I’d say the important thing to keep in mind is make sure players have /something/ to do, don’t go out of your way to make it clear the player’s actions aren’t relevant, and don’t constantly make yourself above and beyond anything the other players could accomplish. If anyone can catch the DnD analogies, make sure the players are occupied with some task, don’t railroad things down a pre-determined path, and don’t godmode with a GMPC. Beyond that it’s all down to individual judgment calls on specific scenarios, taking into account what you know of the people involved and trying to balance convenience to immersion. We don’t want it to look like we are dealing with gods unless someone actually uses the pray feature and legitimately dealing with a god.
Putting all power to the station when there’s no engineers is a good example here as if there are engineers who would appreciate the work your just taking their job away, but if no one wants to be bothered setting the power then just press that button to ease our headaches. On the reverse, knocking out all the power or pressing that one button that blows all of the lights is annoying as squeak if you expect to just make a mess for people to clean up, or want to say “Oh! Enjoy the darkshift!” like I’ve seen before. One instance of this outright caused an argument and a player to leave, because she was CE at the time and the admin who blew the lights went to bed, then while everyone else was having fun late at night with a dark station another admin came on and demanded that all the lights be fixed. By hand. Before the shift ends. With about 5 people on, all of whom were perfectly situated …
Blowing all the lights so that a scary horror antagonist can sneak around snatching up prey people, that’s an event. That’s a cool scenario. That’s something more than just cleaning up a mess and probably going to be vore related. Just watch the flavor-text and things can work out fine.
But I get the feeling this is about Admin behavior in general and not just during events. Hmm … while it isn’t something I see often among our actual playerbase, elsewhere in other chats the biggest complaint I hear about Virgo admins is that they are “special snowflake” characters who try to be special and unique, setting up events to make themselves the heroes and spawning themselves the biggest or most effective weapons. While I cannot quite comment on how much of this is accurate and how much is just assumption after seeing things from the perspective of a new player, spawning in your own custom items might be contributing to the feel of these people’s resentment. From the context of someone entirely new to the game, if you see an admin’s character has a special gun with their name on it that only they are allowed to use, and it has special markings making it distinct and different from anything the players can make, how many do you think will assume that it’s stats are modified to make it better than the player only version? How many will hold this against the admins for trying to show off before they ever investigate further?
Okay, sure the kink in this argument is that non-admins can get special fluff items themselves, in the case of catbug even an entire new sprite for himself on the old code, and there are numerous instances of people drawing their own sprites and having them added in just for the fun of it. I once saw Ace take an otherwise new player and set up an entire pirate event JUST to give this guy’s player a reason to have and spawn with pirate clothing. Its not like things are always limited to just admin only, and I’d be hard pressed to say it’s only to “The admin’s friends” or “people who kiss ass to the admins” given the examples in which events and special requests are made for players who from what I can tell are almost complete strangers.
On the old code I know there were a handful of special weapons with clearly modified values, that one scythe gun or the special katana for example. But they were just sort of there … and even then players occasionally got their hands on one. Most of the time refusing to touch them simply because they have no need for an obvious weapon.
Other thing to note, just as a general rule for anyone who’s an admin playing around as any character … your words will always appear to carry more weight than anyone else’s, even if you aren’t speaking as an admin. So making a distinction between what you personally prefer and what your advice or words as a player is, and what you’re saying as an admin regarding the actual rules and acceptable behavior on the server is occasionally important.