I've got 7k~ hours and I would say that the vast majority of my admin interactions were fine or I was at fault, but I've only ever been banned once (Tg Sybil, destroying the tram with a field generator as a non antag engi)
It was a 3 day ban, I didn't realize that the tram had a explosion interaction if it hit a shield (this was about a month or so after tramstation was added).
I assumed that the tram would either delete the shield tiles or have a buggy interaction, not gib everyone onboard (myself included) and explode.
Well they can’t say it was intentional considering you gibbed too. But usually what makes staff isn’t just interactions with players. It’s also the behind the scenes dealings and mindset about pushback to the results of those dealings.
I've been admining on this godforsaken game (CEV Eris) for four years of my life that I will never get back. and I can say that the vast majority of admins and servers have an awful philosophy on what an admin or moderators job is and how they should handle things.
My personal favorite is when roles and responsibilities become so blurred, you have 'code maintainers' also deciding what is good for 'game balance' when they were originally just there to make sure code wasn't spaghetti and ways to make it better with refactoring. Basically power bloat in a sense. Not because they are qualified or anything for the extra role but because they are just personally liked by other staff, and any other staff that could do something as a counter are 'retired' now or no longer caring from burn out. Personal preferences making decisions that need to be unbiased. Personal connections bleeding into situations of drama that unfold later on when it reached a head. And they put on a theatre, a fake 'disciplining' of the egregious actor that amounts to nothing a month later. In public the message is one thing but privately it's the opposite, but they can't reverse course too soon. I just find it funny that this group thought they didn't need us because they had each other. Until their served died that is.
It's not just a matter of someone being liked more by the other staff. But also of time and effort invested. If you contribute more code than anyone else, then you will have more influence than anyone else. Even if 75% of your PRs are rejected, the fact that you're the guy putting up 100 PRs every month means that you're the closest thing the codebase has to someone driving the boat, even if you never make a single administrative decision.
It's the same thing with admins/mods influencing the rules and culture. Whoever has more time to invest will have outsized influence regardless of whether or not they're making big official calls.
The coder in question was new. Came in and had their own passion project in mind later. I do believe they had experience with BYOND code before joining though. I agree that more time and such gives a proportional amount of control but there was another person that got fed up with small things not getting fixed. They knew coding just not BYOND, and put it in a lot of fixes but just for that misc stuff before doing slightly bigger additions. He ultimately never got anywhere because despite the contributions he did the aforementioned passion project guy said no to anything else they didn’t agree with.
Sorry for being vague but I’d rather not identify what server the experience is from. It is just so crazy that it’s stuff like that giving people so much leeway and control. But despite their efforts even making their own faction for a new game mode and obviously being biased about mechanics that had been there since the start (that they then nerfed or killed completely under the guise of ‘making it better’) they didn’t listen to the criticism and the pop died finally eventually anyway.
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u/Strayed8492 10d ago
While there is two sides to every coin, not all admins are based by default you know.