The subtle problem of Abuse - Official Servers

[davidj123456]

Oh right lol, I did not understand. Tbh most staff would be centrists tho.

Back to the topic of the thread, I highly doubt there will be much abuse on official servers

[MoltonMontro]

@RainOfPain125

But yes, almost everything is black and white. There is order and absolutes within everything. Such as, for example, an Official staff member spawning in items is absolutely and inherently abusive in every way shape and form. Theres no gray area there.

The first thing that came to mind was a player falling out the map due to a bug and a staff member spawning items to help restore their inventory.

Or, if you exclusively meant staff spawning items for their own use, something like staff spawning a GPS if there isn’t a tool that lets staff always see the map would make sense, or an electrical item so you can check generator or claim bounds for whatever reason.

I’d argue that just making it so there’s actual administrative tools that do the same thing would be far superior, but if there isn’t I would at least label it a gray area.

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If the issue is that someone on the server might see that and call it abusive, even if the staff isn’t actually spawning stuff in to abuse those items, then that’s more of an issue with the player’s philosophy than staff spawning stuff in. That’s not to say I think staff should be able to spawn stuff, or that there should even be staff, but context leads to different opinions on things.

Someone might consider that to still be abusive. Someone might disagree and say that it’s just a part of the administrative tools. While both people are entitled to their opinions, I wouldn’t agree with both of them (in that situation, even if I’d agree with both of them as separate discussions) because one is based on the context of the situation and one is an issue not with the actions taken but with the fact that it’s a part of the toolkit to begin with.

Two different issues. One isn’t actually related to abusing items, and is something that would be better taken up as its own issue/suggestion entirely. People can often devalue their own points when they piggyback off stuff.

[davidj123456]

Alternatively they could just not allow staff to actually play on the server they have admin on? They can moderate it, but they can’t play like normal players

[MoltonMontro]

That’s my opinion too. If there’s staff, staff really shouldn’t be playing on the server. Or if they are, at least switch accounts.

You can still abuse without actually “playing” (normal gameplay) on a server though, although in that case I feel like it’s usually more clear-cut and just reporting the staff so that they can be evaluated/removed makes more sense.

[Syero]

Oh nice, clown shoes.
I guess that means you won the argument.
i’m just going to put my 2 cents here and try not to derail this anymore,.

[davidj123456]

Realistically speaking so many people would report staff for almost no reason… so Reports would get cluttered and ultimately ignored

[MoltonMontro]

Based on my own experiences with moderating servers and other things, reports against staff aren’t that frequent and when they are they’re usually justified complaints. Sometimes not actually worthy of removing/banning the staff, but a verifiable complaint nonetheless.

Of course you get different results and different experiences, but personally I’ve never dealt with a mass of false reports against staff on (community-ran) game servers.

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EDIT since not worth a new reply: If it’s the same few people making verifiably and blatantly false reports each week and staff intervention hasn’t helped, then they’re misusing the report system and typically servers treat that as “against the server rules” or what have you.

As far as reporting on official servers goes, there should be a proper report/support system with tickets. Let people with a pass make tickets that only staff can see, or are at least done anonymously and more identifiable information is kept staff-only (e.g., accounts involved).

Really, you could go as far as to say that “official server staff” should just be “customer support” and have barely any in-game tools at all.

[davidj123456]

I’ve been admin on frosh****** (removing half the name so I don’t advertise) for 2 years. I think we get a good few reports about staff every week, literally all of which are made up.

[RainOfPain125]

@MoltonMontro

The first thing that came to mind was a player falling out the map due to a bug and a staff member spawning items to help restore their inventory.

Thats inherently abusive, as you would never know what items them had on them. If you did have a way of knowing that they absolutely died because of a server/game fault, and absolutely sure you know what they had on them when it happened, then you should use a code that gives them absolutely what they had. Giving staff the permission to abuse will inevitably let them abuse.

@MoltonMontro

I’d argue that just making it so there’s actual administrative tools that do the same thing would be far superior, but if there isn’t I would at least label it a gray area.

Giving us more tools (like, for instance, Rocketmod’s permission system to limit the commands staff can have) can substantially prevent large abuses, but it won’t stop everything.

@MoltonMontro

If the issue is that someone on the server might see that and call it abusive, even if the staff isn’t actually spawning stuff in to abuse those items, then that’s more of an issue with the player’s philosophy than staff spawning stuff in.

This is wrong. Rather then an issue of the player’s philosophy, or the staff’s individual character and question of abuse, it should be noted that the position of staff is the inherent dilemma. Where theres power, there should always be questioning of authority with said power - this is a universal truth, not a ‘philosophy’.

@davidj123456

Alternatively they could just not allow staff to actually play on the server they have admin on? They can moderate it, but they can’t play like normal players

See I fiddled with this idea many times. Whats the advantage for staff to abuse, if not participating in the server? Then this leads to a few dilemma’s

1 - Players may be friends with said admin, and his motive to abuse might be for them.

2 - Staff who can’t even play the same server they moderate will become extremely disinterested in being staff entirely. Imagine if @MoltonMontro and @SDGNelson and @Yarrrr couldn’t participate on the forums in anyway.

Would they still moderate? Would it put them in a good position to moderate? Should people who don’t even participate in the server be moderators? Likewise, should people who aren’t even citizens of said nation be the ones leading or enforcing its laws?

It doesn’t particularly make sense when you break it down really far.

@MoltonMontro

That’s my opinion too. If there’s staff, staff really shouldn’t be playing on the server. Or if they are, at least switch accounts.

Maybe you should switch SDG accounts

@MoltonMontro

You can still abuse without actually “playing” (normal gameplay) on a server though

This is definitely true. Even with an alt, you could use admin-gained knowledge, like where a base is, on your alt to raid it or tell your friends.

@davidj123456

Realistically speaking so many people would report staff for almost no reason… so Reports would get cluttered and ultimately ignored

This is very true. Many people, especially people like me or other comrades would constantly be reporting staff, and staff would constantly be justifying themselves.

1 - If they’re not justifying themselves, they should be removed

2 - If they put a discrimination policy in place against certain people who report, say people who report often and are false reports (maybe purely on speculation), then such a policy in itself is inherently wrong and distasteful

@MoltonMontro

EDIT since not worth a new reply: If it’s the same few people making verifiably and blatantly false reports each week and staff intervention hasn’t helped, then they’re misusing the report system and typically servers treat that as “against the server rules” or what have you.

And even before I got to this, I already laid it out. You cant punish people for using your own system. You cant prove they’re giving “false” reports on purpose, and each report must be met with equal standing and looked into with equal observation. Otherwise its not fair, fun, or good.

@MoltonMontro

Let people with a pass make tickets that only staff can see

Ah yes. Lets make the report system extremely non-transparent so we can do what we want, when we want, how we want it. All reports should be 100% public and all players should be allowed to read, or join in on reports. What are the staff afraid of, if not their abuse being pointed out? Something is always up if its behind closed doors, and similarly, on this very forum, reports are behind closed doors, too.

@davidj123456

I’ve been admin on frosh****** (removing half the name so I don’t advertise) for 2 years. I think we get a good few reports about staff every week, literally all of which are made up.

Ah yeah. I remember frosh******.

Its actually a good example, as even when the staff were reported for inherently abusing their privileges, the staff went so far as to stalk players of the server to ruin their experience, single them out and kill them, and furthermore followed said players onto non-frosh****** servers to do the same thing, just to drive them off their servers. Furthermore the owner and other staff actively discriminated against me and my friends in-game and on Discord. I’m glad such a franchise no longer exists.

Thats just one of many abusive experiences I’ve had on my servers. This is the exact reason I’m so weary of abuse on Official Servers. So many servers are abusive, even when they dont consider it abuse, or unconsciously abuse, or just abuse unintentionally.

[MoltonMontro]

@RainOfPain125

Lets make the report system extremely non-transparent so we can do what we want, when we want, how we want it. All reports should be 100% public and all players should be allowed to read, or join in on reports. What are the staff afraid of, if not their abuse being pointed out?

It’s not for staff safety, it’s because people making reports have the right to anonymity without other users trying to inject their own opinions unwarranted.

Which is why my full quote also specifies:

@MoltonMontro

or are at least done anonymously and more identifiable information is kept staff-only (e.g., accounts involved).

[RainOfPain125]

@MoltonMontro

It’s not for staff safety, it’s because people making reports have the right to anonymity

OK. The simple fix here is to give people the option of making reports anonymous. If people dont want public reports, they should have anonymity. Whats so hard about that? Atleast on the UT Official warns/kicks/bans are public, so pointing out evident abuse in say, upcoming videos is a lot easier, and easier to talk about.

Speaking of transparency, all staff, if any, should be forced to give a reason with every warn/kick/ban/mute/anything, and all things should be logged publicly. For example, if I warned you for abuse, it could go onto a website, or if you’re a really cool bean, you could have some plugin/bot magic that sends such things to a Discord for the Official Servers (that would be cool, so long as it isn’t multitudes as abusive as UTO)

And speaking of warns being forwarded to Discord, reports could too. That’d be cool. just random ideas.

[DeusExMachina]

The left truly cannot meme.

@RainOfPain125

Where theres power, there should always be questioning of authority with said power - this is a universal truth, not a ‘philosophy’.

Answering for what you do works both ways. I am fine with those in power being questioned, hell I’d advocate for that even. Players just going around claimining “hurr durr staff always ab00se” with fuck all in terms of proof or actual reason to believe they abuse is just petty. I think boogus reports should carry part of, if not the full penality that had been dished out to the staff memember had they abused.

@RainOfPain125

Many people, especially people like me or other comrades would constantly be reporting staff, and staff would constantly be justifying themselves.

Read : Deliberately filing booguse reports because “muh heirarchy bad” and thus actively shitting all over players experience by tying up staff resources. You chose to play on those servers, with that established system in place. If you don’t like that, go play elsewhere.

@RainOfPain125

And even before I got to this, I already laid it out. You cant punish people for using your own system. You cant prove they’re giving “false” reports on purpose, and each report must be met with equal standing and looked into with equal observation. Otherwise its not fair, fun, or good.

Why exactly can you not punish delibaretly misuse? I would probably straight up ignore someone after their 245th report this week. True, I cannot prove beyond any doubt that their boogus report was filed with them knwoing it is boogus (hell, you cannot prove beyond a doubt that it was abuse either), but let me introduce you to the razor of that Occam fellow.

@RainOfPain125

and similarly, on this very forum, reports are behind closed doors, too.

Is that why you and your buddies like to flag stuff you personally find distasteful instead of just inquiring as to why it was posted or maybe even politley aksing for it to be taken down?

@RainOfPain125

as even when the staff were reported for inherently abusing their privileges, the staff went so far as to stalk players of the server to ruin their experience, single them out and kill them

Of the numeours reports we recieved I can recall less than five being anywhere near truthful, and those got acted upon swiftly and decisevly (as in priveleges revoked, player banned from all game servers)

@RainOfPain125

and furthermore followed said players onto non-frosh****** servers to do the same thing, just to drive them off their servers.

I fail to see how staff of one server playing some other server in any capacity drives you of “their” servers but okay. Hell they cannot even ab00se on there on account of lacking any and all advantegs because they are not staff.

@RainOfPain125

Furthermore the owner and other staff actively discriminated against me and my friends in-game and on Discord.

I’ll give you that one. Most if not all of the staff and a part of the playberbase you engaged with have come to dislike you (and by extension most of what you call your friends). You and your friends countinued to act the same way you acted everywhere else, but since they were our servers we could actually do soemthign about it. We asked you to stop douing what you were doing or leave. You choose the latter, that was your call.

@RainOfPain125

I’m glad such a franchise no longer exists.

Very much still exists, but okay.

@RainOfPain125

So many servers are abusive, even when they dont consider it abuse, or unconsciously abuse, or just abuse unintentionally.

Read: If I say it is abuse it tots is guys, believe me.

Your inital argumentation ,which I could sorta sympathize with tuened into yet another average Rain thread.
How about an experiment? Put up two servers, have one be moderated soley be the AC and some sort of flagging system and the other one by staff (chosen in part by the server owner and in part by the community). Both servers will be held to your standards. Let them run for a while, have them be played on by a few people and let’s see what actually works instead of arguing philosphy all day.

@RainOfPain125

OK. The simple fix here is to give people the option of making reports anonymous. If people dont want public reports, they should have anonymity.

I honestly thing you should always attach your name to soemthing with as much riding on it as an offcial report. The ebenfits far outweigh the risks.

@RainOfPain125

so pointing out evident abuse in say, upcoming videos

Put your money where your mouth is, you little tease

@RainOfPain125

(that would be cool, so long as it isn’t multitudes as abusive as UTO)

Ah, the sweet smell of butthurt. How does it feel knwoing the community elected people despite them, according to you, consatntly and blatantly absuing?

[Llamaturkey101]

@RainOfPain125

Official staff member spawning in items is absolutely and inherently abusive

Idk, if someone lost their base to a hacker and the Admin decides its fair to give it back its not necessarily abusive. In fact I would say that if there is never any help after a mass hacker attack its a sign of bad staff.

[anon67155151]

Just going to say, in 3.0 after a while when finding new servers I would automatically leave if I saw an admin. In 600 hours I have never seen an admin make the game “experience” better, only worse. I would be for no admins/an overwatch system

[RainOfPain125]

@Llamaturkey101

Idk, if someone lost their base to a hacker and the Admin decides its fair to give it back its not necessarily abusive.

Who determines if someone is hacking?

If say, like my democratic system people vote on the innocence of a cheater, then that sounds all good and well. Except an admin shouldn’t be the one giving it out, as mentioned earlier it should be a code/plugin.

Besides, manually spawning in items over and over would become boring and annoying, and even if you weren’t doing it under abusive reasons (to you) they’d eventually do something wrong by mistake, like giving the player an item they didn’t actually have, or spawning the wrong item and throwing it away somewhere and someone finds a minigun.

@anon67155151

Just going to say, in 3.0 after a while when finding new servers I would automatically leave if I saw an admin.

I don’t particularly like staff either, and it gets annoying after a while of constantly questioning them. The only use they have is for catching hackers and everything else is bullshit. If we could have an automated anti-cheat system without the need for flesh organisms, then we could (And should) do away with staff entirely.

@anon67155151

I would be for no admins/an overwatch system

yeah, me too.

[davidj123456]

Ngl I agree with what’s been said recently. So what do you think the final solution is?

[DeusExMachina]

@RainOfPain125

If say, like my democratic system people vote on the innocence of a cheater, then that sounds all good and well.

Tyranny by decomcracy can still be abuse(d) tho

@RainOfPain125

I don’t particularly like staff either, and it gets annoying after a while of constantly questioning them. The only use they have is for catching hackers and everything else is bullshit. If we could have an automated anti-cheat system without the need for flesh organisms, then we could (And should) do away with staff entirely.

Amen, amen

[tehswordninja]

I will be the 200th post on this topic. Just figured I ought to point out that from the 1st post to the 200th, barely anything productive occurred. I don’t think I’m really alone in that mentality, either. As fun as it is to write shit for the memes on a topic like this, I in hindsight, having done it myself, recognize that it only promotes stagnant discussion like what is currently happening. I wanted to clarify that since I don’t want to act like a source of authority when I clearly am not.

I feel like discussions like this aren’t good for the forums because, well, the forums ideally shouldn’t be a place of mindless back and forth essays. Rather, it should ideally be promoting dynamic discussion where people’s viewpoints, opinions, etc are changed, reevaluated, or influenced throughout the course of the discussion. Shorter, more concise responses would be ideal as well but I recognize that can be difficult to accomplish.

I think it’s pretty clear everyone is set in their own viewpoint, for better or worse, and I really, really think it’s high time this topic gets locked for good and we all move forward.

TL;DR: Let’s wait until II’s official servers actually come out before we bring up this topic again, shall we?

[anon24515308]

With the 200th reply on this thread, I’d like to respond to the 200th post.

@tehswordninja

I feel like discussions like this aren’t good for the forums because, well, the forums ideally shouldn’t be a place of mindless back and forth essays.

@tehswordninja

Let’s wait until II’s official servers actually come out before we bring up this topic again, shall we?

The problem isn’t this discussion itself or the topic of this discussion. It’s the mindset, argumentation, stubbornness, and/or pride of some of the most active posters on this thread. I could link to some threads where some of the same people were caught in equally repetitive arguments, but am somewhat conflicted about pointing fingers.

@tehswordninja

Rather, it should ideally be promoting dynamic discussion where people’s viewpoints, opinions, etc are changed, reevaluated, or influenced throughout the course of the discussion.

@tehswordninja

I think it’s pretty clear everyone is set in their own viewpoint, for better or worse

Nothing that OP said either in the first post or in his later replies came close to convincing me that we need to rule out the idea of idea of having any sort of staff to help Nelson run official servers, but MoltonMontro’s more neutral responses did influence my opinion to be more accepting of the idea that official staff may not be necessary and helped me to come to the conclusion that we may not need staff on official servers to fill a policing role, (however, I still think giving trusted people certain perms could be useful in maintaining servers, especially if there are servers running where it could be difficult for Nelson to administer them, or when Nelson himself is unavailable.)

@tehswordninja

Shorter, more concise responses would be ideal as well

Why? There’s already posts of many lengths in this thread, and some of them couldn’t be made much shorter without either getting rid of the quotes that contextualize potentially controversial statements, (There have been some disagreements on these forums, simply because someone misunderstood who a reply was directed towards.) or by eliminating the details that make a statement any less useless and generic than simply commenting “I disagree.”

[RainOfPain125]

@DeusExMachina

Tyranny by decomcracy can still be abuse(d) tho

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/cop1nw/how_to_deal_with_the_tyranny_of_the_majority/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

A few ideas:

• Localised consensus voting
• Super-majority voting (60/70%)
• Literally nothing, the people are not so shitty that we need to have tyranny of the minority in order to avoid tyranny of the majority.

EDIT: Ironic that you’re scared of “tyranny of the majority” yet UTO held “elections”. Furthermore if you want a tryanny of the minority instead, then I guess we should uphold my ideas on Official Servers and not have them.

@tehswordninja

I will be the 200th post on this topic. Just figured I ought to point out that from the 1st post to the 200th, barely anything productive occurred.

It seems like all you do is go around my posts shitposting and saying how unproductive and stupid I am, which in itself is unproductive. why aren’t you blocked lol

What languages do you speak (or are learning)?

Yikes. Three years of Spanish and you haven’t learned anything? I think at that point it comes down to your own unwillingness to get anything out of the class or you’re literally just that stupid, no offense. I only speak English well but I know a few phrases and such in Spanish.

I think @anon24515308 successfully dug the grave and put your comment in, so there seemingly is no need to reply. thanks Harvest for sparing me the time. I’ve been busy lately.