As a player, what do you consider reasonable amount of admin intervention on a server and at which point does it detract from the in-game governance system?
As a server admin, what is your approach to administration, and at which point will you intervene, even if it conflicts with governance?
External link →No arbitrary intervention.
Only help with issues that players experience, fixing broken laws, getting that cart out of the deep ocean. All administrative actions based on written down rules in the ecopedia (or anywhere where players have a realistic chance to read them, no matter if they ultimately do) that need to specifiy what's going on. It's not really about the intervention itself, but the fact that players need to know when joining what's going on and what can happen. There is no reasonable beyond that, one server might have a lot of rules to facilitate a specific playstyle which gets interested players for that, another one might limit to action on griefers, getting players for that. Both are fine and reasonable, as long as players were able to be aware of what can happen and there is not suddenly the invention of a new rule or usage of the "this is my server, i decide what i want" trope.
No sudden rule changes and if so, not applicable to things that happened before. If a player does something you didn't see coming, that's not their fault. Not even when you have a feeling big parts of the server are unhappy with it. Establish neutrality. Players have a lot of options to deal with stuff beyond that themselves and for a fair experience it is necessary that pressure doesn't lead your administrative actions.
This is pretty simple and effective, but for some reason - not only in Eco - 80-90% of servers fail this test already. I get that people want to be the boss on their own paid servers, but you can be so while still being neutral and fair by just detailing what is going on and keeping to your own rules in every single case.
And yes, even that doesn't save from drama, as you might need some rules that are open to interpretation to catch edge cases or regulate specific things in a wider scope, given the document would otherwise be a very long law book, but try to define terms that are disputed (Griefing funnily means many different things to different people and can be from very clear cases to a wide array of anything that is 'meh'), develop the rules with your community, adjust them after cycles and yes, live with the occasional "You're free to go, despite I hate what you did" and any pressure you might get for that. In the long run, as of my experience, that works out much better and gives you a reputation that will help you for interpretational cases, given you built up trust.
You keep ownership of the server, staying in charge, being able to build the kind of community you want, but give players the - in my opinion - very basic respect of them being fully informed and knowing if they want to use their time on this server based on your rules.
Having played on a wide variety of both official and community servers, I really respect how you guys on the SLG team run the official servers. I think you guys really do strike a good balance of how to admin the servers while still letting the players be in charge of things like economy and government. Not every run is successful, but that's largely up to the players of the server that round.
I meant that more as a general tip - the same also applies to concept servers like White Tiger that have some presetup stuff. It's only important that players know how stuff is run and what they can do and cannot. If they don't like what you do, they can decide to not use their time, which is respectful. It's creating the bad experiences when players notice something that they did not expect and feel like they wasted their time or got punished for something they couldn't have known, because the admin doesn't like it. If the admin doesn't like it, he should put it in the rules, then players doing it know what the consequences are and can once again freely decide if that server is for them. Just as players reading the rules get an impression of if things they don't like can happen there if players don't do something on their own or if admins will intervene and they hence can expect specific behaviour to not occur. (Like a good chunk of people likes to be able to do anything with property anywhere - not claimed is not yours -, while others expect 'basic decency' of not being blocked in due to someone wanting that iron spot and it being unclaimed. The fact there is different opinions on it already tells it's not universal 'basic decency', hence only a rule or the absence of it can tell what to really expect beyond one's own morality) It's a win situation for everyone but does require thinking and writing on the admin's side about what they imagine and the same on the players side.
devtrackers.gg