(Jun 1, 2020, 01:53 AM)Judge Rage Wrote: [ -> ]Expect a long measured rant tomorrow or some time when I can be arsed, but suffice to say here's my opinion:
- Too much fucking bureaucracy, it's stifling.
- Staff are, however, happy to ignore that bureaucracy when they want to get their friends off the hook for breaking the rules or want to punish someone for something they don't like.
- Too much fucking secrecy. Sometimes, it feels like the staff team are the fucking KGB trying to talk to them.
- Transparency. There fucking is none. What the fuck goes on in the ivory towers of the staff forums/discord? Fuck knows
- Ivory Towers - the superadmins literally never fucking play and have no idea what's going on (still happy to weigh in when someone does something they don't like or the givens need to get off from breaking a rule again though!)
- Community Feedback are just the friends of the admins, and half of them barely ever fucking play
- Too many fucking rules, I hear my university is starting a degree course just to understand the 100000 page long rules, rule clarifications and case law
I can understand some frustration but its important to be precise here. I feel like everytime we get a low playercount for a month or two suddenly everything is percieved as evil and malfunctioning - though in reality not much has changed.
A good example is the issue with "bureaucracy". Where exactly do you see that? The only places were you gotta fill out forms or abide by certain formal standards are suggestions (simply to make it easier to handle them properly), prs (that can seriously impact everyone involved in it and thus require certain proceedings), appeals (for the same reason as prs) and applications (its pretty self explanatory why an application requires a little "bureaucracy").
I can understand that certain processes (eg. the implementation of a suggestion) or matters dealt with in the courthouse-section can feel unescessarily complicated. But certain forms and conduct are nescessary there and have been there for years.
Staff
Trust me, it is not nearly as simple as that. A single appeal or pr can actually be quite time consuming as we want to become absolutetly certain that punishments are handed our or lifted for the right reasons. Yes this may sound like PR-Talk but from my own experience i can assure you that you that we take great precautions with all penalties and courthouse matters. My longest appeal/staff report has been going on for little over a week including pages and pages of conversation, documentation and taking up several hours of investigations.
Luckily Staff are human and as such they occasionaly make misstakes. They are quite rare but when they occur we are not hesitant to correct them. In said appeal for example i managed to overlook a single dot ("."). Though that did not impact the rule violation itself and changed very little about the context to the situation (context is something ill get to in a second) i consulted with HR to alter said penalty in the end.
Its safe to say that could do things a lot easier - but it could easily lead to great harm or negligence as we are well aware of the impact some of our decisions will have.
As for the alleged doublestandard. I think this again is dangerously oversimplified: YES we do have some freedom when it comes to the enforcement of the rules. And believe me we absolutetly need that freedom or things would be alot worse. As matter of fact im fairly confident you have benefited from said freedom as well as most people reading this.
If i see complete rookie with 0h making minor misstakes i will obviously not go for the banhammer right away. If a see a long time player with an otherwise clean record (like you for example) making a similar misstake i too would likely be a bit more lenient. Its common sense and common decency. If see a repeat offender giving me an attitude, lying/dcing or simply repeating the same thing over and over again we have to be a lot more severe with the penalty.
Often times people moan about how the (relatively compact) rules should be made simpler and staff decisions become more standarised, expecting greater freedom or to generally be better of, when instead that same demand would litterarly make them slaves to a very stiff and ill equipped machine. The more mechanical we get the worse we can adapt to certain situations. Context is vital to every single penalty. If i see Chong lee testing his chinese space programm im not gonna ban for him that (unless he decides to intentionally harm/harass people) if someone on the other hand throws train cars around the city (both cases technicly beeing failrRP/prop abuse) i obviously have to intervene.
In the end of the day everyone deserve to be heared out and treated as a human. And for us to be able to treat people humanely we need to be able to make humane and reasonable decisions. Decisions a standarised code does not allow.
I remember Daley waay back in the day making a oversized human grinder one very late night. We had about 10 people left online and all were having a pretty good laugh getting chopped up or throwing stuff in there. Yes it was stupid - but would you rather demote a staff member of some banter or live in the knowledge that we do have the freedom to goof of everyonce in a while. Community work requires some forms of leniency.
Another thing i would like to add here is that we have change pretty much nothing (other then minor changes to the ig-ruleset over time) about our rules or the way in which we enforce them. And all of a sudden its now becoming an issue.... that is a little hard to understand.
Im all open for suggestions regarding individual rules or general efforts to revamp them. But i dont see any recent or infact distant deterioration in the way rules have been enforced etc.
As for the secrecy part i can understand that at times things can feel that way. Often times it may depend a little on the staff member too. This is something we could likely try to improve a little. Though at times this too is a little random or dependend on the circumstances (eg. im much more talktive if im not handling a report or building sth time critical). But generally that is feedback we can work with.
As for the community feedback team i too can understand that impression. Though in the end of the day any efforts like this input team require a certain frame for things not to get lost, overcrowded or generally inefficient. Every peer reviewed process gets increasingly complicated the more people take part. In order for things to stay efficient and thus fulfill the purpouse of a feedback group that group has to maintain a certain maximum size. This however does not exclude anyone else from making suggestions or providing us with feedback. We recently changed the map based on a suggestion and a general poll. Feedback is important and any form of input is appreciated. Thats why we have our suggestion forum - thats why we occasionaly do server side polls etc.
As for the rules that is probably a bit subjective so ill keep this short. As i explained above my general concern is that with a thinner rule set staff would be forced to rely more heavily on circumstances and context which again would feed your concern about staff beeing corrupt. A less specific rule will require less specific/predictable enforcement. The broader something is the broader one can interpret a thing.
Though that at times could be quite beneficiary i doubt that you can meet a perfect mix between less rules and a more predicitble staff response as those two options can often be contradictary.
In the end though i can understand your point (and trust me so does the rest of the team) Though it is not that simple to cut back on rules.
As for the transperency i guess we could imrpove a little on that. But generally speeking some things need to stay secret. I know this sucks and trust me i too was quite eager to see the behind the scenes area of LL when i first became staff. But most of that stuff is fairly irelevant. We do not hide aliens and though the cocaine lounge has been leaked to the public - i can assure you that all the blow has been used up by one very eager admin. In all seriousness though there is nothing hidden that you wouldnt expect to be hidden (as is the case in every major community): Obviously certain security aspects can not be made public and some internal decisions need to be kept internal. Nothing (except some stuff regarding developement) in there is really that interesting. And developement wise doc probably put it best. It is rather pointless if not problematic to announce an update before you can safely know the exact release date. And sometimes it can be very hard to precisely predict that.
In the end of the day i can understand some of the frustation and concerns but I think it is important to stay focused and precise. Some of the things you bring up are not new by any means. It is alright to ctiticise sth. It is perfectly alright to be pissed off everyonce in a while but in oder to change things we need to stay productive, and precise.
Im worried that especially in times like these (where the playercount has been down for a while) people are getting a bit to vague, bring up clichees and fight each other where no fight is nescessary.
We dont need a bunch of "guess im leaving now" " i told you LL gon die" etc. threads or stuff like "the staff team is too corrupt". None of this has the potential to significantly or efficiently change things but only makes things worse feeding into self fulfilling prophecy of gmods eventual and long predicted decline.
You made some good points so that last part is not explicitly directed at you. Though i take it as a general reminder to us all to stay contstructive and productive.
_____
As with any larger community change can take some time. And some stuff will not allways be publicly accesible. I can assure you though that we are self aware and as eager as you are to get things going and maintain the best possible quality. We do not get paid - we all have a real life. We do this because we want to. We too grew quite close with this community and we too have great appreciation for it. And we too wish to do anything to maintain and improve this community as best as humanly possible.