Emily, Sord and QuestX (But also general admin presence on Main)

[Carbadox]

Disclaimer : I write this about 30 mins after the finished round (probably 2 now that I'm finishing it) so I will acknowledge that I might still be considered "salty" but honestly, I want to do this now before I forget anything or lose steam. Also forgive any sentences that don't flow properly, incorrect spelling or poor grammar.

Context:
I had a bad round playing as Head of Security. The details of the round are not neccesary, they're completely irrelevant. The general summary was I personally got overwhelmed with stuff going on (which is expected to happen on Main, especially as HoS). One of the things that happened specifically however was some random naked individual got into Security and started shooting at us with smoke shells from a riot gun. For the record, not only does getting hit with it directly give shrapnel, it also does considerable damage, so it's not a harmless prank done for fun.

Occasionally when I play HoS, I use the who command before joining to see how many players to expect to have to deal with and I noticed that we had 3 admins, Emily, Sord and QuestX. As such, after having arrested and brigged the naked guy who was clearly only looking to cause trouble, I adminhelped a quick message with "[naked guy] is greytiding". Eventually due to the barrage of things going on, one of them being the naked guy who managed to break out and was running around Security being a nuisance, the whole Security team was just overtaken and massacred fighting a shambling abomination at Security. In the end, it was obvious to me that nothing had been done to deal with the guy who had intentionally causing us trouble. End credits revealed that he was in fact not an antag what-so-ever

I didn't get asked for more details or a reply that it was being looked into. I know that we get told that we're not supposed to expect replies when AdminHelping however considering the fact that the guy later stole my items and ID after I had died, it wasn't hard to see that nothing was done at all.

The reason why I'm writing this complaint is because so far, I managed to deal with stuff like this before. I've followed the usual procedure of arrest, brig and AdminHelp if appropriate. And I've always told numerous people, "Even if there isn't an admin online currently, AdminHelp it. It'll go into the Discord server for someone to pick up on". But after AdminHelping with 3 admins online and seeing absolutely no intervention, my confidence with AdminHelps actually being sorted out has tanked considerably.

The reason I mention general admin presence on Main in the title because the quality of rounds on the Main server have fallen immeasurably, and it's something that's basically inspired most of the feelings in this post. The repetition of shitty behaviour has considerably waned my patience to it and has made me feel disdain to the server because of it. People will give different reasons why but personally to me, I think the current list of active admins doesn't neccesarily reflect the actual activity of said admins.

And yes, I understand that the admins are volunteers, I understand that it's incredibly draining trying to force yourself to be active on every front, I understand that the current admins are conciously working towards getting "new hires" so to speak and I understand that it's impossible to deal with such issues on such a large scale, of sometimes 70-90 players on a given round. Not to mention there's probably a lot of things you guys have to do with out us even knowing. However, I've often found myself looking at the list of admins on the sidebar on Discord and realised that, over the 2 years that I've been playing (and however long I've been in the Discord server), I don't think I've even heard some admins speak at all.
(Note that I definetely don't mean this in regards to people who actively develop for the game. Developing for free is one hell of a dedication)

To sum up :
For a while now, the current state of the server have been making it difficult to enjoy the game, despite my best efforts, and today's expirence hasn't helped at. I've been putting off talking properly about it anywhere because I have alot of issues of self-doubt and I always put the issue to be myself but today everything just sort of came together into this.

[Adhara In Space]

heres a few things from my experience that may help you out here

1: ingame logs suck. whenever someone ahelps and i wasnt there to directly witness it i gotta go and look at the logs externally, which means not focusing on the game window. im also slow, so it can take me a while to wade thru the logs and actually deal with something

2: im sometimes in multiple servers at once. its true, sometimes i join a server to deal with a ahelp, and then get distracted by another, or am running a gimmick on another, or something. if im on the server, not a guarantee that im even there.

3: dealing with ahelps is difficult. sometimes u dont have the energy. imagine an mhelp but you gotta dig through the source code to find the answer every single time, and then the person youre trying to help wont actually respond to you, and wow its been 10 minutes and you just have to throw in the towel and stop trying. i resolve them when i can, but sometimes i just dont want to do it. sux, but its the truth. im lazy!!

4: ahelps dont always have tangible results. same way u can do mhelps from discord, u can deal with ahelp stuff in discord too. and 99% of the time its get ahelp, find out that the person was being a jerk after lookin thru logs, ask them why they were being a jerk, they go "my bad sorry", you go "ok dont do it again", they go "ok", and you add a note. thats like, most of the ahelps.

idk. i guess, responding in a timely manner is a bit of an issue if you view it like dming the admins. but its not rly dming. when you ahelp, its logged and stuff. usually people try to toss a "hey checking into it" but that doesnt always happen. and you will almost never get feedback about how an ahelp was resolved too. idk. i take privacy of players kinda seriously. i did some embarassing shit before, and im glad it was dealt with discretely. i try to extend the same courtesy to people who might just be young and making mistakes because that is what you do when you're young and on the internet.

i get what youre saying though. it can be frustrating to feel like you arent heard. especially if youre in a timezone where there arent many admins. or if it feels like admins are ignoring you. but i know that a lot of people (like me) will just join sometimes and pay 1/4th attention. really easy to miss the big "ahelp" box in chat if youre not paying attn. to the game is all.

[UrsulaMejor]

I idle with the game open while I'm working. I pop in every once in a while when something egregious comes across on the ahelp discord channel. If something seems like it can wait, it waits. I'm working, after all.

Clear and descriptive reports help convey urgency. There wasn't a lot of urgency to "[Firstname Lastname] Greytiding". It didn't tell me what the problem was. It didn't tell me what they were doing or what, specifically, the problem was. It didn't seem to require my immediate attention, and so it waited.

I'm sorry that you feel like you're not being heard, but we have to triage what reports we invest our time into. Personally, I always investigate reports of bigotry or harrassment first, or obvious + extremely harmful acts of grief (such as ttvs or smoke bombs).

At peak times, we're getting several reports across 4 different servers. We can't get to everything. Sometimes things have to be dealth with post-mortem through logs.

You say you understand that we're volunteers. Please also recognize that this also means that I get to choose which reports seem urgent enough to interrupt my job and walk across my house for.

Finally, I'd like to mention: our rules specifically allow for you to kill griefers. When and how you do this is a matter of best judgement and experience, but if the time is right, make the call. You don't have to rely on us to solve the problem of "guy won't stop breaking in and out of security and causing hell with riot shells". We'll get to the rules enforcement aspect when we can, so feel free to take of the gameplay aspect for yourself in the moment.

---

Just wanted to clarify that last bit: I'm not telling you "lol deal with it yourself" or saying that this is codifed gameplay that admins won't do anything about.

Ahelp that you're making the call to kill a griefer and then just do it. We'll talk about it afterward when we have time and if you make a bad call, we can talk about that, too.

[Carbadox]

Thank you for the replies.

I definetely understand that it's not players business to find out what happens after making a report, so no contest there.

While I do agree that ideally I should have given a more descriptive report, the circumstances weren't exactly allowing for such a thing. I'm pretty sure as soon as I sent out that report I got sting by a ling 30 seconds later. But even then, I do believe a reply asking for more details would have sufficed.

You say you understand that we're volunteers. Please also recognize that this also means that I get to choose which reports seem urgent enough to interrupt my job and walk across my house for.

Of course, and I can relate (though its definetely not on the same level) in regards to MentorHelps. I do hope it didn't come across as if there's supposed to be any ill will directed towards anyone.

In regards to this however

our rules specifically allow for you to kill griefers.

I'm aware of this, and people have bought it up alot whenever I've vented about bad rounds. However, the issue I find is that 1. it gives people looking for a reaction exactly what they want, 2. only incites other people into violence (ie. if the HoS is doing then, then Im going to as well) and 3. it's something that I've purposefully haven't done. While theoretically I could start dishing out punishments by death, it's the exactly the sort of thing that turned me off whenever I read about old HoS' and their attitudes. I'm self-concious of what people think of me and behaving exactly like the personalities I dislike is not something I want to have to do. It's provocative and it doesn't make anything better.

And truth be told, people that go out of their way to be intentionally obnoxious won't stop because an HoS told, or killed, them to. The people that respect the HoS are the ones that aren't getting caught carrying half the armoury in their backpocket. It's the sort of thing only an admin can properly enforce

[BorisBubbleton]

Hey there! Sorry you had some bad rounds!

I just want you to know I actively try to help people with ahelps but with a 100 people on a server it can be hard to respond to everything. Occasionally I step away from the game and I may have missed it. Either way, I apologize if I overlooked your issue.