Who is your CM character?
Lenina ‘Salt’ Hange, Nina ‘Salt’
Are you 16 or older?
Yes
Timezone:
EST
Qualifications:
On average, how many hours are you available to moderate?
4 a day except on weekends when its more
Do you have any previous experience in being staff (not just SS13)?
I moderated for a subreddit 4 years ago and it’s Discord Server. I wrote the rules and enforced them. I didn’t write these ones, but I can enforce them.
Provide links to any previous Colonial Marines applications that you’ve made:
Can’t find my mentor app. It was accepted. Woo.
Have you ever been made for more than 24 hours on CM-SS13?
No.
Communication is a vital part of being a Moderator. Are you willing to actively do so with the team?
Yes. Grim is currently begging me to join staff. He’s very communicative, and I am being very communicative back.
Final Details:
Why would you like to become a moderator?
I wanna make cool sprites (at some point) and cool maps (at some point) and cut down on LRP in more ways than playing CMP/CO and also there’s like 4 of you and it looks kinda stressful and jesus christ the PR from March is still waiting for logs.
In your opinion, what is the most important quality for a moderator?
Objectivity and Self-censure.
To use an example, Morrow talked about creating cutting down/not developing dev only weapons or tools cause that’s not fun for everyone.
Anything else you want to add?
I hate the internet and the wet handed people who use it. They need to be reined in.
Hi Nina! I’m excited to see you apply for moderator, and would be pleased to have you on the moderation team in fact.
However, before I go giving you an upvote or whatever, I want to ask you a few additional questions!
Formality
a. How formal should you be between other staff members?
b. How formal should you be between players?
c. Where would you be formal and where would you be informal? Use examples if you need to!
What is your image of a perfect staff member?
a. How do you aim to achieve this?
It’s been 3 hours and the round is stagnating with half of the playerbase are essentially ghosts - what is your solution to this problem? Get creative!
Normally I don’t comment on mod applications anymore unless it is promising or someone I know/can vouch for or a person who I see around a lot. But, a few of your answers were a bit confusing and I want to go over them.
Not sure if you understood the question correctly. The question is more pertaining to communicating with other staff members if/when you are a part of it more than why are you joining and which staff members you talk to.
Making sprites and maps are developer work, so try applying for that as well/instead (you can be a mod and a dev.)
Not sure what ‘wet handed’ means, but saying you hate the internet and the people in it is a eyebrow raising answer and does not seem like a good quality for a staff member, because that usually entails that you view the internet from a biased ‘hating’ point of view. Unless you mean something else entirely in which case I would like you to elaborate what you mean?
Also if you could answer a few of my own questions that would be good as well.
You see a naked marine running around the ship with a rifle in their hands. They seem lost, but they just shot someone once (not to death) and they get gunned down by a marine. How do you go about handling the situation?
An MP was just ahelped for flashbanging briefing and are now arresting 4 marines and pepper spraying people all over the place, you are the only staff member on, what do you do?
You see 3 or 4 people getting into a heated argument on the discord, one person starts calling the others slurs, what do you do?
Queen ahelps that 5 larva have just died near the larva, they state that a larva every once in a while runs up to the FOB and gets gunned down by a sentry, what do you do?
A Whitelisted CO just BE’d 2 people at briefing, a spec and a medic, they both ahelp the CO for griefing them, what do you do?
A marine was arrested for breaking into the COs office and stealing jones and ahelps stating the MPs falsely arrested them for DTGP and tresspassing, what do you do?
If I am being honest I don’t do formal when communicating - the entire process of me writing this app is informal - unless it needs to be objective information. Your character did X in Y logs at Z time. You did x in Y channel on discord. I did Y in response to X. I don’t play CMP much anymore but much is the same process. I would objectively explain the series of events, including what I did that may or may not have been wrong, and it would be case by case basis judgment.
The best staff don’t abuse power, and ignore bias. Even if a player I have had OOC problems with ahelps, i cannot ignore or rule against them just because. To use an example, certain players have M2Ced me as CMP before. That doesn’t mean if someone M2Cs that player I go about my day when the ahelp pops up.
Entirely context dependent.
If the odds are bias in favor of the Marines, I’ve seen hostile ERTs spawned. This is a little iffy tho, because it’s shipside, not groundside. So I like the idea of a “Super Boiler” which Marines would have to kill to stop the Almayer from being shot out of the sky.
If the odds are in favor of Xenos, nuke. But I would caution: Marine players who stall out the round by cadehugging infinitum when Xenos have 12 left shouldn’t be rewarded with the “win here button.” I’ve experienced the other side of a shitty, unearned nuke, and it does in fact feel super demotivating.
I’d probably let the situation be dealt with for a bit ICly - usually nearby medics will heal and deal with the bodies - while mentorsaying “is anyone free to train a bald PVT?” or ping the SEA as to the situation - if there is one. PVTs will be PVTs. They just need teachers.
In this situation the MP is wrong from the get-go. Not because of the non-lethals usage, but in mass arrests. Unless you have backup, arrests numbering anymore than 1 are CMO-verifiably insane. I don’t know the protocol, but I’d unironically admin PM the guy. “Run. You lose these. Run before you are lynched.” After they - probably - get away and done with I’d investigate if the 4 arrests were valid. If they were I’d send a fax as the Provost outlining why his approach to that situation was wrong, and what to do better. If they weren’t, I’d love to do some training ICly as a Provost.
I don’t know discord Moderation rules. I assumed this was just for the game. However, off that, I’d lock the channel and DM the persons involved to take such things to DMs. And the one using slurs I’d issue whatever stage of the punishment system they are on.
From what I understand, this is no different than a Spec running naked into the field naked. Or you can’t just aheal 10 people cause a bad OB gibbed them. I’d investigate the ckeys - if it was multiple, similar ckeys, or newer ckey - and go from there off their intention.
Unless the CO is named “Jesus Christ” and M2Cing gaming people, I am not intervening. From what I understand invalid/valid BEs are a Council issue anyhow. I’d simply investigate the reasoning for the BE and explain it to those executed. If the BE reasoning was invalid or a mistake, from what I understand, respawns have been offered. If it was Valid, I’d say make a PR and good luck.
You should 100% PM the naked guy and get their attention. Understand what happened to both or all people involved (this doesn’t mean PM every marine in a 100 tile radius, but PMing the person shot and the person who mowed them down is a good start to a proper investigation.) Usually if someone mows down another marine, they will not get healed ICly more often then not. You have access to Aheal abilities, and use them if a medic isn’t able to or wont heal them. You should have a decent game knowledge being a mentor yourself and should try to the best of your ability to assist them if no mentors are able to assist.
Most importantly, you MUST Investigate what happened, if the guy needs help or if they are a griefer- even if the situation only was a simple shot that hit someone once, it is still IE unless it was a confirmed accident. Of course you have the digression of being the staff member handling the situation, you can allow some leniency.
Although this is an interesting approach, PMing someone to ‘run or they lynch you’ is definitely not acceptable. Remember that ALL staff interaction should be taken 100% professionally, I don’t mean this in a ‘everything must be a robotic response or question’ way, but that is definitely something you should avoid doing. Investigate their note history for previous situations like this and see if the use of the flashbang and the pepper spray was reasonable. If there is reason to use a flashbang on green and use of full non lethal measures such as being mobbed by marines while making an arrest, there is no reason to sanction the MP if they followed marine law to the book. There is no laws stating its insane to make 4 or more arrests in one go, however it is most likely impossible to get all 4 prisoned and charged correctly all by yourself unless they comply (which they never) in under15 minutes. Responding with a fax to improper use of ML is a excellent approach as long as the MP didn’t do anything too crazy worthy of a job ban or OOC punishment severely. Provosts are usually reserved for extreme cases and not necessarily distributed for training purposes because the SEA role exists.
This was sort of a trick question/understand how you handle things question but, unless you actually become discord staff, you are not really obligated/allowed to provide any discord moderation. The most you should do is screenshot and link what was said and bring it up with the discord staff members. Remember, its a staff TEAM, you should contact proper departments for different jobs and they will handle things accordingly.
Go from there off their intention…? To what? Provide any compensation for hives massive 5 larva loss? PM them at all? Provide any form of infraction? Larvas are strictly NOT allowed to leave hive unless extreme circumstances such as hive being actively destroyed, being a burst larva from a shipside marine etc. Leaving hive and dying is harshly punished due to the respawning nature of xenos and how detrimental it is to hive to constantly be losing larva’s to a griefer. PMing the person(s) who are leaving hive as larva’s and providing warnings (or bans) depending on note history and other variables. Usually this is a heavy warning or job ban from xeno in multiple cases.
BEs are strictly whitelist based issues and should only be brought up in a PR or directly messaged to the councilors and senator. However, if the CO is breaking SERVER rules and not whitelist rules, you deal with them like any other player who has broken a server rule.
While this pretty much is always an IC issue, something involving ML you should ALWAYS investigate, even if it seem like a very minor occurrence. Obviously if it was not wrong, you can mark it as an IC issue/resolved but there could always be a issue, so you should investigate. Now if someone ahelped that they just died to a xeno and want you to restart the round, that is 100% an IC issue (unless an event or something) Also saying skill issue is not appropriate staff conduct. As much as you sometimes wanna say it, don’t.
I know the moderation application was just changed like, today, I feel that a lot of important questions have been completely removed. I see a huge issue of investigation and the way you handle yourself. Although its nice to have some unhinged moments, answering every question almost seemingly sarcastically give me 0 indication that you will handle yourself seriously and professionally. I understand a ton of stuff about staff you will never get any information to fill out your mod app until after you join staff but, basic principles such as investigation and self conduct should be innate before applying- Especially being a mentor already. I really don’t see a good reason to +1 your moderation application at this time.
i’ve never had an issue with you personally, but
recently you accussed somebody of metagaming (in ooc) for a reason i can not fathom and i quote
,Alan Jones, if you’re here. Try to make it less obvious you metacomm. I arrest you for assaulting a doctor with a chair and 4 delta appear just out of thin air and wordlessly intervene"
you were extremely quick to assume the worst, not only that but you chose to air the dirty laundry in ooc
i don’t think a staff applicant should be participating in this behaviour
-1
i also dont like how you treat the round removal tool (BE) as a CO but thats a whole another topic
Heya thanks for applying to become a moderator.
This won’t be my +1 or -1 because personally I’m a bit confused with why you want to become a moderator, mostly because you mention stuff that is on the dev side of things. So I wanted to maybe clear up any confusion (at least on my end) by making a bit clearer what mods do and don’t do.
Moderation and Development of CM are two totally separate branches of staff. Staff can be cross trained or you can be a member of both sides but as a general rule of thumb moderators handle ingame enforcement of the rules while maintainers handle the code side of CM, mostly on our Github.
Let me paint a bit of a picture of the separation. When someone is griefing or there is an ahelp about a rulebreak members of the dev team will generally ignore it and let moderators handle it, only when there is a real worst case scenario like no staff being online do devs break out the moderation tools to, for example, stop a mass griefer or something like that. On the other end of the spectrum members of the moderation team don’t get any priority/privileges when it comes to pull requests, nor do members of the moderation team review and approve sprites/code in pull requests. As a mod you’re basically just the same as any other player when it comes to codebase stuff.
As a moderator you will be enforcing the Rules along with pulling logs for various things. Honestly what you’ll mostly be doing is handling ahelps and investigating stuff that catches your eye as rulebreaks.
So when it comes to this response:
I just want to make sure that you have the right expectations. Outside of events spriting and mapping are things that are more on the developer side of things (also everyone can do it since we’re opensource, just make a PR with your proposed changes on the github).
And when it comes to cutting down on LRP: Its an admirable goal but we aren’t the RP police (as much as it might feel that way sometimes). RP is really subjective so LRP is pretty broad and not always entirely enforceable (mostly because different people have different standards for RP). We do have some standards but you shouldn’t be going into moderation thinking that you’ll be wielding the HRP sword cutting down folks who aren’t meeting the Aliens franchise standards. On the RP side you’ll mostly be handling stuff like people saying outright OOC stuff ICly, getting very upset and shouting slurs or people who are trying to ban evade so they can wordlessly walk into briefing and start shooting.
If there was any confusion on your end I hope that clears it up.
So now to clear up the confusion on my end I do wanna ask again: Why would you like to become a moderator? and probably more importantly Do you want to become a moderator?
Because if you just want to help improve CM with stuff like sprites/maps or adjustments to the code to add features/tools becoming a contributor and possibly joining the development team after you get some experience might be a better fit. You don’t need to do moderation if that isn’t the kind of stuff that you’d enjoy doing.
I don’t want this reply to be condescending or anything like that by the way, I just want to make sure that you know what you’re signing up for so its not wildly different to what you expected.
My understanding is that you can be of both, and it is my intention to be of both at some point (Similar to Segrain). My intention was to apply for mod now, and when I learn spriting/mapping/etc I can eventually apply for maintainer (which from what I understand isn’t really an app anymore than just asking).
And when I am saying cutting down on LRP, I mean I’ve seen rulebreaks just happening and no staff is online/free to deal with it due to how much of a staff shortage there is. I’ve been making a joke of “the mentor coup is occuring” cause in the Staffwho half the time its just mentors on and no one else.
The game can be improved with both positions and so I would like to do both with the free time I have now - with even more eventually. I’ve been a mod before on multiple forums, and would like to do it again if it means I can be of help to a server I want to remain MRP.
Was going to say pretty much the same, but you were faster.
My take on this application:
I have seen BE on newer players from you for pretty much stupid reasons ( which really surprises me due to the fact that you are a mentor ) that I shouldn’t be commenting since that is a whole another topic as mentioned previously, however, it already indicates to me what type of person you are.
Righto thanks for the response on my previous post! Now I did have some questions for you to answer so here goes.
You recieve an ahelp that a marine is hiding from MPs in the dropship. Upon investigation the marine is refusing to leave the dropship and is encouraging other marines to shoot any MPs that come onboard to try and arrest them. Luckily nobody ended up getting shot. How do you resolve this situation?
While playing you notice a squad rifleman with the name “Dee Snutz” on the crew manifest. What action(s), if any, do you take?
After a long conversation where you ended up warning someone for metagaming the player that you warned is getting upset with you and disagreeing with your decision. They argue with you that their actions don’t qualify as metagaming and are requesting a second opinion from one of the three admins that are online since they outrank you. How do you resolve this situation?
So you’ve been a Mentor for a bit over a month. Why is it you’ve chosen to apply for Mod? I should also note for reference I did recently receive a valid complaint about you as SEA recently.
You also say your important quality is “self-censure” I couldn’t disagree more, in it’s place should honestly being able to keep yourself composed so that objectivity means anything. Censoring yourself doesn’t mean it still doesn’t effect you, and in character you’re rather abrasive at times which makes me wonder if that’s more true to your actual composure and you’re simply better at “self-censure” out of character. I’m going to say I recommend your or not but I’m not sure if I’d want you to be the person handling a ticket involving me.
I’ll just ask without any BS. You have a problem with using BEs too much being unfair in certain situations. It’s basically the highlight of this app, and you brag about using BEs frequently which is a red flag. Seriously it’s a tool to maintain order not something to whip out cause you can
Do you think you could realistically be trusted with moderation tools as they’re much more powerful and can turn someone away from playing cm ever again.
This one I find hard to answer because I’ve dealt with it recently as the MP, ahelped, and was told IC issue and instantly had the ticket closed. Unless they cause a riot on the DS, from my understanding its not even in verbal warning territory.
2nd thing
Verbal warning if its a new player and move on. Unless I have tools to rename/send them back to menu to rename themself.
3rd thing
My understanding is that tickets are handled by whoever grabs it. If the player believes the ticket was mishandled, they can make a Staff report.
What I mean by self-censure is maintaining objectivity in approach. It doesn’t matter the problems I have with a player/person ahelping if they’re being M2C gamed on or not. I need to help them the objectively correct way despite that history.
Lenina/Nina are both abrasive characters. Lenina marks very quickly for arrest, and before as SL I’ve gotten 4 of my own squad arrested along with me for not following an order to not speak non-english in squad comms.
Most of the main points I had were already said so I will not repeat them, simply add:
The small interactions I had with them scaled more on the bad than the good, I do not think their “abrasiveness” IC is apart of their roleplay as I’ve witnessed the same behavior OOC.
I’ve seen them get away with rule-breaks that would’ve gotten some others banned in a blink. (like telling people to kill themselves)
I’ve witnessed them boast after ahelping someone in LOOC talking about the damages.
I’ve seen them BE some private for misfiring their weapon during a briefing and, instead of letting MPs do their job (they literally pushed the MP that had a taser in hand away) they decided to wordlessly remove them from the round over a clear mistake that didn’t hurt anyone.
Their behavior on discord can be incredibly out of place and when called out they’d rather insult people instead of rectifying the wrong. There’s enough out of place posting (to be polite) in channels like last round chat I personally do not wish to see staff drive cm-related conversations away.
I do not believe that someone with their temperament should be let with any ounce of power as I trust that they are unable to be non-biased and I fail to see their ability to not abuse the tools they are given.
) that I shouldn’t be commenting since that is a whole another topic as mentioned previously, however, it already indicates to me what type of person you are.