Feedback Open letter to the Admin and Dev team

[jckrfc03]

Just as a preface, I did not spend a lot of time writing this, I have not proofread it, there are most definitely some mistakes in here but I just want to get this out before I get burnt out completely, I know this isn’t in the usual format of admin feedback however this is the easiest way for me to express feedback I have for the Admin & Dev team.

Here are my ragtag band of sources:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lux0aYa0vV8i33MrA8Drdf9JRH2cl1OxP2aZ9f76Rh8/ 

From my short time on Goonstation I have come to see that there is an outlook that rears its head out from time to time and it pushes the community in bad directions. It feels like some admins take a strong standpoint on their views and how it should affect the servers, and this leads to ostracization of community members and pushes a further divide between players and admins to the point where people are scared to talk against admins for fear of being banned[ap.2](the names of people in conversations outside the Goonstation discord server will be censored to avoid any unnecessary drama). There was a discussion on the discord recently involving multiple community members and admins in which both sides aired their issues and during this, Curie posted ”it feels unnecessarily hostile and makes other players uncomfortable to speak up. it's not what was said but how it was said and it kinda goes beyond what Moberry themselves feel?” in regards to this comment[ap.3] and I feel that this encapsulates my point perfectly. After this discussion Moberry and Wolf Muddler were banned from the discord, I was told that Wolf was also permabanned from the servers too and with no public ban reason or appeal forums we as a community are forced to only take the banned parties word as when asking an admin we are told that its “Not their place to hand it out” and whilst this is understandable it leads to massive misunderstandings between the community and the admin team and causes more flak for the admin team than if they had public ban reasons. As it stands I see no downside to having public ban reasons, it forces proper documentation and creates a permanent standard of what is and isn’t rule breaking behaviour that anyone can browse. 

The divide between RP and Classic leads to a rift within the community, not only when it comes to general conversation but it creeps into balance and PR discussion a lot also. This can be seen mainly on the forums where a majority of the discussions boil down to RP vs Classic and how an item/antag would have to be balanced for both and how admins don't want Classic or RP deviating too much from one another. And this mindset really hurts the chance for any major developments within the codebase. During my two years in the community the few changes or added content I can name off the top of my head is the Wraith rework, Nadir and Flock getting finished. I am not saying that the reason people don't merge things is because of RP, just that it is incredibly hard to balance things for two inherently different servers and that it hurts the contributors as it limits them on what they could add.

The severe lack of transparency hurts the community a lot. We are often the last to know about the developments and changes and are often just surprised with admin decisions and are usually left wondering what happened or what was decided on. Admins do not communicate enough with the playerbase, in regards to their decisions within PRs and bans. This lack of transparency harbours with it a distinct lack of accountability and responsibility. More often than not an admin can come into a round, run a gimmick that may or may not ruin the experience of the players without any say on the matter. Just because they are admins. Compensation for these ruined rounds are very varied depending on the admin. Some will reward antag tokens, others will not with some arbitrary hidden rule about having ‘unspent tokens’. Whenever an admin complaint is filed, and there are some with numerous, It feels like nothing is done. It exists for show, so that there’s the option to write up a post and perhaps an illusion of being able to speak up when admins aren’t behaving properly, yet still little to no action is taken as far as we are aware because we rarely get any kind of information or feedback on the forum posts from admins other than the one involved with the complaint. This lack of transparency extends even into the code where we can find the Secret module. This module contains code that normal coders cant access, this includes Ranch code and Salvager code to name a few. And from the outside it seems that this module is mostly used for dev projects that they either; don’t want being public, or aren’t finished yet. This only goes for active player-facing projects within the secret module as far as I know. I don't know what exactly is in there since I cannot access the folder. This secret folder, whilst it may be used for some server side code stuff, I don’t feel that it's a good place to hold dev projects. It leads to confusion and makes it harder for the community to come up with changes, new ideas or fixes for bugs and it undercuts the “open-source” label that Goonstation has.

The handling of rule breaks applies the same way too, instead of a uniform or standardisation of punishments, one admin might just warn you the other might ban you for a week. Sometimes warnings are issued for rule breaks and sometimes they aren't, I understand that this is dependent on both the player and the admin involved and it's not just solely influenced by how the admin is feeling on one particular day. However it is odd to see people being granted leniency for major rulebreaks and others being banned for much less.

PR posts are also a victim of lack of transparency. The community is very passionate about the game, I myself am and would like to contribute but when a PR is posted, there happens to be a lack of proper response from the admin team when it is reviewed. I’m sure you’ve seen suggestions that are backhanded with “confused emoji” or just “nah”[ap.4]. The given  PR here is the throwable baton PR, it received 2 public admin responses and 1 developer response before being closed wordlessly. Goonstation is a passion project for everyone involved,without players there would be no Goonstation just as if there were no admins or developers there would be no Goonstation. It feels extremely demoralising to show your work and for it to be turned down with a single word. It feels as if the person who made the change wasn’t even worth the feedback and can lead to people taking extended breaks or just leaving the community altogether. 

We see a stagnation of the game. Pop count is lower than usual, and while I think this is due to work and what not, possibly being a seasonal issue, I think certain aspects I’ve mentioned here might drive away players. There is a veritable fear of speaking out against the admins because a ban might be issued. People want this game to do well, I want this game to do well. I would not be writing this detailed post if I wasn’t. However as soon as criticism is issued by the community, it is perceived in a negative light. I do understand that it is hard to sift out the positive feedback from people needlessly complaining over minor details. We want to make the game better. We want to enjoy Goonstation and I do hope some of these points are taken into consideration. This will most likely be the last time I interact with Goonstation.

[pali6]

Screnshot of me in the appendix is not even referenced in the post body. I feel left out

[pali6]

> During my two years in the community the few changes or added content I can name off the top of my head is the Wraith rework, Nadir and Flock getting finished.

Lots of content and features got added. You are focusing only on the big ones. It has zero to do with RP. Big features rarely get finished because they require time and effort and dedication and not burning out.

> More often than not an admin can come into a round, run a gimmick that may or may not ruin the experience of the players without any say on the matter. Just because they are admins.

I rarely see players voicing any resposne to a gimmick even when I ask them to do so. I'd happily stop or amend what I'm doing in a round but I can't read minds. If you are dissatisfied let us know during the round.

> others will not with some arbitrary hidden rule about having ‘unspent tokens’.

There is no such rule.

> Whenever an admin complaint is filed, and there are some with numerous, It feels like nothing is done.

Yeah that's usually true. We do discuss the feedback and get headaches but sadly they rarely lead to any changes.

> The handling of rule breaks applies the same way too, instead of a uniform or standardisation of punishments, one admin might just warn you the other might ban you for a week.

I agree that this is something we do poorly and ideally it'd in some way change. No clue how.

> a lack of proper response from the admin team when it is reviewed

There have been recent discussions among us devs and admins about that and about how we should give more feeback on PRs. Idk if it'll improve or not, hopefully yes. But at least we are hearing the feedback on it and try to push each other a bit to be better in this regard.

> We see a stagnation of the game.

I don't think we do? Pop fluctuates up and down and is seasonal. It also goes up when the game itself gets more popular and then has a slow dropoff.

> However as soon as criticism is issued by the community, it is perceived in a negative light.

The thing is that a lot of the time the criticism just boils down to dogpiling and bashing on the devs. I'm honestly pretty burnt out on goonstation because of this and I feel like whatever I do or don't do is just get community to start yelling at me. Ideally we'd take in all criticism but also idk how.

[jckrfc03]

The thing is that a lot of the time the criticism just boils down to dogpiling and bashing on the devs. I'm honestly pretty burnt out on goonstation because of this and I feel like whatever I do or don't do is just get community to start yelling at me. Ideally we'd take in all criticism but also idk how.

Thanks for reading this and giving me some solid answers, I appreciate it alot and I do see the dogpiling happening from time to time on the discord. I'm glad you took the time to read this and saw that it wasn't just me dogpiling on the dev team.

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> We see a stagnation of the game.

just a clarification, by stagnation I didnt mean the server was dying. Although I understand why you thought that considering the earlier parts of the post, by stagnation i simply meant that people were finding the game stagnant and ignoring their jobs more often than not, this can be seen how validhunting has gotten worse recently and how its become more prevalent on 1 as people get bored with their jobs so they flock to security for action and engagement or validhunt for the same reasons.

[pali6]

> just a clarification, by stagnation I didnt mean the server was dying. Although I understand why you thought that considering the earlier parts of the post, by stagnation i simply meant that people were finding the game stagnant and ignoring their jobs more often than not, this can be seen how validhunting has gotten worse recently and how its become more prevalent on 1 as people get bored with their jobs so they flock to security for action and engagement or validhunt for the same reasons.

The game goes through swings of a pendulum in a way. Not too long ago we were having the problem of people mostly ignoring antags and being indifferent to them. "Player apathy" is the usual term. I think what you are describing might be just the push to stop that sometimes swinging the pendulum a bit too far to the other side.

And let's not kid ourselves on 1 people have been ignoring their jobs since forever. I started playing in 2018 I think? And stuff like "engine not even turned on" and "HoP immediately fucking off to space" were very common occurences back then. Also note that the current rate of adding content is positively enormous compared to the closed source days. I'm sorry if it feels dismissive but compared to how the pop, feature additions and stuff were when I started playing I just can't see the current state sa stagnant and I respectfully disagree with your point.

[Leeanei]

To be transparent, admin discussion on this feedback is actively ongoing and there's been no decisions made.

[Sbmhawk]

>> others will not with some arbitrary hidden rule about having ‘unspent tokens’.
>
>There is no such rule.

Providing context

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Cannot edit my post, dammit

But, like jckrfc03 said, it might not be a written rule, but it sure seems like an unspoken rule, as more than one dev/admin has said this.

---

If I'm missing crucial context from Emily, please add it, I am not trying to paint anyone in a bad light.

[UrsulaMejor]

I will respond to the admin token part since the contention seems to be some statements I have made:

I personally do not feel that is a fair characterization to call it an "unspoken rule" for admins to give away discretionary awards on a discretionary basis, when we are open about the fact that these are not a thing you are entitled to by any measure, but a tool admins have access to if they choose to use it.

Tokens were originally coded back when we had a system that would stop you from getting antagonist too soon from a previous time you got antagonist, so when an admin fucked with your antagonist round you genuinely lost the opportunity to get antagonist again naturally, and so the token was a way of giving that back to you.

Now, being a traitor is perfectly random again. Therefore, the original purpose of antag tokens has disappeared, and they're basically just fun little treats for admins to hand out. The impetus for their use and existence is gone, and so there is no longer any standardization for how they are given out. Some admins have given them away as prizes for challenges. Others never give them out, ever. Some admins give them out for when the server crashes. Other admins don't.

Here are the baseline expectations:

If an admin gimmick has totally wrecked your antagonist round to the point that you were unable to act in your capacity as an antagonist (e.g., the admin gave everyone a pet bomb that exploded you and you died instantly), you may ask for one and may get one.

If an admin crashes the server by accident, and you were an antagonist, you may ask for one and will probably get one.

If the server crashes unexpectedly, and you were an antagonist, you may ask for one and will sometimes get one.

These situations, as with all other possible situations, are at the discretion of the admins online at the time. They are not an expectation, nor an entitlement.

For further reference, see:
https://wiki.ss13.co/Antagonist#Antag_Tokens

[Cal]

It feels like some admins take a strong standpoint on their views and how it should affect the servers, and this leads to ostracization of community members and pushes a further divide between players and admins to the point where people are scared to talk against admins for fear of being banned

For clarification, we have not nor will ever ban people for simply speaking their mind on our server. If someone *perceives* their ban as being for ‘speaking up’ they were very likely for the hundredth time making a jab at our admin/dev team and received a final warning already.

We as a community are forced to only take the banned parties word as when asking an admin we are told that its “Not their place to hand it out” and whilst this is understandable it leads to massive misunderstandings between the community and the admin team and causes more flak for the admin team than if they had public ban reasons.

We privated ban appeals because we care about the privacy of the banned person. If they want to make something up about their ban to share with others that's on them, we don't want players being judged (and laughed at) by the community. It was not a decision that was made lightly and it will not be reversed. As it stands, we're seeing more people appeal in general.

Here is the news post about the ban-appeal-privating for reference: https://discord.com/channels/18224996089...7556051005

As it stands I see no downside to having public ban reasons, it forces proper documentation and creates a permanent standard of what is and isn’t rule breaking behaviour that anyone can browse.

The downside is how - straight up - creepy and obsessive players got about them. We had people making RSS feeds to alert them when a ban appeal was posted. We don’t want that for us and we don’t want that for you.  As for "a standard of what is and isn't rule breaking behavior" - We have a page of rules. Most people end up banned because they can’t stop breaking rules, or time and time again bend them as hard as they can. We do not give out endless warnings, and we’re not going to tolerate people harassing our players or us.

The divide between RP and Classic leads to a rift within the community, not only when it comes to general conversation but it creeps into balance and PR discussion a lot also. This can be seen mainly on the forums where a majority of the discussions boil down to RP vs Classic and how an item/antag would have to be balanced for both and how admins don't want Classic or RP deviating too much from one another.

The consensus we came to on this is that we try to make changes work for both servers because it's a huge amount more to try to maintain something in two separate ways.

I genuinely have not seen "An item/antag would have to be balanced for one or the other" as this is legitimately one of the easiest things to do, we can exclude rampage-y antagonists from the RP gamemode.

What we don't like to see, that we DO see is "grr squicky RP players made this change happen" as this is almost NEVER the case. There is no genuine "rift" between the community. be good to your fellow player.

And this mindset really hurts the chance for any major developments within the codebase. During my two years in the community the few changes or added content I can name off the top of my head is the Wraith rework, Nadir and Flock getting finished.

You’re focusing on things you personally see that affect you.

We just had a group effort of Say code being refactored, that’s gigantic. We just had a bunch of object critters converted to mobs, that’s gigantic, we just had Parallax implemented, that’s gigantic. We had the Nuclear Engine added, enormous changes.

Sure, it isn’t a brand new antagonist (Of which we ALSO added two that you did not list - Arcfiend and Salvagers) or a brand new map (Decarabia is WIP.) but they are giant steps towards making the game better.

The severe lack of transparency hurts the community a lot. We are often the last to know about the developments and changes and are often just surprised with admin decisions and are usually left wondering what happened or what was decided on.

Going to be blunt here - Players aren’t obligated to know about our developments or changes, we’d never get anything done. We aren’t a giant game company or whatever, but imagine if Capcom had all of their work on public display, or asked their community feedback on every little thing. NOTHING would ever get done. Not everyone agrees on things, and devs communicating to other devs know the game systems well and how they interact, as well as are considering balance implications instead of how cool something is.

Admins do not communicate enough with the playerbase, in regards to their decisions within PRs and bans. This lack of transparency harbours with it a distinct lack of accountability and responsibility.

We as a group have decided that for the sake of sparing ourselves the stress of having to announce and justify every single ban and judgement we make, that we simply won't. We maintain this game for free.

More often than not an admin can come into a round, run a gimmick that may or may not ruin the experience of the players without any say on the matter. Just because they are admins.

The game is free, we have a big disclaimer that says we can play with the round at basically any time. This is how we interact with the game because when we try to actually PLAY we get people treating us weird.

Compensation for these ruined rounds are very varied depending on the admin. Some will reward antag tokens, others will not with some arbitrary hidden rule about having ‘unspent tokens’.

Emily already addressed this but this isn’t untrue. I personally hand them out like candy, but I’d definitely be annoyed at someone already sitting on 8 demanding another. They could get 8 back to back rounds of being an antagonist. At some point we have to put our foot down.

It feels like nothing is done. It exists for show, so that there’s the option to write up a post and perhaps an illusion of being able to speak up when admins aren’t behaving properly, yet still little to no action is taken as far as we are aware because we rarely get any kind of information or feedback on the forum posts from admins other than the one involved with the complaint.

You can bet that we talk to and discuss every single admin feedback that shows up, in fact our discord bot pops up in our chat when we do get feedback, private or public. Not sure what else you want from here, as most end in “There is no issue here” or “This won’t happen again”.

This lack of transparency extends even into the code where we can find the Secret module. This module contains code that normal coders cant access, this includes Ranch code and Salvager code to name a few. And from the outside it seems that this module is mostly used for dev projects that they either; don’t want being public, or aren’t finished yet.

This is correct - you seem to misunderstand the purpose of the Secret submodule. This is where the devs put their personal projects they want to work on in their spare time without having them outright stolen by other servers. Coding isn’t cheap, Emily spent tens of hours of her spare time coding ranching, something she would have earned a lot of money for were it a paid job!

The handling of rule breaks applies the same way too, instead of a uniform or standardisation of punishments, one admin might just warn you the other might ban you for a week. Sometimes warnings are issued for rule breaks and sometimes they aren't, I understand that this is dependent on both the player and the admin involved and it's not just solely influenced by how the admin is feeling on one particular day. However it is odd to see people being granted leniency for major rulebreaks and others being banned for much less.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on this, but if we ban someone for a rule break it’s generally an hour ban with “Read the rules and come back”. We are much more lenient to newer players and not so to people who rack up tens of notes in a month. The vast majority of players have one or two notes. If you keep popping up on our radar and being an issue, Occam’s razor dictates the easiest solution is to remove you from the community.

PR posts are also a victim of lack of transparency.

I don’t think I can reply to this properly being that I myself am not a developer - I’ll leave this point alone.

We see a stagnation of the game. Pop count is lower than usual, and while I think this is due to work and what not, possibly being a seasonal issue, I think certain aspects I’ve mentioned here might drive away players.

Pop comes and goes, it doesn’t look to be “stagnating” at all in my opinion.

There is a veritable fear of speaking out against the admins because a ban might be issued.

Rest assured that genuine discussion or issues will be taken seriously - We have a private admin feedback section after all.

We want to make the game better.

Me too. Sincerely. That's why I spent over an hour writing up a reply to this on my day off.

[MichiRecRoom]

The severe lack of transparency hurts the community a lot. We are often the last to know about the developments and changes and are often just surprised with admin decisions and are usually left wondering what happened or what was decided on.

Going to be blunt here - Players aren’t obligated to know about our developments or changes, we’d never get anything done. We aren’t a giant game company or whatever, but imagine if Capcom had all of their work on public display, or asked their community feedback on every little thing. NOTHING would ever get done. Not everyone agrees on things, and devs communicating to other devs know the game systems well and how they interact, as well as are considering balance implications instead of how cool something is.

Admins do not communicate enough with the playerbase, in regards to their decisions within PRs and bans. This lack of transparency harbours with it a distinct lack of accountability and responsibility.

We as a group have decided that for the sake of sparing ourselves the stress of having to announce and justify every single ban and judgement we make, that we simply won't. We maintain this game for free.

Cal, if I may, I think you're misunderstanding those issues.



I believe the point being made here is that the amount of communication that is brought to the table, is far too little. Nobody expects you to publicly justify or announce every single little thing you do. But what is publicly announced is too little to understand.



As an example, when I was permabanned a while ago (by another admin). To be clear, I do think I deserved the ban, considering the situation. However, I also felt that it came with no warning, no attempt to communicate with me and see if there's some miscommunication or something that could be done to help solve the issue.



Still, I attempted to appeal it, but was denied. But the response I was given left me without much understanding of what to do next. Do I wait a few months and try again? Or maybe I'll never be allowed in Goonstation again? Maybe there's more issues I'm simply not aware of, that I need to address with myself? I don't know the answers to any of those. All I know is that the admin who banned me doesn't have confidence at this time for me to be a positive presence in the community, due to how much problematic behavior was exhibited by myself.

The handling of rule breaks applies the same way too, instead of a uniform or standardisation of punishments, one admin might just warn you the other might ban you for a week. Sometimes warnings are issued for rule breaks and sometimes they aren't, I understand that this is dependent on both the player and the admin involved and it's not just solely influenced by how the admin is feeling on one particular day. However it is odd to see people being granted leniency for major rulebreaks and others being banned for much less.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on this, but if we ban someone for a rule break it’s generally an hour ban with “Read the rules and come back”. We are much more lenient to newer players and not so to people who rack up tens of notes in a month. The vast majority of players have one or two notes. If you keep popping up on our radar and being an issue, Occam’s razor dictates the easiest solution is to remove you from the community.

I also want to speak up about this. To preface this, I have trouble understanding things in the same way as other people do (whether admin or non-admin). Really - even things that seem obvious to you (even "common sense") might not be obvious to me - a point that I've had to deal with many times across many servers and many years.

Anyways, I want to give an example of how I feel there's a lack of standardization among the admins. There was a point when I was rolebanned from Security. However, the matter of whether Brobocop counted as part of that roleban seemed... up in the air. I asked admins about it on two separate occasions, and both times was told that Brobocop should be OK even during my roleban. One admin even justified that "OK" as "Brobocop is a joke module."

So imagine my surprise one day - when I had played Brobocop in the RP server, and talked about it in the Discord after - that I was brought into the admin-to-user chat (I forget the name) by the one who handed me the roleban, and was given a clarification that playing Brobocop was considered an evasion of the roleban. This was in spite of the aforementioned "OK" from the admins (which the clarifying admin even acknowledged), and also in spite of the fact that I had avoided the original issue during that round that had gotten me a security roleban.

Even now, I'm still having trouble understanding how it was considered evading my roleban by one admin, despite having gotten an explicit OK from two others. Can admins just override each other like that? Does the admin who handed out the roleban have the ultimate say on those exact rolebans?

It feels like a lack of standardization - at the very least, if there is a standard for situations like this, it's not very clear and not communicated well to non-admins.

[Sord213]

I'm going to preface this by saying, very clearly, that is is my singular opinion and not that of the admin/dev team as a whole. If you try to take anything here as a "the admins said" I will find you and bonk you on the head with a comically oversized mallet. I also typed this up yesterday but forgot to post it and only glimpsed at the replies before this post.

I'm going to break this down into whatever bite size pieces my brain will dissolve the large and intimidating wall of text into. deal w/ it and enjoy the effort post

The first point of "people are afraid to talk about X or Y for fear of being banned" is dumb. We don't ban people for saying "man this change sucks" or "ugh I don't like this change." We ban people who provide a consistent drag on the overall conversations or discussions in discord as a whole. People who go "devs suck, they did this, fuck the devs, I hate the devs" regularly. And by regularly I mean multiple times a week. People who turn a discussion into a feature into some grandstanding argument about how the devs aren't humans and can all burn in hell or whatever. PS if anyone reading this thinks I'm talking about them, I'm not, it just happens regularly enough that it's fucking tiring. If someone wants to tell me they think a change I made is bad, feel free to tell me. If you ask me why I made a change I usually have a pretty good (in my head at least) reason for it. The thing is, though, by the time the nth person says they think the change is bad I might be responding with less and less messages because explaining your thoughts for the nth+1 time is tiring. I think a lot of devs are similar. You post your reasoning once, but then when multiple people want to disassemble your reason part by part while also insulting you you tend to just give up posting any reasoning at all. Also don't go "man sord fucking is the worst and only makes awful changes" when you see I haven't said anything in public channels for a while so you think I'm not online or just be snipey posting "x dev sucks" or "x dev moment". I'll say it flat out that people who act like that deserve to be removed from the community. If your entire purpose is to shit on people (players, admins, or devs) you don't deserve to be a member in the community. We owe you nothing, you don't have any right to sit in the channels for the passion project we're working on and people have been working on for longer than some people in the community have been alive and be a toxic asshole. If you are a toxic asshole constantly you're going to get the boot (again, very specifically not referencing anyone in particular, it just happens so fuckin much it's goddamn tiring to see it all the time.) Don't be the reason I drink.

RP and classic features aren't added because adding more codebase differences sucks to maintain. "Hey I'm tweaking a thing" and then seeing oops, the RP mode version of that thing is actually super different just makes me groan and wonder why it is like that. 9 times out of 10 the only consideration I'll put into something is hollering at an rp regular admin if they think it's good. Otherwise I'm adding it because I think it improves the game as a whole, or is funny. Typically something doesn't get denied because it will be bad on RP or bad on classic. It will get denied because we think it's shit and doesn't improve the game. Sorry! Not every idea is a good one, even I know that. I'm someone who throws a lot of dumb ideas into chat to get opinions on them. If I added every awful idea i have to this game the game would probably be vastly different. Not every idea is a winner, not every feature is complete, not every feature is balanced. I can't think of very many changes that were made because RP or classic players specifically felt whatever emotion about it. If a feature gets nerfed it's because it was too strong, if a feature gets changed it's because it was probably bad or unbalanced or impossible to balance or any other number of reasons. I think I can count on one hand how many changes have been made because some feature was bad specifically on RP or classic, and not a detriment to the server as a whole.

Transparency is a funny thing. Not a lot of games or communities have any transparency at all. You won't see admins or devs chatting in public channels other than warning people. I think our level of transparency is pretty ok. There are some places where we could probably improve, and others I'd fight against with tooth and nail. For one, I don't think when people ask for transparency they want to see the ban reasons we see in admin chat multiple times a day. It's a drag, mentally, on me, so I'm sure others feel the same. Sure, you might want to see the ban appeal where the guy who called someone a slur writes in their ban appeal that they are a PROUD MURICAN and have a right to freeze some peaches however they see fit, but you don't want to see the person who has crippling anxiety have to post a really embarrassing ban appeal over something they regret because they know they'll get made fun of or ostracized by the community for it. Yes, that has happened, yes it sucks for everyone involved. No, chances are we're not going to make ban appeals public again any time soon. We have a rule we keep things private for the sake of the player that was banned. If they decide they want to stir up shit publicly about it we can and will drop every detail and every warning we've given them over the years to knock it off that were ignored. If you want to sit in your sidecord or group DMs and talk shit good for you, keep lying to your friends about how the evil literally 1984 turbo mecha super hitler admins banned you for no reason and you're a martyr for the cause of the little guy. If you want to bring it to the rest of the class publicly expect to get called out for your shit.

Feedback posts are (almost) always taken seriously. We have an agreement between us admins that we don't ban someone for shitty feedback unless it's really obviously a troll (or a few other reasons that aren't relevant). You can see this by scrolling through feedback posts. Even if we don't post that something has been actioned, chances are we've at the very least talked about the feedback post briefly. Yeah maybe we could do better, but we try to respond to most feedback posts. A lot of times an admin will go "yeah I fucked up" and post it. Sometimes we all go "no, you didn't fuck up that person is a dork" and obviously if we posted that it's not constructive. Other times we will remove an admin. It has happened. Just because you don't see a direct action to feedback doesn't mean it didn't happen. When we warn some idiot not to talk about ERP we don't inform the entire community because, just like with ban appeals, we don't want them to get ostracized for it. If they improve, great, if they don't, well, we have things we can do to resolve the issue.

"Punishment matrixes" will never be a thing. Simple as. We might make some sort of "guidelines" that are just something you can use to get a vibe check on what you're doing but we will never go beyond that. People will game the system, people will cry and complain when X admin follows the system to the letter without allowing any leniency, other people will cry and complain when Y admin doesn't follow it to the exact letter. Other people will write long winded posts about how the admin team is slipping as a whole because we're letting off racists too easily because we unbanned a person who said a slur 8 years ago and blah blah blah my brain is hurting now. It's very common for admins to get gut checks from other admins on what to do or if the punishment was good or not. Most things that involve admins involve multiple admins, even if the others are silent.

PR transparency, eh, I guess. Yeah we can do better at commenting but a lot of times we don't because, like I said above, not all of them are winners. Historically, when devs do long winded reasons on why they don't want something in the game it gets broken down piece by piece and turned into a multi day argument about how they're wrong and feature good and whatever blah blah hoo hah. It's tiring. No one wants to deal with that bullshit. Sometimes we give good reasons, sometimes the most we can deal with as a volunteer with limited time in a day is "nope, sorry, not what we're lookin for." You bring up the baton pr because good lord you people (gestures wildly at everyone) can't let anything go. I'm the dev who said it was a cool idea in discord and told someone to make it. I didn't reply to the PR (or closing) because we talked about it in admin chat and I didn't feel that strongly about the changes. Thought it was cool but otherwise other people felt more strongly about it so *shrug. The fact that people are still grumbling about a stupid PR irritates me. Oh no, a neat feature didn't get added! The game is ruined and I'm mailing a pipe bomb to the admins house! It's not the end of the world.

At the end of the day, us devs are volunteer maintainers who just want to see the game get better and be fun. People don't like when their favorite toy gets nerfed because someone ran it into the ground. That sucks. The game is still fun to play, you just have to adjust how you play. Balance is always changing. People yell "STUN META!" into the void endlessly despite stuns being quite literally the weakest they've ever been. People yell that X traitor item is stupid and broken and Y traitor item is stupid and broken(ly bad and useless) and also Z traitor item is literally the worst thing to exist on the planet because they died to it last round. It's how it be. Things get adjusted, things get tuned, but the game continues onward.

Pop counts? pop counts shift, they do that. I played the game 10 years before being an admin, pop counts go up pop counts go down. People play to win, people play to chat with their friends and have fun. Some people want to make spaceman go sideways and will burn themselves out and then grumble on discord about how the game used to be better (shakes fist angrily), while some people want to make number go higher and see the funny new hat I added (it's really funny). game still fun, and if it's not fun maybe you are burnt out. Getting burned out is natural, it happens to literally everyone. Becoming a salty toxic person who grumbles in discord about how the game used to be better is a choice you're actively making. Go play something else for a while and come back 6 months later to see all the cool new features that have been added.


As a final thought, even though I've spent way more brainpower than I should on this, people don't have every fact on every matter. Just like this is a game about having incomplete information, the people in the community (admins, devs, players, all) don't have complete information on everything that exists as well. The game is still fun and my spaceman still farts when I press F. Now I'm gonna go play the legend of zelda and most likely forget this thread existed

[Ikea]

Hey uhh, I dont know if this comment here counts as peanut posting or not. Normally its pretty clear cut because the feedback is about a specific event, but this one is about the community as a whole, and Ive participated in that a bit so idk. To avoid making this thread a free for all of everyone with their two cents, Im gonna focus on the bit that Im pretty relevant for (which is the thing relating to pr feedback). If this counts as peanut posting feel free to delete this post.

So for the like, average reader who may not know who I am, hi I'm Ikea, I do code stuff occasionally. In specific, Im interested in balance and all those other prs that have a tendency to be naturally controversial, I also watch and engage in the discussion regarding lots of prs. What I've found is that pr's rarely get closed with no feedback whatsoever. Even my first pr which made drills do csaber level damage (jesus I was not good at this balance stuff), got a paragraph in response explaining why that's a bad idea despite that being seemingly obvious. So why is there this perception of "the dev team never gives reasoning", I think this boils down to mostly two reasons, one actionable and one not.

The first one is that, while dev pr feedback is common, it's often dispersed. To a casual viewer, if they go on a pr, see two comments none of them from devs, then a dev closing it, it can look like that dev didnt give any reasons for closing, when in reality they just did it in the unlinked forum thread. Devs tend to be already okay about this, but I feel like going "closing due to reasons mentioned in discord" more would be an easy step that help here.

The second one is just willful ignorance. There are some people, some still here some no longer here, who for a decision they dislike, will intentionally ignore any reasons as to why someone would want that decision. You see/saw this a lot with mime. There was one person in particular who would go on about how arbitrary it was for the devs to not want roundstart mime, despite them very well having seen the reasons firsthand why people don't want roundstart mime many many times. People who are like this become a brick wall of negativity, there is nothing you can say that will make them go "Well I may dislike it but I see the reasoning" because they have already decided that there is no reasoning no matter how many times you give it to them. These people will often bring back up these changes constantly, just dragging chat down into arguments. This also has the effect of other people taking them at face value, thus reinforcing the belief that decision making is a black box. I do not believe there is any practical approach to these types of attitudes other then administrative ones.

[Stonepillar]

hello people    i am stone. i worked on flock, and forked goonstation. and a dozen other things.
in case you can't tell- i am not an admin or dev. i'm just a nerd who loves gooncode after all the ups and downs.
i have some stuff that is relevant so here goes. i am bad at using western forum software so ignore any formatting issues

>would like to contribute
then do! there is so much stuff that needs fixing just grab an issue and fix it 
no one will murder you and you'll learn how things are done

>pull / github contribution lack of transparency and people being turned down for their passion projects
this was a problem for a while, and over almost a year, the nerds at imcoder have improved developer to contributor communication significantly. around this time last year there was a bunch of huge PRs punching their ways through, and we had that exact problem. to fix it, the player-projects discord forum was set up specifically for receiving player and admin feedback on new large features before they were produced in code.

nowadays, you can get that  emoji quickly, only spending at most a week some words and crude drawings and maybe a quick demo instead of after working on a massive size/xxl pull request for half a year that you poured your heart into and got really invested in.
also seconding Ikea's post (which is hopefully directly above mine). most developer feedback is over Discord and not directly over GitHub.

>lack of transparency for new features
if it's a contributor-submitted feature there is an absurd amount of transparency when discussing whether it's added. it's all in the discord. for direct dev team contributions, i've literally never seen an dev outright ignore feedback from players. they really really want this game to be fun. if they didn't, they wouldn't be devs. they always are bouncing ideas on discord or among other devs.

>secret module + undercuts the "open source" label that goon has
it doesn't really make it harder to request changes to these parts of the game. you can bring it up as you would anything else. new stuff like Salvagers has it's own discord thread where you can talk with devs directly. if you have real problems, type them up and ask about it.

>RP vs. classic balance
development wise, it's not that much of an issue. at worst a new feature is disabled on RP. there is arguments between players about it but there is arguments between players over *literally everything*. just see the last bit of Sord's reply.

>public ban reasons / codified rules
no, please dont. goon is not a government. i've also been on the receiving end of some bans, especially early on. it's not fun having a public ban record, and i never would've adjusted to goon if i had one. ban reasons are always dumb and most want to move past it. i was a stupid kid and i grew up. for most of my bans, the duration was just right. honestly, my month ban for crashing the server with a lag machine was *extremely lenient*.
>public appeals
also no. I never appealed any of my bans, and the appeals being visible was part of it. it sucks being that day's powergamer tea party gossip and having you fessing up to your mistakes burned into this forum's archive forever, all at the same time.

>people being driven away / ostracized / losing interest
i am that. i quit playing goon late last year. i didn't like the game anymore, but that doesn't mean the game isn't good.
generally, goonstation is doing great. it always has and always will do it's own thing.
stuff like the RP server will never be what *i* want, but that doesn't mean the admins are full throttle driving this game into the ground.
at every single major change, they've always driven the game in a better direction.

can the goons improve? absolutely. everyone has something they can work on
but sweeping reverts in recent changes is not progress.
hope this was helpful in figuring out what to do. bye now 

[jan.antilles]

I'm going to reply to your post specifically, MichiRecRoom, since I'm directly involved in the points of feedback you've left here. If you wish to respond to this post, make a new thread, because you're getting into the territory of "thinly disguised ban appeal." Your ban appeal has been dealt with separately.

Cal, if I may, I think you're misunderstanding those issues.

I believe the point being made here is that the amount of communication that is brought to the table, is far too little. Nobody expects you to publicly justify or announce every single little thing you do. But what is publicly announced is too little to understand.

As an example, when I was permabanned a while ago (by another admin). To be clear, I do think I deserved the ban, considering the situation. However, I also felt that it came with no warning, no attempt to communicate with me and see if there's some miscommunication or something that could be done to help solve the issue.

Still, I attempted to appeal it, but was denied. But the response I was given left me without much understanding of what to do next. Do I wait a few months and try again? Or maybe I'll never be allowed in Goonstation again? Maybe there's more issues I'm simply not aware of, that I need to address with myself? I don't know the answers to any of those. All I know is that the admin who banned me doesn't have confidence at this time for me to be a positive presence in the community, due to how much problematic behavior was exhibited by myself.

This is not a case of unclear communication. You were warned many, many times for your behavior, and I personally sat in multiple conversations with you that lasted for over an hour apiece, attempting to communicate exactly what the behaviors were that were unacceptable on Goonstation. It is patently false for you to state that anything came with "no warning."

If the person who banned you doesn't have confidence that you'll be a positive presence, and doesn't give you specific "next steps," then your answer is to chill. Go do something else. Let both yourself and the community have some time to move on from the point where we decided that you needed to be removed from it.

I also want to speak up about this. To preface this, I have trouble understanding things in the same way as other people do (whether admin or non-admin). Really - even things that seem obvious to you (even "common sense") might not be obvious to me - a point that I've had to deal with many times across many servers and many years.

Anyways, I want to give an example of how I feel there's a lack of standardization among the admins. There was a point when I was rolebanned from Security. However, the matter of whether Brobocop counted as part of that roleban seemed... up in the air. I asked admins about it on two separate occasions, and both times was told that Brobocop should be OK even during my roleban. One admin even justified that "OK" as "Brobocop is a joke module."

So imagine my surprise one day - when I had played Brobocop in the RP server, and talked about it in the Discord after - that I was brought into the admin-to-user chat (I forget the name) by the one who handed me the roleban, and was given a clarification that playing Brobocop was considered an evasion of the roleban. This was in spite of the aforementioned "OK" from the admins (which the clarifying admin even acknowledged), and also in spite of the fact that I had avoided the original issue during that round that had gotten me a security roleban.

Even now, I'm still having trouble understanding how it was considered evading my roleban by one admin, despite having gotten an explicit OK from two others. Can admins just override each other like that? Does the admin who handed out the roleban have the ultimate say on those exact rolebans?

It feels like a lack of standardization - at the very least, if there is a standard for situations like this, it's not very clear and not communicated well to non-admins.

This was also me, and this was the subject of a very extended conversation between the two of us, in which I was very clear about what the misunderstanding had been. The other administrators gave you the okay to play with Brobocop because the intent of the module was silly. You took the module and played it as if you were an actual serious member of Security, and I confronted you about this and said that you should not do this in the future due to your Security role ban. You did not receive any punishment for "evading," I merely explained to you that your use of the module was not acceptable, given the unique circumstances that you were in.

Miscommunication between admins happens. We are human beings who are volunteering our time and effort to make the silly space-toot game and its community better, because we love it. We're not employees with top-down directions about how to handle each and every scenario. Mistakes happen, and we deal with them, and we move on.

As I stated: if you want to reply to this post, make it in another thread, becuase I have no desire to clutter this thread with further argument about your bans.

[TrueOrder]

Truthfully I would love some transparency with bans and consistency with punishments for said bans.  Also I'd like it if when a rule is broken or interpreted as broken that further rule breaks by other entities present are not ignored.

I murdered a critter human and my quickly improvised excuse for such was interpreted as a rule break, some of whom were disgusted by their interpretation called Security down on me.  And Security immediately lynched me in the RP SERVER with no actual justification for executing someone who was essentially committing disorderly conduct.  I have very strong reason to believe the Admin called this lynch down on me and waited for it to happen before banning me due to the timing.  What sick twisted conduct if true.  Going to be honest?  I stopped playing Goon even after that temp ban passed.    The Admins have created such a scrubbed "sanitized" and "all inclusive" atmosphere with the suggestion to others to be tolerant while they themselves are oft incredibly intolerant of the slightest of infractions.  It is needlessly authoritarian and creates an oppressive atmosphere that hangs in the server once you've experienced the bullshit once yourself.  Any of the fun interactions or zany interesting bits are completely overshadowed by the fact that at any moment you'll be slapped with a permanent ban for a joke that was taken wrong or be lynch mobbed over it.  Lynch mobbing is a rule break itself but apparently when Admins do it it's fine?

This isn't about my ban in the slightest.  I just find this conduct abhorrent.  Why not standardize punishments for certain rulebreaks?  Why not give a mandatory warning, just one, when someone is doing something wrong?  What if it's a situation like mine or others where they don't realize something is being seen as such?  You'd seriously punish someone ignorant of their wrongdoing with the same severity of someone doing it with malintent?  Just give a warning, then if they don't improve or walkback their incident fast hit, them with the punishment.  That's much more reasonable than the inconsistency of banning someone's IP as punishment for their second ban over naughty words or a simple hour temp ban for making a grossly offensive political joke.  Both examples being hypothetical of course.

I appreciate all admins for the volunteer work they do.  But if they can't reel in their own knee jerk reactions or can't enforce the rules without breaking rules themselves, then perhaps some people just aren't meant to be admins.



On another note:  the admin gimmicks.  I don't mind when a gimmick is announced pre-round or it's an event.  But well, I was a Security lad having a great round whilst struggling to keep this particular prisoner in line for his short sentence.  When suddenly I see him fly upwards, basketball in hand.  Chaosdunked.  Very immersion ruining.  I hear that apparently this sort of thing occurs as a result of a "bored admin?" Kind of a dick move gent.  I don't mind more chill rps, everything need not be high intensity chaos every moment.  It feels fine organically but when it's forced like that?  Leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I recall Adminhelping that incident because of my disappointment.  I didn't request anything, but I suppose an apology would've made me feel better. Or some assurance that such occurrences would be rare


I came to the server to hang out with neat folks and have zany fun in space.  I did NOT come here to be under the heel and at the mercy of the admin's whims!  I appreciate the dedication to retaining order but going full whimsical dictator mode is awful taste.  The content on the server is amazing, you guys have a great thing here with so much potential, why ruin it with arbitration?  I hope you folks actually remove the more psycho admins if behavior doesn't improve.  The idea that you'd keep someone toxic around forever just because they're active seems suicidal.  I'm not actually pointing fingers, I don't really know any admins I just know of certain patterns of sunken cost fallacy that some servers suffer from.


On another note, keeping the ban appeals public is a no brainer.  Perhaps give each person the option to make them private?  There has to be a better way to do this for people who see no reason to hide their infractions.  Even if people enjoy the drama to a strange degree I don't see that as an adequate reason to ruin their fun unless you're seeing a lot of incidents of harrasment or something?  Even then, who cares?  Said figurative victim has the means to block them.  The opinions of random entities on the internet don't really matter to me and they shouldn't to you.


Thanks for the Thread OP.  Takes a good bit of courage to post that considering the very atmosphere you speak of and its ever present truth.

Unrelated bit, but I also stopped playing because of the whole 120 min reduction to 90 minutes.  I savored the round end, struggling to survive in wrecked ship or desperately repairing it to survivability, or simply decompressing in the bar after a stressful Detective case. I mourn the loss of that time.  But that's all off topic so I'll cease my rambling.

---

If you want to sit in your sidecord or group DMs and talk shit good for you, keep lying to your friends about how the evil literally 1984 turbo mecha super hitler admins banned you for no reason and you're a martyr for the cause of the little guy. If you want to bring it to the rest of the class publicly expect to get called out for your shit.

And what if they aren't lying and get pounced on anyway?