My Experience as an Administrator

[Wrynn 1349]

7 minutes ago, Wendigo said:

You as the community admin went to him probably on multiple occasions with community feedback and you were either ignored or given a passing glance in his eyes. This further shows not only 501s disconnection from the playerbase but ALSO from other admins. Correct me if I'm wrong please.

It did happen a few times. I tried to make sure community opinions were being taken into consideration as much as possible whenever decisions were being made but other admins sometimes shrugged it off. Which is honestly something that annoyed me, and I feel now that I was probably just not confident enough to argue my point across. Recently I've been becoming more confident, and I suppose that's something that simply comes with age, and if I had the chance again I feel I certainly would. 501 really does however care about the server so much, and he'll fight tooth and nail for it; which was clearly evident from his work in the admin chat.

 

35 minutes ago, Wendigo said:

Telanir. Wow he's been around forever and although I haven't really directly interacted with him, he seems like a nice guy. But how can an admin who isn't active on the server make proper decisions concerning it. So in my eyes I see only 3 Admins that we are aware of that are currently active. That doesn't seem like enough. He's the chairmen and has a say in new members for the administration but also current issues that are connected with the server. In my eyes from a business perspective him having a vote for server related things when he's not been online and only reading the forums, which isn't always true to reality as we're aware, has me SERIOUSLY concerned. As a member of the administration you not only want to have a connection with the playerbase, you NEED to have one. I have no problem with Telanir making decisions on new members because in my eyes he's done a pretty good job thus far, but as a admin who has a say in the going ons of the inner workings of the server who isn't actively participating in it has me concerned. In order to speed things up for not only the admin team but the server as a whole he should as a chairmen be excused from votes concerning the server or be used as an UNBIASED tie break voter since he's not too active. He may disagree and and once again please correct me if wrong.

Telanir is a really nice guy, and he was pleasant to talk too - however I feel his inactivity did more harm for the team than good. If someone with much more time and motivation to put into the server could take his position it's more work being done with the same amount of members. Also yes Telanir also had to give approval on every action to be taken, and due to his lack of understanding of the server's climate due to him pretty much never logging on it could've made his votes skewed.

 

I really enjoy getting feedback from you btw Wendigo, thank you ?

 

[501warhead 1796]

A well constructed and thought out post. You have good points and I'm glad to hear them, though I do wish you mentioned them sooner ?. You were quiet on the team but I suppose that mainly came from being uncomfortable, so it's nice to hear feedback relevant to how we work.

 

If there was some way to ensure all admins could feel heard and a part of the team while minimizing delays it'd be my dream to pursue it personally, but it's hard to consider a system that allows it. If all decisions are made by three out of five members of a team then the two that are left out will grow bitter. It sometimes happens still where I know some admins have or do vote a way that they don't want to vote because they feel pressured but the intent is to try to leverage out opinions.

 

Yes, that is a quote from me. I get frustrated at times because the community matters to me a lot, but it's hard to make calls based on popular opinion. It took us 3 years of effort to finally pull Nexus from production and within the first two months of it being absent we heard calls for it's return. To the people who are asking, yes - there were many polls. Leowarrior's profile has a few of them if you wish to investigate them, we didn't do official polls because we knew the general community response at that time would have been "Ofc we want nexus removed stop polling just do it".

 

In the end we worked silently on the goal. I'm glad nexus is gone (the hours I poured into that thing was unhealthy) but I'm still left with a flinch whenever it's mentioned that someone wants Nexus to return. It's a sore point, because it represents to me a continuous highlight on the ever shifting matter of community opinions. So, it's for that reason that in my time as an Administrator I tend to try to look deeper than unrest and investigate roots of unrest. If someone wants nexus, what is it that they really want? Nexus itself was poor, but if I hear someone asking for nexus I hear "I want a return of custom crafting options" or "I want something to do in off hours" or "I want something to grind".

 

This is what I feel like I have to do. Taking opinions at face value has left us running around in circles over and over because of LotC's cyclic nature, what may be popular one month is the opposite the next month. One day I had everyone asking for raids to be looser, and the other I have people asking for raids to be non-existent. Maybe I'm paranoid, or maybe I'm reading way too much into things - it's hard to see fault in ourselves sometimes, but after working with LotC for so long it's the only way I know to approach topics like this.

 

And yes, at times it does mean that I tend to argue against popular community opinion, especially if there is a reason to do so. Sometimes we make gameplay decisions that people don't like for the betterment of the server, such as voting mina rewards. We see the need for it, and try to do it the best we can, but it's still not going to be something incredibly popular with everyone.

[Wrynn 1349]

7 hours ago, ibraheemc2000 said:

ps: How you been I Miss you and been wanting to rp with you :3

I've been pretty good, how about yourself? ? and we'll have to find eachother irp sometime!

[Wendigo 786]

Thanks @501warheadfor the speedy response.

2 hours ago, 501warhead said:

If there was some way to ensure all admins could feel heard and a part of the team while minimizing delays it'd be my dream to pursue it personally, but it's hard to consider a system that allows it. If all decisions are made by three out of five members of a team then the two that are left out will grow bitter. It sometimes happens still where I know some admins have or do vote a way that they don't want to vote because they feel pressured but the intent is to try to leverage out opinions.

I think it's important to go over this paragraph. I think it's time to consider a system to allow it for the betterment of the server and its overall health and growth. It's unacceptable to have a member of team who's sole purpose is to vote on things he or she feels pressured in or out of especially when one of those members is disconnected from the server. I'M NOT typing this to try and get someone removed, I said in previous post that I actively believe you're both contributing members of the team. However when a contributing member is only contributing because he/she feel pressured but the intent is to leverage opinions, what's really going on?

2 hours ago, 501warhead said:

at times it does mean that I tend to argue against popular community opinion, especially if there is a reason to do so.

I'm not going into Nexus, or voting for mina as I believe those were both good decisions.

 

Do you take a step back however and try to listen to other admins opinions or even ask the GM team on the community opinion, and if yours is so drastically divergent from theirs maybe it's time to take a look at it from our perspective instead of your opinion of what SHOULD be done?

 

Edit: I mentioned this in the drama thread last night but do you guys have a medium of communication outside of lotc and discord for 'emergencies' like this? Say...texting or facebook.

[501warhead 1796]

2 hours ago, Wendigo said:

Thanks @501warheadfor the speedy response.

I think it's important to go over this paragraph. I think it's time to consider a system to allow it for the betterment of the server and its overall health and growth. It's unacceptable to have a member of team who's sole purpose is to vote on things he or she feels pressured in or out of especially when one of those members is disconnected from the server. I'M NOT typing this to try and get someone removed, I said in previous post that I actively believe you're both contributing members of the team. However when a contributing member is only contributing because he/she feel pressured but the intent is to leverage opinions, what's really going on?

I'm not going into Nexus, or voting for mina as I believe those were both good decisions.

 

Do you take a step back however and try to listen to other admins opinions or even ask the GM team on the community opinion, and if yours is so drastically divergent from theirs maybe it's time to take a look at it from our perspective instead of your opinion of what SHOULD be done?

 

Edit: I mentioned this in the drama thread last night but do you guys have a medium of communication outside of lotc and discord for 'emergencies' like this? Say...texting or facebook.

 

You misunderstood that paragraph. I never implied it was the sole purpose, but moreso since we operate under the idea that every administrator has the power to veto anything a member of staff, including another administrator, tries to do (short of an action from tythus) we require a full 4/4 vote to complete anything. A no is the equivalent of a veto. So we operate collectively and we do this so that we all can be sure that the direction we're going is the direction that we, collectively as a team, believe in.

 

We don't pressure people to stay around so they can vote. We try not to pressure people at all, but it's moreso when we have an idea that most of us believe in but 1-2 admins aren't sure of they may feel pressured to vote yes rather than vote no and "deny" the movement, so they vote along with it. That's all. We usually complete all of our votes in ~2-3 days of the initial movement, and people don't stick around just to vote.

 

Now, I have to say that I do try to talk out ideas that might not go with the general community opinion (or even those that do) with all levels of staff that it effects. When we were adding new rules and some war rules (I added a few minor ones) I took the time to ask the GM team what they thought of it. As a matter of fact, there were several proposed rules for alliances that I was very, very excited about and thought were good before I presented it to the GM team. They never saw the light of day. They made solid points and they convinced me that the idea that I was backing super heavily wasn't good for the server and wouldn't work in today's environment; that feedback changed my mind and my decision.

 

I try to get feedback on controversial stuff because I know I can be pigheaded and bullheaded, and lately it's been pretty effective albeit even if it doesn't feel like it. I announced several points in my FAQ that were opinions/statements, not really rulings or additions - any that I do make (the last one being the monk project which I still need to try to work on ? ) I have gotten a lot of feedback and discussion on before I went through with it and made sure that when I did that I was certain it was the right direction for LotC.

 

It's easy to point at my actions of a year ago and say otherwise but I have, I believe, grown quite a lot since that time. I've tried asking more opinions about stuff from the GM team and sometimes the community (when I think the feedback is less subject to 180). I talk out a lot of some of my project and code designs with the team and have done a few livestreams for Territories to ask some player questions and show my development process.

 

Probably one of the major points that I think is brought up to the contrary is Limited Creative; and I can rant about why LC doesn't work and it's not just from a top-down view. There are a lot of dev reasons, economy reasons, mechanical reasons, plugin reasons, and management reasons why LC isn't good or healthy for this community, but I know it's going to be pushed back against. I've had a lot of conversations with various groups on staff about this, and I feel a good number of folks there agree with me after argument. And some who dont, I know, but it's still my stance.

[Wendigo 786]

40 minutes ago, 501warhead said:

 

Okay thank you for the clarification. Your answer definitely boosted my already high confidence in the admins and teams and I hope you're aware I wasn't trying to put you on the defensive with these posts. Most of us want what's best for the server and sometimes our strong feelings for it get in the way of proper reasoning.

 

Best of luck with everything else that's going on.

[ThatGuy_777 220]

You're definitely one of the most approachable GMs I can name off the top of my head. Just a generally swell and level-headed dude. Keep on doing great work!

[Burnsy 437]

Moved to The Great Library. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.

 

If you feel this is a mistake, please contact myself or any FM and we'll restore it.