I’m trying to collect some information on the staff complaint process. Please consider posting comments about things you like (do not want changed) and about changes you’d like to see made. Please also include an explanation of why you either like something or want a change made. For changes, please describe the actual change rather than simply saying you want something to change.
I have to include a quick disclaimer: Currently all admin tasks are backlogged, including staff complaints which currently have a significant backlog. This means that I can’t promise that any change requested here will be implemented, no matter how popular. I also definitely can’t promise that any changes that result from this topic will happen anytime soon. I will try to monitor this thread to reply to answer questions if any come up, but I also can’t promise that’ll happen.
This topic isn’t for providing feedback on the determinations made in specific staff complaints, but things like how those determinations are presented is within the scope of this topic.
Here’s a summary on the current staff complaints process for those unfamiliar:
Players are provided information at Staff Complaint Instructions and Info including requirements and a suggested template. The current requirements attempt to manage the backlog by preventing complaints from being used as ban appeals, disallowing complaints which can’t point to specific issues, and preventing lazy complaints. The requirements also attempt to keep staff complaints serious.
Players make a complaint by sending it via the forums to project managers privately.
Project managers correct the title of the complaint when necessary to fit a specific format and add tags. This should eventually be done automatically using a wizard similar to the one used for ban appeals.
Complaints are self assigned when someone starts working on them. Complaints about game admins are either handled by a head game admin or someone with permission from a head game admin.
The assigned person investigates the complaint, which can include a combination of asking questions, contacting the complaint subject, and checking logs.
The assigned person drafts a resolution. If the complaint is about a game admin, the draft is usually presented to the other head game admins. If the resolution is an accept, it’s also presented to the complaint subject.
The resolution is posted on the complaint. If the person who made the complaint requests it be made public or kept private, their request is almost always honored. If they don’t give a preference, I almost always publish the complaint, but I haven’t kept up with how other people handle these cases.
I do not have any complaints about the process from an admin perspective. If anything it seems the issue is mostly on the headmin side with how time consuming it is for you to process them.
In general the only issue I have with complaints (and ban appeals) is the fact that it just takes way too long to actually see any action taken, as mentioned in the OP.
I think note 4 can be changed, but I’m not sure of a reasonable way to handle it since no matter what the issue always ends up having to go up the chain to the relevant head wether it be admin or moderation.
If the guidelines for admins had more precise examples and time allotments for certain offenses that require bans, the moderator team would likely have less complaints and fewer ban appeals(unless specific moderators have willingly decided to act out of line or in bad faith).
Our Banning policy (which includes warns) is public and fairly precise bundled into groups and then specific rules/offenses.
Can you specify places where you think these are lacking?
Asking as someone who uses and checks this for most every ban I have put in place, as it feels fairly comprehensive for most part.
I think that even if staff can’t handle complaints that they are directly involved with, there is still a lot of bias if an admin handles the complaint against another admin, or a PM against another PM.
That’s probably also a contributing factor to the backlog, people don’t want to investigate and hand out punishments to the people that they work with.
who is supposed to handle the complaints then? How would they be selected and how would they be informed on the practices of a specific group to know what is or isn’t appropriate?
Many complaints seem to be about account notes. Perhaps adding a visibly marked (to the player) expiration date would offer an alternative course of action (waiting) that doesn’t require time spent handling the case. That could cut down on such cases. Of course you could just “hide” them from the player after some time but that would reintroduce the problem if people found out the notes are still there.
Nobody wants to be reminded of the stupid shit they did last year hangs permanently on their record and staff complaint is the only option.
notes can actually be set to expire, which basically deletes them, so using the term expiration might be confusing particularly for admins, but there is a fade out system that fades out old notes. I think right now it’s set to start at 6 months and finish at 12, so probably very few people know about it. Maybe reducing the times for this could help and trying to find a way to educate players a bit more on how notes are used
It just generally takes too long. The turnaround time not being good for some simple complaints generally gives off the impression that complaints are allowed to linger. For relatively simple disputes like what an admin did/didn’t do, handling these in a few hours or so once it starts being worked on seems reasonable unless the situation is much more complex then it seems or the involved are not available. Needing to at least present the work done for a peer review to another person seems reasonable in this case, so that probably extends a complaint to a day or two as availability requires.
I personally don’t like how responses are laid out as a numeric list with callbacks to things in those lists. I feel like it makes things difficult to follow sometimes as I have to double back and read what “finding 7” was while I’m reading “action 2”. I feel like it would be more readable and presentable if it were just some plain paragraphs explaining what actually transpired and what action was taken.
It definitely takes way too long for complaints to be finished right now. Unfortunately pretty much everything in the project is backlogged right now. Up until someone cleared out a bunch of appeal recently, I think every single admin task was backlogged. I don’t have much personal experience with backlogs outside of the admin team, but the same is true with at least a few things there. I think we’re at 500 open PRs right now, discord appeals were also backlogged until someone else ran through them a bit ago, and we have so many reported issues that it’s hard for a lot of people to figure out what has and hasn’t already been reported, even if they’re active in development.
In my opinion, every backlog we have is “unacceptably” long, with unacceptably in quotes because of the whole everyone is a volunteer thing. While headmins try to prioritize complaints where they see a significant issue, it still takes way too long for even some very severe ones to be processed. The same is true for appeals, PRs, and even whitelist requests, I imagine all of it can be discouraging and frustrating to anyone involved on either end of the process.
For the complaint response format, I do it like that because I thought having a separation between what happened and what was done in response would make things clearer to people, and that referencing findings in actions would help to explain what specifically contributed to an action. One of the ideas being that it’s easy to read through some paragraphs and miss what was done in the details. This could probably be mitigated with a summary somewhere, but I’m not sure that anything can be more clear than a numbered list of resulting actions. I also think the format makes it easier for subjects of complaints to dispute any issues. Having the “facts” of what happened in a list lets people go through point by point and look to see if they agree or disagree with each of them.
I’d be interested in more opinions on this. I’d also be interested to hear from any admins, regardless of if they’ve received a complaint in the past, about their opinion on the format. If it’s a widespread belief that a different style would be preferable then I wouldn’t mind switching
though I’ve never had any complaints with the staff and thus unable to comment on what you said about being able to refer back to facts to dispute an issue with it. as someone just reading though them, i personally enjoy the numbered list as i find it to be quick and concise. then from attempting to put myself into your place, i would assume that a numbered list would be generally easier to put together than nicely written paragraphs
Mmm. Before I respond: what exactly is making admin complaints take so long?
Is it the admins needing to type long and unecessary responses? Is it having to look into the issue(s)? Is there not enough staff to look at the reports?
To clarify, I don’t mind the findings and action taken being two separate sections. I just think the numbered list outlining every detail can make it a bit more verbose then it needs to be.
It’s a combination of burnout, other backlogs/tasks existing, and things about the complaints themselves.
Right now most of the admin team, including headmins, are at least some degree of burnt out, and that makes people have little time to do much.
Most of the time staff complaints are admin complaints, and almost all admin complaints are processed by headmins. Headmins have more to do than just process complaints, so sometimes other things take priority. The severity of complaints vary a lot, but fortunately a lot of the valid ones are relatively minor in impact, often other tasks will take priority over those to a degree. There are also sometimes fairly severe complaints but they might have something that mitigates the need to close them immediately, and in those cases again there might be other tasks or backlogs that would get some degree of higher priority over the complaints.
Other tasks
Just for some examples of other tasks, currently there’s a lot of focus on trial admins, specifically on getting them accepted, trained, and promoted, because we’ve got such high backlogs. That’s something that has a higher impact than most complaints do. There’s also stuff like rule/policy changes/discussions. It’s most common with rules, but sometimes there will be a fairly substantial disagreement with how to interpret a rule or discussion about if a rule is having the intended effect. While any admin is able to go through the process to change a rule, it’s incredibly rare for them to write out a proposed change so it’s something that ends up falling to headmins in almost every case. Again, this typically has a higher impact than any single complaint.
Complaint priority
Complaint itself
To give some examples of how even some severe complaints can be de-prioritized, most complaints are about an admin action, but few admin actions are actively having significant effects at the time they get to a complaint. So as an example, a note or a ban that has been successfully appealed isn’t preventing the person from playing. It definitely can still have an impact, especially if there’s an admin encounter in the future, but it’s nowhere near as impactful to resolve a complaint about an admin that wrote a note after making a bad ruling as it is to fix a rule so that multiple admins who interpreted the old rule differently agree on the interpretation. Even if a complaint is about something very serious, it is possible to take some remediating action before the complaint is closed, like lifting a ban that a complaint is about, and this has happened in at least one case.
Likelihood of continuing issues
The previous paragraph addresses direct impact related to the complaint, but there’s also the chance of continuing issues that should be considered. This is fortunately fairly easy, we seem to rarely get complaints about the same sort of issue pilling up, and I hope that any time we do we’d notice the repeated names quickly and focus on those complaints. Since we have a very significant backlog right now, there’s also another factor, and that’s admin activity. Sometimes an admin gets a complaint but goes inactive, for whatever reason, before someone is able to get to the complaint. In these cases, even a severe complaint has a low chance of continuing issues, so that’ll affect it’s priority.
Summary
Hopefully that provides a good explanation of how there’s a lot that can cause other things to very quickly take priority over complaints. Particularly when factors combine, like when a complaint is about a note being inaccurate and the admin isn’t currently adminning, there are a lot of things that’d be more impactful with our current backlogs and stuff. Sometimes the question a headmin has to ask themselves is “do I process this complaint about this note a player is saying is inaccurate from an admin who hasn’t been active in a month, or do I write feedback for a trialmin who has been adminning multiple rounds per day?”
I don’t want this to come off as complaints being pointless because they have little impact. For probably a majority of complaints, even if the impact is small compared to other things a headmin can work on, it’s very reasonable for the player to feel significantly impacted. There are also multiple cases where complaints have resulted in or contributed to significant actions.
Complaints themselves
Since complaints can cover a wide variety of issues, there’s a lot various things closely related to the complaint itself that can contribute to the delays.
Probably the main thing is that no one likes to deal with complaints afaik. You have a player that’s annoyed about something an admin did and in most cases it’s not going to be a “clearly you should have known” situation but rather “this is a gray area”, “you messed up this minor detail”, or “you were wrong but there’s no reasonable way you could have known”. I’ve had a complaint before where I had two uninvolved admins review the round and give me opposite opinions.
Basically no matter what you do or decide, someone will be upset with you. The player might be less visible to you, and the admin might be less likely to respond inappropriately, but sometimes they do and that can cause a whole mess of other issues depending on the specifics. You can’t let any of this affect the final outcome, and everyone who works on complaints has experience with ahelps so that offeres a good bit of experience with upset people, but it still contributes to how unenjoyable the situation is. That’s especially true if you know the actual investigation is going to take a lot of time and effort, and despite that there’s probably not going to be a happy ending.
Cut and dry situations are usually fast and easy to handle, but those are also the easiest for admins to get right and avoid a complaint entirely. Sometimes a situation is just so complicated that it takes days to sort out what actually happened and what should have happened. The easiest thing to do would be to say “something this small isn’t worth the effort”, but at least when I’m processing complaints I don’t want to throw something out just because I think it’s a minor issue that will take a lot of work, it was enough of an issue to the player that they went through the effort to make a complaint so I want to address their complaint correctly. With the example of two uninvolved admins disagreeing, at that point it’s fairly easy to handle, but having two additional admins review a round and talking to each of them about it separately adds a lot of processing time and work. There are also just some times where it could be a major issue but it’ll take a long time to investigate. Sometimes people wait to make a complaint until a ton of small stuff has happened, or a ton of stuff just happens all at once, and that can be hard to sort through.
Another thing that sometimes contributes to the time is timezone/free time differences between the subject of the complaint and whoever is processing it. The more complex the situation is, the more communication is usually required with the complaint subject to process the complaint. Usually this takes a few messages back and forth over the course of a few hours. It can be as fast as a few minutes if free time lines up well, and it’s usually not required for rejected complaints, but sometimes with the way free times line up it ends up being a message each per day, and that can really drag things out. While this sometimes makes the minimum time a complaint can be handled in several days or even weeks, this isn’t really responsible for the current backlog. Most backlogged complaints aren’t actively being processed right now because of burnout or other tasks taking priority.
Other replies
Thanks for the feedback. Even if you’ve never been involved in a complaint, I think it’s good to hear your opinions. Public complaints are at least partially for the public, particularly for people who are involved in WizDen.
As far as which would be easier for me to write, it probably wouldn’t make a significant difference. I don’t feel like the numbered format is difficult to write, and I think there’s less writing than full paragraphs, but there are other people who have processed complaints that I think prefer using a paragraph/sentence style
Thanks for clarifying, I misunderstood your earlier post and thought you were suggesting just paragraphs with no separation. I wouldn’t mind using any of the formats that have been brought up before if one of them was generally more preferred