Feedback Open letter to the Admin and Dev team

[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.