I think Rule 11 on discord is detrimental to the quality of the community

General Policy Feedback
30

My brorther in christ that is LRP, its a outright server rule break. If the player is mad
about something like that they need get a reality check. They the one fart on people have not thought about how their LRP is bad to and for other players.

Like its been said here the whole community should not suffer for the actions of a few. Iirc a mentor or someone made a joke in OOC as round was starting that there was a event that round so some folks ghosted hoping for event roles. There was no event and was just a prank. Obv ppl ahelp and it was looked into. The result? Mentors can no longer change out OOC chat color. Its stays lightblue.
Now I personally don’t care about being able to change my OOC chat color but you get my point. We all lost that cool thing cause of one person. The rest of us dont and should not suffer for the actions of a few.

4 Likes
31

These are just tangents, I never said I agreed with rule 11. If anything, it’s guaranteed to be removed anyway.

I said I disagree with the sentiment that there’s a sharp divide between the playerbase and staff. Most of the playerbase, I’m sure, is not on the cord, just staff, whitelists, dev, etc. And they have their own staffcord anyways. We get along fine, in so far as small communities get along. Having either side stepping on eggshells isn’t going to solve the problem.

Plus, demonizing staff members or players is what led up to this rule in the first place. Since he’s already been namedropped, I assume it’s Segrain. I’ve never had any encounter with Segrain, but I was on the mod team temporarily, believe it or not not. Here’s a few things to consider, if you’re often active, you’re going to get more attention and be more subject to scrutiny. When there are tickets, sometimes moderators ask someone else to take care of it. Staff, when I was there, is paying attention to what’s going on and the reports.

If they’re defending him, it’s because staff has come together to push back against the shit flinging by bad actors in the discord. Or, at least to calm it. If you collectively think that he should be ousted and that he’s overstepping, you’ve been told to make reports and let staff know. If they decide they don’t agree, tough. Either they’re wrong, which, by the way, would mean all the managers are complicit in ignoring the issue, or, you’re wrong and they’re pushing back against groups trying to collectively slander a member they deem is being harassed. It’s impossible to talk to a crowd that’s made up their mind.

That you whisper among yourselves and murmur in secret instead of plainly stating your dislike is the reason this blanket ban was placed. It’s obvious when it happens, Chen told me plainly that he disliked me because I slighted him at some point, and that’s more respectable and relieving than hushed attacks on people’s reputations that culminates in group whining on discord over notes or offhand remarks such as, “@xxx I logged on, saw him, straight logged off.”

We already lost a great coder, Morrowwolf, because of this collective game. He might not come back, I would’ve loved to ask him to help code for Crystal Keep with the amazing work he did coding mobs on PvE. But, I know that this game the community’s been playing is shit to deal with and now he’s gone.

2 Likes
32

you will be disliked to an extent. But you will be disliked FURTHER if you treat players like shit.
Time and time again i keep saying this to everyone.
When will staff have regulations or standards of approaching or PMing people in game.

Also please stop it with “they’re just volunteers”.
Its not an excuse to be rude to people

6 Likes
33

I’ve almost never seen someone who’s good friends with head staff get sacked on any server I’ve ever been on (bar 1 case I guess). Nor have I ever seen someone voluntarily step down for messing up.

There really isn’t any built-in accountability for moderators or administrators regardless of server. Having been in such positions before as a headmin, it’s actually very difficult on a personal level to enforce punishment on personal friends because they actually take offense to it; you end up wanting to make excuses and giving them chance after chance to make up for bad mistakes, which in the end isn’t helpful for the server at all.

Additionally, I find that the less transparent the staff are, the more abuses you’ll end up seeing. When people know their shit’s getting logged and the entire community can review everything they say and do, the actions admins take and the things they say become self-limiting to how they want the public to perceive them. Remove the transparency and stuff starts being said and done that wouldn’t and shouldn’t be said and done if everyone could see it.

One of the things I’ve been aghast with how staff of CM act, is their outright insulting behaviour towards players. For matter of fact I would outright remove every single automatic button for answering adminhelps - it’s like you’re not even treated as a human being worth a human response. Give me back my, “Sorry I can’t help you” instead of autoclosing an adminhelp.

Then there are things like “you talked back to me so eat a ban” that comes off as extreme immaturity for the position in question. You need a thick skin to be an admin, if you’re thinskinned and easily offended, you shouldn’t be doing it. I’ve even seen bans here and there that had me questioning if it was because of the behaviour in-game or because the player had an argument with the admin in discord and now here was a chance to take that frustration out at long last, complete with plausible deniability - in fact all the better. With punishments oddly maximal when the norm would otherwise be a note or simple talking-to.

One of the rules I had for the admin team I was working with, was that they could not enforce bans on any situation that involved themselves - if an admin had a problem, they had to get a different admin to look at it, which included “disrespect” in adminhelps (it was preferable by far to let people hang themselves in the adminhelps as the logs would get posted on the forums for the community to review if there was an appeal - very very embarassed players when their appeal showed them cussing us out). This peer-review when admins were involved was intended as a sanity check to prevent moment-of-passion abuses.

Overall I give the staff for CM like… 4/10 in general quality, from transparency, to outcomes. I wasn’t around for most of the apop days, but it looks and feels like things got better after him, and then started nosediving more recently, with less transparency, less community engagement, and less care what the community thinks about anything.

In many ways it feels like CM’s now run by people bored of the game but unwilling to move on from the power they have over it.

15 Likes
34

@Wintermote. Very well said. More transparency is always a good thing.

2 Likes
35

I’ll just leave this in: I adminned for an SS14 server for about 3 months, our admin policy was open for the public so I’m not showing any secret information - but one of the policies in place was that we could not deal with ahelps we were personally involved in. I’m not sure about the other servers or the servers here on SS13, though.

2 Likes
36

Always a good idea.

1 Like