Sorry if this is in the wrong place xd

Anyway I couldn't find much about probation anywhere on the site outside of this https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/750846

I want to talk about how probation is handed out to BN's post evaluation since currently what happens is:
- BN's are pinged in server saying they will be evaluated for the past couple months
- BN's are evaluated
- Pass or Fail messages are sent out.

If you fail you get a warning and are sent into probation thus limiting you actions as a BN. To me I feel the warning and punishment should not be given at the same time. Probation in my eyes is a punishment and receiving the warning and punishment at the same time just leads to a extremely stressful month where if you mess up you get kicked. We have a warning system for those who don't pass evaluation based on activity:
"Nominators with low activity will not be demoted to probation. However, they will receive a warning, and if they fail to be more active on the upcoming month, their membership will be terminated."

And I assume most BN's who receive the "get your activity in line" message do in fact get their activity together and improve. So in the end I feel the message at the end of evaluations shouldn't come with the punishment but a warning. After the month NAT should issue out the punishment of probation for those who don't improve.

I know extended probation exists as well but the issue to me is you are still punished instead of being warned you are messing up. Probation just leads delaying sets as the mapper then has to find more BN's

I think probation for new BN's is fine since they are new and what not.

tl;dr
Instead of Warning + Punishment at the end of evaluations just send out warnings then after a month if no improvement place the BN on probation.

pops and dqs are your warnings and a way for improvement, seems like thats not so obvious so i wont mind this change

The probation is the warning though, and in a lot of cases, the probation is due to lack of quality/proficiency, so yeah your abilities as a BN are limited. We don’t probation people for doing nothing because they aren’t causing the same harm as someone who is pushing unrankable content into qualified, they just get removed if they don’t pick up activity. There’s no point in saying “you’re doing nothing, here’s less tools to work with”.

disclaimer: just my own opinion my words don’t reflect the opinion of the nat!

Personal opinion:
Not really against this change, however I would still reserve moving to probation immediately for severe cases (stuff like missing RC stuff consistently rather than like 1 in 3 nominations).

Ascendance wrote:

The probation is the warning though!

To me it's more of a punishment since you are being punished for not doing good. And your rights are taken away, also a warning is "a statement or event that indicates a possible or impending danger, problem, or other unpleasant situation." while a punishment is "the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense."

So while probation can be a warning isn't a bit harsh to just go from oh you full bn to PROBATION. And it doesn't hurt/kill the game if minor things get into qualified since they get found most of the time. Of course I mean if it's some crazy 2b stuff the bn should get probation'd if its happening consistently.

-Mo- wrote:

I would still reserve moving to probation immediately for severe cases (stuff like missing RC stuff consistently rather than like 1 in 3 nominations).

For stuff like 2b and completely missnapped things that affect playing I understand but for the more minor stuff that doesn't ruin a players experience i.e metadata, hitsounds, tags, and stuff I think a warning is much better.


also sorry for cutting out most of your quotes I wanted to reply to the stuff :3c

As much as we'd like to send out warnings prior to putting people on probation, I don't think we'd really have enough manpower to do this, and it'd make nat work even more of desk work than it already is by adding an additional re-evaluations of the same people, which leads to lower motivation to get anything done since it also affects less for the same effort. Plus it would probably take even longer for us to do a whole round of evaluations and they're already long enough as-is.

By keeping nominators that commonly amass tons of resets as full nominators, and in turn allowing two people that commonly struggle with stuff to qualify something, it would increase overhead for people checking qualified (since it'd be more likely that issues pass through). With QAH being pretty small rn, that probably isn't a great idea. Less of other safety nets means more necessity to rely on probation.

It may be tempting to think that if we just probation people for more notable issues and warn the rest it would work, but since we're already probationing people for things we believe are serious, that would just mean warning people for less notable issues instead as a pre-caution, which doesn't make much sense since everyone makes a mistake here and there (currently it's only when they start happening frequently, in relation to how much you nominate, that we take action).

In conclusion: Unless we can make QAH more alive (e.g. incentives), make evaluations go faster/be efficient (e.g. semi-automated score system), or some other thing that makes it more safe for unrankables to pass through to qualified more frequently (e.g. auto-reporting + better modding tools), this would likely cause more harm than good in our current state.

@naxxess but we already have a system to warn people since the warning is given out when BN's are placed into probation so why not just send out the warnings then when you reevaluate at end of month dish out punishments since regardless the amount of evaluations wouldn't change much from the current system. Mainly since after a warning most BN's (hopefully) would improve and for the ones that don't just probation them.

I'm more making this thing since probation just kills BN spirit and leads to a stressful month and when you go from fine to probation without really any warning it just makes the whole thing extremely stressful and depressing.

And for QAH stuff why not just let probation BNs also do QAH work like it's not like them checking does anything except help out. Even none BN's do QAH work (unofficially ofc) and try to help out.

blobheart i've never talked to you before

full -> probation -> kick
is less steps than
full -> warn -> probation -> kick
meaning stuff takes longer etc, see other post, there's downsides to "just" adding an extra re-evaluation and foregoing probation on the first big/consistent mess-up

activity is
full -> warn -> kick
so it's not really much better, but since the quota is super low (1 nom 3 mods per month on average), it's not very common

as long as you focus on whatever we warned you for you'll pretty much never get kicked since if you mess up elsewhere you'll just get extended again unless it's really severe. You can get extended over and over as long as you don't repeat the same kind of mess-ups

issue with letting people we don't fully trust in catching unrankables archive stuff on the trello is that QAH is the last line of defense so anything they miss is going into ranked (although pretty much nothing gets archived atm anyway and there's a issues preventing us from incentivising it more, but that's another topic. Worst issue is probably that someone could just delete all the tables if they're disatisfied with their probation lol)

if you go from thinking you're fine to suddenly probation, it may be a good idea to keep track of nominations you placed that get reset - not only can you learn from it but it also acts as a warning to pay more attention to similar stuff. Learning from your mistakes is really encouraged, it's like the whole reason why we have a repeat-driven 2 strike system and not an all-general 3 strike one