Request for Feedback: Changes to the Appeals Policy

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This is a request for feedback by the Wizard’s Den Playerbase on changes to our appeals policy. This does not affect the appeals policy of any other server. This is only applicable to official Wizard’s Den Servers.

Background

The Current State of the Appeals Policy

Our current appeal policy relies heavily on votes. Most appeals will be brought forward to an admin team vote which may take anywhere from a few hours to several days or in extreme cases weeks where admin engagement is low.

In all cases except speedy appeals(see bellow), this also puts a further burden on on the processing admin who has to do “vote paperwork” as well as coordinate it.

This, along with the complexity of the current appeals policy(we have 3 different appeals procedures which may be used) often means that huge backlogs develop especially when admins are burned out on appeals or admining as a whole.

Our “Release valve” to this is the speedy appeal process. With it, an admin is able to process an appeal immediately as long as another admin agrees with their judgement. The Speedy Appeal Procedure before emergency measures were taken could only be invoked under the following circumstances:

Speedy Appeal Conditions
  • the ban is a temporary ban and the player indicated on the appeal that they are ok with it being processed without a vote,
  • the ban length is less than or equal to 14 days,
  • this appeal is older than 7 days and no other admin is handling the appeal, or the result of the appeal is obvious.
  • Similar appeals of bans for similar situations are almost always accepted.
  • So little effort was made in the appeal, that it is improbable it would be accepted.

Unfortunately, due to the prevalence of backlogs this release valve became the main way that appeals are handled while also making handling appeals more confusing and more prone to error.

Additionally we would often receive appeals for players with short bans on second chance grounds(they wished for lenience after apologizing in their appeal). While the players appealing are well meaning, the bans applied in this situations are proper and we often could not get to them in time before the ban expired. At the same time those appeals were taking up admin resources.

Lastly, a lot of admins who prefer to focus on other activities such as in game admining often get roped in to helping with appeals despite not wanting to(No admins are not forced to participate, however they may be repeatedly pinged if a vote does not have enough admin engagement). This contributes to burnout.

The reasoning behind the current policy

Our current appeals policy is based on not trusting a singular admin to make a decision if possible, and instead relies on the wisdom of the collective admin team.

The main reason that the policy is like this is because of how appeals were handled beforehand. There were a handful of admins(1-3 at any given time) which would summarily deal with appeals. While this did deal with submitted appeals effectively, this system was informal and it often resulted in the processing admins not investigating the appeal to an acceptable level leading to improper appeals decisions being taken. During this period, the appeals policy still called for handling appeals mainly through votes however this provision was often ignored.

The New Policy

The main goals of the new appeals policy is to alleviate the bureaucracy involved with handling appeals, and at the same time maintain a level of accountability to ensure that appeals are investigated thoroughly. You can find the draft of the new appeals policy here.

Change Summary

The Appeals Team

The new policy creates an Appeals Team. These are trusted admins dedicated to handling appeals. Its members must be voted on by the admin team. Head game admins are always members of the Appeals Team. This measure is to allow for capable admins that are interested in dealing with appeals to do so quickly and efficiently.

Closing an Appeal Requires a detailed response by the Handling Appeals Team Member

In order to make sure that appeals get the investigation they need, Appeals Team members handling them will need to provide information on what facts they relied on and why they made the decision they did. This will just take the form of a summary, but must include enough information to adequately explain the processor’s actions.

Their opinion can then be subject to review in a complaint to determine if an appeal was handled improperly. This should hopefully address the issues we had in the past with admins summarily handling appeals improperly.

Most Ban Appeals can now be handled individually

All Appeals Team members are empowered to handle appeals on their own. A vote will not be required for them to process an appeal. This allows Appeal Team members to dispatch with appeals quickly.

Voucher bans will require a vote of the entire Appeals Team.

Permanent Bans(Bans that cannot be appealed) still require a vote from the entire admin team.

Limitations on Repeated Appeals

Players will not be able the same temporary ban multiple times. Their first appeal will lead to a final decision. The handling Appeals Team member may still allow further appeals for long temporary bans at their discretion.

Players who receive Indefinite, and Voucher bans will still be entitled to submit appeals in the future.

Expected Wait Periods between appeals are clearly defined

This is something we lacked in our previous policies. The new policy now offers clear recommendations on how long a player should wait between appeals depending on their type.

The Purpose of this Topic

This Topic has the following purposes:

  • To inform the playerbase of the upcoming changes to the Appeals Policy
  • To solicit feedback on the proposed changes
  • To address any question players may have

Feel free to comment here with any concerns, feedback, or questions you may have.

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I reviewed the new policy. It all looks good to me except for the part where the appeals procedure section is skipping a number (2) in the steps.

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despair

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Is it not possible to have 2 admin teams rotate with one another?
if so, why?

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There is only one admin team.

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Embrace the Anarchy:
Sec Officers: Instead of formal bans, players could be “arrested” security officers, thrown into perma, forced to wear silly costumes, or given menial tasks by the community as punishment. This would align with SS14’s theme of player-driven justice and chaos.

Streamlined Admin Interventions:
Admin Veto: Admins could maintain a “veto” power where they can intervene in extreme cases, but the default should be to let the game environment handle minor infractions. For instance, an admin could teleport a rule-breaker to a part of the station where they’d be at the mercy of players’ whims or directly in perma.

Simplified Ruleset:
Core Rules Only: Focus the rules on critical issues like cheating, griefing, or harassment. For everything else, let the game’s inherent chaos be the judge. Players know what to expect in SS14, and part of the fun is dealing with the unexpected.

Appeals via Game Mechanics:
In-Game Trials: Implement or encourage player-driven trials or tribunals where those accused of breaking the game’s spirit (rather than strict rules) can plead their case before peers, who then decide on an in-game punishment.

Feedback Mechanism:
Community Suggestion Box: Have an in-game or forum-based suggestion system where players can propose how different rule-breaking scenarios should be handled in-game. This could lead to community-created “punishments” that are fun and thematic.There’s a court room in most station. Use the voting system.

Admin Role Reduction:
Player Autonomy: Since SS14 is about player interaction, reduce the admin role in day-to-day gameplay. Admins should be like the “gods” of the game, stepping in only when necessary to maintain balance or when the game’s functionality is at stake.

Educational Approach:
Guide New Players: Instead of punishing for ignorance, guide new players through the chaotic world of SS14. Perhaps have veteran players or in-game mentors who can show newcomers the ropes, reducing misunderstandings that might lead to rule-breaking.

In Conclusion:
SS14’s appeal lies in its unpredictability and the freedom players have to shape their environment. Let’s keep the rules minimal and let the station’s chaos be our justice system. Admins should be there to guide the game, not govern every interaction. Let’s make punishment part of the game’s fun, not a reason to leave it or get banned.

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It’s obvious you used AI to write this since it has a very poor understanding of how things actually work and is in ChatGPT’s style.

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May be it just help me write what I’m thinking…

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You guys are so mean I don’t understand why… sad

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This kind of punishment would last less than a round, and so would be unsuitable as a replacement for normal bans. We do sometimes do this if a player is being role banned and we need them out of the role.

First of all, this makes no sense, but we do already allow many situations to be handled in-character. I think that teleporting players around like that would be more immersion breaking than just banning. The game isn’t as self-correcting as you think it is.

Players on our servers want and expect at least some level of roleplay, the rules are there to make sure everyone meets that level. Core rules on our server are only used for non-roleplay gamemodes like deathmatch.

We already have this with General wizden-servers and Rule Clarifications, unless you mean something else?

Other than events, which increase player interaction, we strive to minimise the impact we have on the round, except where doing so is beneficial to the community, such as banning rule breakers.

While I agree that unpredictability and freedom is one of the core aspects of the game, another part is the structure and shared expectations in place that makes the game fair for all those involved.

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If it’s intentional that checking for Ban Evasion be done both in Step 1 and Step 8, it may be best to state Step 8 as “Check again for ban evasion, even if you did so in Step 1”. Really though I don’t see why it isn’t just a necessary step for both Step 1 and Step 8, rather than being optional in Step 1. Admins doing Ban Appeals need to know how to check for evasion anyways, right?

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It basically just means that you can deny the appeal without doing any other work if you can prove ban evasion but you must ensure that no evasion has taken place when you want to close the appeal.

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Right, but shouldn’t the first check for Ban Evasion just be mandatory? To avoid the awkward possibility of going through the whole process only to find out at the very end at Step 8 that they had tried to evade the Ban from the very beginning.

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This is going to be long. Some people might remember me as the guy who handed 500 appeals by myself because otherwise they were not getting done at all in any timely manner. I pushed multiple times to reduce the red tape needed to do ban appeals (unsuccessfully) and this combined with interpersonal friction at the sheer law book being an administrator was becoming led to me leaving the team about a year ago. I want to talk about some of the issues that were in place since I started in 2022 and the problems they caused. I think this proposed policy addresses some of it but not all of it.

Some of the original problems

  • Admin Voting on All Appeals - This is already solved in some part by this proposed policy, but requiring the whole or a large part of the admin team’s input on every appeal instantly burnt everyone out with being spammed by appeal votes. It also didn’t do much to foster discussion. Handling obvious-outcome appeals wasn’t something you could usually do because you needed a vote on top of the investigation, so you couldn’t just do the investigation and be done with it. Furthermore summarizing your whole investigation for everyone else to vote on was a large amount of subjectivity, so having to “present your case” for every appeal was absolutely exhausting and one of the primary reasons they never got done and sat for weeks.
  • Split Admin Interest - Also addressed by this policy. Some people don’t care about appeals. Hopefully having “appeal admins” helps keep that specialty where there’s some interest in it.
  • Convoluted and Intimidating Appeal Procedures - Nobody could just jump into handling appeals because there was an extremely lengthy flowchart in handling them. There are multiple processes eligible in multiple circumstances some of which are not clearly identifiable or mutually exclusive. At the end of the day the only thing “speedy” about the “speedy appeal process” was the fact once someone started working on it they could conclude it quickly, and the “avoiding red tape minigame” was just letting them sit for a week.

What I actually ended up doing (sanctioned by Chief Engineer at the time because we were so backlogged with so little interest on appeals) was handling appeals myself without input from really anyone. If there was something I felt would be better with the team’s input, I put it to a vote like normal. For vast majority of them, they were easy to deny for standard reasons (ex: ban evasion) or easy to approve if they were even modestly competently written with some hint of remorse or mitigating factor. I ended up approving a significant number of appeals alongside denying, it wasn’t one-sided. This was the only time the appeals subforum actually stayed empty of open appeals. Otherwise there was constantly 5-20 waiting.

Perceived Problems

  • Voting to Establish Appeal Admin - I don’t think this needs to be a vote among the admins. I think the headmin(s) [+maybe PM input] just need to assess the interested person and appoint them. If there were some alarming reason this person was not fit for an appeal admin position I am sure it would be brought forward privately and would be unlikely to be done in a public vote space anyways with your peers.
  • Trial Admins Processing Appeals - I don’t think trial admins need to have anything to do with touching appeals while on trial. They can certainly learn about the process but they shouldn’t be taking action if someone has to supervise every step of the way, and those making appeals will probably question the authority of their appeal being handled by an admin-in-training. This is something that can easily wait until the trial admin is out of trial.
  • Appeal Procedure
  • If checking for evasion is going to result in denying the appeal the appeal should just immediately be denied outright. It should be the first thing done. There were at least two instances I was ready to unban someone before awkwardly figuring out they tried to evade.
  • If expired bans are arguing the ban was mistaken or unjust, someone should at least verify the facts of the ban so that ban can be stricken from the player’s record if it turns out to be incorrect.
  • Trialmins under supervison are allowed to process bans, but regular admins don’t seem to be afforded the same opportunity. I think this is probably just a typo. Admins under supervision of an appeal admin should be able to process bans if they want.
  • Bans <2 weeks should be eligible for at least a review or second chance. If someone can competently write out an appeal requesting a reduced duration for a long ban they can be met halfway.
  • Info Collecting - “Reading the ahelp that led to the ban is highly recommended”. That should be a requirement. Someone’s conduct during the time they were banned is arguably more important than some of the other required steps here.

What It Needs

I think overall this will address at least a few of the constant issues that were being experienced with appeals. I think it will succeed especially in denying re-appeal spam and allowing appeal admins the autonomy to efficiently deal with appeals on their own time without needing to bother other team members or wait upon someone else’s input except in cases where it is required.

I do think something should be in here to indicate that very low-effort or low-quality appeals can immediately be thrown out. The number of those dealt with is significant, and those making an appeal should be warned to at least put some effort into what they’re writing.

This sort of leans into “admin policy” more than “appeals policy”, but I think the current guideline book for ban duration is frankly ridiculously complex to the point of being a work of satire. The appeals policy mentions about votes indicating if a ban is within guidelines, but the guidelines are so needlessly complex and verbose that myself and some other admins never considered using them and relied upon our own judgement when doing so. The offense table lists almost 50 types of offenses with wide ranges of possible punishments across up to four repeat offenses punctuated by a list of 13 footnotes of special cases, with special rules applied for certain offenses and an entire section of punishment modifiers and grouping/stacking offenses rulings.

If this table were going to be used, it needs to be codified into a ban calculator where an admin can just press the buttons to spit out a recommended ban. As it is, very few admins are realistically going to want to interface with this massive table of offenses and special cases to produce a ban “within guidelines”.

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Suggestion applied.

Suggestion applied.

Suggestion applied. Keep in mind that handling admins will just be able to deny such appeals arbitrarily according to their judgement as no facts are disputed.

Suggestion applied

Suggestion applied partially. Unfortunately it is sometimes impossible for us to go through all appeals due to their sheer volume. I will be changing the requirement to close the appeal to be at the discretion of the handling admin instead.

This is mostly to ensure that admins actually have confidence in appeals team members as they are given powers that are only comparable to what you had. We have had a lot of discussions in the past about the appeal process, something similar to this where 1 person or multiple are given the ability to process appeals on their own had a lot of push back so it’s important that admin opinion is taken into account where possible even if in most cases these votes will just be formalities.

I don’t believe that trialmins should be completely locked out of the appeals process. While it should not be the focus of their trial, it does allow them to get used to tools and resources like replays and logs. Appeals have historically also seemed very daunting to trials(In large part due to how bureaucratic the process was before these change) so it’s good to also have them do 1 or 2 during their trial to dispel that.

I’ll be adding a step that just allows for the immediate denial of troll, and low effort appeals.

The complexity of the banning policy is indeed extreme. It is kind of needed because our rules can at times also be extremely complicated due to the nature of the game. I was originally planning to make a ban calculator integrated into the game and then I spontaneously became the headmin of a shattered admin team. I will be working on that when I have time.

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I think being an admin for a game like SS13/14 naturally has a massive amount of subjectivity; almost everything is going to have to be written as a guideline, not a hard rule or definite flowchart. I was/is my opinion that admins for a game like this, whom are trusted with administrative tools, also need to be trusted to make subjective judgement calls for the health of the game. Rules are going to end up similar; there needs to be enough information to classify what is and isn’t OK, but there needs to be enough leeway to allow an administrator to act when a behavior is obviously being done to detriment of the game.

I observed previously that it seemed administrators were largely not being trusted to exercise their best judgement, resulting in increasingly complex rules, annendums, the dreaded rule clarifications, and de facto practices emerging because they simply made more sense to do rather then following written policy. I think for the most part the actual amount of bad admin calls that needed someone to step in were fairly insignificant compared to other issues caused by phonebook policy.

Having some degree of consistency is certainly important for similar offenses, but like with current banning policy there’s too many outside factors to consider (lying, hostility, new player, low round impact, offense histort, conduct) that you can’t just apply a flowchart or spreadsheet of offenses to rule them all. Basic ground rules do need to be set, but getting into particular offenses and modifiers starts to become too much.

I almost want to get back in and start rewriting things again, but I don’t think I have the time and interest in SS14 as a game anymore. This is also getting off track from the actual appeals process.

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