[Scrapped Thread] Global Moderator Criticism.

[mitto 2312]

 

Going through my drive I discovered a thread I made a while back. It was my personal viewpoint on the GM team accompanied by some supporting players that never got to input besides iMattyz. Looking back on this almost 6 months in the future I believe that what I thought then was merely the beginning of thing getting further worse, in my opinion.

 

I would like to have a sort of debate that doesn't include singling out people or leads but merely just to discuss how the GM team has changed and what that has meant.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QU-1Tps3_nFQeIlVpPUSa5BZVDrBrp-hxCogrbtd-Uo/edit

 

A lot of the information is really old and extremely irrelevant now, however the point are still worth noting.

[Stag 3234]

I think it is the duty of the GMs to be assertive however if you are a person who mistakes being aggressive for assertive then you need to take a step back in general and let others handle it. I don't see a huge issue with GMs being passive in regards to feedback and similar topics so long as they are there to either support, critique constructively or engage in the creative process with players. 

 

I do think that many GMs and staff in general are afraid to get on the communities bad side because as we have seen certain members hold grudges and just like how GMs will tend to herd so will the community. Mistakes are blown out of proportion and so there comes a time in most GMs careers where you think "Is this worth it? People seem to hate me. I don't want that attention." and you might begin to back off. Instead I would say it is best to try and engage the community in a different way or at least try to take the criticism or step away from it.

 

It is even more important that GMs are good people and that they realize that even though they are higher staff that they have no more actual power than any other community member and when your activity declines the duties should be passed on. Not a single good thing has ever come out of GMs hording onto their position for the sake of being a GM. 

[mitto 2312]

Spoiler

 

 

Just now, Sir K Andruske said:

I think it is the duty of the GMs to be assertive however if you are a person who mistakes being aggressive for assertive then you need to take a step back in general and let others handle it. I don't see a huge issue with GMs being passive in regards to feedback and similar topics so long as they are there to either support, critique constructively or engage in the creative process with players. 

 

I do think that many GMs and staff in general are afraid to get on the communities bad side because as we have seen certain members hold grudges and just like how GMs will tend to herd so will the community. Mistakes are blown out of proportion and so there comes a time in most GMs careers where you think "Is this worth it? People seem to hate me. I don't want that attention." and you might begin to back off. Instead I would say it is best to try and engage the community in a different way or at least try to take the criticism or step away from it.

 

It is even more important that GMs are good people and that they realize that even though they are higher staff that they have no more actual power than any other community member and when your activity declines the duties should be passed on. Not a single good thing has ever come out of GMs hording onto their position for the sake of being a GM. 

 

 

On the topic of players who are less known and less active in the community either through spurts of activity or simply less time on the serve. Do you believe that the relevance in the community has a greater affect on the work you do as a GM,and how effective your relationship with the community is?

 

As someone who was once a GM as well personally, I believe that because I knew quite a few people at the time and they some how knew me I could easily be myself and people would listen to me more and I wouldn't have to put on this facade of professionality and pretend to be a big man in order to push the same point.

 

I personally feel that giving the position to more underqualified players really lowers the quality of the role, it really take away the status and power behind the title, as well as the actual power that has been taken away due to a trust to not abuse. Which in fact is also a risk of picking people that are known less.

[Wendigo 786]

I'll be watching as well for any trolly posts.

Consider this your verbal warn.

On that note, try to keep it constructively criticizing. I feel like these types of threads are great for staff teams to connect with the player base.

[Medvekoma 2073]

2 minutes ago, mitto said:

I personally feel that giving the position to more underqualified players really lowers the quality of the role, it really take away the status and power behind the title, as well as the actual power that has been taken away due to a trust to not abuse. Which in fact is also a risk of picking people that are known less.

 

The google doc however mentions high waiting times and lack of GMs in certain time zones.

 

I'm pretty sure the GM team's goal is to find a golden middle: have enough members to cover all time zones with relatively low waiting times, while at the same time remain professional. The pool from which GMs are picked isn't that large though, it doesn't allow to find "qualified and active GMs for every time zone".

 

Since end-Vailor I've experienced an increase in GM activity myself, without any noticeable change in quality / professionalism. I think that's a win.

[Space 2335]

consider tihs your verbal warning that i am posting a reply

 

red is the colour of severity so i use it

 

infact my whole post will be this colour because of how severe it is

 

 

I don't think the moderator team has changed all too much in the 4 and a half years I've played on LotC. Infact, not a lot changes. We took until like Asulon or Anthos to get roleplay down pat, but we're pretty good now, and there's not a lot that I see that's all too different.

 

Modreqs have always taken a long time randomly. Modreqs have always been illogical (one sitting for hours about getting a spawn flag changed in a region, while the one about world editting gets insta grabbed or whatever). There's always been a disconnect between mods and players. The admins have always been criticized for being lame or severe or inactive. GMT and AU have always had less mods.

 

If we want to have a post addressing hwo to fix those issues, maybe that's good, but the suggestion that things have taken a deep turn for the worse is false in my opinion. Maybe the only thing that has changed is you've (anyone who agrees with this, not just mitto) fallen out of favour with certain mods or something.

 

 

Oh the trial choices are a bit suspect recently, I guess.

[Guest]

Fame isn't relevant, but you should always have an air of professionalism without being as they are currently, closed off and unwilling to communicate with others outside their groups

or cliques. 

[mitto 2312]

Modreq wait times is a bit more of an irrelevant point now, I must admit, I would say not to stay too long on that point. I would hope it wasn't bad with the size of the team.

[Song Druid 1486]

I know GM friends who when doing modreqs would simply close out ones of people who have logged out waiting.  This wasn't that long ago.  *shrug*

 

And then if you need something done and ask a GM who is right next to you or whatever they have you modreq it and instantly claim it so they get the points for doing it but throw the system off balance by not doing the others before it.  Grumble grumble

[argonian 14254]

The staff are just as biased towards High Elves as they've been since Asulon. We need to purge all the High Elf staff and replace them. The amount of abuse they constantly get away with is downright ridiculous. 

 

Also, target bans are definitely a lot more common than they used to be. Staff are perfectly fine now with randomly banning players for arbitrary reasons just because they don't like them, inventing rules to do so. The most common excuse is "breaking raid rules", where they'll invent a new definition of raiding(despite they're already being one on the rules page) after they've already banned the player. We saw it happen when the Dunamis came to Felsen to negotiate and we saw it happen during the Haelun'or coup. Both times the actions weren't raids by the actual definition, and both times the staff invented new definitions to justify it afterwards.

 

There's also a lot of times where the staff will enforce a rule that doesn't exist and then add it afterwards. They deleted a guy's persona because he bought an account, something which wasn't against the rules at the time. They banned people for fast-travelling to a settlement from which they walked to another settlement to raid. That was kind of a rule(no using fast-travel to raid), but it was dodgy because they never specified how long before a raid you're unable to fast-travel. They set a precedent for banning people just because they fast-travelled at some point in the distant past and then went on to raid one day, and there'd be no defense against that.

[Stag 3234]

1 hour ago, mitto said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

 

 Do you believe that the (your*) relevance in the community has a greater affect on the work you do as a GM, and how effective your relationship with the community is?

 

 

 

I absolutely do. When you **** up as a GM you are immediately labelled as "corrupt, evil and untrustworthy" when in reality most individuals on the server will **** up if they haven't done so already. You just get the benefit of the lime light as a GM. The want or need to label an entire staff team leads to a faster turnover rate for GMs. When you as a GM have to stop looking at the forums because its mostly just inflammatory towards you it makes it difficult to dot he job. When I was a GM I never wanted to hate anybody but I ended up hating quite a few for the animosity they showed outside of the actual game. It wasn't until I stepped down that I felt completely free of whatever opinions I had of people prior.

 

Along those same lines relationships between staff and community that are positive are crucial for the development of the server and in more ways than one. It helps boost staff confidence, work ethic, determination, dutifulness, staff empathy, etc... So the further you go down the "this is all the staff's fault and always has been" line the harder it gets to create an environment where volunteers are going to be successful at the roles you place them in.

 

----

 

Another thing I believe is a major factor in how we perceive staff are how reliant on plugins we are. Due to want or need for excessive technical devices it creates a language gap between not only community and staff but the different levels of staff. In order for a community to function reliably by itself it needs the devices that help maintain the server more readily at their disposal or those devices need to be simplified or removed. The community does a pretty good job at maintaining itself but you will notice that at key times it tends to fall apart and that is almost always due to a faulty plugin or rule setting that bars, slows or inhibits the creativity of the playerbase.

 

I guarantee you that community relations would go up sharply if we started letting go of the RPG/MMO elements we have adopted on this server and start investing our time into the aesthetics. How can we, as staff, improve the ROLEPLAY rather than the mechanical side that will forever be imbalanced. This isn't so black&white though as many of our rules and functions on this server are so intertwined that older ideas of how to run a RP server seem alien to us. We all want control but I feel it shouldn't be the role of staff to have total control. The playerbase should have equal share and responsibility in the server. When staff are allowed take the focus on "how to make the server run better" and shift it to "how can we produce engaging content" I believe it will be much more easy to manage. What is your take on the mechanical side of the server? Have you ever watched youtube videos depicting the earlier days of the server?

[Wendigo 786]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.