I’m making this post after the “discussion” that happened last night on Discord.
Grasshopper
Grasshopper is the "temporary" server that was brought up for PCTide and is the new player server. As it was intended for new players a "Baby Jail" was created. Originally only allowing Whitelisted Wizden player's and player's with < 20 hours of playtime. This was then bumped to <50 hours of playtime. Over time this babyjail would be turned off or on. It seems that the majority believe that baby jail has been turned off for the majority of Grasshoppers lifespan.
Culture
In Grasshopper's short run it seems to now be the "*best*" server in terms of RP and player quality. Less Lizard / Leviathan shitters, less Malding from Salamander players. Overall the culture surrounding the server is pretty great. As someone that's played Grasshopper pretty much exclusively since it's started I would agree that it's probably the best server to play on currently for a nice mix of MRP and LRP. This is most likely due to the new players and people willing to teach said new players (and possibly baby jail).
Grasshopper Today
As far as I know baby jail is currently on and Hopper has a respectable 60 players on it at this time, but can be seen frequently at ~50 players and usually during these times most command roles are empty and less people are on to teach new players. This is why a handful of people are asking for baby jail to be permanently removed from Grasshopper so that those that haven't been whitelisted yet and are over 50 hours can join and play with the friend's they've made on the server and continue teaching.
Remove babyjail?
It seems like a lot of veteran players are against removing baby jail as it is essentially what gives Grasshopper that unique culture. Not only that but many veterans have seen the rise and fall of servers and know that eventually they all lead to Lizard / Leviathan problems. I personally wasn't around for the Levi Psyop, but it seems that Levi is very similar to Grasshopper in terms of "culture" near the start of it's life. Here is a link to the psyop to read about it's beginning and then compare it to the Levi of today. Here is also the start of CE's thought on Hopper and removing baby jail.
On the other hand it can be said that removing baby jail will “keep the server alive” and allow the players that have “graduated” but not whitelisted yet to return and continue the cycle of teaching new players and trying to preserve the culture it currently has. Also the fact that most rounds without experienced player’s are miserable due to power being out for half the round or accidental looses.
Possible Solutions?
Increase baby jail time to from 50 hours to 100 hours? (just delays the inevitable)
Have a more streamlined whitelist approach (complicated)
There is definitely stuff I didn’t touch on, but this post is long enough as is. It’s meant to start more discussion. I didn’t even really touch on the possibility of Grasshopper potentially being killed since it was only supposed to be a temporary server.
It’s been planned for awhile, and the person working on it currently (Simyon) has a lot of other stuff going on as well. Also there is the question on how automatic whitelisting will work. CE makes these points in #admin-questions in the discord.
I don’t think the baby jail should be permanently removed, i believe it should be removed until we can put in an automated whitelisting system. The whitelist system should allow new players who want to continue learning on hopper automatically. What i mean by this is new players who don’t get banned in anyway should be let through via the whitelist automatically. The players who are here to teach and play will get whitelisted manually still because most of those players have the discord. Though on the topic of that i also recommend making a separate whitelist of grasshopper specifically (also possibly make this whitelist automated if security and command still has problems not having players despite player count being high). The server with these restrictions will be both better with player count, player retention to the server and veteran players will also be able to teach and play while keep problem players out. Now of course all of this hinges on the admin team having enough people to cover all of their servers, which the admin team has expressed that they don’t. This is a more complicated issue that i don’t have an easy solution for other than just paying people to be admins. On the topic of removing the server, in my personal opinion grasshopper is too big of a server to remove at this point and i believe it would cause a lot of resentment in the community. I personally heavily disagree with the potential removal of grasshopper as i am one player who loves what the community has built. The state of grasshopper currently is quite depressing to see. The server is in a state of perpetually not having enough players playing security or command. This problem even occurs at 60 players and only gets worse as that player count goes down. I believe what i have proposed (assuming the automatic whitelist system actually gets finished within a reasonable time frame) will fix the issues that players currently have with grasshopper as a perfectly fine band aid solution.
EDIT: sorry for the wall of text i’m quite bad at forming papers.
Regarding admin coverage, if we had enough admins to cover all the servers, there likely wouldn’t be any need for miros and vulture to be on default panic bunker, the culture on lizard and leviathan would likely be much better, and a reserved slot system for grass hopper would likely be sufficient to maintain culture and the goal of being an actual new player server.
Regarding whitelisting, I don’t know that anyone is currently working on support for multiple connection whitelists within a server group, and I don’t think the admin team has the capacity to maintain a second whitelist. As many whitelist applicants can probably attest, we don’t really have the capacity to maintain the current whitelist. About a month ago, the backlog extended past 2 weeks, which is the amount of time we tell people that they can reapply after.
Someone has been working on a substantial improvement to the whitelisting system that would allow automatic whitelisted. It’s possible that this will introduce multiple manual whitelists, but I don’t think any work has been done on that feature yet. What it does allow is having different whitelisting criteria for each server, which is not currently possible. This means that grass hopper could have its automatic whitelist criteria adjusted independently of MRP servers, which would likely allow for a less strict whitelist requirement. The biggest issue with all of the automatic whitelisting stuff right now is that we can’t have any ETA on it. It’s obviously being done by a volunteer, so the only way to speed it up is if someone works on it themselves. The current PR has been worked on since mid January
Just here to echo the sentiment that the current limit should probably not be in place while the rest of the whitelisting infrastructure isn’t there to support it. In my humble opinion, this is a short term problem that has a short term solution.
If grasshoppers gets any kind of whitelist i will 100% only play on that server most of the time for teach new players both how to play and how not be shitters.
TL;DR: I think the time limit definitely chokes the ability for people to learn from competent teachers because teachers need to be competent and confident within the time limit. Guides massively accelerate learning, but new players and players in general shouldn’t be expected to watch/read them to play either. “Mentor” whitelist might be the only viable option, but sounds to be too burdensome to implement and brings its own issues.
This was just discussed in my own friend group which plays. Grasshopper is great! It’s a nice server when introducing a friend to play, which we recently did. The problem is that those of us with more hours can’t join and try to teach them (or by extension anyone else) because we have too many hours, barring creating a smurf account which I assume is obviously not the intent. The new player can’t come to a different server because there’s a minimum hour count at least on some of them. If it’s a problem for someone who is planning to come on and slot in with the intent to train a specific individual, I can only imagine it’s worse with total strangers. They need to be people who are sufficiently competent in their job within the time limit and who are willing and able to train others to do the job. Command roles which are intimidating even with experience are far less likely to be filled, and far less likely to have competent players in them.
Now, I think you can learn a lot watching some guide videos and I absolutely think people interested should take a look at them rather than wholly relying on strangers to teach them. I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to teach someone something just to be interrupted because that’s the very nature of funny spessman game. But also it can’t just be expected that someone will watch an external video especially with the nature of content changing so often. And it’s hard to teach someone when they need to learn the basics of the basics, think basic gameplay concepts, in something like engineering. Not at all impossible, but it does make it harder to teach department gameplay as a result especially when others are further ahead. I have directed people who wanted to learn but I failed to sufficiently teach to guides in the post game, and often they didn’t even realize they existed. All I can hope is that it sets them up for success in later rounds and keeps them playing the game.
Ultimately, a second “mentor” whitelist does sound like the only real option to have both but also a second whitelist does no one any good if it can’t be maintained. And being some sort of mentor cannot have ANY tangible benefit to the mentor aside from the satisfaction of mentoring new players because I have seen theoretically good systems fail. Looking at FFXIV for that one, ironically people best suited to be mentors are pushed away by the bad rep mentors have due to being people who just chased the requirements for the crown and the ability to dominate the novice chat as their own in-group groupchat and have little patience for non-mentors. Not that I think SS14 can fall prey to that as easily simply due to the structure differences, but even just the allure of a colored name seems to be enough for some.
A lot more wordy than I initially planned but hopefully it makes sense.
Anyone who is whitelisted on the same whitelist used for MRP is able to play regardless of their overall playtime. I don’t know if the denial message actually says anything about the whitelist, so I’m going to try to remember to check on that and get it fixed within the next day if it doesn’t, maybe that will help some.
Here’s every concrete proposal that I remember hearing about so far:
Remove baby jail, permanently or temporarily. I went into more details about this in my replies on Discord that were linked earlier, but I think either of these options carry a significant risk of grass hopper culture changing to be indistinguishable from lizard or leviathan.
Add a second manual whitelist. This requires someone to develop it, but even if someone did, I don’t think the admin team would be able to maintain a second whitelist, I think we struggle to maintain the current whitelist.
Add an automatic whitelist. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time. There is currently a PR open for this, but I don’t think there’s anything that I can do to speed it up.
There is a very temporary mitigation that I’ve been trying to get to happen, it is part of the wider whitelist changes that I talked about in my Discord response that I said I don’t think people would be entirely pleased with overall. That’s currently held up by me trying to quantify admin coverage across our servers and share that coverage information with the admin team.
Adjust baby jail times. As JIP points out, this just delays when people are made to move off. I’m not sure if it would actually help at all. This was probably within the first few weeks of grass hopper, but while baby jail was disabled due to having issues, I collected the playtimes of all players from a few rounds. The finding of this was that the amount of players by playtime dropped off a lot before 50 hours. I don’t remember a precise point where the drop off was, but essentially it seemed that players were split into two groups, ones with less than 50 hours who were learning, and ones with substantially more than 50 hours who were teaching. Again, this was collected while baby jail was off, so in my view this is the type of distribution that led to current culture
I should have looked deeper then! I didn’t realize the whitelist also applied to Hopper, and makes everything I said irrelevant. A denial message that clarifies it I’m sure would do wonders, since it isn’t obvious otherwise (I think).
Babyjail should probably stay as is, it can be stressful to learn on the other servers with such a gap in experience so making it so only new people and people who are openly willing to play and teach new people is a huge positive to bring people into the fold.
whitelisting should be a more complicated process, I have a lot of terrible bad, roleplay experience on Salamander, where a lot of LRPers and antagonist deliberately wait for the shuttle to be called just to do their objectives of killing and stealing while ignoring the security factor and not wanting to have any trials
Agreed honestly, I finally gave Mander a try and it just felt like LRP with a few less egregious tiders and whatnot. I didn’t feel like I changed my level of RP at all to match and that could be that I just play at a more MRP level but also if I didn’t know it was “MRP” I wouldn’t have even noticed. Indistinguishable from Levi to me, where I mostly play.
People whitelisted on Hopper tend to be good though after playing there for a while. I understand why there’s a solid contingent of dedicated Hopper players (Though I don’t like having to teach so much every round, so I am definitely not one of them).
I’m personally for keeping baby jail active, or at least something similar. A large part of what makes Hopper what it is is the mix of newbies and experienced players - without baby jail, people who aren’t willing to at least tolerate new players should still be filtered out (since… well, it’s still the new player server), but there’s no quality control beyond that.
The MRP/Hopper whitelist may not be great in terms of quality control, but it filters out people with particularly bad records, and people with too little playtime to be teaching newbies. The population of former/current MRP players also helps prepare newbies for MRP environments, and - optimistically - may serve to raise the quality of RP across WizDen in the long run, even if it’s just by a little bit.