Increasingly disenfranchised with PERPHeads - forwarding some genuine complaints

I implore you to read the entire contents of the post before formulating your opinions.

There's no doubts that, over the years, the community has made significant improvements in some areas. However, the server and community as a whole has become increasingly tiring/disappointing to be a part of, and I know for a fact I'm not alone in this feeling as others have expressed similar themes directly to me.

This is a community I love but has oftentimes made me frustrated in the heat of the moment over the years, however recently I've noticed this feeling fading away and taking its place has been a low-level consistent frustration and disappointment with decisions made and the nature of the community now. Even while only very passively being a part of the community and being completely unbothered with possessions on the server as I simply don't have the time to involve myself in the community and be as active as I used to, trying to involve myself even minorly often leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth. I'll cover some of my main complaints here.

Attitudes in administration

I've noticed increasingly a tendency to issue punishments with greater frequency but less severity, and I think it's no coincidence that I've observed a much larger increase in intentional impactful rule infringements in order to benefit oneself. It's become a rare occurrence from what I've witnessed for the intent of the player, when applied to impact of actions, to be considered for severity of punishment when reporting a player. A lot of players have taken on a very reckless attitude towards the rules as a result because, at the end of the day, what does a warning matter if they can benefit themselves to a significant extent as a trade-off?

Carrying on from this, the greater frequency of punishment has led to punishments given for the sake of punishment, and a much greater decrease in verbal warnings for unintentional infringements which can easily be remedied, which just leaves otherwise generally rule-abiding players saddened when future infringements would've been prevented just the same via verbal warning. If an intentional infringement has no possible/realised impact on other players or any situations, or an unintentional infringement has very minimal possible/realised impact on other players or situations, formal punishment should never be a first-line response. However, this is not the current case. I've had a staff member directly inform me that they never issue verbal warnings, which is one of the most concerning statements I've heard in regards to administration in a long time.

Both of these in tandem results in the ordinary, oftentimes rule-abiding but prone to occasional minor slip-ups in fringe or accidental cases, player taking on increased feelings of disappointment and alienation, when in reality this should be one of the main demographics that the administration of the server should be directly catered towards. My proposal is that formal punishments should be much greater in severity in both intentional infringements and repeat offenders, and should be avoided in the minor cases mentioned in bold in the previous paragraph.

Subjectivity of rules

A significant quantity of rules are phrased in such a manner where they are left up for interpretation from player to player; while one may not necessarily be wrong in their interpretation of a rule, if a specific staff member is in disagreement with them for whatever reason, they can simply decide to issue punishment and then it could just be a coin toss on who handles the dispute as to whether or not the punishment is enforced. There are too many situations left unaccounted for by the vagueness of a lot of rules and there are far too many fringe cases which cause divisions in opinion even within the staff team, who are meant to be the absolute authority on the rules.

The community feels to have reverted to a 2017-esque attitude towards the rules, in that there are a lot of situations which are not directly specified but widely accepted as within the rules or infringements of the rules, even though what is expressed in the rules themselves may contradict these "widely-accepted" scenarios. This, once again, alienates those who are actually trying to follow the textbook definitions of the rules, and oftentimes causes issues for newer and returning, previously inactive players. There were previously strides made to move away from this direction, however this seems to have been put on the backburner when the problem is becoming greater than ever.

In conjunction with the last point made, players can oftentimes not realistically be breaking any rules whatsoever but get unlucky with whoever's handling their situation and end up punished significantly. This leads to much greater time investments from players and staff members alike in creating and handling disputes, and therefore consumes more staff resources in the long run. Oftentimes, this can also lead to unnecessary and arguably false punishments being upheld. My proposal is that the rules see a large overhaul in order to make cases for interpretation much fewer and further between where at all possible, with any contradictions between separate rules and vague statements corrected and/or divulged on further.

The next points I will make will be shorter-form, but equal in significance. These are points where there's simply much less to say.

Additional points

- One thing that always confused me is the hostility and opposition seemingly embedded into a lot of administrative systems in PERP: for example the inability to dispute the length of a ban always seemed very unreasonable to me, with the requirement of a staff complaint just creating additional hostility. Additionally, the requirement of an IA, AR, or report against another individual to acquire refunds from rule or policy infringements can add to hostility between players who simply just want to get their wrongly lost possessions back but are unbothered by the infringement itself. This thread by @Ayjay brought up some absolutely brilliant points but sadly wasn't really taken in or accepted by the staff team.

- The handling of acclimatizing new players to the servers feels very thrown-together and almost too much at a point - I'm aware that a new tutorial system is in the pipeline, but the provisions put in place for new players have become too significant to the point that new players can often get an advantage over older players when all the new additional help resources are combined with the excess provisions. The difficulty of the server to begin with is a lot of what sucked me in, because your achievements felt that much more significant. Cut back on some excess provisions and work more towards better tutorial systems, help resources, and guides, as the way it is now I can envision that while you may see a larger net amount of new players connecting, the player retention pales in comparison to what it could be with more challenge in place making one's earlier achievements more meaningful.

- Continuing on from the last point, the atmosphere of the community has become very "hand-holdy" - while making people feel more welcome is never going to be a bad thing, you begin to toe a dangerous line where there feels to be a forced, falsified mask over the true thoughts of each member of the community which is kept up in order to feel like one is staying in line. In my eyes, the community has crossed this line. What has come to be interpreted as toxicity can oftentimes seem completely innocuous in a lot of people's eyes, and I can't help to feel like, whether consciously or not, some of this can result from the ideas that PERPHeads was, for some time - whether it wants to be admitted or not will not change the truth of it - a safe space for any describable kind of discrimination, the far right, some truly unnerving and disturbing people mixed in with genuine predators, and a place where underage girls could be and actually were forced into rape roleplay. There has to be some sort of feeling that this needs to be made up for, but realistically the correct changes have been made and what has happened in the past has been left in the past. The reputation of the community has noticeably improved to the point where I'm sure that it would be safe to pull back slightly in the stringency in which "toxicity" is interpreted, so that we're not so far over the line, because in my eyes it's very safe to say we went too far.

- The amount of "admin" work necessary on PERP is way too significant, with excess convolution seeming to come at every turn whenever something is updated. This has been a very large deterrent for a lot of players and has seemingly got worse over the years, for example with the turn of the drug updates. As one of my good friends put it: "It's not PERP if you aren't forced to jump through multiple unnecessary hoops as a solution to a very mundane issue". At the end of the day, while there should be a strive for realism, it's a video game. The level of convolution seemingly being forced into each update is excessive, and it gets to a stage where it feels like a chore to join the server with the amount of admin work necessary.

- Oftentimes complaints by players can be entirely overlooked and completely disregarded when not expressed as a full-form suggestion; there seems to be a level of pedantism in what is and isn't brought into question in terms of complaints by both members of higher administration and development, with some development members being very guilty of excess pedantism over balancing matters with observable differences which just seem to get ignored. In reality, there needs to be some level of consideration applied to every even somewhat reasonable complaint made by a community member, otherwise people end up just feeling discarded and frustrated.


In conclusion, while PERPHeads has improved in a lot of areas and made a lot of steps forward, it's beginning to feel like for every step made forwards there was a step made backwards in a different area. Feel free to post your thoughts, independent complaints, and opinions on statements made below.

With all these made up words can you please give me a TLDR. TTS is having a huge spaz attack.

Sorle said:

and a much greater decrease in verbal warnings for unintentional infringements

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A problem with this is that certain people in this community want to see each other banned as if it's a sport to get as many of your rivals banned. I've handed out numerous verbal warnings when I was a mod for rulebreaks that either weren't intentional, were low-impact or people genuinly refunded the persons involved completly. To the point where the original reporters we're happy and didn't care about others getting banned, this has gotten me at least 2 staff complaints due to the fact that "verbal warnings" aren't a thing and that other staff won't know what happened in the past if they ever break the rules again. The saddest part is that at least one of those wasn't even made by anyone directly impacted by those rulebreak(s). It was made out of pure rivalry towards me as a staff member.

Sorle said:

I've had a staff member directly inform me that they never issue verbal warnings, which is one of the most concerning statements I've heard in regards to administration in a long time.

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We actually got told off a few times for giving verbal warnings in general, that we shouldn't do those, instead just give them a warning. Problem with verbal warnings is that some people can get quite a few by different staff on the same day, it's not logged. I proposed to get "remarks" on the scamban profiles for this kind of stuff, but never got listened to. It would be a great addition to log some low-impact, not-intential rulebreaks, just to have it logged for the future. We have to stay real, some people are very good at lying in your face.

Sorle said:

or example the inability to dispute the length of a ban always seemed very unreasonable to me, with the requirement of a staff complaint just creating additional hostility.

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Same for this, I've addressed this during a meeting, as well as to a few admins, nothing really got done with it, seeing as a staff complaint could be made. "A dispute is only if you disagree with the punishment itself." The length of said punishment is staff discretion, so if it's too long, the staff member who banned you acted in the wrong, so should receive a staff complaint, which indeed adds additional hostility. We have to be honest with ourselves, all staff complaints are indeed confidential and your identity doesn't get revealed at any point, however I've always known who made a certain staff complaint on me, it's not hard.

Additionally I'm very glad you created this thread and I hope this will be discussed further within the administration team!

Elliot Podger's second paralake Manifesto before the 30/12/2021 bazaar massacre (Dont come to bazaar tomorrow incident)

Benj said:

Elliot Podger's second paralake Manifesto before the 30/12/2021 bazaar massacre (Dont come to bazaar tomorrow incident)

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WAIT FOR ME

To be honest the majority of this is more an administration team issue so I won't comment much on the first two points and more address the points that I have some say in.

New players
In regards to what assistance new players get I don't understand what you refer to as too much. They receive minimal benefits unless they attempt to integrate within the community by joining different aspects of it. The perks they receive are not handed to them on a plate.

Over moderation of toxicity and "hand holding"
I see where you're coming from a certain point and this probably is straying closer to administration but as it's something myself and Tyla have tried to combat through Communication Bans then I feel it's fit for me to comment on it. However, I do think much of why you feel this way is because quite a few punishments have been handed out to people being jokingly toxic to friends but staff have not realised it is friendly jokes. I think this isn't really much of an issue but it is something staff could maybe keep in mind when monitoring behaviour.

Complaints ignored
I do not feel this is fair or true. If anyone ever comes to me, I see someone complaining or suggesting change I will nine times out of ten acknowledge them and address their concerns or say we will take this on board. Any can contact me via forum PM and I will normally respond within hours.

Now for a more serious reply:

Consistency in moderation and administration duties:
Inconsistency is an issue that the upper staff team have been trying to patch for years to no avail. There's what some may call solid proof that within our very much enclosed community that personal opinions and feelings, such as negative opinions towards users or their playstyle may come into play when handling reports involving those users. Whilst in most cases of this accusation being thrown around this is simply not the case, to dismiss this as the possibility in certain cases wouldn't be outlandish.

What is seemingly a real issue we should actively work on overcoming has taken such a long time at this point that despite clear proof of change, its hard for some people to accept the change as the issue is seemingly still there, albeit at a lesser scale. A complete rewording of many rules could come into play as to patch out these inconsistencies but as demonstrated by the 1.2 change it takes an appalling amount of time for some users to learn and adapt to these changes, and that was a simple line of text being changed. Imagine if this were the case for, say, 3 rules, or even the whole lot.

Unfortunately its likely that a few key issues bought up are beyond saving at this point. People don't like change, change takes a lot of time and effort to pull off. The best we can do is grin and bear it for the most part.

In regards to disputing a ban length, I'm very much on the fence about this issue. On the plus side, It takes literally 0 effort for a dispute on a ban length that is completely invalid to be weeded out as such. Seeing as typically the reason for the ban length is either mentioned in the ban comments of the ban, or within the text describing the nature of the ban itself, Meaning that seeing a staff members reasoning for the long ban by those handling said disputes straight up can allow administration to make decisions without even going through the hassle of contacting the staff member who issued the ban.
Disputing lengths of bans:
A huge issue with allowing users to dispute the length of their punishments is that in most cases the appeal will fall on deaf ears and that typically, administration have in the past been known to edit a ban length to see fit to the actions that lead up to the ban. An example of this was, I banned a user who went to school with another user and announced the name of their school and their city to them at the bazaar for 6 months on the terms that the user who had this information leaked was not fussed about it when they found out who it was who said it. I was told specifically not to permaban this user from a higher up member of staff, only for an admin meeting to occur where my ban length of 6 months, that I was told to give, was not severe enough, and the ban was extended to permanent. Alongside this, other bans, including a 6 month one, were reduced. Ban lengths were at this pretty recent point edited by administration if the punishment was deemed too far or not far enough.

Furthermore, there's no guidelines when it comes to issuing these sanctions on users, meaning that it would simply be a matter of opinion if a ban length is deemed unfair. If this were the case, everyone could dispute their ban lengths for what they did and in most cases, accepting one dispute whilst denying another could lead to all sorts of issues. You could argue it would make users feel targeted by members of the administration team but at the same time it would be a good way of proving that you are victim of this sort of abuse of authority if allegations of such conduct were made.

If say, guidelines on ban lengths were made and made public, This dispute system would work brilliantly however this opens up all sorts of possibilities for consistently toxic users to commit the same rule breaks to receive the same fixed punishments because they know they can wait out the ban, come back and do it again. The level of humanity and discretion required by staff would also deteriorate as it would force us to operate off of a form rather than use our own intuition to deal with rule breaks how we see fit.

A personal thing I've seen from past and maybe present staff however is quite often they aren't open for confrontation on their issued punishments. I personally would be more than happy to justify every punishment I've ever given to a user on the basis that the user in question who I punished asks for it, And if they have anything constructive on my conduct to say then I can take that and look into it further, and possibly use it to better myself if its valid. I've seen users question a staff members methods and authority only for it to be compiled onto their punishment as "poor cooperation" or "Bad attitude". Of course, I'm not considering genuine toxicity as constructive and valid and all punishments issued for that sort of behaviour are valid.

New player benefits:
In regards to new player benefits, Whilst I see your point on it offering some absurd benefits, such as increased gambling odds and significant resistance from conventional raiding methods, this is merely the brain child of years upon years of complaints. Larger organisations and players (At some points myself included) used new players lack of experience over our own combined experience to our advantage in order to gain loot and simply, give ourselves something to do that involved killing cops and not having users who are just as experienced as us drop us mean messages in LOOC as they stored our weapons we overpaid for. These benefits were added as a direct result of player feedback. If we had implemented these features far sooner who knows how many players would have stuck around. New players are sticking around considerably more than they did in 2018, especially during the near-fatal dry season that damn near killed our server when all we could muster up was no more than 40 players on days that that time last year we'd be sat in a queue server behind nearly as many as that.

Efan said:

To be honest the majority of this is more an administration team issue so I won't comment much on the first two points and more address the points that I have some say in.

New players
In regards to what assistance new players get I don't understand what you refer to as too much. They receive minimal benefits unless they attempt to integrate within the community by joining different aspects of it. The perks they receive are not handed to them on a plate.

Over moderation of toxicity and "hand holding"
I see where you're coming from a certain point and this probably is straying closer to administration but as it's something myself and Tyla have tried to combat through Communication Bans then I feel it's fit for me to comment on it. However, I do think much of why you feel this way is because quite a few punishments have been handed out to people being jokingly toxic to friends but staff have not realised it is friendly jokes. I think this isn't really much of an issue but it is something staff could maybe keep in mind when monitoring behaviour.

Complaints ignored
I do not feel this is fair or true. If anyone ever comes to me, I see someone complaining or suggesting change I will nine times out of ten acknowledge them and address their concerns or say we will take this on board. Any can contact me via forum PM and I will normally respond within hours.

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Between additional drug yields, often large amounts of protection due to their tag (which lasts for way too long imo), and everything else it is a bit much. It could probably be adjusted well enough by just lowering the duration of the new player tag because a lot of it comes from the pretty much universal agreement to not target new players, but it's very much common for me to see people with the new player tag in 500k+ cars actually being relatively established already.

I think the administrative perception of toxicity is strange more than anything as opposed to the quantity of moderation. It's gone too far the other way from allowing too much to allowing too little, in my eyes - coming from someone who nearly ended up with a 3 month ban for "extreme" toxicity for being passive aggressive if I backed down at any point pmsl

I know for a fact you and Tyla are very good with the complaints thing, that one was more targeted towards upper administration and especially development.

The only problem that I've had with the administration of the server is the inactivity and lack of interest in the server, now I don't know how it's been when I've been gone for a half month cus of christmas celebrations and just spending time off my computer but it got much better towards the end of my activity.

The part where you talk about verbal warnings is the biggest bull I've ever read from a staff member, every report I ever make; if the person is genuinely sorry for their actions I ask for them to not be punished for it other than getting told off, there's no point in them being given a warning if they're actually sorry about it and if they didn't mean to violate the rules in my eyes. I used to work a lot with verbal warnings and a lot of people argue against it because "oh how are you going to know if they violate the rule again?" Firstly; Every situation is different. Secondly; Communication in the staff team would stop this from happening, I can't speak for the staff team and say how it is now but when I was staff we were very good at communicating with each other and utilized the administration chat very well.

John Daymon said:

I can't speak for the staff team and say how it is now but when I was staff we were very good at communicating with each other and utilized the administration chat very well.

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Don't mean to leak anything but staff communicate very well within Slack but their focus is entirely on toxicity or people who break general conduct rules. You will rarely see an occassional 'remember this guy so he doesn't do stupid stuff again' but that's about it.

I just think staff need to be more lenient towards giving punishments unless they entirely see it fit to do so for example if the rule breaker is a repeat offender or did something they were completely aware off. Their conduct in a situation is weighted towards my decision (when I was staff lol) which is why I was more 'hesitant' on giving out punishments, if I had to it was more of a warning or a ban that wouldn't last so long.

One thing people also seem to dislike is staff constantly hovering or spectating specific people. It happened before and breaks a lot of trust between a player and the staff team. I'm not sure if this still happens however, this always irked me, you can be seen in demo's so it's easy to see for how long or much you're stalking someone.

Overall it's easy (IMO) to be a staff member if you're actually just an okay guy that accepts other people and their differences in opinions they might have without taking the piss and trying to help as best as you can. Be open to criticism and put yourself in the shoes of a player during a sit to give yourself a better perspective (this is literally what I wrote in the Staff Requirements thread lmao)

~phone

John Daymon said:

I can't speak for the staff team and say how it is now but when I was staff we were very good at communicating with each other and utilized the administration chat very well.

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Whilst what you’ve said is absolutely true and merited, this is the only part I can’t agree with. Staff aren’t on 24/7, and they aren’t expected to be, so you can’t always rely on the same staff member that gave so and so a verbal warning to still be on 7 hours later when/if they do it again. I’m all for verbal warnings, but discretion must be used when issuing them. Otherwise, things will slip through the cracks and players will get away with things unnecessarily.

curak said:

We actually got told off a few times for giving verbal warnings in general, that we shouldn't do those, instead just give them a warning. Problem with verbal warnings is that some people can get quite a few by different staff on the same day, it's not logged. I proposed to get "remarks" on the scamban profiles for this kind of stuff, but never got listened to. It would be a great addition to log some low-impact, not-intential rulebreaks, just to have it logged for the future. We have to stay real, some people are very good at lying in your face.

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Similarly, I just want to comment on your points regarding verbal warnings. You’re absolutely right about why they aren’t normally issued, but I was present during the meeting in which your idea was raised and I can assure you that it was fairly considered and discussed in the admin meeting that followed. The problem is that if you’re going to leave a remark on someone’s profile, you’re better off warning them. If you thing something is serious enough to be logged, warn them. If you think someone deserves to be let off on that occasion, it doesn’t need to be logged at all. Adding such a system would result in an excess of verbal warnings and this “remark” system would likely be overused.

Verbal warnings as a whole can be a very effective way of dealing with a player in certain situations. Cases such as unintentional rule infractions, lack of knowledge, etc, can warrant a verbal warning depending on different factors. However, it does require a good use of one’s discretion. For example, if a player didn’t mean to break a rule, was it out of them being idiotic? If a player didn’t know they were breaking a rule, have they been here long enough that they should? There are lots of things that factor into a punishment and it isn’t always as easy as “leaving it at a verbal”, nor is that always an appropriate option. They can’t always be relied on, and I’ve seen a lot of verbal warnings be inappropriately issued; hence why we generally discouraged staff from handing them out unless they it was absolutely appropriate. It was never a case of “don’t give verbal warnings”, more “avoid giving them out in most cases so as to avoid players getting away with the same thing twice”. That being said; if you give a verbal warning to someone under appropriate circumstances, they shouldn’t reoffend!

Some other excellent points have been raised in this thread, I just thought I’d comment on this. This post has caused some very constructive replies and I can personally agree with quite a bit of what’s been said, especially from @RIM.

(written on phone)

Sorle said:

that one was more targeted towards upper administration and especially development.

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Can you give examples of the development part? In my opinion, development has improved a lot in the past year. It used to be "PH Accepted", "PH Denied", "We don't care". And now, I've at least tried to force everyone to put detailed reasons in when making decisions, and on top of that create server discussions for updates to gather community feedback. And when it comes to staff complaints on developers, that has gone from something that seemed to just be ignored to something where real action is taken.

Sam said:

Can you give examples of the development part? In my opinion, development has improved a lot in the past year. It used to be "PH Accepted", "PH Denied", "We don't care". And now, I've at least tried to force everyone to put detailed reasons in when making decisions, and on top of that create server discussions for updates to gather community feedback. And when it comes to staff complaints on developers, that has gone from something that seemed to just be ignored to something where real action is taken.

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Once again, I'd say you've been very good at this and I don't want to start naming names, but there definitely was a specific person in mind with this statement, especially with disputes over the balancing of some weapons, specifically the M4, which was simply suggested to have not changed when people complained, when practical use cases suggested consistently the opposite

There have been very good levels of improvement in this area overall in truth, but there were still some issues raised from specific individuals which did not sit with me very well in recent times

Sam said:

Can you give examples of the development part? In my opinion, development has improved a lot in the past year. It used to be "PH Accepted", "PH Denied", "We don't care". And now, I've at least tried to force everyone to put detailed reasons in when making decisions, and on top of that create server discussions for updates to gather community feedback. And when it comes to staff complaints on developers, that has gone from something that seemed to just be ignored to something where real action is taken.

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So what about when Tiny places bombs as medic? Then goes ahead and punishes others for rulebreaks? It’s so hypocritical and sometimes actually rather annoying because you receive non stop explosions calls, life alerts all over the place, it’s just a shit show and not fun for something that is supposed to be serious roleplay.

Yeah i get people can have their fun especially developers for the time and effort they put in, but I’ve seen this shit go too far one too many times now.

Sorle said:

Once again, I'd say you've been very good at this and I don't want to start naming names, but there definitely was a specific person in mind with this statement, especially with disputes over the balancing of some weapons, specifically the M4, which was simply suggested to have not changed when people complained, when practical use cases suggested consistently the opposite

There have been very good levels of improvement in this area overall in truth, but there were still some issues raised from specific individuals which did not sit with me very well in recent times

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Well, thank you
Not to sound rude or up my own ass, and I am sure you understand what I am about to say next. Just because something is suggested, and is something people want does not mean it will be so. Developers have or should have (lol) some creative freedom, as long as that freedom does not impact the overall player-base in such a way that causes major issues. As you can see under the Suggestions node, we've denied plenty of highly popular suggestions simply because we do not think it's the right way to go. Although, each decision taken should be justified in writing when something is denied, which informs everyone of the development team's thoughts and allows for a possible discussion if someone disagrees.
I've not heard any complaints about the M4A1 in recent times, so can not comment on the issues people have brought up. But what I can say is that re-balancing of weapons is on the agenda, but as I am sure everyone understands, that is a massive project. If the M4A1 is bad, then that should be changed in my opinion.

Clarky said:

So what about when Tiny places bombs as medic? Then goes ahead and punishes others for rulebreaks? It’s so hypocritical and sometimes actually rather annoying because you receive non stop explosions calls, life alerts all over the place, it’s just a shit show and not fun for something that is supposed to be serious roleplay.

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I would suggest you submit a staff complaint if you think an owner has broken the rules or has abused their powers in any way. The same goes for developers. I have personally taken developer staff complaints very seriously. In the past developers have had access to everything to perform debug duties, catch cheaters, catch alt-accounts and help enforce rules when staff is nowhere to be seen. But as you may have heard, recently the developer permissions got nerfed due to abuse. And please don't quote me, but I think developers now have the same permissions as Community Managers + debug permissions. Which is a big cutdown on permissions.
And before people like Creepis say "I told you dev perms would be an issue years ago", let me say this. Abuse of development permissions has not really been an issue before, at least no one has reported it via staff complaints. The only situation that was reported that was not within the last 6 months was like 1.5 years ago and dealt with. Where I am going with this wall of text is that you should trust the system and submit a complaint.

I think the server is less of a serious roleplay and more of a restricted roleplay. Devil's Son's Dad said that once over Teamspeak between Mr.Lewis and probably Bolli (I think) and they were arguing over some rule discrepancy.

I skimmed through the thread so if I missed something just let me know. Anyway I am only gonna talk about the staff side. I personally do not punish people unless they don't care or its a repeat offender and they need to learn. Even when it comes to people running intersection/jumping lights or breaking nlr and attempting to grab guns, Typically I will just slay them and tell them why and hope they learn with that. I know there is repeat offenders of this and if/when I see it again they do get punished properly. I personally wish we had a note thing (Like on bans/warnings/blacklists) but for someone's who profile that we can view, and staff can write notes there but that's up to others. As for the staff team itself, I have my own view on that and I am sure a lot of people know that, especially the staff team itself. But I will say it has improved slightly since the last staff meeting. There was something to do with a complaint on me recently and I wont go into too much detail but it took ages for me to be contacted about it. I did speak to administration and they explained it but still, how am I meant to remember exactly something basically 3 weeks ago. The activity in the staff team has improved slightly but still, it isn't amazing. I get people have lives but you volunteer to the role so you must at least attempt to meet expectations. I wont say exactly what I said in slack but it got a good response from most of the staff team but there was a clear divide on what role in the staff team didn't like it and it was discussed properly hence changes.

I will finish this later at somepoint....

Back in day, we had a staff member that was a part of a particular organisation that would constantly complain on other moderators. His name began with an "A", and "A" was in the same organisation as "H", "H" did not like me, or @John Daymon and would stop at nothing to get me ousted (which succeeded thanks to another "A").

I’ve taken some time to read the entirety of your post, and wanted to spend some time to leave some of my own thoughts on some of what you’ve said as a member of the administration team.

The whole idea surrounding verbal warnings has been a frequently discussed issue within the staff team in the past, as the idea has been thrown around in staff meetings, as well as discussions through slack. I’m very much in the position of mainly reserving verbal warnings for very specific scenarios. These include new players, incredibly minor rule infringements, when the rule in question causes a bit of confusion due to a grey area or where someone's actions are mostly justified. I would be completely fine with other staff members following a similar routine. I understand curak raised in the past about a ‘remark’ system, although it seems pretty unnecessary to have ‘pre-warnings’ for most situations if you like. Generally, if it is a clear-cut rule violation, some sort of punishment will likely be issued by the staff member handling the situation for a level of traceability. I have unfortunately in the past witnessed scenarios where a player has been issued more than one verbal warning for a very similar rule violation, which is pretty counter-intuitive as it clearly hasn’t helped them understand the rule much better, and they haven’t actually faced a proper punishment. Maybe a way to tackle this issue is to look at the root cause of the problem, which is likely subjectivity of the rules. This moves me on nicely to your second point.

There’s no doubt that a large proportion of the rules have a level of subjectivity involved in them. I believe this is a prevalent issue that impacts a lot of roleplay servers and not just ours, as it is not practical to have individual rules to cover loads of potential scenarios. However, that being said, it could be worth to add more examples to individual rules, like rule 3.4 is now on the things that are allowed and disallowed. Feel free to create a rule discussion thread for a specific rule to include more examples (with examples included ideally), and this will be discussed in one of our admin meetings. We want to hear from the player base on things that are generally considered widely acceptable, but maybe aren’t with the current rules.

As for disputes and your “coin toss” suggestion, I can assure you that every single one I have been involved in has involved some sort of discussion for an unbiased conclusion, and the same should be happening with others. Take your recent punishment issued by SamSN and backed by me. After you appealed, multiple staff members not involved in the situation came on Teamspeak and had a long discussion about it. I did have the opportunity to explain why I believed it was against the rules, but ultimately the decided outcome was different, which proves the dispute system is effective. In most disputes, it has to be handled by at least two senior moderators or one senior moderator and two enforcers+ to come to a fair decision.

Thank you for spending your own time to write something like this up to highlight some of the ongoing issues that we may be facing. This will likely be a topic of discussion in an upcoming admin meeting. I was going to write a response for each area you've highlighted but didn't want to write pages and page of stuff with information overload, and leave some areas for other members of staff to leave thoughts if they wish to do so.

Hayden said:

I’ve taken some time to read the entirety of your post, and wanted to spend some time to leave some of my own thoughts on some of what you’ve said as a member of the administration team.

The whole idea surrounding verbal warnings has been a frequently discussed issue within the staff team in the past, as the idea has been thrown around in staff meetings, as well as discussions through slack. I’m very much in the position of mainly reserving verbal warnings for very specific scenarios. These include new players, incredibly minor rule infringements, when the rule in question causes a bit of confusion due to a grey area or where someone's actions are mostly justified. I would be completely fine with other staff members following a similar routine. I understand curak raised in the past about a ‘remark’ system, although it seems pretty unnecessary to have ‘pre-warnings’ for most situations if you like. Generally, if it is a clear-cut rule violation, some sort of punishment will likely be issued by the staff member handling the situation for a level of traceability. I have unfortunately in the past witnessed scenarios where a player has been issued more than one verbal warning for a very similar rule violation, which is pretty counter-intuitive as it clearly hasn’t helped them understand the rule much better, and they haven’t actually faced a proper punishment. Maybe a way to tackle this issue is to look at the root cause of the problem, which is likely subjectivity of the rules. This moves me on nicely to your second point.

Click to expand...

Great post overall, I'll address this part in particular.

Then, in my eyes, the perception of warnings & the impact they may have on certain areas of the community (PLPD limitations for example) needs a shift - maybe a whole renaming of the system & reclarification of the actual intent of warnings. I understand the use of warnings as sort of a record-keeping method, however if warnings are used in such a manner with verbal warnings being heavily discouraged and/or limited, there should be a reclassification to warnings becoming less of a formal punishment and more of a record of infringements. Maybe along with this warnings being private could be reintroduced?