CMDR-JohnAlex's Admin Application

In-game Username: CMDR_JohnAlex
Discord username: CMDR_JohnAlex (Originally known as CMDR-JohnAlex#2520)
Characters you play: Nova Gibson (Moth), DELTA-V (Silicon), Zachary Hudson (Human)

On average, how many hours do you expect to admin per week: Depends on external factors, however I would say at least a shift or two during weekdays, and many shifts on the weekend. I would assume around 18h on the low end per week.

Days you are available to admin on: Depends on external factors, but I should be able to admin most weekdays, and all weekends.

How old are you? Today is my birthday, I have just turned 18 years old. :partying_face:

Do you have any SS14 experience outside of Wizard’s Den servers, or any SS13 experience? Yes. After playing many hours on SS14, I decided to play SS13’s Paradise station server and I have enjoyed the experience. I have a total of 170 hours image.png on SS13’s Paradise station so far. Otherwise, I have experience playing on Frontier station, Delta-V, and a handful of SS13 servers, however my playtime there isn’t very much.

Do you have prior administration experience (SS13/SS14 experience preferred, please also post a way for us to verify this)? I do not have prior administration experience, however I have been in leadership roles before through school, clubs, and external groups. Sadly, nothing that can be verified.

Have you ever been banned from any SS14 or SS13 servers? Yes I have. In SS14 I was two-week role banned from command because I suicided as CE “within 20 minutes of the shift to become Hamlet”. I forget when this was, but it was very very long ago. In September I was appeal-banned in SS13 from command due to suddenly disconnecting from the shift in a critical time as captain without informing anyone, not even admins. What happened was my parents messed with our router without informing anyone, disconnecting me from the shift until it ended. I successfully appealed my ban here (for more information) as soon as I was able to re-connect to the internet. I would also like to note that SS13 has a different banning strategy than SS14 does.

_ Admins have the ability to perform various tasks which are not available to the average player. An incomplete list of these tasks is: in-game rule enforcement, in-game events, ban appeals, and out-of-game rule enforcement through things like replay/log reviews in response to player reports. With these, and any other tasks you’re aware of in mind, answer the following two questions. _

What are you primarily interested in doing as an admin? Keeping the shifts fun for all and keeping the community a safe and welcoming place. I am also interested in creating small events every once in a while.

What are you least interested in doing as an admin? Ban appeals and watching replays don’t peak my interest.

_ Answer the following questions in detail, so we can get a better idea of how you’d approach adminning. _

What role do you think game admins serve on our servers?
First role game admins serve, is to keep the shifts and the community a safe and enjoyable place for all. Dealing with ahelps, rule breakers and shitters is an important role of an admin, but so is keeping the round enjoyable by maybe creating an event every once in a while. Welcoming and assisting new players is also great for the community.

Why do you want to become an administrator for SS14?
Plenty of reasons. I enjoy the community, the game, and I would like to keep it a safe place. I also want to gain admining experience that could be useful in future paths. One strong skill I have is teaching, I love teaching. I would love to be able to assist new players with questions and guide them through the game. I also feel that half the time, there is a lack of admins on some Wizards Den servers. I have seen an increase in shitters and hitler spammers in the past few months, however I have recently seen an increase in active admins, solving these problems quickly!

How do you feel about the current roleplay status on the servers?
Salamander is doing great, I love the current roleplay status there. Levi however, is a different story. I spend most of my time in the LRP servers, and I have had wonderful roleplay moments there, however every shift I spot someone who doesn’t roleplay at all and it can sometimes ruin the experience for people. I would like to encourage and nudge people to role play a bit more.

Other than banning problematic players, what admin actions do you believe have the biggest positive impact?
On the topic of problematic players, here I start with my, “Admining is like being a secoff.” Secoffs are always taught to de-escalate and deal with situations before using your stunbaton/lethals or in this case, the ban hammer, and I feel like being an admin is the same. Using the ahelp system to figure the situation out, and following the Wizards Den Banning Policy if a ban is needed.

Have you ever had a negative experience in the game or with a game admin? If so what, if anything, would you do to prevent other players from experiencing this?
In the game I’ve had some negative experiences, most due to either my lack of skill and “robustness”, or due to other players lowering the quality of roleplay. If anyone needs any other help than on how to be robust, I would assist with any questions they have. As for the players lowering the quality of roleplay, I would be nudging them to roleplay a bit more, maybe give them some tips as well if it would be useful.
As for nagative experiences with admins, nothing major. I do wish admins would reply to ahelps more often, for example if I ahelp someone, I would like a small resonse to confirm an admin is taking action on my ahelp. It’s a small thing, but it lets me know my voice has been heard.

Have you ever had a good experience with the game or a game admin? If so, what was it?
I have had a lot of positive experiences with the game and game admins. I love the whole idea how the shifts are all structured the same and everyone has their own little role they play, and yet every shift is different. I strongly enjoy the uniqueness of every shift.
Game admins are also amazing. I’ve had plenty of fun in admin events, or when asking questions using the ahelp feature. I also enjoy the rare time an admin goes to their test map, spawns some ghost roles and some xenos, and let dead people have fun while not messing with the current shift. I have a huge respect for admins who do that because it gives the people who have died something to do instead of waiting for the next shift, increasing their enjoyment of the game and creating a positive impact.

_ The following are scenarios, respond with how you would handle each as an administrator. Respond with the assumption that you are an administrator with full access to the admin tools, and that you have all the knowledge needed to use these tools. Respond in detail, explain the reasons behind decisions you make and describe any assumptions you are making. When you need to make an assumption, it is preferred for you to describe how differences in the assumption would affect your actions. _

I would like to note here that I have read Space Law, the Wizards Den Admin Policy, the Wizards Den Banning Policy, the forum rules, and the server rules. I also have played around as an admin on a test server, so I already know some of the tools available to admins and how to use them.

It is the start of the round. There are 60 players on the server. The game mode is traitors, traitors have not been selected yet. There are three players who decided to observe the round instead of join it orbiting you. Two of them are encouraging you to “do something funny”.
Start of the shift with 60 players, nice. Traitors gamemode, also cool. If players observing me tell me to do something funny, doesn’t mean I have to or should. Admin events shouldn’t be done very often and any intervention that heavily affects many people must be voted on by the players and done on Extended gamemode. If I was allowed and wanted to, I might spawn a single basketball hidden in maints or do something very small that doesn’t affect many people. Perhaps I could teleport to my admin map and do something funny there. Otherwise I would probably ignore it.

You see a clown using crayon to write on the floor in front of security. The clown writings are negative things about security, like “shitsec”. A secoff tells the clown that they’re being arrested for vandalism, stuns them, and cuffs them. Before the secoff is able to get the clown into the brig, a passenger slips the secoff, causing them to lose their baton, then uses the baton to stun another secoff that comes to help as the clown runs away. The passenger escapes through disposals. Having heard an AOS radio callout, the detective enters maintenance near disposals and shoots the passenger to crit. There are four players in this scenario, the clown, the passenger, the secoff, and the detective.
So a clown writes “shitsec” on the floor outside of security, it can be annoying to see that, however nothing is wrong here unless the clown starts swearing hard or uses slurs. The officer states what the clown is to be charged with and then arrests the clown, good work. No action should be taken so far.
A passenger slips the first secoff, steals the baton and stuns a second secoff as the clown escapes? Assuming the passenger is an antag, this is fine and no action needs to be taken. If the passenger was not an antag, this would count as self-antaging, “Intentionally making yourself a major problem/annoyance/disruption for the crew or other players at large while not an antagonist is forbidden … but it becomes self-antagonism when it begins to degrade the station at large or cause a significant issue, or is simply done for no purpose other than to be annoying.” and so I would ahelp the passenger to figure out why they prevented security from arresting the clown, and why they stole the baton that is restricted gear IC. According to the banning policy, self-antaging would be a warning, up to a 12 hour game ban maximum for the first offence. I would check the passenger’s admin remarks to see if they have done this before, and either way I would add another admin remark with a quick message saying, “_player’s username_ slipped a secoff, preventing an arrest and stole a secbaton while not being an antag” and I would give the passenger a warning (assuming it is their first offence).
The next part here about the detective criting the passenger on an AOS call? This is very odd as the call was only to arrest on site, and there was no reason to use lethals on a passenger who is only armed with a secbaton, There are many non-lethal ways of arresting the passenger without shooting them with lethal shots, regardless of if the passenger was a syndicate or not. Hopefully the passenger recieves medical treatment. It sounds to me the detective over escalated the situation and I would ahelp the detective to figure our their perspective on the situation and why they did what they did, giving them a warning assuming it was their first offence, and adding an admin remark to the detective.

You and another admin have been adminning for around an hour. The rate of issues has been easily manageable due to having 2 admins. Neither of you have been talking in admin chat. You are using ahelp to warn a player for breaking a rule when the other admin joins the ahelp and confirms that it is against the rules, but that it’s fine in this case and they can ignore the rule for the rest of the round. You haven’t taken any other admin actions yet, such as applying a ban or writing a note.
Not talking in the admin chat doesn’t sound like a good start. Admins should be communicating with each other to better coordinate their efforts. If another admin wanted to let me know something was indeed against the rules, say if they were agreeing with me. I would suggest they use the admin chat rather than making the ahelp a three-way conversation. Admins in my opinion could work together on a single ahelp, but it should feel like the person is speaking back and fourth to an admin collective, rather than a three-way chat where the admins are talking to someone, but also to each other in someone’s ahelp. The second part about the admin allowing someone to ignore a rule for the rest of the shift sounds very odd. Rules are there for a reason, and I don’t see why someone should be exempted from following one of the rules. While I don’t know who the person I am warning is, or what rule they have broken, it doesn’t sound like they should be allowed to ignore a rule for the rest of the shift. Assuming I’m still learning, I would probably let the other admin deal with it as I could be in the wrong, but I would also use the admin chat to ask the other admin why they did that, and I would probably inform another admin about the situation if I feel the other admin was in the wrong. Assuming I am no longer a trial admin and that I know what the other admin did was wrong, I would start messaging the other admin in the admin chat, and in the ahelp I would tell the player NOT to ignore the rule until the two of us can chat so I can get the second admin’s reasoning for saying that. I feel this question could also be improved on for future applications, as it doesn’t give much information so applicants need to assume a lot. Perhaps the user is a friend to the second admin, meaning the admin there is breaking a lot of rules, or possibly the second admin doesn’t, or has a lot more experience than I do. I would tend to trust someone with more experience than I do, however getting a third opinion on discord sounds like the right thing to do.

Happy Birthday 🥳

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday:3

Happy Birthday!

 

happy birthday !!

hapy 365-day survival streak day!

Thank you for applying. We’ve decided to not accept this application, but you’re free to apply again in the future.

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