Discord Name: Kashargul
How old are you?: Early 30s
What role you are applying for: Maintainer
When you are most active? (including timezone):
Timezone is UTC+1/UTC+2, online times are varying depending on when I find time, but otherwise, always reachable through DMs if needed.
Roughly how much time do you dedicate to the server each week?:
Truth be told, I rarely find time to play as of late, even downstream I often end up debugging when I join a round. But in general coding wise there's barely been any day without contributions over the last year.
Names of notable characters you play in Vorestation:
This one's tricky, I've only played Kash rarely on Vorestation and my main active character is the character I play on when I don't want to be bothered downstream with coding work, so I'll not name this one publicly. Sorry.
How long have you been playing Space Station 13?
Actively for ~ 1.5 years by now, even though my coding time is higher than my active playtime.
How long have you been playing Vorestation?
More of a now and then within the same time period stated above.
Explain what most interests you about being staff:
While mostly being a maintainer for downstream, most of my code changes usually go directly to upstream and not often I'm ending up fixing issues that were introduced from upstream changes. Joining the Maintainers upstream allows me to directly code review changes actively and request changes within the code before those changes are merged. At the same time, I personally care little about any spat that might have been between upstream and downstream. In the end we work on the same codebase and should develop major changes and backend changes at the same pace to keep the codebase alive and up to date.
Explain what you think you will least enjoy about being staff:
I'm often diving too deep into developing and bug fixing. When I'm chasing after something, I can get too focussed on it. Not too often, I ended up idling entire rounds downstream after running into a bug trying to track it down and fix it. But I already know that for myself that when opening runtime logs or del logs, the round is more than likely going to end in debugging rather than playing.
Describe what role-playing means to you:
Roleplaying for me is to dive into another world, playing as another character to simply escape reality for a while as it allows to play out situations or themes from a different point of view and in a virtual environment.
Define what a "Problem Player" is in your own words:
A problem player is a player that's not fitting into the environment and causes trouble by for example acting too harshly or going too far in their reactions. If those things go too far, one has to interfere and deal with the situation. Quite commonly, one can get problem players to adjust their behaviour though.
Define a "Toxic Player" in your own words:
A toxic player though often shows through bad attitudes at a consistent level, not too often even verbally aggressively. Not too often there's a high self-confidence along with it, making it lot harder to get a toxic player to tune down. Often this shows straight up in negative behaviours to impact other players like griefing or trolling.
Define "Admin Abuse" in your own words:
Admin abuse is the misuse of the powers given to an admin. This can be misuse of admin abilities for personal gain or any other reason, e.g. spawning in admin guns, sharing server logs, etc.. At no time any of the admin abilities or access should be used outside of the allowed instances. Any violation of this can be seen as admin abuse.
In your opinion, what the biggest problem with the server right now?:
It often feels like handling two code bases at once while being a maintainer for downstream, there's still a lot of tech debt upstream is behind on. Even thought many of those things changed over the last few months, I think the staff team knows my personal opinion to this and I rather don't want to copy paste that text back in here.
How would you have it resolved?:
I think most people know that I'm already after it to have newer changes directly brought to upstream if they are larger ones or steadily up port / assist people in up porting backlog to get virgo back into line with the basic "frameworks" with downstream, so that it's less of a worry with new features or major updates to cause issues. Nonetheless, there's a major migration I still recommend and that is to get the option for test merges. For larger or critical features it's currently a shot in the dark. You'll have to hope you won't fuck something badly over. Not too often I'm test merging mirrors downstream to test them out and then rush changes before the next map swap back to virgo. This could be avoided if things could get test merged directly.
Go through the following scenarios and state how you would deal with it...
- An adminhelp comes in claiming an individual is griefing.
How I'd handle it: A ticket for griefing requires quick reactions, something I can't always guarantee for as a developer as I might be busy in debug / runtime logs or vs code. Nonetheless, if I would see it and there's no one around to handle it, the quickest way is to aghost and jump to the position, checking what's going on as well as reading through the logs on the side to get an overview of the situation. If the situation visibly during the spectating or within the logs can be classified as grief, then it's time to contact the problematic player in a PM and informing them about the situation. Depending on the case, it might even be justified to lock them into place or to teleport them away to handle the situation in calm. In general, this will lead to player notes being placed or even a warning / ban, but for the latter, I would hand over the report as well as the note to the admin team to handle. - A player is upset about a scenario, but they are clearly in the wrong.
How I'd handle it: This one's trickier as it can lead to a longer discussion, but in general it might be best to let them describe the situation from their point of view to get some time in between the event and answering before trying to de-escalate the situation. Especially when emotions are still heated such situations can go worse than they need to. For such situations, it's best to stay calm and don't join into any upset manner of responses. - When interviewing several individuals, one is lying but you cannot tell who it is.
How I'd handle it: In such a case, evidence is your best friend. When you can't trust anyone, just take the logs and examine them thoroughly to see who's telling the truth about the situation. But even though there's logs for most things, sometimes it takes a long time to go through or not every part of the situation is logged. In such cases, make sure to let everyone describe the situation while examining the logfiles and talk with each of the persons alone. By this point it's also never bad to get some other admins involved who might know some more about the players involved. - After interviewing several individuals, you have a pretty good idea of who is lying, but still lack concrete, infallible proof. Despite your best efforts, some details remain ambiguous. What now?
How I'd handle it: If it's a serious issue, time to get some other opinions weighted in from the admin team. For that a team exists to look over tricky situations and discuss a decision whilst keeping an eye on the suspect. - An individual is playing a character who has sparked several adminhelps regarding said individual, but they are not in any clear violation of the rules.
How I'd handle it: Controversial and needs to be looked into in details. What exactly is the reason for the ahelps and how's the history of the player. Nonetheless, the situation should be brought up with the staff team and discussed and if it's an issue negatively affecting the community, even a QC vote should be considered. - Multiple character deaths have occurred and you are attempting to investigate. One player exhibits poor role-playing skills combined with insulting all those involved, another rushed after trouble started and only used lethal force, and a third went on and attacked several other individuals after the first fight was finished.
How I'd handle it: This is so heavy LRP... Nonetheless, a conflict like this is best handled by multiple admins if possible. Otherwise, one best makes sure to separate the players what's a little trickier to do alone. Make sure to stop any ongoing fights, if needed even by forceMoving players away or freezing them in place. You don't want to investigate during a shootout... Talking with multiple parties at the same time will require quite some focus and best also making some notes on the side right away as this situation will lead to player notes or harsher consequences.
-> Someone must have started the situation and needs to be handled. This can be up to a ban for all the trouble. Especially if the entire situation was on such a LRP level with insults.
-> Going straight in with lethal weapons is just as bad. That needs to be made clear not to be done again including a clear warning and note.
-> Attacking random people is just as questionable, nonetheless, the reasoning might be interesting to hear out before falling a decision, but like above this is far over the edge of how far things should've gone.
What prior admin/moderator/management experience do you possess, if any?:
I'm developer downstream since end of January 2024 and offered to become a maintainer a few months later.
https://github.com/Kashargul
Finally, what unique aspects of yourself can you bring to the staff? What can you bring to the team that is, in your opinion, needed?:
The entire development process has been stagnant for a while and a lot of changes were carried from downstream to upstream. My goal is to have the code bases cooperate closer together on larger changes and have frameworks and core changes implemented upstream right away to keep the code bases going without too much diversion on fundamentals. Many of those changes are often not even player focussing, but simply allow for better performance , to keep the code up to date or to fix bugs and issues.
