[Accepted] Proposition to redo the command whitelist format and the procedures surrounding it.

[Scheveningen]

A major issue of the command whitelist format is that it falsely prioritizes the need for having a flowery backstory to substitute for actual substance.

2 paragraphs of Snowflake McGee tells me literally nothing of how responsible and how good of a player someone is on the OOC side.

These are the major qualities needed of a command whitelisted player:

• Needs to have leadership/social skills, must get along well with others, respectful, non-hostile in most cases.
• An overall competence with game mechanics to make them an able and capable teacher.
  
• Being a responsible player with a good record. A mixed record as a player that follows the rules and when they don't is not necessarily a disqualifier, but a bad player that has no respect for rules or community traditions should be disqualified entirely.
  
• The understanding that whitelistees are expected to act above and beyond the typical expected standard of a normal player when they play as a command staff character.
  
• Overall respect for the community and for the rules + guidelines set in general and for heads of staff.
  
• OOC honesty. Liars and people that hide the truth about issues due to ego problems are not desirable candidates for a whitelist.
  
• The willingness to identify their own personal mistakes and resolve them in mature and reasonable fashions.
  
• A respect for their own place in a round and the reasonable limitations they're expected to apply their character to in order for a more interesting gameplay experience. A respect for 'lanes' and line-leading departments in general.
  
• Knowing how to accept if and when they are wrong and are willing to improve themselves whenever necessary.

 

It is utterly necessary for the sake of the server culture that whitelistees actually take the privilege they were given, very seriously. No player should be entitled to a command whitelist. They must earn it! Greater power means greater responsibility, greater responsibility demands a greater understanding that one's conduct must be nothing less than decent.

I do not think 'mediocre' whitelists should be accepted because of the merit alone that there are no purely negative aspects to an application. There must be an actual guideline on what gets your application accepted. You must have positive qualities to be deserving of command staff whitelisting.

Furthermore, requiring several paragraphs prose about a character that likely is not even implemented in-game yet is dumb. Nobody cares about your character's background when you apply them as a head of staff because being a responsible writer of backstory is expected even without the whitelist.

Being able to write a long backstory does not qualify the character as command staff material. Being able to identify why being whitelisted as command is important on the OOC side is much more relevant to the idea of ensuring a player is actually qualified for the whitelist. It's not just an IC thing. It is literally the main thing to the server as to why it's been able to bring forth quality roleplay scenarios time and time again, because the command staff are supposed to basically be the pillars of each round to which people are supposed to uphold a similar standard if they want the same thing. Command is not treated like this because it's presently a fucking joke to get a whitelist accepted.

The reason being? The format is bad and the expectations for a head of staff are not clear.

 

[b]BYOND key:[/b]
[b]Character names:[/b]
[hr]
[b]How long have you been playing on Aurora?:[/b]
[b]Why do you wish to be on the whitelist?:[/b]
[b]Why did you come to Aurora?:[/b]
[b]Have you read the Aurora wiki on the head roles and qualifications you plan on playing?:[/b]
[hr]
[b]Have you ever been banned from the server, or any staff-issued offenses that would be worthy of talking about in this application? Be honest:[/b]

[b]What is roleplay? Why is it important to you?:[/b]

[b]What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?:[/b]

[b]What values do you think are necessary to properly play a head of staff?:[/b]

[b]What does the 'Heavy' component to this roleplaying server - mean to you?:[/b]

[b]What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?:[/b]
[hr]
Please pick one of your characters for this section, and provide well articulated responses to the following questions.

[b]Character name:[/b]
[b]Character age:[/b]
[b]Character role being applied for:[/b]
[b]Speak honestly and with good faith; is this character qualified through their attitude and past conduct (if applicable) to be a head of staff?:[/b]

[hr]
'Yes' alone is not an answer. Provide detailed explanations to questions. We want to know your mindset.

[b]How would you rate your own roleplaying?:[/b]

[b]Do you consider yourself a responsible player?:[/b]

[b]With your track record on this server, would you consider yourself deserving of a command whitelist?:[/b]
[hr]
[b]Extra notes:[/b]

 

Furthermore, I believe the whitelisting team should have the right and own personal discretion to immediately deny a whitelist application and force the applicant to reapply exactly one month after if the offending player has a previous ban over two weeks on record in the past 3 months, or if they have any similar conduct issues that put them down the strait into Deep Shit Creek.

We need filters for controversial and sub-par command applicants, because it is arguable that the lack of quality heads of staff are creating adverse effects on the roleplay quality of this server. Applying for head of staff should not feel like a home-work assignment for lore, but heads of staff are important for other reasons besides lore. They make or break a round if the person playing the head is either good or bad, respectively.

I seriously think we should be more strict about it for future applications. Being command is no small thing, it is very easy to screw up if the person playing it has no idea what they're doing or has no intention of playing it seriously to the best of their effort and abilities. Command has the most impact on how the round turns out because they are leadership roles. They should be taken seriously OOCly and start to be moderated under a higher degree of proactive scrutiny.

Asking the playerbase to ahelp issues does not work to a great effect. The playerbase does not know how the rules are supposed to be applied and if they can be applied for any given case. The rest of the staff do, however, and they're better qualified than virtually anyone else. I really think, in general, they should be looking out for people screwing up in roleplay contexts, but most of all important looking out for bad command.

To a player, the value at which something is ahelpable is absolutely not quantifiable by them. So they don't know whether it is worth it or not. It shouldn't be the community's responsibility to help staff moderate command, it should be the responsibility of staff to actively try to oversee and moderate the behavior of the most important game roles in most rounds.

Command needs to be more heavily moderated than virtually anyone else. Can we start cracking down? I view this as very important to the server's identity to have only decent or better players be command staff.

I will now ping the relevant individuals for their thoughts. [mention]Sharp[/mention][mention]Garnascus[/mention][mention]Coalf[/mention][mention]Synnono[/mention]

Sorry, I know you hate me, I do too.

In case Syn asks "why am I pinged", it is because I consider their position as Head Fax Dictator as one with major clout and I'd like to see what they have to say as someone that has enforced certain actions on heads of staff before, and likely has an equally unique perspective as the others I pinged in this listing.

Anyone else is free to discuss but I won't guarantee that I value your opinion unless you 100% agree with my proposition without question, only positive feedback is helpful to me, I do not tolerate dissent of opinion. /s

[Zaeperry99]

Oh hey, something I've been bringing up in private, now posted by another respected acknowledged venerable person.

I'm in full support of this changing the application questions in this way, or this direction at the very least. The current system is dedicated almost entirely to how good of a writer/bluffer you are rather than competence, willingness to let other people have the fun or intent toward playing the head of staff. However, I don't know so much about cracking down harder on the players themselves and treating it as more of a coveted position for a couple of reasons.

First of all, command staff can already be sort of sparse. For late hours especially, it can be rare to see any command staff whatsoever. I fear making it more of a sparingly given away role would further this problem.

Secondly - And I'm sure there's an established term for this, but I'm too lazy to search it up and will thus explain it - The less somebody feels like they'll succeed, the less likely they are to make an attempt. Couple this with the fact that the more absolutely stupid less competent a person actually is, the surer of themselves they are, and you're going to sharply decrease the number of actually capable players applying (and by comparison an increased percentage of utterly incompetent people applying.

I know several very extremely competent players who refuse to apply simply because there's far too much effort involved in what amounts to showing a select group of people that "No, I swear, I really am good at this game!" rather than actually being good at the game, displaying competence, or actively playing the game. I didn't apply for a head of staff whitelist until I'd been playing for nearing a year solely because it felt like I was jumping through hoops for the staff rather than actually showing my worth as a player or dedication to the community. Making the application system more vigorous would further this whole shebang of 'Telling over showing'.

Now that I'm done blabbering about why I think it shouldn't be made harder, I'll re-emphasize that I think a change to the head of staff whitelist application is more than a little bit necessary. I won't re-state most of Schev's points in that it has practically nothing to do with actually being a head of staff and almost everything to do with your character-writing skill, just point out that I wholly agree with them and can't wait to see somebody derail and disregard this entire thread by pointing out a single issue with your argument in a two-sentence post. +1.

[Coalf]

Agree with pretty much everything above, one concern.

You say "deny a command application" but what about existing command?

Does that mean that if someone gets banned with a whitelist on, should we strip it?

If someone is applying and they get weekbanned, I strip it.

But if someone gets weekbanned after his application is accepted, should I strip it instantly?

What about job-bans, what if someone does a terrible work as sec offficer but I know he's an awesome medical doctor?

Lot of things that can be pondered in this case.

 

Asking the playerbase to ahelp issues does not work to a great effect. The playerbase does not know how the rules are supposed to be applied and if they can be applied for any given case. The rest of the staff do, however, and they're better qualified than virtually anyone else. I really think, in general, they should be looking out for people screwing up in roleplay contexts, but most of all important looking out for bad command.

To a player, the value at which something is ahelpable is absolutely not quantifiable by them. So they don't know whether it is worth it or not. It shouldn't be the community's responsibility to help staff moderate command, it should be the responsibility of staff to actively try to oversee and moderate the behavior of the most important game roles in most rounds.

I read the rules the day I applied for moderator, it's really not that hard to know what to ahelp and what not to.

This is a communtiy game not a WoW server, the simple gist is:

"Does it bother you? Ahelp it"

Sometimes we say "Yes this is a problem." Sometimes we say "IC issue" we don't operate on some set of super rules, we read the same rules everyone else does.

I play robotics a lot and I can't really ban the HoS when he's going something I'm not aware of because I'm the robotics and nobody in security is ahelp, sure I could ghost round start and oversee every single department but I want to play the game too.

Not really our responsibility to educate everyone, our responsibility is to respond to issues actively and re-actively, we try our best actively but a lot of times we miss things simply because there isn't that many of us and we're not gods(yet).

 

Command needs to be more heavily moderated than virtually anyone else. Can we start cracking down? I view this as very important to the server's identity to have only decent or better players be command staff.

I will now ping the relevant individuals for their thoughts. @Sharp @Garnascus @Coalf @Synnono

Sorry, I know you hate me, I do too.

In case Syn asks "why am I pinged", it is because I consider their position as Head Fax Dictator as one with major clout and I'd like to see what they have to say as someone that has enforced certain actions on heads of staff before, and likely has an equally unique perspective as the others I pinged in this listing.

The pings seem to be broken, still hate you.

 

Anyone else is free to discuss but I won't guarantee that I value your opinion unless you 100% agree with my proposition without question, only positive feedback is helpful to me, I do not tolerate dissent of opinion. /s

Wow, metaphore as subtle as a submarine in a teacup.

[Scheveningen]

Does that mean that if someone gets banned with a whitelist on, should we strip it?

 

In regards to this, I think the context should be seen as to why they were banned. If it was head of staff related and a fuck-up of epic proportions, then their whitelist integrity should certainly be reviewed if it comes down to the point where it's like "this guy pretty much is supposed to represent command whitelistees and he blew it."

If not, then it's unnecessary to tack on unrelated punishments.

In regards to the whole reactive moderator policy, I get that nobody on the staff team wants to turn their volunteer thing into a full time job that they will slowly stop enjoying if they try to take moderation much more seriously, but I really have no better suggestions than just for staff to be a bit more proactive in checking for issues, particularly with command and security. Simply because of how easy it is to ruin the round as either of those roles, whereas others require substantially more obvious effort to do so and thus is easier to scrutinize, whereas command/security acting beyond their station is harder to scrutinize due to the nature of their jobs.

[Faris]

This has essentially been implemented. We're not in what I'd call an enforcement test to see if there's anything to tinker with.

https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=11915&p=105635#p105635