About a week ago, the headmin team decided to leave the project. We are mixed on whether anything could bring us back, but at least some have no interest in returning. Joining us in our departure are several members of the game admin team.

Below, we detail some of the issues we’ve seen, and why we don’t think things are likely to improve. We encourage anyone who has seen or been affected by these issues, especially those who are convinced they will not improve, to choose to follow us. We ask that if you choose to, you make it known, at least within staff.

There are problems within the project which we believe are so strongly ingrained that they cannot be corrected. Since the start of triple headmins, the headmin team has been united in our beliefs about issues within the project, and despite our unified efforts, we have been unable to effect substantial change. For long before that, individuals have worked towards our same goals and struggled just as we have. For this reason, we believe continued efforts would only delay the inevitable.

Game Security

This November marks the one year point of a publicly available cheat client for Space Station 14 which, among other things, effectively allows anyone who downloads it to be unbannable. This is the reason BEAM was created, and BEAM methods have been essentially the only way we have been able to detect people doing things like this. For over a year there have been people willing to work on game security, but attempts at improvement are often shot down. Ideas are criticized and blocked, often because they do not perfectly solve all aspects of a problem, even if they are an improvement over the existing system, and often without work even starting on an alternative.

There are likely improvements to other parts of the game that experience a similar fate, but game security is the most visible and highest impact example to game admins.

Here is the current situation with game security:

  • Anyone can evade a ban, it’s incredibly simple to teach and can be done manually in less than a minute.
  • For around a year, a cheat client that enables ban evasion has been publicly and freely available. Work on it has stopped and the client will stop working eventually, but the reason for this is that there is now a paid cheat client.
  • In the last 30 days, over 200 accounts connected to WizDen with a cheat client, and we aren’t able to effectively ban them with existing tools. It’s likely that this number would be much higher if we were trying because they would just make new accounts and evade. It is also likely that each account does not represent a single person, because a majority seem to be raiders, but it’s not possible to determine how many accounts there are per person on average.
  • We have confirmed multiple instances of HWIDs being used to impersonate players and get them banned, including successful impersonation of WizDen staff, which is what led to BEAM-7 and our inability to use HWIDs to confirm ban evasion.
  • Multiple people have attempted to improve the situation over the last approximately year and a half, but nothing has been deployed that seems to have substantially mitigated the issues. It seems extremely unlikely that anything substantial will be deployed if things continue on their current course.

Internal Conflict and Toxicity

There are significant internal issues with toxicity and hostility high within the project. High level staff regularly fight and are uncivil towards each other to a degree that would likely result in immediate removal if done by a game admin. Occasionally this spills out of PM channels and is visible to other staff, who in the best cases are made uncomfortable, and in the worst are caught in the crossfire. In all cases, these issues are either unaddressed or take months to properly address. People who should be removed from the project are given chance after chance to change, and by the time they’re removed, they’ve pushed out or away countless innocent staff and potential staff.

With everyone being a volunteer, it’s difficult to place blame for not dealing with these issues on any one person, but the existence of these issues within the project is unacceptable. Despite not being the fault of game admins, these issues often have a significant impact on game admins, sometimes more than any other staff group. These issues lead to other issues, which compound and cause even more problems, sometimes causing people to miss-attribute the root cause of other issues they see.

Exploitation of the Admin Team

Whether intentional or not, the admin team is being exploited and abused as they attempt to do their best to deal with the fallout from these issues that they cannot reasonably address. A majority of admins chose to become admins because they care about the community, and it is this same motivation that works against them in these situations, pressuring them to try to solve or mitigate issues they likely are fully aware they’re unable to appropriately address.

We understand that you may have a strong drive and desire to try to fix things, even if the odds that you’ll be successful are low, but we hope to convince you that right now the best option is to stop trying. Again, multiple headmins and project managers have tried together for months to fix these issues, and there has been no substantial improvement. It is extremely unlikely that anyone left at the game admin level is going to be able to contribute to solving any of these issues by continuing to work as a game admin. It’s very likely that it would negatively affect your mental health if you tried.

Messages from the Headmins

Skarlet

It’s been epic, adminning gave me a taste of responsibilities after not having any for so long, and I’m really grateful for that. I truly believe working with you all put me on a good path to rehabilitating my actual life. I really enjoyed hanging out and adminning with other staffies. Thank you to everyone who ever helped me when I asked for assistance. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there more in the last few months, I got kinda blasted by burn out and other stuff. There are also a lot of things that brought me grief over the year.

Whether it be to staff or to players, I firmly and strongly believe everyone should be treated with respect, and this has been the value I have been looking for in admins and staff since the very beginning of my adminship. I have been teaching it to trialmins, I have been encouraging it in (all) chats, but clearly that isn’t enough. I cannot in good conscience associate myself with a project where people are rude to one another constantly. I also cannot see myself back up a project that disrespects it’s playerbase and it’s userbase. Time and time again I have seen internal conflicts and external conflicts, and nothing seems to change or improve.

Players get disrespected, contribs get disrespected, admins get disrespected, higher staff gets disrespected. I dunno about regular players, but I know some contribs, some admins and possibly even higher staff have been driven away because of this, and now it’s driving me away. Obviously this doesn’t fall on a single person’s shoulders, and even I have had times where I have been disrespectful, whether it be accidentally or not. It’s fine to make mistakes, it’s not fine to consistently be like this. It really takes a toll on me whenever I see anything flare up in chat.

I love all staffies, I don’t like the fights, I don’t like the issues, I don’t like how people are usually not held accountable. I love adminning, I love interacting with the playerbase, I love making the servers a better place, but this is just not working out for me. I’ll genuinely miss some of my admin tasks (log diving, helping/reviewing trialmins). Most of what I did, I did with enjoyment, but right now Wizden is not what my life needs, at least not in it’s current state. I have my own issues to take care of, and having to take care of a server whose actions I don’t back is not on my current to-do list. So I say, goodbye Wizden. For now only, I hope. Who knows.

Nairod

Well, it’s been a solid 2 years working aside you all. Unfortunately those two years have worn me down to my near core, and I’ve finally realized, I’m just plain not happy here anymore. Honestly, I can’t even look back here with much disdain, I have thoroughly enjoyed working with you guys and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else. My gripes rest in other areas of the project; procedures, handling, treatment of staff, and the fact that our workload has increased, and still is increasing, well beyond our scope, with lackluster support from the other sections of the project- but I don’t have much desire to get into that. Point is, you guys are great, but this compounding stress has finally gotten to me, and I’m going to be happy when I let it all off my shoulders. I’ll still be around, most of you should know where to find me, but for all intents and purposes, so long, farewell, and thanks for having me, this team has meant the world to me.

Chief_Engineer

I appreciate all the work every member of the admin team has put into WizDen, all the contributors that helped develop admin features, and everyone else that made WizDen a place that people felt was worth working to improve or protect by adminning. Unfortunately it seems that efforts to improve things are futile.

Issues that should take weeks at most to resolve take months or years, and in that time the project is flooded with many more issues, each also taking months or years to solve. Meanwhile, despite having essentially no ability to address the issues themselves, the admin team is often most impacted by them.

Backlogs are present in every end of the project from ban appeals to PRs, even to PM tasks. There is no sign of any improvement to any of these backlogs in sight. Certainly for the admin backlogs, I cannot imagine any significant positive change in the near term without a significant decrease in the quality and fairness of adminning. Despite this, people, particularly some high within the project, continue to push for expansions that would increase the workloads we already can’t keep up with.

Admins are being given a workload that they cannot reasonably manage, and they are pressured by their love of the community and knowledge that the tasks won’t be completed unless they do them. This is all done in a toxic environment where incivility between high level staff is common, and where admins are either afraid of speaking up, or feel there is no point. This is why so many admins have left or burnt out recently.

Leaving without Abandoning SS14

If you do not want to step away from working on SS14 completely, but are willing to step away from work on WizDen, then we highly recommend you instead join a fork, at least until things visibly improve.

For those who are willing to leave but want to come back if things improve, we highly recommend working together to form a single unified set of requirements that can be evaluated objectively. Having multiple smaller groups makes it less likely anyone’s requirements will be met, and having poorly defined requirements opens them up to being whittled down.

– The Former Wizard’s Den Headmin Team