You are already a staff member and have a lot of experience both as a player and as a coder, so I won’t ask questions I’d ask other players, that would be pointless.
This app is a complex one to process for me, For each strong points in this, I find an equally strong negative point that makes me constantly reconsider my previous positions. I’ll try to summarize my issues here so that it may not shine lights on what I believe are the issues in the app, while at the same laying the foundations for your training and subsequent growth as an admin if this app is to go through.
About your involvement in the community (mostly the position of codermin)
The elephant in the room is how you’ve quickly gained roles and responsibility within the community. In the span of three months you’ve become maintainer, mentor, and now are trying to become admin. I know some people will disagree with me on this, or think I’m being too dramatic, but this needs to be pointed out.
Each of these roles bring some degree of overhead with them, maintainers have to assist the headdev and manage the repo as well as bring guidance to coders, mentors have to actively answer mhelps ingame while having a perfect conduct ooc, admins deal with rules issues, ahelps, player reports, community management and events/bussing.
Notice the length of that previous sentence, despite this being volunteer work, these responsibilities add up, and you do not adress this in your app. If this app is accepted, you would become codermin, cumulating the prerogatives and responsibilities of both maintainer and admin. If you lay things bare, only the host on this server can casually swap caps between admin and maint (at a leadership level ofc), admins don’t have a say in how the maints manages the repo, and the maints don’t have power over admins decisions.
My point is, I am convinced you will burn out on at least one of these two aspects, I don’t believe it is possible to consistently work on both these aspects of server maintenance without dedicating an unhealthy amount of time to Beestation.
I can’t hide that I don’t like the codermin position, not only for what I outlined above, but also because in my experience having worked with one, the role can inspire confusion as you don’t really know which cap the codermin is wearing while they are online. In my opinion, cumulating both maint and admin should only be possible through direct appointing by the host of headmins/headdev, after it’s been assessed that the volunteer can handle the workload.
I’ve heard some say that you mostly want to cumulate roles and permissions for the fun of it, because “you are bored”, and that you will grow disilusioned pretty quickly. A part of me fueled by past experiences before being involved with Beestation, screams at me that you only want to grab open positions in order to better root yourself in the community and do whatever you want. I’ve witnessed people come in NGOs I worked in join to grab every open positions before burning out like a bright comet or worse. The truth regarding your app is that, ultimately, I do not know.
However, had you adressed this in your app or straight up stepped down for maintainer, stating that you wanted to fully dedicated your leisure time on bee to adminning, I would have probably already voted +1 as that would have been the display of commitment I need here.
Most of this is outside of your control and frankly, mostly my own opinion that I know isn’t shared by all staff members. This has a weight on how I would vote, but I’m restraining myself from basing it solely on that, hence why I’m not stopping my response here.
About your previous conduct as a player, we talked about this privately but I didn’t believe you were properly abiding by the roleplay standards we are currently enforcing, as shown by some of your notes. We however discussed this at length privately and you’ve shown that you were willing to improve, as demonstrated in your mentor app.
Still, I would have preferred for some more time to pass, to show that this was really a change of character and not you momentarily changing your attitude before realising that this wasn’t actually what you enjoyed doing in SS13 before reverting back to not really roleplaying.
About your overall mindset, I’ve had one issue while bussing you where I gave you something to play with and you took it way too far to the point I had to step in and stop you. I would have considered this incident to be my fault given that I was the admin initiating the bus. I would have dismissed it for this app.
However, I heard from other admins that they had to deal with instances of you sitting in asay, urging and pushing them to take their own busses further, to fuck with players and throw more chaos into the round in a manner that didn’t feel very constructed or thought-through.
As such, given the current state of things, I am afraid that you would “mess up” often while adminning, potentially making players’ rounds worse due to you only relying on your own personnal compass to build your admin busses. For instance, spawning a bunch of antags to “spice up the round”, not realizing that you are just making the round a chaotic, incomprehensible mess where players that didn’t roll a combat role are just getting stomped. Despite what others might say, I don’t believe training can prevent that as this is really an issue with having an inappropriate mindset. Again, I don’t have the definite answer to this, I can only ask a question.
Finally, just to touch on briefly on the thing that makes you really mad, real fast:
There is nothing inherently wrong with this naturally, I however witnessed you involving yourself in an incident once where you believed you saw a word that was offensive to you and projected a meaning on it, despite it being somewhat remote from the definition of that word and far from the intent of the player in the current context.
My point here is that we manage a multicultural community involving players who all have radically different upbrining and tendencies, we ask of everyone to behave and act respectable. But in my opinion, we cannot change the way others might think, and stepping into that territory is fruitless for us.
Moreover, sometimes doing less is more, others may disagree with me on this but in my opinion, the less noise and posturing there is when enforcing these standards, the stronger they become.
Again, this ties back into your issue with “tunnel visioning” that you yourself outlines, and what I described as you previously relying too much on your own system of reference to make decisions.
You have to be patient when adminning to make sure you aren’t striking the wrong people. Activism and moralism are dead ends in that regard.
With that Ted talk out of the way, here are some questions that I hope will help me and others, reach a decision:
A lot of people are up to the job, but few last. Could you develop on this? What kind of admin do you think you will be? What exactly would drive you to log on weekly to deal with players in tickets?
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How do you think becoming an admin will affect your role of maintainer?
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When should a player be permabanned?
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Assume you have admin permissions for this question. You hop on sage, the round (traitor gamemode) has been going on for an hour. Most traitors except for one are dead, and the last one doesn’t seem to be doing anything. Some players in dchat notice you and beg you to “do something”. What’s your next course of action?
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Someone ahelps saying that another player’s name is a reference to a war criminal in their country. You look up the name on wikipedia and find that the last name matches, but not the first name. What’s your next course of action?
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Bonus one: Can a round be too chaotic? And if so, what’s the limit?
These are the most open ended questions I’ve ever asked in an app. Again, I believe asking you game knowledge questions or policy questions to be pointless. You know way more than the average applicant about how the team works and have more game knowledge than most of us frankly.
I apologize for delaying my response to this app. I didn’t know how to proceed frankly and have been tempted more than once to just let apathy win and hope others would vote for me.
I also apologize for its length, I’ve thought about this answer for the better part of this week, and frankly I’ve failed to find a way to shorten it in a way that wouldn’t leave critical informations out of the way.
I chose to expose all of my thoughts in details, as you’ve contributed a lot to this project and this community, everyone is thankful for it. No matter what, I believe we have to take your application seriously. Leaving out key details before voting would feel disrespectful, it wouldn’t sit right with me.