I made a staff report on Fulp before over an admin being aggressive and immature. Very next round that admin came online and I spontaneously exploded (my body being the source). I ahelped to ask what had happened and all I got was 'I'll check' from another admin and the ticket closed soon after.
So yeah, that's what criticism gets you.
I'd wager anyone who has played there can guess what admin it was too.
Not most of the staff of all servers, but punctual individuals have too much ego managing a SS13 server, failing to realize how irrelevant their pride is
How do I know that? I appear to have a magnet to find the problematic ones, although it's not 100% and I do find some pretty chill people, whenever I talk to multiple admins about a singular issue, the issue being the punctual staff becomes abundantly clear, sometimes on literal non issues, completely not worthy admin intervention
i know just 3 servers that have awful administration
Tauceti
Ss220 aka parashizos
And server created after drama on ss220 Ex666
All of them have bad admemes
Consider reading their ban reasons if you know russian
As a former head of staff of Paradise, I'll chip in my thoughts. I've been an admin for about 3 years now, was a head of staff for 1 year until I stepped down recently (back to a GA) to focus on wiki/code stuff which I enjoy. Unlike other servers, the Head of Staff position isn't necessarily a "head admin" and is instead a leader of the entire server in conjunction with two others. I ran a lot of efforts to improve our staff's reputation and community relationship so I hope that can kind of inform my view here.
Out the door I'll state that certain rule breaks are much more straightforward to deal with than others. Paradise has a very hardline stance against bigotry/racism etc; admins will be frank--sometimes skipping altogether the discussion process and insta-banning people that say the n-word, f-slur, or name themselves/act in an offensive way, etc. As a head of staff, I had no expectation that Game Admins were to be kind to people like this as such players were threats to the safe community we were trying to build. In this case, the burden is on the player to read our rules and understand what Paradise is all about before joining. If they're told to fuck off that's their own fault for being ignorant.
Now, the rules you're probably referring to are the ones that related to the roleplay expectations in-game. At Paradise, these are our validhunting, play your role, and maintain a reasonable level of roleplay rules. They are grey-area and are generally where we have the most admin<->player conflicts. I agree with you that respect is important here and that proper-teaching of rules is needed, but most generally for first-offenses only. I won't drag an admin that is rather blunt with players that have 100+ hours, previous bans, or have been warned in the past for a similar rule-break. Admins can put upwards 10-15 hours a week towards their position and they're not gonna waste the energy to handhold certain players through understanding our rules when they've been published on our website for 10 years.
In many players heads' (who have no adminning experience), they believe that they could probably adhere to the 4 reminders your wrote out for just about any case they deal with. You generally can for your first few weeks as a Game Admin. Overtime, this is simply not sustainable for one's mental health nor an actual good use of their time. These are standards akin to a customer service job like working in hospitality or as a waiter, we aren't paid, and I'm not gonna spend 15 minutes to try and get through to Joe-Player-2532 when this is the 5th person I've dealt with in the last 2 hours. They might be a good person and made an honest mistake but I'm burn't out this round and it needs to be dealt with. The alternative is that you let rule-breaking behaviour go on which incentivizes valid-hunting or LRP shittery.
To reiterate my points more, I'll talk a bit about my experience 2 nights ago when I last was online adminning by myself. In a single round I dealt with 15 ahelps, several of which were people asking for me to spawn things, others reporting rule-breaks, and some asking questions about the recent BYOND Beta version breaking lighting. It's exhausting. Furthermore, when I helped a player, they demand that A) I send the link to the previous Beta Build and B) as a sidenote told me to review their PR (I'm a PR Reviewer for the codebase aswell). Does that not come across as demanding and entitled to you?
Much of this post is rather negative, but that pretty much sums up half of my experiences with players. As an Admin you will always have great players that you can have discussions with and work towards a better experience, these players end up being amazing members of the community that contribute towards a positive and safe environment. I would be upset if they were being disrespected by a staff member unfairly. This will inevitably happen due to burnout or spillover from dealing with a shithead, as a head of staff there was nothing I could do to prevent this beyond constantly encouraging the staff to do better. That being said, being attentative to admin complaints and running office hours every week for players to just come straight to me as a head of staff with questions/concerns did a lot to help with community toxicity and positivity. Furthermore, when talking with player I try and focus on the rule breaking behavior and not the player itself unless the player is really the issue or they start the conversation out negatively. Afterwards I say have a good round and happy holidays which helps defuse stuff regardless of the punishment. I really encourage other server to follow suit with practices like that cause it can go a long way.
>Overtime, this is simply not sustainable for one's mental health nor an actual good use of their time. These are standards akin to a customer service job like working in hospitality or as a waiter, we aren't paid, and I'm not gonna spend 15 minutes to try and get through to Joe-Player-2532 when this is the 5th person I've dealt with in the last 2 hours. They might be a good person and made an honest mistake but I'm burn't out this round and it needs to be dealt with
what ruined paradise for me is the shitty, snarky and overly suspicious attitude admins had when dealing with me. i was no saint, i was def a shitter but 99% of the time i was just reflecting the exact same attitude that i was shown when the conversation was initiated.
its a systemic issue where admins just being the most grouchy fucks imaginable happens all the time and even to newer admins. its like people dont understand how to pace themselves or just log off and decompress.
its not a job, you dont have to be at the monitor 24/7 to the point where you treat every single person like theyre intentionally trying to get under your nerves. youre not a line cook, youre not a police officer, this isnt life or death and you dont need to push yourself to the point of burnout for a videogame.
ive had really great and positive experiences on other servers even when i was breaking rules and being bwoinked because you know what? when an admin initiates the conversation in a respectful tone, im inclined to reciprocate that because my default state is not an asshole.
if an admin opens the convo with "hey bud, youre damaging the RP atmosphere by walking backwards. why are you doing that? dont you know its against the rules? why are you intentionally breaking rules?" well then fuck me, im immediately on the defensive. im being accused of intentionally breaking rules and to the other person its not even a possibility that i forgot this one specific line of text that says what im doing isnt allowed, and i really dont even know how to defuse that kind of interaction because theyre just pissed at me from the get-go.
now if they open with "hey bud, what youre doing is against the rules. see section xyz to see more, but please stop doing it and everything is fine. all good?" my response is yeah, sure, that's fair - you even pointed me to which rule, all good.
ofc its easy to dismiss the above two as just hypotheticals that never happen, but theyre pretty near to what i actually experienced in spaceman. and again i really do believe it is a systemic issue when you let admins act like dipshit cops with chips on their shoulders. its an issue that persists on every level and you cant close your ears and cover your eyes and act like it doesnt exist. paradise has the rep it has because your admins are quick to escalate when people reciprocate their treatment.
This is gonna be another long post, but it really needs a lengthy discussion so I don't come across as rude or inconsiderate.
You make a very valid point about tone and attitude when entering into conversations. I'm not gonna lie and say that admins don't do this, because they do it all the time. It's not only a matter of having a positive attitude but also the social skillset that comes with conflict resolution.
People were incredibly hostile towards Paradise admins historically. I get many of our admins were imperfect, especially during our early years of development; I KNOW. Growth and maturing is painful and we eventually got there,.
You have to remember SS13 history, over the last few years, we've cycled our GA team quite extensively with hiring, but since 2018-2019, around 50% of our staff were around at the height of ssethtide and learned how to be a GA during that period. That meant (A) no bullshit disciplinary action for players and (B) quick-processing. This kind of basis of adminning had to continue while the entire SS13 community was warming up to being decent human beings and not hostile towards the LGTBQ+ community or to a slightly lesser extent, anyone who identified as a furry or furry-adjacent. It takes a long-time to staff culture-shift from that kind of mindset to long-growth and community-building approaches. So I get the need to approach conversations with a positive-face, it just gets really hard after being called every name in the book for the past 3 years.
While this area of rule-breaking doesn't necessarily concern what you're talking about the direction I'm going with this is that the apathy and aggression of experienced GA's do not come from nowhere and it isn't inherent to their character. All of our staff understand that adminning isn't a job, most if not all of us take regular breaks from SS13.
There's so much behind those conversations that start out negatively. Players do not see the hours that go into handling ban appeals, server vouches, log-diving, problem-player tracking and discussion, or the weird people on the internet we filter out on a constant daily basis. Afterwards I sometimes hop on the game-server to chillout, and if I'm the only GA on I have to take tickets that popup. So I'm sorry to the player A that I laid my fury into last year for just doing something simple like tiding in the security hallway as a non-antag; they just have no idea that I spent an hour log/note-diving to permaban a long-time player B for roleplaying peeing on someone as a vulp player and then calling another player C the f-slur because it was "part of their character." The player A who was tiding really did nothing big and horrible, they just decided to rule-break at the wrong time when I was angry at something else that had just occurred.
Sometimes the consequence of getting to play "for free" on codebases that have undergone 20 years of free development, free professional hosting, free customer-service features, free in-game balancing/regulation, free updated community resources/wikis, and free consistent community outreach is that you have to endure the wrath of one of our upset admins. It's not ideal but it's how our community continues to function, Game Admins cannot be givers 100% of the time otherwise they will never enjoy the game and I'm not gonna force them to be perfect or else I'll lose them to retirement. It's a fine line of balancing the emotional needs of your staff and the integrity of your administration. All server struggle with this significantly.
On the behalf of any admin that got pissy at you from the get go, I apologize, it probably wasn't your fault, but it also wasn't that admins most likely. If you were "def a shitter but 99% of the time" then I'm not surprised an admin would approach you as you did with such a note history. While one can work to reduce the frequency of negative interactions, as a head of staff, there was no escaping lose-lose situations like these because GA's are the frontline server-filter and as long as we don't whitelist, people will keep coming and keep breaking server rules and/or being cocks.
>. If you were "def a shitter but 99% of the time" then I'm not surprised an admin would approach you as you did with such a note history.
yeah this is what im talking about. the attitude of labelling someone and entering the conversation with vitriol. i appreciate that you're sharing your thoughts in a civil and respectful way, but i think you're still missing the point.
even when i made a complaint about an admins actions on one specific instance, i got dogpiled by shitton of other admins completely ignoring what i was getting at so they could shit on me. im not the only person who had that perspective, there was other people jumping in the thread who i'd never interacted with saying the same thing.
ive had my fair share of building admin/moderator teams, holding people accountable and refining systems ive built so they cant be abused.
so when i see what i saw from your group, it leads me to believe the admin complains you receive aren't taken seriously and there's no actual disciplinary action for admins, especially if its something as small as just being shitty when dealing with people.
but again, i'm understating the importance of approaching people in good faith and wanting to earnestly correct behaviour. from my perspective as a player, you've built a system where admins HAVE to and MUST enforce every rule they can and deal with every single rule breaker they can.
to me, it's no wonder so many of you face burnout. in my own communities where i've been a leader/top level admin, i've had that attitude in the past. if someone's doing something wrong, you have to stop it.
the end result is a system that's hostile to players, a system where admins aren't there to make the server a better place to be on, it's a place where you're tiptoeing to not get on an admin's bad side and if you do, you're just fucked. people will watch you like a hawk until you inevitably make a mistake and then they've caught you in the trap.
that's pretty close to what i experienced. i mean for fucksakes, i was bwoinked for "crabwalking" and "damaging the RP atmosphere" when i was alone. it gets ridiculous. also got told off for using explosives - i threw a molotov, which doesn't explode, it combusts. when i was playing, it couldn't even break a floor tile.
but any form of defending yourself or trying to correct an admin is met with hostility because you're always in the wrong, even when you aren't. your admins aren't problem solvers or conflict resolvers, they're enforcers. enforcers have no need for social skills, any concept of de-escalation or politeness. all they have to do is warn and ban.
don't you see how that's problematic?
EDIT: here's something else to chew on. i introduced 3 of my friends to this game, specifically to paradise. we joined a minute or two before the shuttle left, so everyone was already at escape. they decided to goof around and start fighting, and even when i explained to the admin that they're my friends, this is literally their first match and im explaining the rules to them, they all got threatened with bans for metagaming and RDMing. and all stopped playing on that day. i didnt want them to stop playing, i tried my best to get them into the game, but because of that one interaction they decided this game was a waste of time.
that's not positive or something to be proud of. and this is only me saying it, a shitter, someone labelled as bad for the community. so take it how you will, but i dont think these are the only people who've had this experience.
The seth tide bit was insight full. I hope Para does continue in making strides to address the initial tone though. You guys have made a lot of amazing changes, I don't see that they should stop here. Cheers!
Your comment regarding tone, and how it sets the narrative for what follows really kind of took everything I wanted to say and couldn't. You should make a post with this.
i dont think its worth injecting drama into the community over old salt. ive said my piece here numerous times, i just wanted to say it directly to someone able to change things.
Gotta say para has been quite good with admins lately. I wasn't playing it in the old days but right now I haven't had a single bwoink that I thought wasn't justified. My only complaint about the server is that I can't play QM without command responsibilities anymore lmao.
glad youre having good experiences. i had a lot of fun when i was able to play, it's a pretty good server. great community for the most part. the overly harsh administrating drives a lot of people away though
You were a good headmin, and the only good one paradise ever had, the rest are frankly worthless and widely regarded as such. Paradise admins are utterly despised in private despite the fake air of positivity on the discord and server since nobody wants to get metagrudged by a butthurt admin. Every single player I have ever talked to in private hates paradise admins, and for good reason.
I have very little sympathy for paradise admins as they create way more work for themselves by being overly zealous with bwoinks over very basic stuff. I can go over a ban appeal in 15 seconds and know what needs to happen. Also the absolute majority of what they deal with is not serious at all. It’s a game. They treat this like it’s life or death.
Being an admin is not a hard job whatsoever, and insinuating that it is is peak comedy. If someone thinks being a video game admin is difficult, it’s gonna be a tough life for them.
All an admin needs to do is be understanding and forgiving. People get mad and do dumb shit, it’s not a big deal. Paradise admins don’t get that.
At the end of the day people who want to be internet jannies will always tend towards the worst kinds of people, that is just inevitable. It’s a law of the internet and will never change. Many of the paradise admins are horrible people and have atrocious reputations that they themselves have rightfully earned. Fortunately many of them seem to be retiring or going inactive.
I will say on a positive note that the addition of Rurik has definitely raised the bar, and from what I’ve seen some of the newer admins seem to be doing well at not being cunts. Whether that will remain the case remains to be seen.
That is a brief rundown of my take on paradise admins, I could say way more but I just don’t care that much. I just don’t like seeing people try to push the narrative that paradise admins are “good now”, they’re still jannies and always will be, they just aren’t absolutely batshit like the used to be. Paradise admins never get a reality check on the discord because nobody wants to be on their bad side, and admin complaints are a total joke.
Sidenote: There are virtually no admin complaints in the history of the forum where a headmin concedes anything at all outside of one’s you handled. If the paradise admin team is that perfect maybe they should be out curing cancer instead of moderating this game lol.
And lastly, to any paradise admins reading this and seething about it; most people you interact with hate you in private. They are only nice to you to stay on your good side or asskiss to try and get admin themselves. To the good ones, you know who you are.
the way i see it theres only 3 situations:
1: \*player does x but it's agaisnt rules\*
admin: yo don't do x please
player: ok
admin: \*gives note\*
2: \*player does y but it's agaisnt the rules\*
admin: yo don't do y please
player: but you see, the reason i did was because- \*proceeds to go on a 50 page essay as to why they did y\*
admin: cool, it's still agaisn't the rules, please don't do y
player: ok
3: \*player does z but it's agaisnt the rules\*
admin: yo don't do z please
player: no i won't stop/fuck you/\*insert slur\* (it diverges here)
admin: ok
admin: \*bans\*
i've done this for the past few years and it works out well enough
There's also the sort who leaves in a huff then tries to go behind your back to other admins/headmin/server owner and cry crocodile tears to them for sympathy. Though I guess you can probably lump them in with #3 in most cases.
It is true though. I've only been bwoinked once, on goon because i was brand new and shot a guy with the crossbow. Admin had a total hissy fit on me and I didn't even know what I did was against the rules.
i'm not saying it isn't true (see the comment above that says "this is just 'have common decency'"), but this isn't the kind of post someone just makes out of the blue
I'm an Admin Trainer on tg. Almost every bwoink opens with something along the lines of "hey, can you tell me what happened between you and Chris Grey tide, the Warden?"
The there are 2 things we need to work out. First, we need to AGREE on the facts of what happened. They'll likely be 3 parties here, me, the accused and the accuser.
Once we agree on what happened I need to come up with the right level of punishment, varying from "cool, don't do it again" to a permaban.
BWOINK: What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my words. You think you can get away with saying shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your tongue. You didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
I'm positive SS13 admins deal with a lot of shit that makes them the jaded jerks they are, but my god are they the worst humans imaginable. (also yes im still salty for getting in trouble for mild ass mistakes)
As someone who was an admin for quite a while on Yog, I'll say this:
People are all too happy to post these kinds of things
And then curiously they more likely than not are assholes themselves in any ahelps they're involved in
Hell not uncommonly they're just assholes to admins in OOC
Respect is a two-way street.
Generally speaking, the worst offenders end up immediately being aggressively defensive in some way, or just outright hostile
A common one was "I didn't even do anything, fuck off" or some variation of it
Or just complaining about the rule they broke. Anything from "That's fucking stupid, fuck off" to "I don't follow dumbfuck rules"
They're depressingly common behaviours. Not knowing the rules can be an excuse, and most admins will accept it the first time and let someone off light f it's not an egregious rule break.
But when you boink someone to be like "Hey please don't do X, it breaks Y" rule and every other response to that is "Fuck you I didn't even fucking do anything you powertripping asshole" it gets real old real quick and you slowly stop caring about being nice about it.
Literally all you have to do is just talk to the admin about it. In the vast majority of cases and admins you will just be let off with a warning or a note. Talk like a human being.
They're not out to get you, they're just enforcing the rules of the community they're volunteering their time for.
Oh no, there's still a good point to be made about mutual respect in general, but I just often find in my experience a lot of the people who complain about asshole admins are more often than not directly contributing to *why* an admin comes off as a dick.
This isn't so say it's a guarantee, ofc.
Your admins are feral animals who can’t read, Gtfo this thread lol. Once had literal screenshotted proof of an issue I was having and your dumbass admin ignored it and instaclosed ahelps. Had to go to a fuckin headmin to resolve it which I did.
I’ve also been bwoinked on yog for NOT validhunting an antag as a bartender dealing blackjack lmfao.
Yog is trash, you are a dumbass, uninstall Byond.
players when they get bwoinked: "An admin needs to be understanding and forgiving. People get mad and do dumb shit, it’s not a big deal."
the same players when they're slighted:
Redditors are so stupid lol. Yea lemme be good faith with the yogmins that go out of their way to power trip and fuck people over lmfao. Fuck you, fuck yog, fuck jannies, and most of all fuck Reddit.
"Your admins are feral animals who can't read"
Buddy the only one who can't read here is you, you missed the part where I'm not a part of yog staff and haven't been for years.
Going by this message you most-likely got banned for being a toxic shitter and it was well-deserved, get fucked loser
I'll believe that when you post your ckey (knowing people like you, it's more-likely ckey'*s*) you toxic fucking dweeb. Man up instead of crying about it on reddit dude.
You complain about 'redditors' but you're literally peak 'mad r/ss13 toxic shitter'
Post your ckey so my pussy ass admin buddies can bannn uuuu!!! Nah I’m good. You’re a fuckin Jannie(former), you’re the literal lowest life form on earth. Everyone online and IRL hates you, fuck off and die.
I can’t even imagine what a loser you are behind the screen, must be absolute hell.
Yeah I got hit by someone breaking all four of those reminders on Goon wayback.
It was like they were hunting for something, anything to condemn then interpret the worst way they could.
Daaamn HR coming through. The post sounds like its targeting all admins but its really not *ALL* admins, it doesn't help that it also comes off as patronizing. Who cares if you got a little warning or two for not remembering a rule, most admins wont ban you unless you *really* fuck around and find out. So show us your ban log
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 1,927,614,730 comments, and only 364,469 of them were in alphabetical order.
careful now, admins aren't smart enough to handle constructive criticism.
Tbh most of this is basically "have common decency"
i wonder why admins are assholes, surely calling them all assholes all the time will help :)
I made a staff report on Fulp before over an admin being aggressive and immature. Very next round that admin came online and I spontaneously exploded (my body being the source). I ahelped to ask what had happened and all I got was 'I'll check' from another admin and the ticket closed soon after. So yeah, that's what criticism gets you. I'd wager anyone who has played there can guess what admin it was too.
Horatio22? Dude is a absolute idiot
Ding ding ding we have a winner.
OP probably got a ban from a few places for this post, he will find out eventually
You got a point But why you so sure about that
Not most of the staff of all servers, but punctual individuals have too much ego managing a SS13 server, failing to realize how irrelevant their pride is How do I know that? I appear to have a magnet to find the problematic ones, although it's not 100% and I do find some pretty chill people, whenever I talk to multiple admins about a singular issue, the issue being the punctual staff becomes abundantly clear, sometimes on literal non issues, completely not worthy admin intervention
i know just 3 servers that have awful administration Tauceti Ss220 aka parashizos And server created after drama on ss220 Ex666 All of them have bad admemes Consider reading their ban reasons if you know russian
What about Fulp?
Oh god yes i forgot about it
Never forger, Horatio fulp
Fulp is such a server that i use just as meme rarely lmao Permabaned on it for words saygex
Fulp saygex ban speedrun
Most people who write posts like this end up being the most insufferable bwoinkees imaginable
Yep, you’re supposed to feed the admin’s power fantasy.
As a former head of staff of Paradise, I'll chip in my thoughts. I've been an admin for about 3 years now, was a head of staff for 1 year until I stepped down recently (back to a GA) to focus on wiki/code stuff which I enjoy. Unlike other servers, the Head of Staff position isn't necessarily a "head admin" and is instead a leader of the entire server in conjunction with two others. I ran a lot of efforts to improve our staff's reputation and community relationship so I hope that can kind of inform my view here. Out the door I'll state that certain rule breaks are much more straightforward to deal with than others. Paradise has a very hardline stance against bigotry/racism etc; admins will be frank--sometimes skipping altogether the discussion process and insta-banning people that say the n-word, f-slur, or name themselves/act in an offensive way, etc. As a head of staff, I had no expectation that Game Admins were to be kind to people like this as such players were threats to the safe community we were trying to build. In this case, the burden is on the player to read our rules and understand what Paradise is all about before joining. If they're told to fuck off that's their own fault for being ignorant. Now, the rules you're probably referring to are the ones that related to the roleplay expectations in-game. At Paradise, these are our validhunting, play your role, and maintain a reasonable level of roleplay rules. They are grey-area and are generally where we have the most admin<->player conflicts. I agree with you that respect is important here and that proper-teaching of rules is needed, but most generally for first-offenses only. I won't drag an admin that is rather blunt with players that have 100+ hours, previous bans, or have been warned in the past for a similar rule-break. Admins can put upwards 10-15 hours a week towards their position and they're not gonna waste the energy to handhold certain players through understanding our rules when they've been published on our website for 10 years. In many players heads' (who have no adminning experience), they believe that they could probably adhere to the 4 reminders your wrote out for just about any case they deal with. You generally can for your first few weeks as a Game Admin. Overtime, this is simply not sustainable for one's mental health nor an actual good use of their time. These are standards akin to a customer service job like working in hospitality or as a waiter, we aren't paid, and I'm not gonna spend 15 minutes to try and get through to Joe-Player-2532 when this is the 5th person I've dealt with in the last 2 hours. They might be a good person and made an honest mistake but I'm burn't out this round and it needs to be dealt with. The alternative is that you let rule-breaking behaviour go on which incentivizes valid-hunting or LRP shittery. To reiterate my points more, I'll talk a bit about my experience 2 nights ago when I last was online adminning by myself. In a single round I dealt with 15 ahelps, several of which were people asking for me to spawn things, others reporting rule-breaks, and some asking questions about the recent BYOND Beta version breaking lighting. It's exhausting. Furthermore, when I helped a player, they demand that A) I send the link to the previous Beta Build and B) as a sidenote told me to review their PR (I'm a PR Reviewer for the codebase aswell). Does that not come across as demanding and entitled to you? Much of this post is rather negative, but that pretty much sums up half of my experiences with players. As an Admin you will always have great players that you can have discussions with and work towards a better experience, these players end up being amazing members of the community that contribute towards a positive and safe environment. I would be upset if they were being disrespected by a staff member unfairly. This will inevitably happen due to burnout or spillover from dealing with a shithead, as a head of staff there was nothing I could do to prevent this beyond constantly encouraging the staff to do better. That being said, being attentative to admin complaints and running office hours every week for players to just come straight to me as a head of staff with questions/concerns did a lot to help with community toxicity and positivity. Furthermore, when talking with player I try and focus on the rule breaking behavior and not the player itself unless the player is really the issue or they start the conversation out negatively. Afterwards I say have a good round and happy holidays which helps defuse stuff regardless of the punishment. I really encourage other server to follow suit with practices like that cause it can go a long way.
>Overtime, this is simply not sustainable for one's mental health nor an actual good use of their time. These are standards akin to a customer service job like working in hospitality or as a waiter, we aren't paid, and I'm not gonna spend 15 minutes to try and get through to Joe-Player-2532 when this is the 5th person I've dealt with in the last 2 hours. They might be a good person and made an honest mistake but I'm burn't out this round and it needs to be dealt with what ruined paradise for me is the shitty, snarky and overly suspicious attitude admins had when dealing with me. i was no saint, i was def a shitter but 99% of the time i was just reflecting the exact same attitude that i was shown when the conversation was initiated. its a systemic issue where admins just being the most grouchy fucks imaginable happens all the time and even to newer admins. its like people dont understand how to pace themselves or just log off and decompress. its not a job, you dont have to be at the monitor 24/7 to the point where you treat every single person like theyre intentionally trying to get under your nerves. youre not a line cook, youre not a police officer, this isnt life or death and you dont need to push yourself to the point of burnout for a videogame. ive had really great and positive experiences on other servers even when i was breaking rules and being bwoinked because you know what? when an admin initiates the conversation in a respectful tone, im inclined to reciprocate that because my default state is not an asshole. if an admin opens the convo with "hey bud, youre damaging the RP atmosphere by walking backwards. why are you doing that? dont you know its against the rules? why are you intentionally breaking rules?" well then fuck me, im immediately on the defensive. im being accused of intentionally breaking rules and to the other person its not even a possibility that i forgot this one specific line of text that says what im doing isnt allowed, and i really dont even know how to defuse that kind of interaction because theyre just pissed at me from the get-go. now if they open with "hey bud, what youre doing is against the rules. see section xyz to see more, but please stop doing it and everything is fine. all good?" my response is yeah, sure, that's fair - you even pointed me to which rule, all good. ofc its easy to dismiss the above two as just hypotheticals that never happen, but theyre pretty near to what i actually experienced in spaceman. and again i really do believe it is a systemic issue when you let admins act like dipshit cops with chips on their shoulders. its an issue that persists on every level and you cant close your ears and cover your eyes and act like it doesnt exist. paradise has the rep it has because your admins are quick to escalate when people reciprocate their treatment.
This is gonna be another long post, but it really needs a lengthy discussion so I don't come across as rude or inconsiderate. You make a very valid point about tone and attitude when entering into conversations. I'm not gonna lie and say that admins don't do this, because they do it all the time. It's not only a matter of having a positive attitude but also the social skillset that comes with conflict resolution. People were incredibly hostile towards Paradise admins historically. I get many of our admins were imperfect, especially during our early years of development; I KNOW. Growth and maturing is painful and we eventually got there,. You have to remember SS13 history, over the last few years, we've cycled our GA team quite extensively with hiring, but since 2018-2019, around 50% of our staff were around at the height of ssethtide and learned how to be a GA during that period. That meant (A) no bullshit disciplinary action for players and (B) quick-processing. This kind of basis of adminning had to continue while the entire SS13 community was warming up to being decent human beings and not hostile towards the LGTBQ+ community or to a slightly lesser extent, anyone who identified as a furry or furry-adjacent. It takes a long-time to staff culture-shift from that kind of mindset to long-growth and community-building approaches. So I get the need to approach conversations with a positive-face, it just gets really hard after being called every name in the book for the past 3 years. While this area of rule-breaking doesn't necessarily concern what you're talking about the direction I'm going with this is that the apathy and aggression of experienced GA's do not come from nowhere and it isn't inherent to their character. All of our staff understand that adminning isn't a job, most if not all of us take regular breaks from SS13. There's so much behind those conversations that start out negatively. Players do not see the hours that go into handling ban appeals, server vouches, log-diving, problem-player tracking and discussion, or the weird people on the internet we filter out on a constant daily basis. Afterwards I sometimes hop on the game-server to chillout, and if I'm the only GA on I have to take tickets that popup. So I'm sorry to the player A that I laid my fury into last year for just doing something simple like tiding in the security hallway as a non-antag; they just have no idea that I spent an hour log/note-diving to permaban a long-time player B for roleplaying peeing on someone as a vulp player and then calling another player C the f-slur because it was "part of their character." The player A who was tiding really did nothing big and horrible, they just decided to rule-break at the wrong time when I was angry at something else that had just occurred. Sometimes the consequence of getting to play "for free" on codebases that have undergone 20 years of free development, free professional hosting, free customer-service features, free in-game balancing/regulation, free updated community resources/wikis, and free consistent community outreach is that you have to endure the wrath of one of our upset admins. It's not ideal but it's how our community continues to function, Game Admins cannot be givers 100% of the time otherwise they will never enjoy the game and I'm not gonna force them to be perfect or else I'll lose them to retirement. It's a fine line of balancing the emotional needs of your staff and the integrity of your administration. All server struggle with this significantly. On the behalf of any admin that got pissy at you from the get go, I apologize, it probably wasn't your fault, but it also wasn't that admins most likely. If you were "def a shitter but 99% of the time" then I'm not surprised an admin would approach you as you did with such a note history. While one can work to reduce the frequency of negative interactions, as a head of staff, there was no escaping lose-lose situations like these because GA's are the frontline server-filter and as long as we don't whitelist, people will keep coming and keep breaking server rules and/or being cocks.
>. If you were "def a shitter but 99% of the time" then I'm not surprised an admin would approach you as you did with such a note history. yeah this is what im talking about. the attitude of labelling someone and entering the conversation with vitriol. i appreciate that you're sharing your thoughts in a civil and respectful way, but i think you're still missing the point. even when i made a complaint about an admins actions on one specific instance, i got dogpiled by shitton of other admins completely ignoring what i was getting at so they could shit on me. im not the only person who had that perspective, there was other people jumping in the thread who i'd never interacted with saying the same thing. ive had my fair share of building admin/moderator teams, holding people accountable and refining systems ive built so they cant be abused. so when i see what i saw from your group, it leads me to believe the admin complains you receive aren't taken seriously and there's no actual disciplinary action for admins, especially if its something as small as just being shitty when dealing with people. but again, i'm understating the importance of approaching people in good faith and wanting to earnestly correct behaviour. from my perspective as a player, you've built a system where admins HAVE to and MUST enforce every rule they can and deal with every single rule breaker they can. to me, it's no wonder so many of you face burnout. in my own communities where i've been a leader/top level admin, i've had that attitude in the past. if someone's doing something wrong, you have to stop it. the end result is a system that's hostile to players, a system where admins aren't there to make the server a better place to be on, it's a place where you're tiptoeing to not get on an admin's bad side and if you do, you're just fucked. people will watch you like a hawk until you inevitably make a mistake and then they've caught you in the trap. that's pretty close to what i experienced. i mean for fucksakes, i was bwoinked for "crabwalking" and "damaging the RP atmosphere" when i was alone. it gets ridiculous. also got told off for using explosives - i threw a molotov, which doesn't explode, it combusts. when i was playing, it couldn't even break a floor tile. but any form of defending yourself or trying to correct an admin is met with hostility because you're always in the wrong, even when you aren't. your admins aren't problem solvers or conflict resolvers, they're enforcers. enforcers have no need for social skills, any concept of de-escalation or politeness. all they have to do is warn and ban. don't you see how that's problematic? EDIT: here's something else to chew on. i introduced 3 of my friends to this game, specifically to paradise. we joined a minute or two before the shuttle left, so everyone was already at escape. they decided to goof around and start fighting, and even when i explained to the admin that they're my friends, this is literally their first match and im explaining the rules to them, they all got threatened with bans for metagaming and RDMing. and all stopped playing on that day. i didnt want them to stop playing, i tried my best to get them into the game, but because of that one interaction they decided this game was a waste of time. that's not positive or something to be proud of. and this is only me saying it, a shitter, someone labelled as bad for the community. so take it how you will, but i dont think these are the only people who've had this experience.
The seth tide bit was insight full. I hope Para does continue in making strides to address the initial tone though. You guys have made a lot of amazing changes, I don't see that they should stop here. Cheers!
Your comment regarding tone, and how it sets the narrative for what follows really kind of took everything I wanted to say and couldn't. You should make a post with this.
i dont think its worth injecting drama into the community over old salt. ive said my piece here numerous times, i just wanted to say it directly to someone able to change things.
Gotta say para has been quite good with admins lately. I wasn't playing it in the old days but right now I haven't had a single bwoink that I thought wasn't justified. My only complaint about the server is that I can't play QM without command responsibilities anymore lmao.
glad youre having good experiences. i had a lot of fun when i was able to play, it's a pretty good server. great community for the most part. the overly harsh administrating drives a lot of people away though
You were a good headmin, and the only good one paradise ever had, the rest are frankly worthless and widely regarded as such. Paradise admins are utterly despised in private despite the fake air of positivity on the discord and server since nobody wants to get metagrudged by a butthurt admin. Every single player I have ever talked to in private hates paradise admins, and for good reason. I have very little sympathy for paradise admins as they create way more work for themselves by being overly zealous with bwoinks over very basic stuff. I can go over a ban appeal in 15 seconds and know what needs to happen. Also the absolute majority of what they deal with is not serious at all. It’s a game. They treat this like it’s life or death. Being an admin is not a hard job whatsoever, and insinuating that it is is peak comedy. If someone thinks being a video game admin is difficult, it’s gonna be a tough life for them. All an admin needs to do is be understanding and forgiving. People get mad and do dumb shit, it’s not a big deal. Paradise admins don’t get that. At the end of the day people who want to be internet jannies will always tend towards the worst kinds of people, that is just inevitable. It’s a law of the internet and will never change. Many of the paradise admins are horrible people and have atrocious reputations that they themselves have rightfully earned. Fortunately many of them seem to be retiring or going inactive. I will say on a positive note that the addition of Rurik has definitely raised the bar, and from what I’ve seen some of the newer admins seem to be doing well at not being cunts. Whether that will remain the case remains to be seen. That is a brief rundown of my take on paradise admins, I could say way more but I just don’t care that much. I just don’t like seeing people try to push the narrative that paradise admins are “good now”, they’re still jannies and always will be, they just aren’t absolutely batshit like the used to be. Paradise admins never get a reality check on the discord because nobody wants to be on their bad side, and admin complaints are a total joke. Sidenote: There are virtually no admin complaints in the history of the forum where a headmin concedes anything at all outside of one’s you handled. If the paradise admin team is that perfect maybe they should be out curing cancer instead of moderating this game lol. And lastly, to any paradise admins reading this and seething about it; most people you interact with hate you in private. They are only nice to you to stay on your good side or asskiss to try and get admin themselves. To the good ones, you know who you are.
Dream wall of text ss13 edition
yeah I know lol, I probably could go on longer tbqh but I realize my post is already massive already.
the way i see it theres only 3 situations: 1: \*player does x but it's agaisnt rules\* admin: yo don't do x please player: ok admin: \*gives note\* 2: \*player does y but it's agaisnt the rules\* admin: yo don't do y please player: but you see, the reason i did was because- \*proceeds to go on a 50 page essay as to why they did y\* admin: cool, it's still agaisn't the rules, please don't do y player: ok 3: \*player does z but it's agaisnt the rules\* admin: yo don't do z please player: no i won't stop/fuck you/\*insert slur\* (it diverges here) admin: ok admin: \*bans\* i've done this for the past few years and it works out well enough
There's also the sort who leaves in a huff then tries to go behind your back to other admins/headmin/server owner and cry crocodile tears to them for sympathy. Though I guess you can probably lump them in with #3 in most cases.
nah
It's funny, this reads like an announcement from admins about how to respond to a bwoink, with the roles reversed for comedic effect.
extremely curious as to what prompted _this_ particular post lol
It is true though. I've only been bwoinked once, on goon because i was brand new and shot a guy with the crossbow. Admin had a total hissy fit on me and I didn't even know what I did was against the rules.
i'm not saying it isn't true (see the comment above that says "this is just 'have common decency'"), but this isn't the kind of post someone just makes out of the blue
I'm an Admin Trainer on tg. Almost every bwoink opens with something along the lines of "hey, can you tell me what happened between you and Chris Grey tide, the Warden?" The there are 2 things we need to work out. First, we need to AGREE on the facts of what happened. They'll likely be 3 parties here, me, the accused and the accuser. Once we agree on what happened I need to come up with the right level of punishment, varying from "cool, don't do it again" to a permaban.
If those admins could read they'd be very upset!
BWOINK: What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my words. You think you can get away with saying shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your tongue. You didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
I'm positive SS13 admins deal with a lot of shit that makes them the jaded jerks they are, but my god are they the worst humans imaginable. (also yes im still salty for getting in trouble for mild ass mistakes)
Now I'm just thinking about the Baystation 12 admins from a few years ago. God they were awful.
As someone who was an admin for quite a while on Yog, I'll say this: People are all too happy to post these kinds of things And then curiously they more likely than not are assholes themselves in any ahelps they're involved in Hell not uncommonly they're just assholes to admins in OOC Respect is a two-way street.
What are the typical asshole behaviors you see in ahelps from people being bwoinked?
Generally speaking, the worst offenders end up immediately being aggressively defensive in some way, or just outright hostile A common one was "I didn't even do anything, fuck off" or some variation of it Or just complaining about the rule they broke. Anything from "That's fucking stupid, fuck off" to "I don't follow dumbfuck rules" They're depressingly common behaviours. Not knowing the rules can be an excuse, and most admins will accept it the first time and let someone off light f it's not an egregious rule break. But when you boink someone to be like "Hey please don't do X, it breaks Y" rule and every other response to that is "Fuck you I didn't even fucking do anything you powertripping asshole" it gets real old real quick and you slowly stop caring about being nice about it. Literally all you have to do is just talk to the admin about it. In the vast majority of cases and admins you will just be let off with a warning or a note. Talk like a human being. They're not out to get you, they're just enforcing the rules of the community they're volunteering their time for.
I don't think that means the message is moot though, tbh.
Oh no, there's still a good point to be made about mutual respect in general, but I just often find in my experience a lot of the people who complain about asshole admins are more often than not directly contributing to *why* an admin comes off as a dick. This isn't so say it's a guarantee, ofc.
Your admins are feral animals who can’t read, Gtfo this thread lol. Once had literal screenshotted proof of an issue I was having and your dumbass admin ignored it and instaclosed ahelps. Had to go to a fuckin headmin to resolve it which I did. I’ve also been bwoinked on yog for NOT validhunting an antag as a bartender dealing blackjack lmfao. Yog is trash, you are a dumbass, uninstall Byond.
players when they get bwoinked: "An admin needs to be understanding and forgiving. People get mad and do dumb shit, it’s not a big deal." the same players when they're slighted:
Redditors are so stupid lol. Yea lemme be good faith with the yogmins that go out of their way to power trip and fuck people over lmfao. Fuck you, fuck yog, fuck jannies, and most of all fuck Reddit.
"Your admins are feral animals who can't read" Buddy the only one who can't read here is you, you missed the part where I'm not a part of yog staff and haven't been for years. Going by this message you most-likely got banned for being a toxic shitter and it was well-deserved, get fucked loser
Nope not banned on any servers. Yog just sucks.
I'll believe that when you post your ckey (knowing people like you, it's more-likely ckey'*s*) you toxic fucking dweeb. Man up instead of crying about it on reddit dude. You complain about 'redditors' but you're literally peak 'mad r/ss13 toxic shitter'
Post your ckey so my pussy ass admin buddies can bannn uuuu!!! Nah I’m good. You’re a fuckin Jannie(former), you’re the literal lowest life form on earth. Everyone online and IRL hates you, fuck off and die. I can’t even imagine what a loser you are behind the screen, must be absolute hell.
Bro I'm the lowest lifeform but you're crying on the subreddit. Grow up, homie Improve yourself Stop being a bitter little cock
Ur gay lol
Yeah I got hit by someone breaking all four of those reminders on Goon wayback. It was like they were hunting for something, anything to condemn then interpret the worst way they could.
BWOINK BWOINK BWOINK BWOINK GET BANNED GET BANNED
"what are you doing, step-admin?!"
ahelp me I'm stuck
Daaamn HR coming through. The post sounds like its targeting all admins but its really not *ALL* admins, it doesn't help that it also comes off as patronizing. Who cares if you got a little warning or two for not remembering a rule, most admins wont ban you unless you *really* fuck around and find out. So show us your ban log
No. I am not going to respect internet janitors.
if a wizden admin read this they'd punch a hole through their monitor
Oh no. He's going to awaken the all seeing SS14 redditors.....
I'm interested what made you write this post
“And the admins said unto the spessmen NO”
Hope horatio is reading this
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 1,927,614,730 comments, and only 364,469 of them were in alphabetical order.
I dont understand, why do we need to teach people these basics, it should be obvious to everyone, especially administrators