Administrative Precedents
Administrative Protocols
This page contains procedures and precedents for administrators.
- An administrator is anyone with game server permissions. This includes event managers and maintainers.
- This page is intentionally (relatively) informal. This is a roleplaying game, not a corporate service. We expect staff to represent the server's community and ideals, not act like machines.
Roles
In-game staff roles currently consist of:
- Administrator: Responsible for handling player disputes, policy questions, etc.
- Trial Admins are not lower ranked than Game Admins; it simply symbolizes a learning period for new staff.
- Maintainer: Given server permissions as codebase maintainers.
- Event Manager: Given server permissions to run events / storylines.
What staff can / can not do:
- Non-administrators should not handle player / policy disputes in most cases.
- Administrators / Maintainers can run events if they choose to, as long as they abide by the standards set for events.
- Anyone with game server permissions is allowed to interfere with the round if said interference abides by the standards set for events.
- Anyone with game server permissions is allowed to apply temporary / inconsequential punishments if a player is overly disruptive on an OOC level. This includes muting OOC, muting specific players from OOC for the round, etc.
General Protocol
These are things staff are generally expected to follow.
Slip-ups happen. We will not side with you if you are obnoxiously hostile to staff over a mistake that is insignificant in the long run. Don't be a dick.
- Staff are expected to remain cordial and impartial in admin tickets.
- Intentionally being belligerent towards staff may net you snarky responses in return. Staff are still human.
- Staff are expected to not handle tickets that they are involved / personally invested in / otherwise unable to make an impartial call.
- This applies to everyone, including head admins. We have a staff team for a reason.
- This can kick in if an admin becomes personally invested when otherwise attempting to handle a ticket impartially. Call another admin if you're getting heated.
- Staff are generally expected to not share data / knowledge only they know that players are trying to conceal.
- Example: character names - while normally not an issue, some players prefer having their identity be on the down-low.
- Anti-example: Whether or not something was sabotaged. After the round, staff are free to share anything they know about general round flow for transparency reasons.
- Pseudo-example: Specifically who did an otherwise stealthy sabotage. Remember, players might have characters trying to be stealthy. Don't ruin it for them.
- Staff should keep each other accountable. Please bring concerns up with each other in staff-chat.
- We are all here to collaboratively build a community; there is no ego, only right and wrong.
- Try to give players proportionate warning before serious consequences unless it is an egregious infraction.
- Outside of cases of obvious grief and/or established hostility, avoid giving excessively long bans.
- Players should generally be warned if they are spotted doing / planning a TK/PK (temporary/until-appeal removal of character) worthy action.
- Try to give IC punishments for IC infractions.
- OOC punishments (full-job-bans, server bans) should be for OOC / rules infractions, or when a player is abusing their allotment of allowable IC trouble-making.
- Investigation is expected when handling a non-trivial ticket.
- Logs do not provide full context. Always talk to everyone involved.
- Logs may leave out context, but logs are factual. Validate the story of those involved before applying a punishment.
'Central Command' / 'Higher Authorities'
This section applies to all 'higher authority' roles. Central Command (potentially to be refluffed) is simply the authority for Nanotrasen. There are others, like faction leaders, other megacorporation executives / leadership, etc.
The word CCO refers to these characters / authorities. Use common sense, do not rules lawyer this section to the letter.
- Be professional (or act in character if your character is not meant to be professional). It hurts player confidence if staff are shit-posting as an IC that can literally fire them.
- CCOs may visit for the sake of visiting, even without a grievance.
- As a CC visitor, they have no overrule authority.
- As a CC officer, they do; they are expected to not show up as an on-duty officer trivially.
- These are some of the only characters that have an exception to 'do not job swap by leaving and rejoining'. Staff are obviously expected to use common sense (ergo; extreme example: getting in a barfight as a visitor and then rejoining as an officer to flex is not acceptable).
- A CCO visiting is still a CCO. Don't do stupid things like provoke fights or otherwise make players miserable.
- Do not dogpile players. There is absolutely no reason for more than 2-3 staff to join as CCOs outside of extreme scenarios.
- It is an absolutely awful feeling to have all the administrators dogpiling you IC as in many non-Citadel servers this is what happens before you are banned. Do not propagate this. Wanting to watch is not a valid reason to join as a CCO.
- Using 'radio monitors' to speak for / as CCOs or just as the corporation is allowed.
- Use common sense. If there's an event that all subspace communications to command are suppressed, don't start shitposting over the traffic monitor if the traffic monitor is lightyears away.
Ascension Clause
'Ascending' existing player characters to a CCO-equivalent is not allowed without prior authorization from a head administrator and discussion with the staff team.
- Existing CCOs at time of writing (4/15/2024) are grandfathered in and are allowed to continue being used.
Fraternization Clause
After a colossal clusterfuck in the ancient eras of the server's history, under no circumstances are CCO-equivalent characters allowed to engage in ERP while in game.
- ICly, if you were too attached to a significant other / associate to the point of losing your impartiality, you would not be allowed to continue making decisions regarding them / their posting by any reasonable corporation.
Events / Round Interference
On Lore Integrity
Citadel is a canon server. This means that memory is continuous between rounds unless otherwise specified.
- Do not do anything outlandish. This includes changing (large amounts of) IC objects to have nonsensical sprites, or anything that would generally be extremely immersion-shattering for players who witness it.
- If doing anything story-significant, try to know the general gist of the lore behind a faction so that it can be portrayed properly.
- We do not expect event runners to know every tiny tidbit of lore about something unless they are running something with very high importance to the 'something'. Characters have natural variance.
On Delaying / Ending the Round
- Staffmembers are allowed to interfere with the round timer / automatic transfer, up to and including cancelling votes, if justifiable reason is procured.
- It's generally reasonable to do this if deemed necessary during announced events. See: 'On Scheduled Events'.
- It is generally inadvisable to outright cancel the transfer vote (or the transfer itself) without good reason.
- Good reason may include finishing IC-critical scenarios occurring in game.
- Staff is generally expected to have a finger on the pulse of the round when doing these things; if a large amount of the server is sitting around with nothing to do / in dead-chat, it's probably not a good idea to keep the round going.
- Delaying the actual reboot post-transfer is allowable for IC scenarios to resolve.
- Please do not do this too often, or for too long. People cannot join the round after the round ends, not to mention it is awkward for everyone sitting around.
On Impromptu Events (Round Interference)
Round interference / 'spicing up the round' is allowed and encouraged within reason. 'Organic' events and conflict can often be even more fun than scheduled events and organized missions.
- Any un-announced event fits in this category; hence why such broad jurisdiction is given. There is no difference between a spontaneous overmaps mission, and spawning something in maintenance for crew to interact with.
- Impromptu events should avoid being chaotic to the point of undue lethality.
- While an argument can be made that being in game (or on duty) makes you fair game for world events, understand that a large part of the server is being able to roleplay without the fear of being randomly gunned down without warning or provocation.
- Danger is allowed in impromptu events; just scale it as necessary and make it believable. Avoid making scenarios that will become overly lethal for uninvolved crew.
- Take into account who is on the station when doing anything dangerous.
- If security is empty, as an example, probably don't give weapons to the stowaway you just spawned.
- Do try to ascertain the impact of your intervention. Giving a rocket launcher to a random person, for example, will probably result in security going on high alert at the very minimum, not to mention that person being grilled by security or worse - even if you thought it would just be a few people involved.
- By no means does this mean you cannot involve on-duty departments as needed; it just means to be mindful and think ahead when interfering with the canon world.
On Scheduled Events
Scheduled events are, in effect, someone reserving a time slot / round on the server to run their scenario.
- Events must be scheduled at least a day in advance (give or take) for it to count as this.
- Scheduled events get a lot more leeway in what can happen. Notably,
- High-chaos / 'we didn't sign up for this' events are generally okay in this context.
- Any event that requires the round to be non-canon can happen in this context.
- Arbitrarily interrupting a crew transfer vote to ensure event completion is generally allowable in this context.
- Do not spam scheduled events; downtime is important.
- Do not make every scheduled event a shootout; the ability to reserve the server for a high-chaos shootout does not mean the server exists for high-chaos shootouts.
- Remember; events, if canon, are still part of the crew's history. Do not turn the crew's history into just moonlighting as space marines.
People should still be having fun in scheduled events. Being given leeway to do whatever you want to the round does not excuse you from having to get a read on the general state of the round.
On Events & Chaos
High chaos events are generally classified as events that involve forcing a significant fraction of the players onboard the main map to deal with something, regardless of their opinion on it.
- There should generally not be too many high-chaos events in a week.
- High-chaos events should generally be announced, unless there is a natural buildup to it / other factors.
- If the crew infinitely escalates against a faction, they consent to being escalated against in return, whether or not announced.
- Low-chaos events are generally 'uncapped' / not limited.
- Combat-heavy events should not be too frequent, regardless of chaos level.
On Event Characters
- ECs (event characters) are those that do not exist outside of an event / is otherwise not normally played by a player.
- PCs (player characters) are those that do / are commonly played by a player, whether on the station or in an offmap.
- Spawning player characters in as an event character is generally acceptable if it makes sense to do so.
- This especially applies to offmap/non-NT characters.
- Permadeath is not automatically enforced on characters that are in an event, unless agreed to prior (and it being sensical to the story to do so; examples include factions that do not revive their dead).
Staff Candidacy
Citadel now utilizes a system inspired by other communities to onboard new administrators, to ensure everyone on the team understands what is expected of them and are on the same page about conduct.
- New administrators will be brought onboard as a Trial Admin.
- A member of staff will be asked to walk the new administrator through tooling and investigations.
- Trial Admins no longer have a fixed term. The server does not have a large amount of population; an admin will be considered to have passed their trial if enough time elapses and they have handled a sufficient amount of tickets.
- Tickets that count as training for new staff are those that require non-negligible investigation / compromise. 'How do I do this', and clear-cut griefing bans do not count.
- Trial Admins are not expected to have any more activity than tenured admins; we will take the activity & pulse of the person in question as well as the server when determining things like this.
- The server has times of inactivity, and we do not expect staff candidates to be on 24/7 when there is nothing to do.
- At the end of their training period, Trial Admins will be given a public review.
- This is explicitly not for +1 / -1 voting, but for a chance for any grievances to be aired and addressed before someone is given tenure.
Administrative Precedents
Miscellaneous, rare / improbable precedents are here.
Round Entrance / Exit
Leaving the round to avoid punishment
Leaving the round to avoid IC consequences for IC actions is something punishable ICly or OOCly depending on context. This includes logging out mid-scenario.
- Intentionally doing so will generally net you a far more negative response from admins; it is also explicitly against the rules.
- If you need to go, you need to go. Inform those around you via LOOC and adminhelp if you're involved in something major.
- Staff reserves the right to continue to push forwards scenarios from prior rounds if deemed necessary, especially if your character did something awful.
Leaving the round to avoid your job
The server generally has no precedents that it is disallowed/punishable to leave during a scenario outside of the above.
- It is unreasonable to force someone to play a job they did not want. That does not work in any context whatsoever.
- It is reasonable to ask that if someone does not want to deal with the majority of a job, that they consider playing a different job.
- Example: Security Officer that leaves the moment they're called upon to do their job.
- It is allowed nonetheless to leave if you really do not want to partake in something and otherwise handle your job fine, especially if that something is somewhat against the general direction of server lore / story.
- Example: Security Officer leaving the round when an event that pits security / exploration against terrorists.
- Remember that the server's general story / direction can be ran counter to by events. Some people simply do not want their characters involved in extreme situations, or some task too far out of what the character signed up to do. This is generally considered fine.
Leaving & Rejoining on the same character
Leaving and rejoining on the same character is not officially allowed, with the following caveats;
- Doing this to perform a prohibited job swap outside of round-start / when having joined initially as another job by mistake is strictly prohibited. This can net you IC and OOC consequences if abused, regardless of if an admin is always there to catch you.
- Prohibited job swaps includes anything involving becoming a head of staff outside of the proper channels in IC, becoming a cyborg/AI on the same character (even where it would otherwise make sense like for some synthetic characters), or swapping factions in any context (between two offmaps / an offmap and main map).
- Doing this to gain an upper hand in an IC disagreement will generally result in the character being judged to be in the wrong, regardless of context, by Central Command. Command characters may not 'clock in' to enforce their will when they did not intend to play the round as command.
- Doing this to heal yourself of an IC affliction is not allowed. Medbay is there for that. If there is no med-bay, figure out another way via IC.
- Doing this to change jobs is discouraged. We reserve the right to turn a blind eye to this in cases where this is not harmful, especially if a HoP/Captain does not exist to perform job changes.
- Do not abuse this. IC trumps all; using this to forcefully change into a department against its head / members' will is very unrealistic, ICly, and is punishable.
Events & Characters
On Hostile Characters
Being an unlikable character is fine. The world is fully simulated. There are jackasses in the world, and the world is more interesting for it.
What is not allowed is joining as a role with authority specifically during events / high-chaos to make everyone miserable.
- Example: A security officer character that attempts to enforce unreasonable rules / precedents like silencing crewmembers from accessing common radio entirely during a high-chaos event and openly threatening non-compliant crewmembers.
- Example: A head of staff character that attempts to dictate extremely strict orders / protocols to their department, when the department normally does not operate under those rules / precedents.
This rule is subjective and is up to the admins online at the time. Do be aware that any online staff will have justification to ask the character in question to stop, or flat-out bar the character from certain roles if this is determined to be harmful to server climate.
Either don't be a dick, or be a consistent dick. Don't show up just to get in on events with a mannerism that is detrimental to our regulars.