As many of you know, the head game admin team recently decided to leave the project. You can read their statement on the status of the project and their personal reasons for stepping down here. Alongside the head admin team, approximately half of the current admin team has also chosen to leave.
Space Station 14 and Wizard’s Den has grown to a massive size. While I’ve personally been working on the game for almost 8 years, this explosive growth has happened only in the last 2. Our leadership has not been able to evolve to reflect that. The reasons for the game admins’ departure are not just specific to Wizden, and they have been heard by the current Project Management (PM) team. We’re doing our best to address them as soon as possible.
We owe both our (former) staff and players an apology for how long it has taken to address these concerns. I hope our actions going forward will be able to deal with our problems and make Space Station 14 and Wizard’s Den the best game and community it can be.
What we’re going to do
We’re planning to make these changes in the short term to address the problems. All resulting staff policy will be public, as it currently is.
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Improve core staff accountability and transparency
- Core staff will have defined roles assigned to make sure things get done and there’s clarity in leadership.
- We are discussing with staff what other changes to make for better accountability and transparency.
- These discussions are not final but some proposals include voting, elections and strike policies.
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Tighten up codebase organization and focus on admin tools
- We’re working on organizing the maintainer team to make it easier to review and prioritize things on the repo.
- We’re going to try to get a more unified vision and design of the game written down and start handling design docs better, which should hopefully make PR review easier.
- Our admin tools are in many areas worse than what SS13 had a decade ago. We will be putting specific focus on this.
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Enforce more professionalism between staff
- This doesn’t mean making the project a corporate hellhole, but it does mean dealing with toxicity between staff and similar.
- This is both internally (between staff) and publicly (PR).
FAQ
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Q: What about Space Station 14 as a whole?
- A: This does not directly affect servers that aren’t Wizard’s Den, in the short term at least. Of course, I hope that all improvements we make will be beneficial to downstreams too, in one way or another.
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Q: Is Wizden over?
- A: No, but we may be in for a rougher ride than usual in the near future. Please remember to thank the remaining staff that has decided to stay.
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Q: I Have More Questions
- A: You can reply on this thread with any questions. You can also send a private message with this link if you prefer.