (don't join your own antag spawn) without crippling the admin teams ability to run the game, I don't like the idea that this is dangerous to even entertain discussion of limits on.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Stickymayhem » #376724

We just had a headmin, with remote access, one of the highest trust positions in the community, get permabanned for abuse, so no I don't want a massive grey area that admins can exploit to take revenge on a round when they're mad/bored that we're not even allowed to scrutinize for fear of "drama"
I wasn't around for this but was this continuous abusive behaviour or one big fuck-up that ruined one round?

Because losing one round of SS13 out of like 50 a day, in exchange for permanently removing someone who is unfit to be an admin, seems like a beneficial trade to me.

How many threads are going to crop up over this issue. One a month? Probably less now that admins are going to be anaylzing their behaviour just so they don't have to deal with the drama of a thread, legitimate complaint or not.

My point once again, is that a case-by-case basis is fine for low-volume issues like this. Adding rules for edge-cases, as you know, makes playing/administrating needlessly more frustrating and difficult. In the same way we handle people who shouldn't be on the server but are well-behaved enough that they slip under the radar, if an admin is doing good things for bad reasons, it's impossible to tell and doesn't upset anyone, so it's not an issue that can be solved or needs solving.

Rules that reduce fun 95% of the time just to prevent that small possibility of misuse are unfair on everyone. I don't want to tell deadchat that this extended/dead-antag round has to stay extended because I played in it, or I can't do their TC trade because it might look abusive, or that I'm sorry the event went to shit because I gave a player that critical RP role instead of myself to avoid it looking bad. I'm not trying to call slippery slope here, but a shitload of admin behaviour can be reduced to that 5% of potential misuse, and this one just happens to have attention because of an unsuccessful admin complaint.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Brotemis » #376765

I'm sure I've been guilty of this before but this thread should serve as a reminder as to why it's not the best idea.

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1132
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Cobby » #376767

Brotemis wrote:I'm sure I've been guilty of this before but this thread should serve as a reminder as to why it's not the best idea.

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1132
The elephant in the room, at least in regards to recent events, is that Sticky has had a history of doing similar situations (regardless of the validity of each individual one) so people are more apt to look at his "events" as such.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Qbopper » #376776

Cobby wrote:
Brotemis wrote:I'm sure I've been guilty of this before but this thread should serve as a reminder as to why it's not the best idea.

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1132
The elephant in the room, at least in regards to recent events, is that Sticky has had a history of doing similar situations (regardless of the validity of each individual one) so people are more apt to look at his "events" as such.
should probably be careful not to make this thread another sticky complaint

edit: to clarify, yes, sticky's actions are relevant, but don't turn this into a "fuck sticky" thread
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Cobby » #376840

Well ofc I had no intention of making this Sticky complaint 2.0.

@Sticky
Case-by-case as well as “just one round” (times X) seems like we’re setting up policy to not hold ourselves accountable by putting every case in a vacuum from similar incidents which is even more odd when you consider some admins still ban players because of similar incidents that happened literal months ago.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Floiven » #376857

As a normal player, I'd give the benefit of the doubt to the admins if they chose to press some buttons after I did something like run around having my way with the station for a while, having some extra attention thrown your way because your influence of the round was so great should be perceived as a "Damn this dude needs some extra challenge so they don't get bored, and it'd be great to get the dead players back in/give deadchat a show". I think of admins doing things like this from a Dungeon Master perspective: it's important for them to keep the round moving along, and throwing a wrench (that doesn't just screw over the antag of course) in their plans to mix it up is welcome. Heck, having an announcement that says you basically need meteors to be flung at the station to stop you at this point pretty much cedes that point that you've "won" the round (if that's what you're going for as antag).

I haven't seen any evidence from my experience that Sticky would mash buttons out of spite to try and get some sorta revenge, I mean once you've been playing and especially administrating a game like this for so long, I assume that those in that sort of position are more detached from their players getting knocked out, and are instead more interested in giving the players a fun/memorable experience.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by RandomMarine » #376859

Floiven wrote:I think of admins doing things like this from a Dungeon Master perspective: it's important for them to keep the round moving along, and throwing a wrench (that doesn't just screw over the antag of course) in their plans to mix it up is welcome. Heck, having an announcement that says you basically need meteors to be flung at the station to stop you at this point pretty much cedes that point that you've "won" the round (if that's what you're going for as antag).
Rocks fall, everyone dies isn't exactly good dungeon master practice.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by oranges » #376871

Brotemis wrote:I'm sure I've been guilty of this before but this thread should serve as a reminder as to why it's not the best idea.

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1132
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Floiven » #376872

RandomMarine wrote:
Floiven wrote:I think of admins doing things like this from a Dungeon Master perspective: it's important for them to keep the round moving along, and throwing a wrench (that doesn't just screw over the antag of course) in their plans to mix it up is welcome. Heck, having an announcement that says you basically need meteors to be flung at the station to stop you at this point pretty much cedes that point that you've "won" the round (if that's what you're going for as antag).
Rocks fall, everyone dies isn't exactly good dungeon master practice.
I'd argue that it can be, if it's essentially the end of the round, and it's framed as a last-ditch effort to get this one guy that kicked the ass of the rest of the station, one last seemingly desperate attempt to bring this guy down, and a final opportunity for them to make it out alive. If I was the wizard in this case, I'd be looking at this as a "Oh yeah, bring it on Centcom! OH GOD SHIT'S GETTING REAL, THIS IS AWESOME." sorta way, but I do admit I'm more of a go with what happens and try and play along kinda person. Maybe reserve these sorta things for people that you know are gonna roll with the punches and have fun with it, this of course leads back to this being a case-by-case basis sorta thing, not really needed a concrete rule in place.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by MrStonedOne » #376898

Cobby wrote:
Brotemis wrote:I'm sure I've been guilty of this before but this thread should serve as a reminder as to why it's not the best idea.

https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1132
The elephant in the room, at least in regards to recent events, is that Sticky has had a history of doing similar situations (regardless of the validity of each individual one) so people are more apt to look at his "events" as such.
I will repeat, for the millionth time, that in the case of the linked thread, all sticky did was receive the benefit of other admin actions, and answer a trialmin's question of what path to find something under.
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Re: Admins pressing buttons in rounds they are/were playing

Post by Brotemis » #376915

This isn't to complain about sticky in the least. I will point out in this case he was killed in the round and used the rudimentary transformation action to turn himself from a ghost back into a human to reinsert himself into the round.

The best judgement wasn't used and if you trust administration to make the best judgement of a situation, then that's all that need be said. I believe sticky when he says they're in a much better situation than we were before with administration burnout
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