Admins have no idea how bad rounds have gotten without them present. It’s at a point now where sec and command are unplayable in adminless shifts, simply because of the sheer amount of tiders and griefers they have to deal with.
I remember when griefers were just a semirare occurance. The occasional angry 13 year would come and go every few weeks, but it wouldn’t escalate past that. Now however it’s almost expected to have a griefer (sometimes multiple!!) every round without admins.
I blame this on two things. Firstly, the completely backwards and out of touch admin ping policy. For those who dont know, if you see someone griefing and no admins are on, you first must open a ticket, then wait 5 minutes for a supposed stealthmin to take it, and only then are you allowed to ping admins on discord. What this really does is reassuring griefers that they have at least 5 more minutes to keep griefing, thus letting them plan their attack better. They might even coordinate it by checking when no admin is on at discord, thus making it outright impossible to truly catch them.
The second thing Im blaming it on is that this server doesnt have a whitelist, or really just any kind of restriction for new players. Yes, I am really going this route. Last time I suggested this, everyone near unanimously rejected it, saying it would “kill the server” and that the griefers wouldnt even be that bad as they seem, because “they come in waves”. Nevermind the fact how much of a cope this is, can I remind you that skyrat has a whitelist too, and is sitting at 150pop?
What people also like to blame is this server being understaffed. While that is true, a whitelist would make the life of an admin enormously easier and would probably make way more people (including myself) join staff. You say we wouldnt be staffed enough anyways to accept whitelist applications? Just let mentors do it too. Fuck it, anyone above 200 hours should be able to. To an average player, this will add 2 hours of waiting time until they can start their multiple months long playtime on the server. To a griefer, this means 2 hours of waiting every single time they evade. It would kill griefing for good. And revive this server.
This server generally seems to be extremely hostile to even the mildest restrictions for new players. There is a pull request that merely prevents players that are not antags and have a playtime of below 3 hours fill cigarettes with plasma. Thats it. And they’re trying to throw it out. Would a genuinely new player that is still trying to learn how to light a cig in the first place even be aware of this?
This just seems like a desperate attempt to clinge to the “welcoming to new players” thing this server is claiming to be. But we are sick and tired of our main problem being basically ignored, and our patience is running thin. If you don’t agree with me, I’m sure you will eventually by the 5th time you got cig bombed. Because those griefers won’t go away by themselves.
TLDR: Drop the “friendly to newbies” act already and add restrictions to new players.
