Feedback Open letter to the Admin and Dev team

[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