Goonhub
05-28-2023, 06:37 PM
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
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