Admin Meeting 2024-04-27

Agenda

• Brief updates from last meeting
• Murderbone
• Salamander RP
• Metashield
• Mandated celebration of the coming of Discourse
• Discourse
• Another mandated celebration of the coming of Discourse
• Review minutes

Topic Details

Brief updates from last meeting

The last meeting’s minutes are available at [link removed]

Summary

• Trialmin event restrictions changed for this batch. I’m not sure how that’s gone because I haven’t really been involved in this trial batch.
• We have gantt charts for trialmins that we’re using to keep a schedule for their trials, including deliverables (incredible)
• There is a propermin wide trialmin feedback/reporting/thingy thread that has somehow managed to not derail yet I think
• I updated the admin application with information on expectations, specifically around time commitment
• Murderbone is a topic on this agenda -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Communicate updates related to items from the last meeting to admins attending the meeting.

Murderbone

Summary

From the last meeting:

Murderboning is currently in a very large gray area and requires clarification. Will be brought up in a future meeting.

Basically we need to get at least a rough idea of what is murderbone so that we can put it in the rules when the great rewrite finishes in 7 years. Some important things are that it be clear with minimal gray areas, that it’s quick to communicate so that it doesn’t add an entire page of rules, and that it be somewhat robust against changes to the games so that we don’t have to rewrite it every 2 weeks when something new is added.

For some background, murderbone used to be essentially any voluntary and unnecessary round removal of another player. Gibbing people who weren’t targets of you for no real reason would have been murderboney. Around a year ago we loosened the definition to basically be mass killing in a way that “isn’t interesting”. That is omega subjective so literally all I’ve ever been able to do when people ask is give the example that was given when it was proposed, camping a maint grille is murderbone, running through the halls with an L6 is not.

This sort of ties in with mass station sabotage as it seeks to accomplish the same goal, ensure that antags aren’t essentially robbing non-antags of gameplay by treating the game like a deathmatch in situations where it is not meant to be a deathmatch. Some important questions are:

• How much do we want to enforce this with rules rather than just letting maintainers deal with it?
• If we are dealing with it with rules, how much of what we’re doing is just compensating for development issues, and should we be compensating that much?

I think intrinsically it’s going to be easier to communicate this the more extreme we go to either side. Kill anyone if you’re an antag and only try to accomplish your objectives are both fairly clear rules, things in the middle generally are not.

When we changed this a year ago, I suggested that we do so by just giving all antags a temporary objective to allow them to murderbone, something like “complete your objectives at any cost”, “(Optional) die a glorious death” or something, but that’s not the option we went with. We’re already pretty close to there being no rule, but I generally would still recommend that if loosening rules experimentally, it be done in a way that minimizes the loosening done through the actual text of the rules since it is a lot harder to get everyone on the same page if you need to tighten rules again. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine the opinions of attending admins about when killing transforms into murderbone.
2. Determine how to clearly and effectively communicate that to players and other admins.

Salamander RP

Summary

I have heard from several salamander players that the rp standard on salamander has fallen drastically. They specifically point to metagaming of antags, and EORG as significant issues. We should establish if there is a larger issue and find out how to deal with it. -nikthechampiongr

Meeting Goals

1. Establish whether the rp level on salamander has fallen by a signficant degree and why.
2. Examine ways to relieve the issue if it exists.

Metashield

Summary

Basically we need to get at least a rough idea of what is metagaming so that we can put it in the rules when the great rewrite finishes in 7 years. Some important things are that it be clear with minimal gray areas, that it’s quick to communicate so that it doesn’t add an entire page of rules, and that it be somewhat robust against changes to the games so that we don’t have to rewrite it every 2 weeks when something new is added.

imo a decent way to do this is to have a table that lists in one column what is metashielded, in another what causes the metashield to lift, and in another extra info or something like exemptions on who it applies to. Examples can be very effective for communicating rules, but can also take up a lot of space, if there’s a way to format things to include collapsed examples for each item, I think we should do that.

Also I have this draft https://wiki.spacestation14.io/wiki/User:Chief_Engineer/Metashield -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Determine the opinions of attending admins about what should be metashielded.
2. Determine how to clearly and effectively communicate that to players and other admins.

Mandated celebration of the coming of Discourse

Summary

Discourse is here, celebrate. Celebration is required. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Ensure that all present have celebrated the coming of Discourse

Discourse

Summary

Discourse is here. Has anyone noticed any issues, or have any concerns right now?

What about suggestions?

Related thread Discourse Organization Workshop -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Compile a list of issues that game admin noticed with Discourse
2. Compile a list of concerns that game admins have with Discourse
3. Compile a list of actionable suggestions that game admins have for improving Discourse

Another mandated celebration of the coming of Discourse

Summary

Discourse is here, celebrate again. Celebration is still required. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Ensure that all present have celebrated the coming of Discourse

Review minutes

Summary

The meeting minutes provide a record of the meeting for those who could not attend, and they are used to action decisions made in the meeting. For these reasons, it is important that they accurately represent what actually happened in the meeting. -Chief_Engineer

Meeting Goals

1. Ensure that nothing important is missing or misrepresented in the minutes.
2. Attempt to ensure that all topics have met their meeting goals. This can be done by ensuring that each meeting goal is directly addressed by the conclusion of the topic’s minutes.
3. Attempt to ensure that all conclusions fit into one of the following categories:
   1. Indicate that a meeting goal was completed.
   2. Are something actionable, meaning that they not only call for an action, but that action is specific enough that it does not require answering questions like “what exactly needs to be done?” or “how can this be done?”
   3. Clearly indicate that the meeting goals for the topic were not met. Examples: the discussion was tabled, the admin team did not reach a conclusion, the admin team was not able to make the conclusion actionable.

Minutes

Updates from last meeting

• Trialmin event restrictions changed. They cannot participate in events. They can host events with supervision near the end of their trial.
• We got the global trialmin thread and through the power of discourse it has not derailed.

Defining Murderboning

• Currently murderboning is an extremely large grey area that needs to be properly defined.
• We could define it as “a traitor going out of their way to murder other players without a reason.” This would include killing players which could plausible pose a threat but otherwise are not actively threatening the antagonist, and don’t contribute to them completing their objectives.
• Alternatively we can define the reasons that justify a traitor killing other players:
  • Killing the player has a strong connection to their objective,
  • They pose a threat to the traitor at the moment,
  • or they could plausible be a threat in the future.
• Additionally we can require that murderboning be a traitor taking a player out of the round permanently rather than simply killing them as medical can often just revive them in a short time. This would allow traitors to be able to murder an incredible amount of people but simply not making them unrevivable.
• This could simply be moved to admin discretion since it’s unbelievably hard to set out a proper definition and most cases can only be resolved on a case-by-case basis.
• IDEAGUYS: We could just have gameplay consequences, for example having players be automatically be put out as wanted if they reach a certain killcount.
• This will be put to a thread for further discussion.
• All of this will be put to a vote in the future.

Salamander RP status

• Consensus is that there has been a degredation of RP status on salamander with a lot of cases where players have “LRP+” behavior. E.g. validhunting terminators.
• We need to brush up on mrp rules and have much stricter enforcement of them.
• Dewhitelists should be handed out more freely to problematic players.
  • Dewhitelists can have the following standard: Should a player commit a violation of rp rules, then the handling admin may at their descrition apply dewhitelistment as a punishment.
• IDEAGUYS: Implement a way for players to properly try to suspect implants, and have a way for them to act on it without having to metagame.
• We currently do not have a proper definition of MRP. We only have a vague idea.
  • A proposed definition: Players act according to their role. They are not all knowing and attempt to cooperate with each other in order to accomplish tasks and try to act like this is a real workplace. This is also facilitated through stuff like space law. Even so, players are allowed to deviate from following these standards allowing them to be silly and bending what they are capable of.

Metashield

• We’ll be adopting the Metashield list which will be a list containing all the reasonable ways for specific antags, and items to be revealed. This list will be kept up to date routinely as the game gets updated.
• Ideally this stuff should be dealt with mechanically, however this is monumental task for contributors and maintainers and currently we are nowhere near that point.
• We’ll be sending this to thread hell for further refinement.

DISCOURSE!!!!

• DISCOURSE
• DISCOURSE
• DISCOURSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Problems with discourse

• Surprisingly nobody has had any issues after having barely used discourse.
• Clearly this means that discourse is perfect
• This topic will be brought up again in the next meeting.
• Admins should report issues with discourse on this thread

DISCOURSE THE SECOND

• LETS GOOO DISCOURSESWjsGDAIJG
• INVISION IS DEAD REST IN PISS

Discussion outside Agenda Items

• There is a general problem with RP standards on all servers, not just mrp.
• We could have a deathmatch server to suck away the people that just want to fight.

Overall Conclusion

Murderboning was discussed. Due to its nature it’s extremely hard to define and has been sent for further discussion. Salamander’s mrp status was discussed and consensus is that it has declined. For now we will be stricter with enforcing mrp rules, and use dewhitelists more often to remove problematic players. The metashield list will be adopted. Discourse is real. Invision is dead.