Admin Meeting 2024-03-16

Agenda

• Brief updates from last meeting
• Ghost role antag rolling
• Async Trialmin Promotions
• Character Impersonation
• Early access blocks from admins
• Reduction votes without reduction times
• Review minutes

Topic Details

Brief updates from last meeting

The last meeting’s minutes are available at [link removed]

Summary

It’s been a month since the last meeting. Two big things from the last one were SOP and space law. Those changes are awaiting the rest of the rule changes currently being worked on. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Communicate updates related to items from the last meeting to admins attending the meeting.

Ghost role antag rolling

Summary

Some people are joining multiple servers at once or within a short period, possibly trying to get ghost roles. Some of these people have been banned for antag rolling. It should be kept in mind that there are other reasons people might appear to be doing this. For example, people might observe a server thinking that the round will end soon, perhaps because they checked the round time, but then discover that the station seems fine and the round is unlikely to end soon, so they leave and do the same on another server. People may also be looking for something interesting to observe or participate in.

Here are some appeals that I think are related:

• [link removed]
• [link removed] -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

The purpose of this topic is to determine the opinions of attending admins on the following questions:

1. If this is a violation of a rule, which rule?
2. Are any of the following relevant when determining if a situation violates a rule:
   1. Whether the player is taking ghost roles or just observing
   2. Whether the player is on multiple servers at the simultaniously
   3. Whether the player is taking an antag vs non-antag ghost role
   4. Whether the player takes roles on the first server vs leaving it without taking a role
3. If being on multiple servers simultaniously is not required to violate a rule, then to avoid issues, presumably they have to spend a long enough period of time on each server, or a long enough time between leaving one and joining another to avoid issues. Roughly, what are those times?
4. Is it reasonable for a player who has read the rules to know all of this?
5. When is it reasonable to ban players for this?
   1. Is it reasonable to place a ban without prior warnings specifically for this?
   2. Is it reasonable to place a ban without prior warnings specifically for this, but with warnings for typical antag rolling?
6. Should any of this be against the rules?

Async Trialmin Promotions

Summary

We talked about this during the last batch and now we get to again. Typically, trialmin promotions have all happened at once. As groups get bigger, this is less feasible. Voting on all trialmins at once means each candidate is looked over less carefully and specific candidates occasionally draw attention, which may lead to the other candidates being neglected in the discussion. Waiting for all trialmins to be ready to do a vote means some trialmins will be held back for little reason. Asynchronous promotion can cause tension between trialmins. With one vote at a time, doing 48 hour votes for 6 trialmins would take 12 days. With two at a time, it would take almost a week. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine the general feelings and concerns of attending admins about asynchronous vs synchronous promotions.

Character Impersonation

Summary

There are varying levels of impersonation. You can “impersonate” or copy:

• Character name
• Character appearance
• Character personality
• Usernames
  • lookalikes: COOL = C00L
  • SS13 usernames that aren’t taken on SS14
  • alterations: SomePlayer = SomePlayerOfficial = Some_Player

You can also create any combination of those.

Impersonating characters outside of SS14 and SS13 is outside the scope of this topic. It is primarily covered by name rules. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

The purpose of this topic is to determine the opinions of attending admins on the following questions:

1. When, if ever, does impersonation become an issue?
2. Does it make a difference if the impersonation is:
   1. Between two wizden players
   2. Between a wizden player and a player of another SS14 server
   3. Between a wizden player and a player of a SS13 server
   4. Impersonation with an OOC component
   5. Impersonation paired with an OOC factor, like a feud that does not rise to harassment
   6. Impersonation where the goal appears to be to primarily or also impersonate an OOC identity
3. Partially discuss the real example that CE will share

Early access blocks from admins

Summary

What do admins feel is necessary prior to leaving playtest? I’ve been reminded that we’re supposed to be tracking this, so I updated the issue, but I want to make sure I’m not missing stuff.

These should all be things that are necessary, or nearly necessary, for game admins to handle a significant surge of players and whatever else may come from leaving playtest. While the issue is not specific to admin things, things that are not specifically related to admins are out of scope for this topic.

https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/23246 -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Create a list of things that are necessary, or nearly necessary, for game admins to handle a significant surge of players and whatever else may come from leaving playtest.

Reduction votes without reduction times

Summary

Can we put what time you want if you vote for reduction, Currently if not one mentions a time it defaults to 1 week. But if someone votes for something like 2 months and there are another 6 admins that did not define something that is a huge difference in reduction. Adding a time would be useful here. Another thing to keep in mind is the ban time. Reductions are a reduction from a indef ban to a set time, not altering the start date of said ban. If they have already been banned for 2 weeks and we reduce to 1 week it was the same as if we had just removed. -Repo

I think if people don’t care enough to write out what they want the reduction to, then there’s no issue with however many do care enough from determining the reduction time on their own.

For reductions, I don’t think it makes sense to reduce from the start of the ban because it makes two of the vote options actually mean the same thing sometimes instead of actually being different options. I think every time I’ve been asked, I’ve told people to reduce from the time that the vote was put up. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine if admins should be required to specify a reduction time if voting to reduce a ban.
2. Determine if the time since the ban was placed is something admins are suggested to add to appeal votes.

Review minutes

Summary

The meeting minutes provide a record of the meeting for those who could not attend, and they are used to action decisions made in the meeting. For these reasons, it is important that they accurately represent what actually happened in the meeting. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Ensure that nothing important is missing or misrepresented in the minutes.
2. Attempt to ensure that all topics have met their meeting goals. This can be done by ensuring that each meeting goal is directly addressed by the conclusion of the topic’s minutes.
3. Attempt to ensure that all conclusions fit into one of the following categories:
   1. Indicate that a meeting goal was completed.
   2. Are something actionable, meaning that they not only call for an action, but that action is specific enough that it does not require answering questions like “what exactly needs to be done?” or “how can this be done?”
   3. Clearly indicate that the meeting goals for the topic were not met. Examples: the discussion was tabled, the admin team did not reach a conclusion, the admin team was not able to make the conclusion actionable.

Minutes

Brief updates from last meeting

• LRP space law and SOP awaiting rule change.

Ghost role antag rolling

• Some players tend to hop between servers in order to get ghost roles. This is usually due to them not wanting to play further in a round they are a part of, as well as other reasons. They will also mostly take antag ghost roles, rather than neutral or otherwise passive ghost roles.
• Players trying to get ghost roles is not against our current rules.
• Players “antag rolling” for ghost roles do take up server slots as they often stay afk waiting for those roles.
• This issue could be resolved much more effectively through code. E.g. Stopping stoping from joining multiple servers at once.
• Rule zero could be considered where players are systematically taking slots in multiple servers at the same time solely for the purpose of becoming ghost antags. This kind of enforcement should ideally be reviewed by a PM, and go through stricter scrutiny than usual.
• Alternatively we can just enforce that players should not connect to multiple wizden servers at the same time, however this should be solved by code eventually.
• Any way of dealing with this through moderation will take up a lot of admin resources that may not be worth it.
• Players should not be expected to know this is being enforced. As such should we moderate this behavior in any way, at most we should warn players doing this if they present no other issues.

Async Trialmin Promotions

• Asynchronous votes/promotions could only be made in exceptional circumstances. For example(This list is not authoritative. In any case this should be decided on a case by case basis.):
  • Severe misconduct which will likely lead to the trialmin’s removal following a vote.
  • Retired admins coming out of retirement who already have knowledge and experience of how to be an admin. Even still, after enough time retired admins will likely still require a full trialmin phase. Such votes should be heavily scrutinized.
  • Trialmins taking extended holidays having their votes delayed compared to others.
• Asynchronous promotions can cause a lot of friction for trialmins that were not promoted. In order to avoid this the promotion of other trialmins should be held back until that trialmin is either promoted, or removed.
• Trialmins may also have no problem with asynchronous votes, in which case it would be fine to promote certain trialmins faster than others.

Character Impersonation

• We commonly get problems with players impersonating other well known player characters or even characters of staff members.
• Players sometimes end up with the same character names by chance, usually this is fine because their character will also look differently.
• Players who intentionally try to impersonate others can cause major issues for the ones they impersonate. Regardless of our rules on meta-grudging, players will inherently treat a character differently depending on who they know them as.
• This currently can fall under the “Don’t be a dick”, or “Notable characters” rule however this would be better addressed by amending our naming rules.
• There is also the posibility of players trying to imitate another’s username. In these cases we can simply use the “Don’t be a dick” rules.
• Enforcement of these kinds of rules starts and ends on our servers only.
• [details of real example provided by CE] Currently the details are still unclear, but it looks like this is not for us to enforce.

Early access blocks from admins

• Mass actions. This includes bans, freezes, and similar admin actions that we can use against coordinated rule breakers. Covered by this issue.
• Toolshed is not finished, and not sufficiently documented. Most admins are unable to use it effectively, and the those that can have only limited uses for it.

Reduction votes without reduction times

• Topic tabled due to lack of time.

Discussion outside Agenda Items

• Trialmin review procedure needs improvement. Currently reviews are often delayed and as a result hold back trialmins.

Overall Conclusion

• Ghost role antag rolling only really presents a problem when players hog slots in multiple servers at the same time for prolonged periods. In aggregious cases we can warn players not to do it under rule zero after approval. We can also simply require that players don’t connect to multiple servers at the same time but this ideally is a coder issue.
• No overall conclusion on async promotions of trialmins was reached and requires furhter discussion.
• Character impersonations become a problem when a player maliciously and intentionally impersonates another. We can use for the “Don’t be a dick”, or “Notable characters” rule in those case and should consider amending our naming rules to better protect against this.
• The only new admin blocker that was brought up is toolshed.