Devilish evilmin traumatizes poor CMO into not playing

[Timonk]

Bottom post of the previous page:

viewtopic.php?f=23&t=36176

tbh CMO is 100% correct

[Timberpoes]

I'd say more appeals and complaints get rejected because the player gave too little info than those where the player gave too much.

[Vekter]

I suppose I've been guilty of doing a few of these things in my time. It's something I think we can all collectively work on, but I also think it's important to understand that admins are not customer service agents for a corporation's helpdesk. We are volunteers doing this for the sake of improving the community as a whole. If you talk shit or act like a jerk, I'm not going to pull punches beyond at least keeping some professionalism.

I can respect being asked by players to be less abrasive up-front, but I cannot respect being asked that and then having players treat me like shit because I dared to ask them why they did a thing.

the unspoken elephant in the room here is that matrixone is asserting that this isn't just drag, but that every admin but duffy has been acting this way.
it's weird. it's not that i don't believe them, but i've literally never personally experienced anything remotely resembling this hostility myself; i don't think duffy's conduct in that ticket is anything interesting or exceptional, all my bwoinks have basically gone that way.
so... it's unclear how prolific of a problem this is from an outside perspective

Yeah a bit odd. Almost every bwoink I see is "hey, can you tell me about what happened between you and him?"

(I looked in my own bwoink history, the most recent bwoink that wasn't like this was 'stop it.' to someone who was spanning alert level changes)

And I have NEVER seen a 'hey got a minute?' in the wild.

Maybe manuel admins run differently, idk

I do it sometimes if it's clear that the person involved might actually be busy, otherwise I'd just rather give someone the reason I'm bothering them up-front. I don't like the anxiety that comes with being told something is wrong (via being bwoinked) without actually being told what is wrong, so I try to save others from that.

[vect0r]

I suppose I've been guilty of doing a few of these things in my time. It's something I think we can all collectively work on, but I also think it's important to understand that admins are not customer service agents for a corporation's helpdesk. We are volunteers doing this for the sake of improving the community as a whole. If you talk shit or act like a jerk, I'm not going to pull punches beyond at least keeping some professionalism.

I can respect being asked by players to be less abrasive up-front, but I cannot respect being asked that and then having players treat me like shit because I dared to ask them why they did a thing.

the unspoken elephant in the room here is that matrixone is asserting that this isn't just drag, but that every admin but duffy has been acting this way.
it's weird. it's not that i don't believe them, but i've literally never personally experienced anything remotely resembling this hostility myself; i don't think duffy's conduct in that ticket is anything interesting or exceptional, all my bwoinks have basically gone that way.
so... it's unclear how prolific of a problem this is from an outside perspective

Yeah a bit odd. Almost every bwoink I see is "hey, can you tell me about what happened between you and him?"

(I looked in my own bwoink history, the most recent bwoink that wasn't like this was 'stop it.' to someone who was spanning alert level changes)

And I have NEVER seen a 'hey got a minute?' in the wild.

Maybe manuel admins run differently, idk

I do it sometimes if it's clear that the person involved might actually be busy, otherwise I'd just rather give someone the reason I'm bothering them up-front. I don't like the anxiety that comes with being told something is wrong (via being bwoinked) without actually being told what is wrong, so I try to save others from that.

But the player wasn’t being aggressive at all! The entire situation was drag telling Selena to not mess with the chemist very aggressively, and Selena attempting to explain and deescalate the situation.

[Vekter]

But the player wasn’t being aggressive at all! The entire situation was drag telling Selena to not mess with the chemist very aggressively, and Selena attempting to explain and deescalate the situation.

Correct. I wasn't talking about this specific instance, I was speaking in general.

I'm not commenting on Drag's behavior here; I don't usually comment on what other admins do in peanut threads as I find it rude if I disagree with their actions.

[TheLoLSwat]

its a million times safer to just put everythig out there and give your side of things and even if you dont fully get it, someone will be able to. The last thing you want is the admin to think youre trolling and instadeny the appeal

[BonChoi]

Admins campaigning for more easily countered arguments in complaints... wewlad

Just to be clear though I think verbose appeals are awful unless there was an actual injustice committed, but that is pretty few and far between.

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

Admins campaigning for more easily countered arguments in complaints... wewlad

Just to be clear though I think verbose appeals are awful unless there was an actual injustice committed, but that is pretty few and far between.

I think it's just that admins souls leave their body a little bit more every time they open an appeal or a complaint and see the great wall of tgstation looking back at them.

[Timberpoes]

Yet every time they open the logs they're able to find the relevant bits of info they need rather quickly, and with much less fanfare and complaining about the literal megabytes of text they had to filter through to get there.

Curious.

[TypicalRig]

In the above appeal, we removed a correct note because it was placed using incorrect procedure. One of the headmins back then which +1'd that decision is a current headmin again today, so it's not impossible in the hypothetical that this was another ctrl-c ctrl-v. The difficulty getting results like that being said term had me, and I was very willing to get into appeals and complaints to actually get them resolved fairly; which meant once an issue was highlighted players didn't have to fight hard to get a headmin to take it seriously.

That appeal also resulted in a conduct strike without the player having to open a complaint.

Huh. I was under the impression that due to MSO's ruling that an admin's noting/banning conduct couldn't be the subject of a complaint without said note/ban being successfully appealed. Not to get too off-topic, but is this example not very much an outlier? A regular concern of mine is that a downside of this ruling is that it encourages admins to note for things they normally wouldn't since even if they slip up a bit with their behaviour, there's that extra barrier of needing to appeal a note first to be taken seriously when calling them out on it.

Yet every time they open the logs they're able to find the relevant bits of info they need rather quickly, and with much less fanfare and complaining about the literal megabytes of text they had to filter through to get there.

Curious.

Logs are incomplete and don't really paint the full picture both with mechanics and player perspective. I could count two, maybe three specific situations where an admin just couldn't reliably help me because of things by the game that aren't tracked. Let the true text wall haters be the ones to code in the ability to rewatch rounds so that they can avoid this, or forever hold their tongues...

[spookuni]

Timberpoest

Huh. I was under the impression that due to MSO's ruling that an admin's noting/banning conduct couldn't be the subject of a complaint without said note/ban being successfully appealed. Not to get too off-topic, but is this example not very much an outlier? A regular concern of mine is that a downside of this ruling is that it encourages admins to note for things they normally wouldn't since even if they slip up a bit with their behaviour, there's that extra barrier of needing to appeal a note first to be taken seriously when calling them out on it.

In that instance the success of the appeal led to an immediate / automatic escalation to an admin conduct strike - bypassing the need for the player themselves to escalate the matter. It was a successful appeal that led to a free complaint, rather than a successful complaint that led to a free appeal, as it were.

There's an argument to be made that an admin could arguably protect themselves against ground level complaints by noting someone for something every time that admin gets toxic, though it would turn out very, very poorly for them as soon as anyone realised what they were doing. Weaponisation of rules designed to protect admins who are acting in good faith to be a dick to players consistently would almost certainly lead to an immediate deadminning though. Doing that would be highjumping past 'Miss-stepping and breaking conduct by accident' and straight into 'active malfeasance.' in ways that get the admin team mad at you real quick, and nobody to blink when headmins employ their collective ability to deadmin anyone for any reason.

[Timberpoes]

Ya. An idea behind the ruling for complaining about banning conduct requiring a successful appeal is that you do the appeal first. If the admin denies it and the headmins uphold that denial, there's no point opening a complaint because the headmins will have already looked at the banning admin's conduct and - by agreeing with the banning admin to uphold it - endorse that the outcome was fair, just and reasonable vis-a-vis the admin's conduct.

If the appeal ends up being accepted - either by the banning admin or by the headmins - then it opens up the route to an admin complaint. The question of if the admin should or shouldn't have placed that punishment has been resolved already, so the complaint can focus purely on conduct.

The hope is that no sane headmin term would uphold a ban or note placed while breaching admin conduct, no matter how correct or valid that note or ban actually was. It would be a fundamental betrayal of trust and a failure in the fairness of how we are meant to operate as admins. That one hope is the keystone holding the entire structure in place and how MSO's ruling can function.

Players lost a bit of freedom in being able to complain about banning conduct without successfully contesting the ban itself first.
Admins lost a bit of freedom because headmins were more bound to consider conduct when deciding appeals, so if they want a note or ban to stick they have to play by the rules.

[kayozz]

I suppose I've been guilty of doing a few of these things in my time. It's something I think we can all collectively work on, but I also think it's important to understand that admins are not customer service agents for a corporation's helpdesk. We are volunteers doing this for the sake of improving the community as a whole. If you talk shit or act like a jerk, I'm not going to pull punches beyond at least keeping some professionalism.

I can respect being asked by players to be less abrasive up-front, but I cannot respect being asked that and then having players treat me like shit because I dared to ask them why they did a thing.

Absolutely it's a two way street. Having been in such a position myself I understand it can be stressful at times having to log dive/note dive/ask for multiple opinions and check facts whilst dealing with perhaps multiple bwoinks, and if someone is rude to you it can grate. But I like to believe the majority of players are decent and shouldn't be spoken to like crap just because someone else has rattled you (not you personally Vekter).

Admins should lead by example I guess.

[Timberpoes]

I've always preached that we admin by consent of the playerbase.

Doing investigations is easiest when all players cooperate with us in tickets. If every single player refused to engage with any admin in every ahelp, our role would rapidly become - for all intents and purposes - impossible. We can only do what we do so effectively because when we ask players questions, they give us answers and those answers fill in the blanks that the logs don't and cannot show.

[Higgin]

[valuable background abt the philosophy of appeal -> complaint]

The hope is that no sane headmin term would uphold a ban or note placed while breaching admin conduct, no matter how correct or valid that note or ban actually was. It would be a fundamental betrayal of trust and a failure in the fairness of how we are meant to operate as admins. That one hope is the keystone holding the entire structure in place and how MSO's ruling can function.

Players lost a bit of freedom in being able to complain about banning conduct without successfully contesting the ban itself first.
Admins lost a bit of freedom because headmins were more bound to consider conduct when deciding appeals, so if they want a note or ban to stick they have to play by the rules.

I struggle a bit with boldfaced part of this because I've seen situations where both the admin and the player needed to be deadminned and banned respectively.

I was writing up a few longwinded examples but to keep it short: I think the breach of conduct in an appeal needs to be considered by how it is prejudicial to the fairness and rightness of the ruling.

Both the ruling and the conduct need to be relitigated fairly and openly, which I think the current system accomplishes - but a breach of conduct does not necessarily mean that there was no breach of the rules which, brought to light, we should not be able to act upon (especially in cases where the breach of the rules involves a danger to other players and the larger community.)

A lot of the procedural fairness principles, i.e. the fruit of the poisoned tree and double jeopardy, end up misapplied if we don't consider that sometimes, in a case where the conduct breach is something like manner/professionalism unrelated to the note/ban, or that the original matter was not at all investigated/ruled on properly to begin with, there's still something "there" there. Flipside, just because a ban is valid doesn't mean conduct wasn't broken.

What I suppose I'm cautious of is that we shouldn't allow procedural loopholes to short-circuit dealing with problems when there are problems to be dealt with. The legitimate concern and the fear so corrosive to trust is that we might get a state of exception smuggling in admin misconduct. We get around that by not making exceptions around admin conduct, either, which I hope people can be satisfied with having not been done by virtue of headmin review - which seems to be now where we're at, even though this particular complaint was never an appeal (though it could have been if a ban/note were applied.)

[PapaMichael]

admin conduct is far more serious than banning players.
a tiny fraction of bwoinks end up in notes/bans, of which a tiny fraction of which are ever appealed, so the vast majority of admin conduct never gets observed by anyone but the bwoinkee, so i kinda don't have a problem with the book getting thrown at admins if/when they step out of line.
if a player's ban gets overturned through a misconduct technicality and they genuinely deserve the ban, they're still very probably going to get banned again unless they cease the offending behavior (in which case, fair play), so i don't see this as big as a problem as you're saying.
for egregious permabans, conduct goes out the window anyway (and i'm certainly not saying it shouldn't); the guy spamming 1488 sieg heil on stream getting perma'd with the reason "fuck off" isn't at all what anyone's talking about here.

[Timberpoes]

A lot of the procedural fairness principles, i.e. the fruit of the poisoned tree and double jeopardy, end up misapplied if we don't consider that sometimes, in a case where the conduct breach is something like manner/professionalism unrelated to the note/ban, or that the original matter was not at all investigated/ruled on properly to begin with, there's still something "there" there. Flipside, just because a ban is valid doesn't mean conduct wasn't broken.

While I understand the concepts with regard to fruit of the poisoned tree and double jeopardy, I raise you a wonderful case from my area of expertise in English law: R v Sussex Justices, ex p. McCarthy [1924] 1 KB 256.

(Emphasis mine)

Spoiler:

It is said, and, no doubt, truly, that when that gentleman retired in the usual way with the justices, taking with him the notes of the evidence in case the justices might desire to consult him, the justices came to a conclusion without consulting him, and that he scrupulously abstained from referring to the case in any way. But while that is so, a long line of cases shows that it is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.

The question therefore is not whether in this case the deputy clerk made any observation or offered any criticism which he might not properly have made or offered; the question is whether he was so related to the case in its civil aspect as to be unfit to act as clerk to the justices in the criminal matter. The answer to that question depends not upon what actually was done but upon what might appear to be done.

Nothing is to be done which creates even a suspicion that there has been an improper interference with the course of justice. Speaking for myself, I accept the statements contained in the justices' affidavit, but they show very clearly that the deputy clerk was connected with the case in a capacity which made it right that he should scrupulously abstain from referring to the matter in any way, although he retired with the justices; in other words, his one position was such that he could not, if he had been required to do so, discharge the duties which his other position involved. His twofold position was a manifest contradiction.

I agree with the above poster that our conduct is more important than banning or noting players. It is not merely of some importance, but is of fundamental importance to our standards as a whole team.

Those standards for being the best admin team of any SS13 server isn't that we always get the ban in the end. It's that we're mature enough to have a robust and fair process where not only are admins expected to be unbiased, that we're also expected to appear as an unbiased party to the community and each other. The mere evidenced possibility that there was some procedural impropriety in how an admin acted is enough to override whether the action itself was correct.

That approach maintains trust in the admins. It means you as an admin can trust a note or ban I placed. It means players can trust the system at all.

We don't need to even entertain shitty admin conduct and we can still make the servers better without it. I'd argue we can only make the servers better if we're avoiding shitty conduct.

[Higgin]

...

While I understand the concepts with regard to fruit of the poisoned tree and double jeopardy, I raise you a wonderful case from my area of expertise in English law: R v Sussex Justices, ex p. McCarthy [1924] 1 KB 256.

(Emphasis mine)

Spoiler:

It is said, and, no doubt, truly, that when that gentleman retired in the usual way with the justices, taking with him the notes of the evidence in case the justices might desire to consult him, the justices came to a conclusion without consulting him, and that he scrupulously abstained from referring to the case in any way. But while that is so, a long line of cases shows that it is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.

The question therefore is not whether in this case the deputy clerk made any observation or offered any criticism which he might not properly have made or offered; the question is whether he was so related to the case in its civil aspect as to be unfit to act as clerk to the justices in the criminal matter. The answer to that question depends not upon what actually was done but upon what might appear to be done.

Nothing is to be done which creates even a suspicion that there has been an improper interference with the course of justice. Speaking for myself, I accept the statements contained in the justices' affidavit, but they show very clearly that the deputy clerk was connected with the case in a capacity which made it right that he should scrupulously abstain from referring to the matter in any way, although he retired with the justices; in other words, his one position was such that he could not, if he had been required to do so, discharge the duties which his other position involved. His twofold position was a manifest contradiction.

I agree with the above poster that our conduct is more important than banning or noting players. It is not merely of some importance, but is of fundamental importance to our standards as a whole team.

Those standards for being the best admin team of any SS13 server isn't that we always get the ban in the end. It's that we're mature enough to have a robust and fair process where not only are admins expected to be unbiased, that we're also expected to appear as an unbiased party to the community and each other. The mere evidenced possibility that there was some procedural impropriety in how an admin acted is enough to override whether the action itself was correct.

That approach maintains trust in the admins. It means you as an admin can trust a note or ban I placed. It means players can trust the system at all.

We don't need to even entertain shitty admin conduct and we can still make the servers better without it. I'd argue we can only make the servers better if we're avoiding shitty conduct.

Having been in low-trust communities, I appreciate that conduct matters. It's no small part of what makes tg great and the whole thing work.

Papa's point is also true. The process needs to work and be upheld even to have confidence in the team that might return to "the one that got away" when they do something shitty next week.

I've got no problem with the book getting tossed at an admin that fucks up. That's critical. I think there's another part in the case law that gets at what I'm getting at here, though, emphasis mine (and a great case to have brought up, thank you for that - are you in or were you going into barristery?)

The question therefore is not whether in this case the deputy clerk made any observation or offered any criticism which he might not properly have made or offered; the question is whether he was so related to the case in its civil aspect as to be unfit to act as clerk to the justices in the criminal matter.

In this case, I suspect the deliberations around conduct are going to be totally separate from the discussion of whether or not an RPR9 violation took place but rather the manner in which drag approached the players.

This has nothing to do with whether or not the violation took place, but it doesn't mean that it hasn't.

If one did, it might just be our lot to take it on the chin, apologize to the player, and do better next time - narrow down our understanding of the issue, encourage admins to get team spot checks on RPR9 issues more often, and generally improve ticket conduct.

It doesn't mean the victim player's round wasn't still worsened by it, nor that there is no loss of trust in our ability as a team to maintain the standards anyway. You might argue it's less of a problem than admin conduct, and with good reason, but it's still a loss to everyone if we totally recuse ourselves from going back and doing due diligence when the conduct issue is resolved.

To bring up the sorts of issues where this actually matters: predatory behavior, bullying, stalking, other sorts of threats. It's in the realm of a hypothetical outside of this case, where the conduct issue isn't about standing to make a ruling or the arrival at a substantive ruling, but the way in which an admin approached and treated other players.

The reason I'm against a universal policy of hard amnesty on a confirmed case of procedural misconduct (which I read into your original statement about never acting against a player on misconduct, ideally - please correct me if I went too far with that,) is that there are some issues where you'd also much less trust a team that couldn't suck it the fuck up and be uncomfortable looking bad if it failed to treat those issues adequately - even if under an entirely different person or party's handling after the conduct is settled.

edit to add: it's also worth saying that most issues of admin conduct that do get raised and sustained around a note/ban seem to be those that would be directly prejudicial to the ruling, which is more than fair, it's good.

I'm not a lawyer or even much of an institutionalist. What I see in the political and judicial space is that systems that can't assert themselves or use power in uncomfortable positions to defend their principles don't have rosy futures either. There are many ways to lose respectability and honor; as far as I'm concerned, being too pious about it is very rightly one of them.

[DaBoss]

Hold on, we're using the English and American legal system for precident? No offence but they're kind of the "Final Fantasy VIII" and "Final Fantasy XIII" of legal systems. We should be aiming for at least a "Final Fantasy IX". Ideally higher.

[MrStonedOne]

why would anybody go higher than the best final fantasy?

[Timberpoes]

Many words

At least in the case of the complaint this peanut is attached to, the two will be separate matters since drag's ruling on what they think heads of staff can and cannot do is not linked to their ticket conduct.

And for any serious enough incident, poor admin conduct isn't going to factor in as procedure permits earlier bans with less investigation. Griefing evaders, for example, can be given no-bwoink no-knock bans. Non-griefing evaders may just be no-knock banned while they're offline when some admin checks new player logs.

The more serious the rule broken, the less procedure tends to be relevant where the facts clearly speak for themselves. That's the sliding scale you're looking for.

If you insta-daybanned someone for killing another player without you talking to them first in a ticket to find the facts and give them a chance to explain to you why they did it, you'd be reprimanded and probably end up with an overturned ban.
Except if that player was a 0 hour account made yesterday and is showcasing way more game experience than you think a 0 hour new player should and just seemingly killed someone FNR, then they might just end up instabanned as a suspected evader without much fanfare over a ticket.
If you insta-permabanned someone for filling chat with racist copypastas, it would be fine and the fact you didn't talk to them before banning them wouldn't even be a factor in the appeal.

[Blacklist897]

any caramel patch maker deserves to have the patches deleted

I can understand where people who don't like caramel are coming from. I think when there are chefs who are putting effort into cooking it's a totally asshole move to make caramel. But to me this is not a one and done issue; I believe that if the chefs are making troll food (death sandwiches, vomit rats) or no food at all, it's valid for a chemist to make caramel for their medbay. And that was when the admin deleted mine. So I can both understand and agree with the sentiment of not liking caramel, but also not approve of a decision which wasn't made in a vacuum. I don't like just blanket "all should be deleted," that seems not very reasonable and easy to say for someone who doesn't play medbay where people run on red hunger a bunch.

if the chefs a asshole its more acceptable if you cant get donks or cargo pizza (as a side note I mained cmo for the 2 months where food did not work at all)

[Timberpoes]

Deadmining is an unfortunate outcome, but really the only one the headmins were left with.

Three conduct strikes in the space of 13 months is just too many, especially when their last conduct strike netted a demotion back to trial which they've only recently re-passed. There's not much room between that and deadminning except being busted down to candidate and retrained from scratch.

[Timonk]

I'd say more appeals and complaints get rejected because the player gave too little info than those where the player gave too much.

Im actually surprised it happened because that has been the first actual deadminning in a long while (coming from an admin complaint)

[MatrixOne]

Now that it won't muddy the waters, I can genuinely thank everyone involved for their opinions and good faith engagement with the topic. Especially I feel really happy to have seen Timberpoes work and to catch a glimpse at the way they reason. I can think of no better person to be training admins, based on what I've seen here. I've never known about Timber because I kept off the forums, though I've been a TG player since 2014; I'm no freshie, I've been assistant banned by MrStonedOne himself in 2015...

I was hesitant to open a complaint because I felt that admins would think of it as no harm done because it didn't result in a note, and not worth their time. I reasoned that, if I was made fun of by the admins further for making a waste of time issue post, I'd at least be able to point to it and say: that's how it is here. But instead, the first admin post I read about my issue was Timber's post early in this thread, and I was like: well shit. This person not only read my wordy complaint but they approached it in good faith. When a friend encouraged me to make a complaint, I looked at the 1 to 6 ratio of upheld to closed complaints and basically told them these don't look like great odds. I was wrong about what the response would be and I'm really happy to have been wrong.

Thank you as well to dendydoom for their response and once again for having read all of that stuff. I hope it's not too out of line or cringe of me to thank the headmins involved. I just know it took time out of their day and that my post should have been shorter to be more respectful of people's time, as people pointed out in this thread.

Huh. Maybe it's time I retry CMO, probably on low pop to begin with.

I think I'm also going to make a post on the policy board to ask about caramel as related to rule 9, and possible rulings on that, and generally what the admins think about it now that I feel like it may be approached in good faith even if it's a contested topic.

[kayozz]

why would anybody go higher than the best final fantasy?

No such thing as a so called 'final' fantasy. It's either a fantasy or it isn't, finality has no place putting its boring time related judgemental shit into it. Fuck you time.

[DrAmazing343]

I quite like Drag, but the three strikes rule is 100% valid here, considering she doesn't appear to be taking much of the reprimands to heart. I 100% agree with Dendy's thing about the Chemist facing demotion AND a tabling, because telling your boss to fuck off within the first ten messages is CRAZY. I'd do the same shit. Interesting stuff to retrospect about for the "lane" of a Head, however- and maybe a policy thread to write up? I'll do more thinking.

I hope that, eventually, Drag will be able to come back and admin again with a better attitude, if that's something they wish. The first part, however, is the better attitude. I can only hope that this will be a good incentive.

[Timberpoes]

...

I was hesitant to open a complaint because I felt that admins would think of it as no harm done because it didn't result in a note, and not worth their time. I reasoned that, if I was made fun of by the admins further for making a waste of time issue post, I'd at least be able to point to it and say: that's how it is here. But instead, the first admin post I read about my issue was Timber's post early in this thread, and I was like: well shit. This person not only read my wordy complaint but they approached it in good faith. When a friend encouraged me to make a complaint, I looked at the 1 to 6 ratio of upheld to closed complaints and basically told them these don't look like great odds. I was wrong about what the response would be and I'm really happy to have been wrong.

The system primarily works because we have people who want it to work and have the drive and passion to yell about the things they believe in to make it work.

The reason the complaint ratio is so skewed in favour of complaints not being upheld is because they tend to be simple communication issues, often players getting frustrated at the seeming inability for the admin to understand them and taking it out on that admin. No conduct breach, just needs one (or sometimes both) parties to properly communicate.

Also some complaints get upheld in appeals instead. And some demotions and deadmins happen outside of the process entirely, such as when there's an internal report by another admin or a headmin stumbles upon it by accident.

[oranges]

Now that it won't muddy the waters, I can genuinely thank everyone involved for their opinions and good faith engagement with the topic. Especially I feel really happy to have seen Timberpoes work and to catch a glimpse at the way they reason.

how much did they pay you come on

[iwishforducks]

Now that it won't muddy the waters, I can genuinely thank everyone involved for their opinions and good faith engagement with the topic. Especially I feel really happy to have seen Timberpoes work and to catch a glimpse at the way they reason.

how much did they pay you come on

500

[MooCow12]

Late but I wanna talk about it too

So from the mechanical side of it.

The plumbing room is more than large enough to be shared, i skim read and saw "cave" so im assuming its tram station plumbing which is by far the largest one out of any map except for old box station.

If tramstation asteroid was fixed so you can claim rooms you dug out again without blueprints , theres no reason for there to have been any confrontation to begin with because the space provided becomes really extreme.

From the social side of it, there wasnt any abuse from the cmo, rather it was a chemist making a fus and trying to escalate over a resource (building space) when there was plenty of it (this is like a scientist trying to stop rd from spending 10k points when there is currently 70k banked up somehow) and the admin didnt investigate this aspect of the situation either




This is highly contextual which is why its probably better to compare it to something like that, but either way wtf heads of staff are not only allowed to but encouraged to fill roles within their department as a filler/Jack of all trades to make sure that department runs smoothly. CMO not being allowed to personally see to it that plumbing is making healing chems might not be as round altering as CE not being able to personally set up SM but they'll still be one of the people you point fingers at when medbay is full of corpses and people with boo-boos

[Indie-ana Jones]

Unfortunate but considering Drag just came off a demotion to trialmin for similar conduct, I can't say I'm surprised the headmins have put their foot down on this one. You have to draw the line in the sand somewhere, you know?

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

From the social side of it, there wasnt any abuse from the cmo, rather it was a chemist making a fus and trying to escalate over a resource (building space) when there was plenty of it (this is like a scientist trying to stop rd from spending 10k points when there is currently 70k banked up somehow) and the admin didnt investigate this aspect of the situation either

Not accurate, part of it was the building space (Which as ive explained before, not only do you have to mine out the cave to make the space uniform and usable (A thin cave line of 5 straight squares is not particularly helpful for plumbing factories, yet for some reason people are saying "BUT LOOK THERE'S 999999 SQUARES", when half of them are not practically applicable without mining.), you have to tile the space to actually anchor equipment, meaning the CMO was forcing me to do even more work on top of the mining work), but the major part was them taking my job content. If they just asked me to make brute/burn meds, I would have done so.

It's like back when virologist was a thing, if the CMO barged in and just started making their own virus because they wanted their own special set of traits, or decided you were taking too long, or just didnt care about your presence at all. Which happened to me several times, and led to me quitting playing virology. Or if you were doing ordnance and a roboticist waltzed into toxins and just started building a bomb to refine a bluespace core for a phazon when you were 5 tiles away. Or if security hired an assistant to defend someone at a trial when you were signed up as an actual Lawyer.

I view this situation as pretty much the same thing.

[Jacquerel]

If the CMO did virology or the RD did ordnance or built a mech or the CE came over and started making gas all of these things would be fine because it's their department

If the heads first ask if you want to do it and you say no then there's not even an inch of room for anyone to say they did anything wrong

[dendydoom]

i would like to take this opportunity to say that the appeals process is open for anyone and no one should be discouraged from utilizing it when it's necessary.

i would also like to remind admins to put themselves in the position of a player when they have to navigate these processes. they are looking for resolution for a situation that is troubling them, and they need a platform to be able to tell their side.

it does no good to undermine a player's ability to do this by pointing out how much they've written. only a few people actually need to read these posts, and it's the people they are addressed to. players are not trained in how to navigate disputes, they don't know the standard or what we look for in resolving situations, so it's often the case where they would rather write as much as possible because of the risk of the handling admin denying their appeal right out the gate because they didn't check off enough appeal buzzwords.

admins are trained. admins have adminbus, a literal admin legal team working pro bono on every case they bring forward. admins have access to unfiltered logs, database querying tools, access to basically every aspect of everything that's happened on a game server, and players have scrubby, perhaps parsed logs if they remember how to access them.

the only consideration a player should be making when writing a lot is that their appeal may take longer to process, some details may get lost in the discussion, or they may be asked to re-iterate specific aspects of it.

it is up to the admin to direct the player through this process, and it's from a culture of balking and denying appeals at the first opportunity that players have reached this observation. help them navigate that situation rather than shut them down for trying.

[MatrixOne]

Since the peanut is related to me, I just wanted to mention that I made another wall of text post related to a different instance for Bmon, in their admin feedback thread here. I was thinking of making it an admin complaint but I have faith in that admin's ability to understand my point of view, and also potentially the rule 9 violation in that disagreement may not be in my favor, but I don't know for sure (hence my questions here). And I don't want to be seen as someone hunting for punishments or conduct strikes, deadminning is not something I expected at all. I just wanted to be treated better by admins by sharing my side of the story and seeing other admins potentially uphold it. That's all.

Tl;dr on what happened in that Bmon ticket:
I went to kitchen, saw no food, so made caramel patches for my medbay because we were all hungry.
Bmon bwoinked me, removed my patches, removed other unrelated patches by mistake, closed ticket. I opened another to argue my case, went to kitchen and saw the chefs STILL not making any food and them saying "We gave up" all while bmon says to use the food in kitchen instead of making patches via my lane as chemist, which resulted in this screenshot that fully encapsulates my point:



I'm happy to hear criticism or opinions on whether I'm in the wrong here, I know some people like Alex Moore hate caramel and I'm seriously willing to engage and hear their side. And I think it's more respectful to Bmon if any side conversations about that happen here in this peanut rather than in their feedback thread which is for feedback.

[Timonk]

we need more whistleblowers like this

[Not-Dorsidarf]

oh shit

[Timberpoes]

RPR9 is not an admin sledgehammer to crack things they personally dislike.

It's a very precise scalpel to deal with players whom are leeching job content from other players by doing their job for them.

I dislike when it's used to force people to apply only a limited subset for the scope of their job's sandbox, and only in very tightly defined and admin-approved ways.

[britgrenadier1]

and yet, it is constantly used to curtail behavior that admins dont like. See the Clara White captain note and also this bwoink about caramel patches(??????).

[MatrixOne]

and yet, it is constantly used to curtail behavior that admins dont like. See the Clara White captain note and also this bwoink about caramel patches(??????).

Clara, the best captain player I know, getting noted by Bmon for fighting station threats on lowpop is absolutely insane. Glad they appealed and got it lifted.

Captain is the one person who can fill in on every department... and has the IC grounds to do it. The station is theirs. The security team also works for them. And the antags are enemies of them, the station, and the corpo. Having captain Clara on lowpop has been amazing because they could deal with so many things that got in the way of player enjoyment, such as power, no research, and - yes - the superantags too. Without a competent hos or captain, the hyper antags absolutely roll through lowpop shifts.

[Timonk]

oh shit

your misdeeds will all become public and inshallah you shall be deadminned.

[dendydoom]

and yet, it is constantly used to curtail behavior that admins dont like. See the Clara White captain note and also this bwoink about caramel patches(??????).

Clara, the best captain player I know, getting noted by Bmon for fighting station threats on lowpop is absolutely insane. Glad they appealed and got it lifted.

Captain is the one person who can fill in on every department... and has the IC grounds to do it. The station is theirs. The security team also works for them. And the antags are enemies of them, the station, and the corpo. Having captain Clara on lowpop has been amazing because they could deal with so many things that got in the way of player enjoyment, such as power, no research, and - yes - the superantags too. Without a competent hos or captain, the hyper antags absolutely roll through lowpop shifts.

for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with how we resolve these rules disputes, this note was overturned by not 3 but a 5 headmin strong pantheon. we were in full agreement on this, and in an attempt to understand just how diversified the opinion was, i spent the time on a thread that proved the majority of us were in absolute unquestioning agreement, and a precedent was set that we expect to factor into enforcement going forward.

it is worth remembering these incidents in that a player was inconvenienced by the unnecessary intervention of an admin, but in the event of an overturn it means that the consensus amongst admins is completely different and after the fact admins will be held to that standard because it has been set in stone. it would be improper to see another note placed in this fashion.

[Higgin]

Many words

...

And for any serious enough incident, poor admin conduct isn't going to factor in as procedure permits earlier bans with less investigation. Griefing evaders, for example, can be given no-bwoink no-knock bans. Non-griefing evaders may just be no-knock banned while they're offline when some admin checks new player logs.

The more serious the rule broken, the less procedure tends to be relevant where the facts clearly speak for themselves. That's the sliding scale you're looking for.

...

As long as serious enough matters aren't dropped even when the facts don't speak for themselves and may require relitigation or reinvestigation, I'm happy with that scale. Thank you for clarifying.

[DrAmazing343]

I was in the goddamn trenches on the Claratain note peanut, I was PISSED. The system works because it's a push and pull from administration to community, as nobody is all-seeing all-knowing and sometimes we gotta have some sort of... public forum... to distinguish what's worthwhile and what's a misstep.

[Constellado]

This is why I champion the forums and that it is important to this community. This is also why I ask people to make an appeal when things happen.

I don't get bwoinked so I don't have any chances to make appeals for things.

Also deleting caramel patches is a lot, (and in this situation not good) but atleast it did not get to a note.

Why am I hearing so much bad admin conduct recently (about the admins that are not the newbies? The newbies have been great.)

[Archie700]

Sometimes I ask myself whether we went too far in "stay in your lane"

[spookuni]

Sometimes I ask myself whether we went too far in "stay in your lane"

In fairness to myself and Timber - When obtaining an item (such as food) or outcome (such as not starving) is not available through it's primary route of access (such as the kitchen) and instead through an alternate route (such as chemistry), RPR 9 does not apply as per precedent 4.

"Players are free to seek alternate routes that do not impinge on the games of other players to obtain the things they want where normal routes are closed to them. (An assistant that wishes to help a cyborg get upgrades while a roboticist is busy making mechs for security or augmenting patients may freely make use of a maintenance robotics bay, for example)"

RPR 9 gives protection to the actual job and department of that job, alternate methods of achieving goals are themselves protected.

To use another example from either of the one I used here or the one in the precedent.

If the station has no power, so a cargo technician breaks into engineering while the engineers are working on the engine (Ineptly or otherwise) and shoves them out of the way to speedrun through setup, trampling over the engineer's ability to do their job - that's an RPR 9 breach
If the station has no power, so a cargo tech purchases several solar panel crates through their cargo access and sets them up in space to power the station that way, that's fine.

Engineering in this example has protection for their interaction with their job mechanics, their engine and their opportunities as engineers to run it and interact with it at their own pace provided they're playing in good faith (though another player who also has a claim to the job content like a chief engineer may intercede and that's fine). The engineers do not however have blanket claim to the concept of providing the station with power - if cargo buys a shard or solars, chemistry sets up a teslium based zap engine or science engages in yellow slime SMES shenaniganary, all of that is not engineering's problem.

[dendydoom]

spook is correct.

people sign up to do their job and in the normal course of the game people who aren't part of that job (and in the case of a head part of that department) should not be able to invalidate the presence of that person by doing it for them when they're ready and willing to do it themselves, because in that case they may as well not even be playing.

if there is no one around to do the job, then there is no one to impose upon. if the person whose job it is doesn't want the job anymore, refuses reasonable requests that are normally part of their role, ran off to space, died, got turned into a magical wizard gorilla, etc, then it's the same deal.

in this specific situation we believed that it's not imposing on or depriving the chemist of their job when the root cause of the situation was an IC conflict involving how the chemist wasn't being co-operative with the head of their department. this was a workplace dispute which was being resolved ICly in order for the CMO to operate their medbay in the way they wanted. the actions the CMO took were reasonable and made sense within that IC context.

as posted above, where people seem to be tripping up in enforcement of this is that if you take a reasonable effort to interact with the person doing the job and they don't give you what you need, then you are entitled to try and get it some other way.

it is important that we allow each other to actually roleplay in the roleplaying game instead of focusing on acquiring exactly what we need as fast and as efficiently as possible. on the other side of the coin, it's important for admins to remember that IC reasoning trumps all else, and if the player is in a situation where they've taken steps to try and get the appropriate person to do the job, or they're in a situation where it's unrealistic to expect this of them, then you really need to ask yourself what it is you're actually protecting by intervening and stopping the player.

interestingly i was discussing this situation offhandedly with a friend last night - and they brought up how the absence of any such rule was what turned them off the game in the first place, because people would roll up, wordlessly do their job for them to get what they wanted, and then leave. it is a common frustration that a lot of us have felt. i think the rule is very important, but the truth is that people are imposing on each other all the time in this game. people have disputes all the time. people help each other all the time with tasks that aren't part of their job. the majority of situations are fine without this rule being applied, but in the cases where it does need to be applied, it really does help a lot in stopping those strong silent types with 3000 hours in every single job who have become convinced that interacting with others is an inconvenience because they can do whatever it is much better.

[dendydoom]

and finally, worth its own post because it's so important:

if the game would be made worse by enforcing the rules in that specific situation, consider not enforcing the rules.

rules do not apply cleanly to every situation. IC reasoning and the current situation dictates how much it applies vs having enough nuance to differentiate it that people would be best served by being left alone to figure things out themselves. rules exist to make the game fair and more fun. if the game would be made less fair and less fun by enforcing them, then just throw them in the trash.

[Yulice]

consider not enforcing the rules.

Thank you Dreary, I will now go cause chaos with zero antag datums to my name and if admins ask I will simply say "funny"

[DaBoss]

Does anyone actually like these stay in your lane rules because they seem massively unpopular and personally I've only had experience with them when admins are powertripping. These are stories from other servers, but when I think of the rule I think of two times in particular, one time on goon where I was playing clown and found a portable gene console in a ruin and brought it back to the station to sell fart powerups, which got me bwoinked immediately and it was taken from me to be given to the geneticists who didn't use it once for the rest of the round because they already had a gene console. Second experience with this rule was on beestation where a repeat nonantag shitter with a grudge labelled implanters stuff like (Storage), (Freedom), (Stealth) etc to mimic traitor implants and upon getting caught by the detective I start implant checking them as warden and get bwoinked for knowing surgery and forced to release them and banned from security. Really makes me question the point of having the rule in the first place.