Misc Policy; Headmin/Dev Elections, Complaints, etc.

[dessysalta]

EDITORS NOTE: A lot of what's suggested here was made with a lot of misdirected anger and self-victimizing behind the scenes. I've since apologized to relevant staff, but this disclaimer is going here because it wouldn't feel right keeping the giant laundry list of how I think staff could be more "inclusive" while also trying to act like I'm their friend, and I don't believe in deleting what I said just because I recognize it was stupid; that's not how taking accountability works. You've been warned, this was made by an upset player in the heat of the moment running off about ~4 hrs of sleep.

After a short session of brooding (I admit, some things as of late have had me a bit heated) and reminiscing on things like the 2IC XO thread (and a complaint that it was the subject of), I brought it up to another Aurora friend of mine and they suggested I make a policy suggestion to see how it goes and to gauge how the rest of the community feels. In broad strokes, here's what I'm thinking:

I think Head Admins and Devs/Hosts should be elected by the community and not the staff team (or not only the staff team).

Spoiler

• Some roles enjoy a significant difference in privileges and responsibilities. Varying “plans of attack” against certain issues or implementations of features will not only give staff and the community different perspectives on these matters, but will also prevent the game from becoming stale and predictable.

  • For instance, there can only be one Host. The community doesn’t have a say in who is elected as host, and they do not have the power to "remove" them from office if they so choose, so to speak. Same for the rest of the admins and head developers, they serve for as long as possible with little intervention short of successful staff complaints or their own volition.

    • This is fine in a vacuum, but raises questions like the below point.

  • It could be argued that it’s difficult to truly hold one another accountable. Where there's only one (or four) at the top of the hierarchy, the most you can have is advisors. Moreover, there isn't a role that can act as an impartial or community-sided third party. Logs and notes are private, and the only way to get them is to ask and hope you receive, or plan way ahead of time.

    • Public logs, notes, and archives of deleted posts could easily be facilitated with the help of a web tool and has been discussed before with most verdicts being “maybe”s.

    • The player base has no way of knowing the process behind complaints, log divings, etc. during investigations and to what diligence they’re conducted, for instance. Making these processes more transparent would quell worries and ensure quality inside and out.

• Other Heads were elected by the rest of staff, and not the community. In regards to how administrative work can be handled, this is fine, a suitable leader is important—but they're just as easily a leader to the dev/admin team as they are to the community. Put simply, the ability to act as a coworker or management figure is very different from doing PR, which is highly sought after due to the open-door nature of most SS13 servers.

  • This is a collaborative project that has been shaped by more than just the development team for well over a decade. Admins and devs should have a chance to be assessed by the community rather than only one or two teams. 

    • See /TG/Station's method of electing Headmins and coders. Each candidate is given a chance to convince the community and answer feedback or questions, and then they're voted for.

      • This keeps the player base in the loop of who is being elected and why, with nothing left up to debate on account of being able to ask the person any question you want at any given time. If they answer unsatisfactorily, the community holds the ability not to vote for them to show the community does not think their direction or ethic is right for the server and its players.

• Headmin/Dev candidates could be elected by the admin/dev team, who would in turn have a chance to be elected by the playerbase to achieve full status (see above point about /TG/).

Complaints should be allowed to be filed towards all of the Headmins/Devs at once, or groups of more than one (if applicable).

Spoiler

• Decisions such as additions or retroactive changes made by any given group of people aren't automatically going to succeed. No matter how much thought fifty people give it, a thousand others will have far more opinions and perspectives; it’s not entirely accurate to presume these decisions all of head administration or development make can’t be rebutted by the larger community.

  • The community should have a method to hold entire teams accountable for rare instances of misconduct which are severe enough to warrant a server-wide complaint.

• Where most complaints refer to a single person, with enough complaints against single-persons in the same team, the question being asked at that point is not how any one person is going wrong, but rather to what expectations the group or overarching team are being held.

• While this means those with additional permissions and authority would be subject to additional scrutiny or punitive action, it will also better highlight the responsibility and expectations these roles have.

Votes and re-votes should be allowed without exception. Terms of what will happen or be implemented after votes conclude (especially for high-status changes) must be detailed before the vote goes through to the best of staff's ability.

Spoiler

• "Without exception" because if there were exceptions, the line would be blurred over time.

• People should have a right to know exactly what they're voting for and how it will happen with only a minor degree of nebulousness.

  • For instance, the recent 2IC XO thread ended in disaster because of this (among other things), with many players citing a lack of transparency as to why they didn't support the changes.

  • Most people don’t ask for chocolate at the price of vanilla. If a vote can potentially result in this sacrifice being made, it should be a notable disclaimer to avoid blindsiding the community when the change does occur.

• If votes aren't binding, then there shouldn't be issues with any number of revotes. With any number of revotes, it can even be argued that there's a much more direct and relevant grasp of how the community views any given change, as they can allow for player insight more often and with new perspectives.

  • This can, however, cause a headache for the administration team (and playerbase) if someone, or several someones keep making or demanding revotes for arbitrary reasons. This could be mitigated by allowing a certain number of revotes or over a certain amount of time; i.e. one revote every six months to a year (erring more on a longer timeline because that's less work for everyone).

As a final suggestion, staff (admins/devs/etc.) that are the subject of a successful complaint should be on a strike system a la player warnings and infractions.

Spoiler

This is a more broad thing that I haven't fleshed out fully; but with the existence of command/species whitelist stripping, job and role and server bans, combined with the ability to appeal or reapply in the future, it just feels natural to have a specific system in place for handling these things. Staff should be held to a much higher standard than the rest of the playerbase and having this codified in the rules (that is to say how warnings and offenses are taken into account when determining punishment for staff) would probably lead to a positive outcome. Big maybe. I know there's already systems in place that are written down on staff/lore conduct pages, but stay with me here.

Hoh my god, that's a lot of text, and I apologize for everyone who has to read it, but I had a lot on my mind and thought separating it into more than one post would make me look like an idiot and be total overkill.

Edited June 20 by dessysalta
Not my best work

[Peppermint]

This all assumes a lot of bad faith on the staff team. Not really sure why? At the end of the day a level of trust in admins and whatnot is needed, or why play on the server at all. It feels a lot that people really don't know what happens behind the scenes and how opinions are reached. I would point out the bar for joining the various teams isn't high - in the sense if you have a good attitude and aren't an ass, you can generally get in without an issue. I wish more people would give it a go to see there isn't this evil staff cabal plotting behind the scenes to fuck everything up. Likewise if we had issues to the point we needed to 'hold the entire team accountable', that's the kind of thing that kills servers - just look at the various fallout and similar entries.

Still, for some of your points:

- Host pays for and runs the server. If you compare Aurora's structure to near any other server's, I think you'll find that Alb and Arrow are much more hands-off than others. The system works well as the 'power' balance is shared across multiple areas - lore, CCIA, admins. The last group often asks the first two what is required. Likewise unless things are wildly different these days and I doubt it, mods/admins all have a lot of say in policy changes and whatnot as do other teams. Sometimes less so, but for the most part it's not like people just say 'ok we're doing this' and that's it. 

- You can complaint head staff. The problem is that there's no practical way to complaint all the head staff, assuming you mean the XO staff complaint. As who's going to take it? The system generally means you need someone of the same 'rank' on a complaint - should the admins all get together and look through the maintainer stuff? It doesn't really work. They're also different jobs. People who spend hours deciding what's best for the server and looking down the various routes to go are going to have a better grasp than folks who just handle the rules.

- Most of the successful complaints on staff are to do with people making the wrong call, it getting reviewed, the punishment reversed, ect. If someone handles 300 tickets over 2 months, there's going to be times they might not make the perfect judgement. That's life. Any that are more serious - such as toxicity, harassment, ect - are dealt with harshly. There isn't a strike system because generally it means complete removal from the community if it's serious enough. I can name four instances of shitty staff members being removed (permanently) for things players may not have had such a harsh handle on, but these generally aren't announced openly. But most complaints are just 'I disagree with this judgement' and someone reviewing it. I

- There's a practical viewpoint to consider as well. Aurora has many talented coders. However of the server, there are maybe three individuals - two of which are on head staff - who can handle maintaining the code of the server to a large degree. Do we just vote random people in to take this slot? There are like, six active developers and that's being generous.

- Things do  evolve and change with what the wider community wants. Most the head devs didn't want the XO thing at all - it was still asked about. Now, I absolutely agree it was handled badly and I think it should be looked at in review (internally, what should we do kind of thing) but it's not like the answer was 'no' and that's it. For other things, they listen too. A while back I had some really gross treatment by an old staff member, as did a bunch of other people. It was handled poorly. Since then however similar issues are dealt with differently and much more carefully - it's a video game server, not a courtroom; shit is going to happen, but it's the way it's picked up that's important. There were other incidents when I was staff where I vehemently disagreed with how some matters were handled. But again, this just led to conversations and progress.

I think you have some points here. That said, I don't think the tone of this is really fair at all. Nonetheless:

- Sure, votes should be handled better. There should be a goal and a (vague) version of how it's going to be implemented. The XO one sucked. It happens. I don't know why it took so long but perhaps people were busy, or sick, or had family issues, ect. 

- More clarity on how long maintainer discussion is going to take would be nice. A goal of it being sorted within a timeframe, same for staff/player complaints. The problem here comes from however that there are often just not enough active admins. Again, voluntary.

- A while ago a similar thread suggested player notes would be made visible. I was against that then and against it now as a player, but there's maybe that could be revisited if folks are worried about clarity on things.

Idk, I have faith in the staff team and stuff like this  tends to be somewhat unfair.

Edited June 19 by Peppermint

[dessysalta]

35 minutes ago, Peppermint said:

It feels a lot that people really don't know what happens behind the scenes and how opinions are reached.

That's a huge part of why I made all of this as a suggestion. I'm not trying to imply there's bad faith on the staff team, but it can be difficult to understand how these conclusions are reached and why they are/aren't continued.

35 minutes ago, Peppermint said:

I would point out the bar for joining the various teams isn't high - in the sense if you have a good attitude and aren't an ass, you can generally get in without an issue. I wish more people would give it a go to see there isn't this evil staff cabal plotting behind the scenes to fuck everything up.

The biggest issue is it's a matter of uncommon single-slot roles that you need to apply for and the different animal of moderating something versus creating for and playing on it. I personally haven't applied for staff because it seems like this huge entity where you need to learn so much, so fast, while also handling the nitty gritty that makes the game unfun (plus the amount of players I've talked to who've said words to the effect of "my track record (~3 warnings) is so bad I'd never get a command whitelist/mod position/etc" or "the staff team is out to get players/they make things arbitrarily/expect you to read their mind/whatever else". 

In order of what you said:

- This is fair and I agree for the most part, but in the 2IC XO thread (something I don't want to keep bringing up), despite other devs, CCIA, and lore writers explaining why they disliked the change publicly, their points were shot down, and with that being the only thing the community can see of staff decisions, it felt like a lot of the negative feedback was being ignored. In this instance, I feel it betrays the idea that there are checks and balances with each team, where the optics of it are "Host said no, so it's no".

- It would be difficult, but there are instances where decisions made by head staff/devs don't align with what the community or the rest of the teams want. There should be some method of pushing back, and assigning blame to any one individual isn't a good idea.

- Strikes in this instance would be a removal from a staff position, not necessarily from the community, unless it's that egregious. Command whitelist players aren't removed from the community permanently for completely overstepping their boundaries even several times, the same logic would apply here. I get that you mean it could pile up to be "5 mistakes out of 995 correct ones means you're no longer staff", but that sort of expectation doesn't exist even for players, even while keeping in mind what I mentioned about staff being held to higher standards.

- I'm not suggesting random people be voted in, I'm suggesting the community have a chance to assess whoever's asking for the position prior to it. Even with checks and balances between the branches, senior positions have a lot of authority behind them. My suggestion of having a player-voting system only scratches the surface of what could be done for a process like this.

- I agree with you for the most part, but where mistakes are made, it becomes a question of, "should I let this sit and assume they'll improve in the future, or do I voice my opinion about it?" I don't take issue with voicing my complaints here or anywhere else, but I do dislike being barred from opening threads for further discussion about any one thing just because in a single instance some people got heated.

I have different amounts of faith in different members of the staff team (which is to be expected, different staff operate in different ways and I'm more or less receptive to them), and I don't always see eye to eye with every developer, CCIA agent, lore writer, whatever. I tried to keep the done as business friendly as possible, but suggestions about how head/staff conduct themselves is almost always going to be prompted by a negative experience or outlook. I didn't want to put a big disclaimer of "I think staff are awesome, actually" because if I didn't already think that I wouldn't be playing.

[Carver]

While I don't always agree with server direction, I have found that Aurora is the one server where the leadership structure for administration and development is truly functional. The present systems have kept Aurora whole where near-all servers that once competed with it have died, often very slow deaths where they lost their core identity along the way.

As it were, elections are popularity contests when it comes to SS13. Being a popular member of staff does not mean that you are a good member of staff. The community cannot be relied upon to make these decisions, which leads onto the next subject.

Votes, I see similar to 'public staff elections' as usually unwise to begin with outside of perhaps the most superfluous details (the name of the ship being one harmless example), but I have found the only issue with the recent one (I will not discuss the contents of the vote, it has been discussed many times over) is that implementation has been substantially slower than one might expect - leading to perhaps my one complaint in regard to the maintainer structure, in that maintainer discussion does not feel especially predictable or transparent in regard to expected length whether of implementation or the discussion period itself. Barring that singular issue, I felt that it was otherwise handled appropriately. Having witnessed the thorough vitriol that would seem to surround votes on this server (Some of the most disgustingly unpleasant behaviour that I have witnessed in this server's history had surrounded the two most contentious votes in the contemporary period, the second one being the cyborg-related one), I feel that the idea of votes in regard to server changes as a whole should be put behind us, outside of the aforementioned superfluous detail-type votes.

I have little else to add on the other subjects, as I haven't paid terribly close attention to the outcomes and threads of the various staff complaints so I cannot speak on them. But, direction-wise I feel that Aurora has maintained the right course in regard to the selection and decisions of it's four heads. I would not trust the server to maintain it's course with any amount of community-voted direction in that front.

Edited June 20 by Carver
Adding the word 'see' because I mistyped something

[Garnascus]

Gonna piggyback off of what Carver has said. The topic of headmin elections has come up numerous times over the years including when I was still headmin. I believe headmin elections to be a popularity contest. Staff work together internally on nearly every issue related to the server and the topic of "Who do we make headmin" is always a lengthy discussion where all the mods and admins have a say. The idea being that the mods and admins are well equipped to asses the potential for the new headmin.

The community sees a very small portion of this process. I'm not saying its good or bad it just is. However its very difficult for someone not on the staff team to make an informed choice on who the next headmin should be. 

[greenjoe]

12 hours ago, dessysalta said:

Complaints should be allowed to be filed towards all of the Headmins/Devs at once, or groups of more than one

Yes, I had a issue with my complaint being "not possible" due to all headstaff being involved. I do wonder how something like that could be handled however, since someone who isn't involved would need to take the complaint, and if all headstaff are involved,  there is nobody with the power to do that.

[Lmwevil]

As former /tg/ administration, I can say categorically that their methods would not work here for a number of reasons. But EVEN /tg/ does not have elections for their development team, which is held under the strict eye of oranges ever since he took it in the late 2010s. Their host MSO would never give up his power and still holds unilateral veto on everything, any mechanic, feature or rule he can enact and everyone just has to go with it. (Though it's /tg/ so with reddit threads, policy threads and countless internal arguments) 

Do you really want endless reddit farming threads about our server to try and influence elections, trying to implement a system that could only have players that are active enough vote, but then have bad actors who know the election is coming do rounds in advance so they can vote despite not being a real member of the community? 


/tg/ survived this for a long time because it was gigantic, not so much these days but it was one of the biggest ss13 communities out there and it lead to one of the most toxic environments possible in the community. Us vs them tribalism and so on. If you wanted to argue for transparency and so on, sure why not, but this is not an argument out of reason but from bad faith emotion and upset at being unable to take an L.

To explain /tg/'s system to those who are unaware, the head admin position is held by 3 people, and elections are held every so and so months. There is the public candidate, who is elected based on the player vote, the HOST vote, who is whoever the leaving headmins want to elect (it can be a leaving headmin but this is rare, basically it's mso's pick but the headmins advise him, so in practice they decide), then the admin vote. The public vote was, at least during my time seen mostly as a joke; That whoever was able to meme the most and get the most community attention would get the most votes, not out of any policy or ways they wanted to run the server. The admin vote was seen with more sincere care, but there were also very old admins who didn't play and only appeared to vote for certain people or metacliques (before the inactive culling happened under coconut). 


Now the headmins by design cannot do things by themselves, they vote together and have to get a majority to do ANYTHING. I mean this in the kindest possible way but this leads to an unironic political landscape where some policies are ceded by others in order to get certain things they wanted to do through. Some terms would LITERALLY be upheaving the entire thing the last 2 terms did, which lead to the administration being kinda aimless overall. I mean hell, for 6 months there were debates over if slurs should actually be banned, and by god that was a totally fine and sane discourse (it wasn't.)

PS: Regarding reporting all of headstaff, that seems kinda pointless from a systems standpoint. Nothing can be done to them, they're the heads. If they fucked up then speak to them about it, if they all screwed up unanimously on something well that's kinda tough you'll have to hope they have the insight and ability to improve on their mistakes. Unless you expect them to all slap eachother on the wrist or all at once be removed from their positions (which would destroy the server).

[Arrow768]

Voting for dismissal.

The other posters have explained well enough why „votes for host/staff in general“ arnt going to happen here.

 

Regarding the duration of maintainer discussions: We try to reach a unanimous decision for PRs that are tagged with maintainer discussion.
The first issue is finding the time when all maintainers are available and for some PRs we need to gather more information/ postpone it.
(I.e. the vaurca bridge crew PR has been on the list of discussed PRs quite a few times by now)

 

Regarding the XO as that has been mentioned in passing.
Guess what: It’s still not implemented despite me having a branch ready since quite a while.

I also want to point out again that I have mentioned multiple times by now to contact me via DM if someone wants to discuss these changes.

So far not a single person has.

[Evandorf]

My two cents are that truthful communication is good for any relationship, including that between the community and the staff.

Can we have more transparency and can understanding of staff procedure be improved? Sure, but if you have concerns or don’t understand how the process works you also need to ask and let us know where the breakdown is happening.

That being said, dissatisfaction with a staff decision doesn’t  necessarily mean a mistake  was made on the staff member’s part and, contrary to popular opinion, all staff complaints are given due scrutiny.

In the interest of being completely candid, I think you’re still coming from a very emotional place regarding your past complaints and while I see you and think your feelings are valid, sweeping changes like what you suggest should be unbiased.

[dessysalta]

1 hour ago, Evandorf said:

I think you’re still coming from a very emotional place regarding your past complaints

Honestly, yeah. I sat on the doc I used to draft this for a few weeks but it still didn't come out how I wanted it to and I don't want to be at odds with staff for my suggestions, let alone over things that have yet to be realized or aren't worth giant bulbous policy changes.

I need to apologize to some people in private. I think my behavior here is (and has been) less than stellar and I need a moment to step back before I completely torch the staff team and myself.

I read the other responses here and they make sense. I feel that staff can be more open with their processes, but that's the limit of what I think now.

[eddymakaveli]

I’m going to go a little against the grain here.

A lot of us spend a lot of time on Aurora, and have a genuine care for it. Care for the characters, the lore, how the two intersect and how those intersections come to fruition through mechanics.

 

Evandorf’s post rings true to me, and I commend your self-awareness in wanting to take a step back, Dessy. When we care about something and the time we invest into it, sometimes we’re a little blinded to how our emotions bleed into our interactions as a whole. And that’s okay, so long as - again - we’re aware of it.

Arrow said it in his post, his DMs are open to discuss the 2IC changes and reason with anyone over them. I can personally attest that all of the head staff are pretty approachable and have no problem working through why a decision was made as it was, so long as it isn’t privileged or sensitive. They are people and not perfect, but I can genuinely say all of Matt, Arrow, Trio, Mel,***bear***, and Alb (if I missed anyone don’t fire me) are pretty great communicators and would gladly talk things over in PMs.

Democracy/elections on a platform like ours only would serve as popularity contests or pushing folks’ agenda who might be aggrieved with the current staff.

While this isn’t a “counter-suggestion”, previously roleplay mediums I’ve been on have had “community councilor” positions, that while not directly staff, were folks elected by the community to kind of liaison with staff and give direct feedback from the community to changes and such. I don’t have an idea of how that’d work on Aurora or even if it should even move to introducing something like that, but I am choosing to engage in your thread with good faith and this is kind of a thing that wouldn’t be full-blown elections, but might help ablate some of the issues you’ve brought up and concerns some other members of the community have echoed.

lastly, as Arrow said too, I think you should maybe get more comfortable with messaging the people you feel you might be having a disconnect with directly, and I assure you that you’ll be surprised with the results you’ll get.

 

[MattAtlas]

Head staff elections are not going to happen for a lot of reasons that were already stated. They're silly popularity contests that handicap the staff team's ability to take strong decisions more than anything. A lot of important decisions that changed the server for the better were unpopular at first and could only be taken because head staff didn't have to fear being voted out.

Separate policy suggestions for more transparency in certain areas would be OK.

Voting for dismissal.

[Triogenix]

Matt said everything I would say, and I see no reason to repeat the same points.

 

Voting for dismissal.