Staff issue

Well, the holdup on some reports is that people often do not screen-record the incident, at least on my end. When that happens, every single time I'll usually have to resort to watching demos which pulls me out of the server for approximately 20 to 40 minutes. This will result in me handling reports I know I can take care of with actual evidence within the report and placing the report with no evidence on the back burner, depending on the type of report. Then you have to remember we open an F6 with the accused player, validate their responses, and or wait for their responses. If they leave the game we will reach out and try to contact them outside of the game via Disord or worse, Steam. Some of these reports take time.

Yes, there are also staff members who are going back to school or like me, have to leave town for work-related business. At the end of the day, there is still an action request sub-thread and things will get taken care of at some point, sometimes it won't always be immediate.
I feel like the staff team are under a lot of pressure, its like i feel like staff are like not allowed too play the game in a way (I feel like on top of that it not fair on them as they also want too play the game), Helpers don't apply hear as in all honesty helper was easier then most probably I think the whole point of the story is too download medal or something too record as it helps the staff team so reports don't take as long.


This the the legal disclaimer I'm not endorsed by medal! Im just dumb
 
Well, the holdup on some reports is that people often do not screen-record the incident, at least on my end. When that happens, every single time I'll usually have to resort to watching demos which pulls me out of the server for approximately 20 to 40 minutes. This will result in me handling reports I know I can take care of with actual evidence within the report and placing the report with no evidence on the back burner, depending on the type of report. Then you have to remember we open an F6 with the accused player, validate their responses, and or wait for their responses. If they leave the game we will reach out and try to contact them outside of the game via Disord or worse, Steam. Some of these reports take time.

Yes, there are also staff members who are going back to school or like me, have to leave town for work-related business. At the end of the day, there is still an action request sub-thread and things will get taken care of at some point, sometimes it won't always be immediate.
Oh that's fine, like I understand the process and you're under a lot of strain and being stretched very thin; my concern is that there often just won't be staff on during peak times at all so no reports are being done whatsoever.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't an issue I'm taking with staff members at all, it's much more to do with recruitment. There simply just needs to be more staff who are available to do reports.

Also could do with a community reminder of some form for people to make their reports actually useful and try to make it easier for staff where possible.
 
I mean as you've stated, it's currently a big issue where there are simply no active staff. Obviously there are various reasons for this which some is just laziness but a lot of it is we all have irl commitments and simply don't have time to sit on Perp all day like a lot of us used too.

There are specific individuals who I would say are currently "carrying" the staff team and their are others who could be doing a bit more. There isn't really any other way of resolving this problem apart from recruiting additional staff however, this isn't as easy as it seems since there aren't many candidates who have the support of the staff team and are willing to take on the role.

With the above being said, we could lower the standard of Enforcer's who we recruit however, I don't think this is the solution as we require experienced members of the community who have a good standing for a reason.

As discussed above by other users, I also think there is a high volume of reports which have no effort put into them by the reporting user or are just simply stupid. We get reports with one word within them or some which don't make sense at all. This means we have to waste time trying to obtain information which should already be included. Maybe we're in need of a new reporting method which specifically asks for questions around the incident.

This is just my thoughts on the matter.
 
There isn't really any other way of resolving this problem apart from recruiting additional staff however, this isn't as easy as it seems since there aren't many candidates who have the support of the staff team and are willing to take on the role.
Agree with your whole post and also this for the most part - certain individuals who could be strong candidates are looked over due to certain rather silly notions within very upper management which they seem to be stuck on. But definitely agree there isn't exactly the best pool of candidates at the moment and we would either have to incentivize the role further somehow to make stronger potential candidates actually interested OR lower standards to recruit more; either option isn't great but we're met with unfortunate circumstances.

If there isn't something present already I might try to draft some basic guidelines to and assistance with reporting that could be used in some way to increase the quality of player-submitted reports e.g advice on the use of clipping software.
 
The biggest thing as far as recruitment is we need people who we can trust, who without a doubt don't need to be micromanaged as well as being trusted. There's a lot of trust that is given to staff members, not saying that anyone who has been denied can't be trusted, there are also various other reasons why there are denials on applications. Unfortunately, there's only so much we can do with what we have, and we, to my knowledge and opinion are doing the best we can do for you, the player base. I personally appreciate those of you who understand we're overwhelmed with reports. I understand where you guys are coming from.
 
Anyone noticed that recently reports will take a very long amount of time to be completed on average & the ratio of staff actively doing reports to users will often be very low, even during peak times?

It's been a growing problem recently on the server, and it has led to massive mounting pressure on the few active staff who do a lot of reports. Surely in some way this needs to be addressed? There simply aren't enough active staff members for the amount of players the server gets; there needs to be some sort of push for more good applicants to come forward because in no world should there be no staff members on during peak hours.
I don't know why you're asking why, when you know the answer already. Would you want to be staff and deal with small children screaming/idiots/insufferable assholes, willingly every day on perp? No, you wouldn't, you would get tired of it too. I've been staff on one of the most cancerous servers known to mankind, so I know how aids it is to constantly deal with reports. Some staff just want to get on the server to play and RP like they used to, instead of dealing with 20+ reports all day. The staff who are inactive, also have lives as I am sure you know. I believe the server could be more open when taking enforcers however, it seems like you have to be a goodie two shoes to even get helper on this sever... well minus @rxsm
 
I don't know why you're asking why, when you know the answer already. Would you want to be staff and deal with small children screaming/idiots/insufferable assholes, willingly every day on perp? No, you wouldn't, you would get tired of it too. I've been staff on one of the most cancerous servers known to mankind, so I know how aids it is to constantly deal with reports. Some staff just want to get on the server to play and RP like they used to, instead of dealing with 20+ reports all day. The staff who are inactive, also have lives as I am sure you know.
i would gladly do this again if it wasn't for the idea of working under specific individuals who i cannot see eye-to-eye with morally - if you're reading this and have doubts of whether or not i'm referring to you then i'm not referring to you

there are people who are genuinely passionate about helping (see the helper rank, they basically get nothing for it afaik) and want to make a difference, i have a lot of love for this community and i enjoy helping it wherever i can through guides and resources, people like this do exist
 
i would gladly do this again if it wasn't for the idea of working under specific individuals who i cannot see eye-to-eye with morally - if you're reading this and have doubts of whether or not i'm referring to you then i'm not referring to you

there are people who are genuinely passionate about helping (see the helper rank, they basically get nothing for it afaik) and want to make a difference, i have a lot of love for this community and i enjoy helping it wherever i can through guides and resources, people like this do exist
I feel you, had the same feelings
 
What would save time and I’m sure some staff do this already is:
no clip, only demo? -> “make AR”

That said I can’t blame staff for being demotivated, they’re paid with in store credit without much to use it on while expected to invest multiple long sessions of what essentially is an office job.

Maybe V6 will drive more staff to be on / more users to apply, it feels like drought season and we’re just waiting.
 
Addressing the obvious elephant in the room here would be the sheer influx of players who seem to have a different idea on how to play versus how the server expects players to play. For awhile now since we’ve gained huge influxes of players, I’ve found myself experiencing different sorts of players daily than I did when I got staff initially in 2020.

The reality is, players are en masse reporting without on-hand evidence. They make the report and give us no other option than contacting the individual. This becomes immensely more difficult if that player has disconnected, and even more so if they don’t bother joining our community platforms. Chasing people up on reports is difficult, and it seems with players investing themselves into joining the forums or even the discord for more than 2 minutes less and less, it’s all just a convoluted mess. I’ve got a few pending friend requests with players who I told me to message them via steam with their report outcomes even. The fact is, a singular report can lead to a several day investigation, even seeking out a simple statement can stretch across multiple days.

To further complicate this issue of reports being dragged out, as mentioned by @Allen Kennedy above, a significant number of reports start off as a 15 minute game of 20 Questions just for the reporter to get to the point and explain what precisely they are accusing someone of, and in more cases by the day, who they’re even reporting (if they even know).

If I’m going to be completely and brutally honest, a huge part of the blame befalls onto the lower quality players of the community, as the common subject of a report, also contribute heavily to this issue. A sizeable fraction (sizeable enough to make a huge difference in this regard) of lower quality players who have no idea that we aren’t a DarkRP server and don’t know at all how a seriousRP server really is supposed to work, or chose to disregard this entirely, cause far more issues than benefit and should be made to decide very quickly if they’re going to make a conscious effort to contributing positively to the integrity of the game or become disqualified from it, possibly even indefinitely.

Even if, let’s say 20/ 80 players to join in the span of an hour decide to troll, that’s still 20 reports at the very least on top of existing reports on more experienced players who choose to disregard the rules entirely to benefit themselves, as well as false reports on things that simply aren’t rulebreaks.

Usually on normal days that aren’t during summer holidays, it’s only peak hours that goes into chaos, but many educational facilities are closed and peoples work schedules could be different. Which only escalates the issue, as the influx of new players, and subsequently, trolls increases exponentially. The peak hours stretch further across the day because people have less to do.

Having such a high influx of these players throughout the entirety of daylight hours changes the whole “Peak hours” system. It becomes more mentally draining to deal with the constant report and rulebreaker hours, when those hours are 9am to 1am the next day, meaning staff are doing the same effort they’d usually be doing, in some cases more, yet for each report done, more take it’s place.

Let’s also not forget just how easy it is to troll here. You can drive into someone’s car and it’s a rulebreak capable of costing them significant amounts of money and time wasted, that is if you didn’t just opt to drop a cash register and send their car into the stratosphere. People hang out in droves in bazaar with little care for their surroundings, making massrdm easy. And people buy their props, which are harder to get than spawnmenu, meaning arson on even a little shed shack sets a player back significantly. Job cars are regularly used to VDM, evade police or speed down the wrong lane of traffic. To the average gmod troll , who can’t even gamble yet, they fall under the impression that there’s more to do to troll than to play normally.

Generally, this all adds up to the masses of reports, and subsequently, the report times + staff activity.

Tl;dr: Summer holidays = more players = more inexperienced players running around learning rules from experience + More serverhopping gmod troll tourists = more reports.
Also, More free time because of summer holidays = More players able to play outside of normal peak hours = peak hours start a lot earlier and end a lot later = More reports coming in across said wider spectrum of hours = Staff putting more effort than usual into this = staff get more tired before mass population hours end = staff members taking break.
Tips:
- If you report get evidence, use clipping software, and describe what exactly happened accurately with as much info as possible. The more you put into your singular report the easier it is for the person doing your report and 4 others is to get it done.
- If you didn’t clip something, rather than asking staff to go thru your demo on peak hours, doing it yourself saves us time, and allows us to fix the issue of staff not being on during the entirety of mass populace hours.
- Follow le rules and read them before you play!
 
I feel like this post has been heavily misinterpreted:

Low quality reports has always been a problem, and I agree that players should make higher quality reports. BUT the issue I'm bringing up is that there are regularly no staff on to do ANY reports at all; we either need:
  • a new better way to incentivize staff roles so that stronger candidates come forwards
  • more aggressive recruitment of staff, via encouraging potential good candidates to apply directly or just giving them the role if they've proven trustworthy enough
  • a slight lowering of standards to deal with the gap in the staff team
Making higher-quality reports streamlines the experience for everyone when there are staff on handling reports, and an increase in trolls does result in an increase in reports. However as it stands, a lot of the time the server just has nobody to do reports, and whether or not there's 2 or 20 reports doesn't change the fact that none of them are being dealt with.

The staff team are in a nasty predicament and could really do with being thrown a bone of some form. The time of the year could be impacting this but I don't see how things will be improving to an acceptable degree when there will be 10 unhandled reports instead of 20.
 
If there isn't something present already I might try to draft some basic guidelines to and assistance with reporting that could be used in some way to increase the quality of player-submitted reports e.g advice on the use of clipping software.
I'm going to be real, if we don't get something like this I don't think anything will change with report counts or time-to-solve. Too many reports are stupidly written, lacking information, and more often wastes of time. At some point I will start ignoring reports that simply don't put enough work in to get their outcome, and in the grand scheme of things that's not good at all and should not be happening.
 
I'm going to be real, if we don't get something like this I don't think anything will change with report counts or time-to-solve. Too many reports are stupidly written, lacking information, and more often wastes of time. At some point I will start ignoring reports that simply don't put enough work in to get their outcome, and in the grand scheme of things that's not good at all and should not be happening.
There is https://help.perpheads.com/page/server-reports
Maybe something could be in implemented in the report textbox, similar to how the DNA upload textbox has a pre-placed "Enter your note" before the player starts typing in the box, that just mentions to be descriptive, provide info & a clip if possible.

Another remedy to ease how tedious it can be for staff might be to open up image requests, inactive property clearing, a limited prop increase (~60), or other mundane tasks to the Helper team so the Mod team is less swamped. It will require more training for Helpers/Senior, but generally only good quality candidates are accepted anyhow and they should be capable if trusted to have the roles. The tediousness seems to be centered in dealing with rulebreaks with limited info, and having these tasks outsourced could help a tiny bit.
 
I wish you could make a template like an AR that needs filling out when doing an F6 this would make so many better reports instead of all the stupid ones the mods get
 
Another remedy to ease how tedious it can be for staff might be to open up image requests, inactive property clearing, a limited prop increase (~60), or other mundane tasks to the Helper team so the Mod team is less swamped. It will require more training for Helpers/Senior, but generally only good quality candidates are accepted anyhow and they should be capable if trusted to have the roles. The tediousness seems to be centered in dealing with rulebreaks with limited info, and having these tasks outsourced could help a tiny bit.
This would be nice. I would also like to suggest something like the props menu but for properties. Using !property [name] and then seeing a list of what they own would be nice, or just !properties showing every single property on the server and allowing you to goto, send all owner props to storage, or sell
 
I know that quality is what you are looking for in a staff team. But sometimes it takes hiring the ones that aren't your first pick in order to get the quality that you are looking for some people are made to fit into the role and not just come naturally. I genuinely think that far to many people are passed up on for little to no reason. That is why this server goes through so many staff members because everyone wants to be it until there is 1 or 2 people on duty. The same people that aren't accepting these enforcer applications are the same ones who don't take reports.


Just give people that are active in the community and actually care about the game mode a chance to prove you wrong. Interacting on the stupid ass forums or discord can come in time. You dont wake up one day and just be an amazing enforcer or admin it comes in time.
 
I'll be real honest here. Half the reports we get is "I got RDM".

And the conversation goes like this:
"What do you mean RDMed?"
"He killed me for no reason"
2min pass

"Can you tell me what happened?"
"He killed me for no reason"
3min pass

"Do you have evidence?"
"No, check logs"
1min passes

"Yes, the logs in fact show you got killed. Can you explain what happened?"
"He killed me for no reason."

"Okay I'll open up a report with the other person"
waiting 20min for an answer from the reported person

"Can you explain why you killed xyz?"
"He threatened me"
10min pass

"How did he threaten you?"
"He threatened my life"
20min pass

"Yes, but what did he say?"
"Oh that he will slice my throat"
5min pass

And this is not the end of the conversation yet. Then you have to go back to the other guy and tell him that for him to in a loop and disagree and him wanting the reported player's demo to be requested and reviewed, whilst there is 10 other reports waiting to be solved. And then you review the demo and it's exactly what the reported player told you.

Besides we're also just players. Not all of us have the time to play every day and when we play, we don't want to do reports the entire time.

Additionally with the change that in the past if a player disconnected, you were forced to make an AR (which there is only a few of now). Now it goes completely on the handling staff member.

In terms of the "more staff" topic... A bad staff member can cause more harm than no staff members available every moment. It's not as simple as just give people staff and let them try it out. Disputes take time guys, because a group of staff members has to vote on it... 3 mods, 2 senior mods or 1 administrator.

I agree we could do more. But the playerbase could also do a lot more to help us out and not think of us as just report printing machines. So please. Help us out. Make your reports detailed and with evidence and trust me, we'll get through the reports a lot quicker!
 
Back
Top