@Tye
I think you raise some good points, and I know that you make a decent number of these threads and one of the few members that do to spark an actual conversation, so as a staff member it's hard to sometimes see how the players feel with wait times and such forth. So for that, you will not be punished for simply reaching out to the community, it's more appreciated than not.
With some things you mentioned it is also fair to look at it through a staffs perspective as well, which I think a lot of players fail to do, and then blame staff for all the issues, which was previous stated as "We are not perfect" and nowhere close it. So let's take some of your concerns and see if we come up with a solution, here are my thoughts at least through my perspective and ill try my best to explain, and then from there, we can see if we can help solve the issues.
I do ask instead of broad topics that you try and share personal experiences or things you have seen so we can better address the issue because I do not want to guess at the issues you are trying to bring to light in your option.
1.With your first concern of staff being too harsh. With this, I do see it happen sometimes, and when I do it does become corrected like I said every situation is different when a sit is taken. A player who has been on the server since 2018 and has pages and pages of negative notes will NOT be receiving the punishment of a player who joined last week, and I think this is where many of the issues from a player perspective comes from. I see if often when players constantly abuse the rules and get off with warnings and verbals where it is clear that they will just constantly break the rules again. This is the only situation where "Harsh" punishment should take place, to those players who do not want to RP on the server and just want to go around doing whatever they want, which has a negative connotation on the players who follow the rules.
And the issue is sometimes players are only going to see the harsh punishments, you only see the sits that are taken when you are a part of them, or maybe the bans that you saw in chat when online, but what you couldn't possibly see is maybe the 3-4 times that this player was already warned when you were offline, or maybe this player has been banned 3 times in the past 2 months for this same issue. And that's at no fault to the community. (Like I said it's hard to reply with a broad statement)
2. I cannot comment on police standards because I have not seen this happen, in my experience when police break the rules they tend to be semi-minor, (Not gathering enough evidence which leads to avoided raid, baton abuse, or aggressive behavior and abusing power) which are all very easily corrected mistakes that are made and police do get reported and dealt with appropriately, Some players have served longer blacklist to those who abuse those powers as police.
3. As the Recruitment Lead, 99% of all new staff hires are hired by me with a few other recruitment team members (along with 25% of mentor hires are by me), and I get this statement a lot and it is kind of a double-ended sword no matter which way I fall with staffing policy one party will always be upset. Now within this same post, we already have people commenting about the response time, and that's a common issue I see and yet in the same post, we have quality v quantity. Well, I'm sorry, but both ways just won't happen unless players follow the rules and want to join staff apply. The staff in this server are not paid and dedicate their
*FREE* time to help with reports, which are met with the same players harassing them with "Oh You're a Staff member for a Gmod server" yet they want to come and cry to the admins every time a player breaks the rules or complain about the poor response time. Yet these are the same players who tend to have a long list of rule breaks and constantly go around abusing the rules and find it funny saying "oh it's just a gmod server ban me for a week IDC". Then we have players who want to become staff/mentors yet when the chance is given to them even after their extremely long poor history in this server, we find that rules end up being broken within a couple of weeks. These same people also then tend to complain that mentors break the rules all the time yet the same people complaining have been banned/warned / and blacklisted on multiple accounts, it is hardly ever from someone who follows the rules.
There is so much more that goes into staffing that was not in this post simply because it's just too much to explain. But the bottom line is, I do not hire random players on the sidewalks of the monolith, but those who deserve a staffing position in this server to better the community, and yes that might mean we deny a lot and that might mean report times will suffer, but we hope that this creates fair treatment within players. If you think a staff member is not doing their job appropriately then by all means please feel free to report it as a staff report.
4. This seems more like a personal thing, I cannot really control other players' burnout? So if you are willing to expand on this maybe I can better understand.
5. I am not in development, however, I do know we have a very small team, and mark, pmx, devt + a few others spend a lot of time developing new content for the server, that everyone would enjoy. This takes time, testing, error, more testing, etc... if you want to look for anyone or know anyone that's interested I'm sure the dev team is always looking for new devs (don't quote me on that) 2.0 provides a LOT of new content so look forward to that!
I know the response time on tickets is sometimes lacking, even when staff is online, but let's remember that staff doesn't want to join monolith servers to just take hours out of their day to take tickets of players yelling at them, and the same players being reported again and again. And sometimes staff come online after work and want to relax on the server, maybe they are the only staff in the server but there not on duty does this mean after working 4-9 hours they should have to hop on-duty just to start taking tickets? If they want to then by all means, and if there's a ton of reports I would love for them to help close some of those but I will not be forcing any members to do so in that situation because then that leads to staff burnout and lower staffing numbers, and once you clear these tickets, more just follow.
And reducing the waiting time we could also use help from the community, if video proof is uploaded or ready before the report is made/taken, then we won't have to look in logs or wait for it to be uploaded or anything, and can reduce the time if there are a ton of tickets. Players can also double-check to find the rules in the rule book to ensure that what they're reporting is a violation.
