To start with, please let me know if I cut out a part you wanted me to address and I will go back to it. I will be trying to quote and then respond to your argument in separate pieces.
Now this is a big one for me, both because I was an admin for quite some time, and because I love playing on the public servers, and unfortunately, I find the adminship less than satisfactory...
My reasoning for this is because I have submitted several reports of admins and others doing things that I would actually consider worthy of them getting booted from the team, and yet, it seemed like quite the opposite happened, and nothing was done...
Were these all to me, to littleguy, or to another member of the administration? As far as I recall I have personally responded to most administrative complaints, even if it was one I considered to be unneeded.
and the people in question really never showed any signs of that. Further more, it wasn't just like one report per person or something, I mean I had sent in several reports with long explanations and screenshots and everything, clearly showing that something was up, and yet still, the people in question showed no signs of punishment or change.
If you can PM me the time of these messages I will re review them if you were unsatisfied with my response.
Now that I have spoken about that, there are some other things I wish to speak about. First, some of the things admins are doing that I do not agree with and feel an admin shouldn't do. Firstly, using their adminship to promote their group or regiment.
This is not ever condoned by me. If this was occurring did you send me a report of it, or is this the first time of notification? Nevertheless, it will be looked at closely. I will never tolerate the abuse of the responsibility of server administration to recruit for one's regiment.
When I was an admin, I was always told to keep it professional and not fool around in admin chat, and always keep a professional image at all times. That's not saying you couldn't have fun, but you couldn't go semi trolling, calling people silly names on admin chat, and ignoring people's complaints, suggestions, and notifications with stupid replies like "K" and then not doing anything about it. Unfortunately, that has been happening an insane amount too
This is something that should be tied down, and I will be crafting a post after all of this for the server admins in order that they know what I will be expecting form this point forward.
I even want to say that it goes back to that whole personal gain thing when admins say silly stuff like that, just to get attention, kind of like saying "hey everybody, look at me, I'm an admin! Aren't I great?!"
Is this hyperbolic or was it actually something that happened? If so was it recently and can I look it up? Send me details if so.
I would also like to talk about the admin selection process too. I think it is vitally flawed, for several reasons. One, the admins have input, and honestly, they can just write something good about a friend, without actually believing any of it, and it goes as a good merit for the person, and ups their chances of being picked.
This is why I do not use one or two admin's opinions on the process, but the entire team. While it does come down to myself and the senior admins finalizing the list, it is through a consensus of players I expect to know what I want from administrators. This very process is what gave you the ability to administrate, as well several high quality administrators.
I think the current process is by far the most capable in the environment I work with. I believe it to be the most fair, most open, and one of the most comprehensive methods possible in order to maintain a solid group of administrators, while creating as few administrative cliques as possible. I can discuss in detail why I think this, but I would prefer to do so only if asked, because I feel it may detract from the overall theme you are going for. But most importantly, this:
but admins are just picked based off of a little paragraph they write and that's it.
Is patently false. Although I can see why such a thought would occur as you were never a part of the second half of the procedure.
That's another problem I have too. How can you guys handle bans and unbans with max efficiency when you barely ever see the person, your admins, or the crimes, in action? Logs may tell a lot, but sometimes, they definitely don't tell the whole thing. I know of many situations where something has happened and you perceive it as something totally different because the logs add up to that. What the logs don't show are people attacking you, damage dealt, hits blocked, etc. What if someone was just going by, hitting people with a sabre briquet, to wound people but not kill them all the way, and someone TKed him? The person who TKed will be punished, and more than likely, the person with the sabre briquet will go unpunished, because a lot of the times people don't actually get screenshot knowledge.
We work with what we are given. Unfortunately the tools at our disposal are very limited (as I am sure you can recall), and so for that reason we try to go as strictly physical as possible. Yes, there will be times that things such as kicking, wounding, and intentional-throwing-oneself-in-front-of-cannons will occur. To counter this we offer a means by which people who saw the incident can report on it as a witness, though the ban and unban request system. That is why when I go through the logs, I find it it very useful when other members of the community take the time to chime in as direct witnesses to give testimony of the situation. It is a huge help, and aids us while we work with a very flawed system.
Some suggestions I can provide to make the admin recruitment process better is maybe include some kind of admin interview or something, and maybe even go in and watch the player's actions under an alias, if they are a likely candidate.
This is something I do very often in what is deemed a trial period. I will endeavor to instill more of such practices amongst my ever growing senior administrative group.
I think like maybe, once a month would be better, so you don't have so many noobies at once.
This is, again, going a bit more into my process then I would care to, but the reasons I do it in the multi month batches is:
+ It is easier to organize and maintain
+ It is much easier to train a bunch of newbies at once, than it is to always have new people added that require people to watch them
+ With the class system in place right now, there is a solid core of more experienced admins that the new admins can turn to for advice and aid.
+ Having people who apply early wait for some time displays the kind of dedication to the game that is needed to sustain interest in administrating. If we were to do it every month I would be afraid that we would have a higher drop out rate as people who are so interested tend to quickly lose it.
Note that this is my personal response, as the one who created both the administrative system, and was the first server administrator. I have not yet spoken to my senior administrators, so consider it off the cuff, as it were.
Okay, missed this piece.
Finally Community Input. Something I think we do not have enough of. As I have shown, I feel the process of sharing and expressing concerns with the head admins is something that does not work. I think we should have maybe, a not flaming and trolling tolerated board, where we can discuss grievances openly and maturely, without having to worry about flame wars and trolls. Another request I have is the removal of the no input from people who were not present during the incident rule in the bans and unbans section, one that I am notorious for breaking. I think this rule is ridiculous.
The issue with allowing community input on the ban unban board is that forumites, over and over, have expressed the need to vent their anger about a user, regardless of the actual circumstances of the event in question.
What if the person has done many other questionable things and you would like to let the admin know? You get in trouble for that.
This should be allowed up to a very specific point. The problem is that is not what people were letting us know. They would give us information about how a couple weeks ago they did such and such, or that they did something we cant look up in the logs, or that they were in a private linebattle and they did something bad. Several times I strongly believe that users were bandwaggoning on people they had never actually met in game, because they belong to a certain regiment they dont like, or committed a supposed offense that happens to be their pet peeve.
The fact of the matter is, with the tools provided we cannot back up hearsay given to us on a regular basis, which is why the rules now explicitly state we ask for direct witnesses only. Direct witnesses can be reviewed through logs, and backed up by others in the same incident. It is a tough measure, but one we did after extreme amounts of sub par posting in the area.
What if you would like to let the admin know of run ins with a person that you have had to share that he is an undesirable person on the server and does not have much to offer? That will get you in trouble too. It's ridiculous. The least you can do is take what we say into consideration, rather than flat out blowing us off and giving us a warning, just because we wanted to help you. Actual input should not be blocked. Trolling and useless info should be blocked..
PM's will never get you in trouble, so feel free to PM me if you have an issue with someone. We want to keep the ban and unban areas as streamlined as possible, because getting people back into the game as soon as possible is important.
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