Rejected Damage logs accessible to everyone

I’ve read recently that staff had a problem with the logs and people trolling/complaining about it. I’m here to say that the logs shouldn’t be “Staff Only” because users do have the ability to point out their own perspective on things. If players are reporting others for 1 damage or arguing about an RDM that’s pretty obvious, then just cancel their report and or gag/mute them. They keep it up and you can gag/mute for longer. Worst you can do is kick/ban them for continuing an invalid argument.


My personal experience with the lack of permission for log viewing is I was unable to describe what happened during a round. ‘Cause of how the logs are set up, you only have a limited view of information. In some cases, you need the victim or offender to explain their perspective. I killed a guy for walking around an un ID body. I asked him 30 seconds prior to his death why he wasn’t IDing it and he said nothing. You can’t look in the logs for something I said in voice chat. At this point, the only option was to look at the death scene and explain things myself. I couldn’t do so to tell the staff that I ID’d ____’s body and asked the guy for 30 seconds.


I’m not going to specify situations where common sense is used but the logs are a great way of finding small details, even if fall damage comes into place or if a grenade is thrown. (If I remember correctly, discombobs don’t show up as a kill)


Also the report system doesn’t have logs either, so sometimes reports can be just completely wrong in the sense of confusion. (Yes, I know when you get killed it shows up as “(killer)_____” next to who killed you.)


If there are multiple staff online and so are players then using “@ XXXXXXX” won’t help very well if there’s a bunch of stuff going on at once. (Talking, chat spam, etc) Sometimes it’s better to explain in words than just text. With this being said if someone damaged you but didn’t kill you, you wouldn’t know who did it.


One last thing I want to add. Shot logs are VERY important in cases where people say “this guy shot at me/this guy t-baited” and they’re not in a deathscene. You can narrow these “this guy shot” situations easily. Not everyone knows about this and some staff might not know.


tl;dr Logs should be accessible to everyone because victims and offenders should show their perspective on things. Plus everyone’s actions shouldn’t define whether a User can use logs or not.

 

+1 this would be great. The post round logs most of the players dont even know exist isnt enough.

 

-1 no need. Staff handle all rdms including damage that was unreported so really no point.

 

Didn't somebody already make a suggestion on this?

 

Yes, but I'm giving my point of view in detail instead of saying "bring back logs. so unfair!"

 

Yup, make it viewable for everybody at all times (not current round obviously). The reasons for not having it are minuscule or non-existant. Trying to stop "backseat moderating" by removing it is unnecessary. Problem players who want to do that will still find any reason to rag on staff because the problem isn't with having the logs available, it's that those people are assholes. Positively, It also would help avoid false reports in some cases. I personally like to review shot logs, damage logs, or deathscenes before I report somebody so I don't waste the staff's time. It'd also gives players the option to decide if they actually want to report somebody for random damage instead of the staff taking care of it without their knowledge.

 

I know you're new, so I'm guessing you didn't know to search before making suggestions.

Either way, there's not much of a need for the advanced damage logs and if you did get them as a player, you shouldn't be able to.open them until end of round. Give players access and they now get to make up stories about how it happened to fit their agenda.

 

From a player's standpoint this isn't really needed. Most of the time a staff member is online, if that isn't the case you can't even file reports on the server anyways. If you want to make a forum report, end of round logs are sufficient.

 

"Most of the time"

 

Edit: Just saw your other post...

The damagelogs that you can find in console at the end of the round is more than enough of a tool to find out who had damaged you at what specific time. If you can't find or cannot seem to identify the damage, a simple message in admin-chat can fix it. Staff members have the tool to highlight instances of specific players in the logs so they should be able to find it in no time. In accords to the toxicity distractions, you are completely correct. Sometimes, servers can get completely out of hand, but that does not mean that the staff will dismiss the investigation of your RDM, merely delay it. We are trained to deal with situations like that and if someone completely dismisses damage like that without a direct and reasonable excuse, and they are refusing to answer you, feel free to report them on the forums through the respective channels to figure out what actually happened so that it may be dealt with accordingly.

Once again, it is mandatory for a staff member to investigate situations like this thoroughly. If you give a vague response, the staff member online will ask you to clarify within reason. If you say that they T-baited you, we won't expect you to tell us the exact millisecond of the round that it occured. Heck, you giving us an estimation is just common courtesy. We will always take into account that you may not remember the exact details of a kill because TTT is just that action-packed of a game.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns on reporting players or private messaging staff member's superiors, open up a conversation with me by clicking here and I won't hesitate to give you a better guide on how to do so.

Overall, I really don't see this as a good idea as it will just give seasoned players tools to work against the system. If not the existing players, it will birth more who will.

 

Yo man I know youre trying hard for that admin position but you couldnt take a joke if it saved your life.

 

The points against having f8 advanced damage logs available for all players are extremely weak. Of course these would be previous rounds only, not including the current round.

To reply to pacifist, Most of the time I am playing TTT on east1,2 or the minecraft one a staff member is not online. I would say its 65/35 ratio of no staff versus staff. If there is its usually a single member. Also, you can still make !reports even if no staff are online. I'm not sure if its saved for later viewing but you can make them.

For Mango, you assume the players are malicious. Give players access to detailed logs and they will just use them to lie instead of, say, giving their perspective on what happened or maybe see who shot them undetected earlier that round? Ludicrous assumption. They don't do this on other servers, they didn't do it on the one I moderated. If they do, its because, as genesis said, they are assholes. Punish assholes, not everyone else.

The argument against this I hear the most from staff online in game is that it "encourages backseat moderating". I've even seen people claim that allowing players to see the damage logs for their own reports encourages backseat moderation. Frankly, that's just ridiculous. You may as well say you don't need to even have a !report option because reporting RDM is backseat moderation. Reporting anything is backseat moderation. Alerting the staff to any problem whatsoever for any reason is backseat moderation. The claim is weak, and the argument ineffective. Most of these claims are worst case scenarios anyway. Just punish them as normal.

The positive points have mostly all been articulated. I'm really not understanding the reactionary behavior from the staff I've spoken to about this. Most players won't backseat mod. Most players are not assholes. Most people will use the logs to gather information before making a report, making the report itself more useful and informative to the staff member.

 

Its not the full damage logs but in the F1 menu in game there is a bind tab, you can set a button to print out a basic damage log in your console. As for the full logs we should keep it to staff only, no need for regulars to have it.

 

I'm not exactly sure how long you have really been around SGM, but what's wrong with the current damage logs? Why do you need logs to give your perspective? You didn't have logs when the event took place.

Honestly, please search for the other times this has been suggested. I'm too tired to do something that you should've done before you posted.

 

I want to clarify some things.


I didn’t say I want logs to update during the round. Also TTT is a game of deceiving people, using common sense, and process of elimination. This game works around evidence and peoples word. Humans make mistakes and everyone can agree on that. I know staff can do their job just fine but sometimes people miss stuff. I agree with what genesis and Stonecutters said. Just because some assholes were crying about stuff and being stubborn about a situation, doesn’t mean everyone will do the same thing. You’re gonna get people who will argue but it’s better to show them the facts and have them learn rather than say “You RDM’d, end of discussion”.


The logs in the console show barely anything. The F8 logs allow you to filter stuff out. I know not every round you’re gonna need to see every callout or grenade thrown, but that situation will arise.


The logs aren’t something that should be hidden from non-staff because it doesn’t show vital information that can hurt the gameplay/server. The logs are the literal game broken down into specific detail.

 

Im going to chime in here becides saying this was allready suggested ... Having damagelogs viewable by everybody will legitimatly create a band of vigilantees and staff will be stuck in admin chat handling these players, furthermore this will add to the toxisity level of "I was slain why wasn't this person. I have no support for this and it gets a big -1

 

+1, I loved the ability to check on what happened exactly on other servers using F8 to figure out if I should actually report something or not.

Yeah staff could do it but if I could do it myself it would reduce the time wasted by staff for something that the player could do themselves with no problem.

A lot of the times I just let damage on me go because I forget to check logs in the 30 second timewindow and since it was like 1-40 damage I dont bother wasting staffs time on it. You can say that "just message staff online" about it but why do I need to waste staffs time on something like this?
Atleast let me check damage of previous rounds at any point.

Yeah, make it so that the player cant check advanced logs until they respond to every report on them. We already have rules that changing your reasoning is not allowed, wheres the problem?

On what basis do you even think this is going to happen on such a "horrifying" scale? There might be few people questioning why X happened but whats wrong with that?

 

The fact that vet players and new players alike do this on a large enough scale for it to be mentioned when they report someone and report them. Just last week I had a 7 round argument if you will with one of our VET players about a certain slay, mind you this did not even involve them being slain. A week before I was in another discussion with a former staff member (From way before my time, thanks to graze i can check this stuff out!) about a pair of slays.

 

Have you ever thought that them having the deathscene and logs would actually help in the arguments? People will argue because they think something happened X way, with advanced logs you could just tell them to look it up and avoid the entire argument all together since they could see with their own eyes how something actually went down with deathscene etc. If its an argument about rules well then advanced logs wouldnt help it or make it worse since its irrelevant.

 

Even as someone who records every aspect of a staffing session and every deathscene, there is only one case I can think of out of all of these arguments where I could see it being bennificial. I can not see where the potential benifit would outweigh the potential harm that I see this causing. I just do not support this.