Communication, the key to everything in life.

Disclaimer: The content you're about to read is not intended to be seen as hateful or hostile, but truly just to help both Staff and Mapleroyals community.

I want to talk about a few topics that have been on my mind for a while, and seem to not really get taken care of in the long run. While I am perma banned from the game, I do still love the people I've met here, both Staff and players alike. I hope this feedback gets taken seriously, as I believe it could improve the state of the server a lot.

Communication within Staff:
As someone who at some point in time has been a part of Staff for nearly 2 years, I think I know well enough what the communication within Staff looks like.
I don't like to romanticize situations, so I'm just going to throw it out here and say that the communication is and pretty much always has been terrible.
Are you trying to ask someone for a second opinion? Ignored. Are you trying to discuss something? Ignored. Are you asking for your fellow Staff members to vote or list their opinion on a decision? Ignored. It's generally been a dead zone for years already, and I strongly believe it is still like this. I'm sure one or two GM's will tell me it's not like this, but hey remember what I said about romanticizing? yeah. I remember many many occassions where I would ask some GM's to take care of something as simple as Report Abuse so I could focus on Character Issues, and what did you think would happen? I would end up having to do both while my fellow Staff members were awol or just chatting in the Staff Lulz chat. So why can we have fun chats, but not serious chats? Let's hold on to this thought until a later chapter.

Communication towards the community:
This topic hurts me more than anything. Staff communication towards the community has been bad for a long time, the people that have the skills to talk to the community are awol, and the people who don't have people skills are blabbing shit all day long and pissing off a fair bit of the community. Why does it have to be like this? While at times both the community and Staff are to blame for the atmosphere, ultimately Staff are the ones supposed to moderate and control the situation. As it currently is, I highly disagree with how the atmosphere is being influenced in a negative way by Staff's input. Let's take the example of these memers that are currently "collecting" warning points. These players are living on the edge because they are frustrated, frustrated with Staff. It goes as far as one of my best friends messaging me saying he wants to drop the n-word just because of how frustrated he has become with you guys. I can't blame this on the players, I'm sorry.. As a Staff member you are the balance between the voice of the people and the voice of the game's management, and right now this is not to be found.
All I sense right now is lazy corporate control, lack of basic social skills and lack of energy to resolve the situation peacefully. I think it is hilarious that a few years ago we worked on forcing players to stop saying "cc or report" and to have them try to solve the conflict themselves by forcing them to use basic human social skills. And now how do the GM's deal with these memers? Do they use basic human social skills to ask them to stop, to give them a warning that this behaviour is unwanted? Nah, they resort to warning points as a lazy system to not having to socially deal with idiots. Why can the GM's and Forum Mods not directly talk to the players? Why does Tim have to send me a message on Muff's behalf asking me to stop stirring the pot? Am I that scary to talk to? Did you not want to press the warning points button because of my former reputation? I'm honestly sorry if it seems like I'm stirring the pot man, but I want to give you guys a wake up call. The players are suffering, the Staff are suffering, a random idiot like me is suffering. This atmosphere is not healthy for anyone. These conflicts could so easily have been solved by just being man enough and energetic enough to speak up to the players. But hold on to the energetic thought, because we're taking that to the next chapter.

Lack of commitment from Staff members:
When a player signs up for the role of a Staff member, they think they know what they sign up for.. but they don't. I have watched this cycle repeat itself for 4 or 5 years now. We have inactive GM's, we don't kick them, we hire new GM's, they pick up the slack of the inactive GM's, they get burned out or lose interest, cycle repeats at step 1. Even I burned out at some point, a few months into new source, and I even admit it to the other Staff members.. I needed a break, I had been workhorsing for a long long time and I was no longer loving what I was doing. It's sad man, if the team would work more coordinated and more as a team, this wouldn't happen. We always had a large Staff team, but if 90% of them are only here 1 hour per 2 weeks, then effectively you have only 2 staff members at all times. I really hope that can change at some point, but that requires better overall management. Which brings me to the next chapter.

Lack of leadership within the team:
While I love Matt and Tim, neither of them are active in group communication, and the GM's aren't in a situation where they can take total control by themselves. I believe there is a lack of a leader within Staff, someone who actively checks up on the other Staff members, who makes sure they still do their job, or to check if / or why a Staff member is mia and for how long. The leader would also make sure the communication stays alive, that we know what we lack and where, and that things go as planned. Why isn't this a thing? Is it because it's silly to assign someone to such a role? It brings me to my last chapter though.


Half serious proposal:
I'm half seriously proposing you should either assign someone within Staff, or recruit for, the role of general team leading or being a community manager. This person could counsil, communicate, direct, do check ups, all the communicative jobs that are currently being struggled with. This person doesn't even need to have a GM account, access to the database or anything, maybe at most a read only account for the hidden forum sections. But I do believe that having better overall management would help both Staff and the community a lot, as good games have good community managers. Communication is key, and good communication makes everyone a lot happier. Think about it.

 

I'm gonna propose the other half and make this a serious proposal.

I feel like this is the sort of post that makes for hard reading for staff members since it plays down on the hard work that people do (I know that's not the intention and Dimi would be the last person to do so) but I want to emphasise Dimi's point on lack of leadership in staff. Thinking back to my time in staff, I think having more structure and accountability in terms of our activity would have done absolute wonders. Staff never really worked like a team but more as individuals that kind just did whatever they could without knowing what anyone else was doing. Occasionally there'd be lots of discussion about various topics but lbr, those rarely ended satisfactorily.

I foresee it being difficult to just hire someone new to just be a community manager. This person would be somewhat responsible for orchestrating others and I think they would need to have a much better grasp on staff dynamics than just being a manager who didn't have any other privileges.

 

I am hoping everyone can take this feedback thread very seriously and we can all hash out these problems, learn from it, and move on to loving this game and having fun.
As someone who has been a volunteer here and knows that it isn't an easy task, why would you want to push the envelope when it comes to the forum rules?
It's a very, very difficult task trying to keep so many people from so many different cultures and walks of life happy while enjoying a game that's been around for 15 years. Even more so when there are some who proclaim love of the game and community but come off as so antagonistic. And I am not labeling anyone specifically with those behaviors, it's a generality.
Where were the serious feedback threads when the issues first became so heated? I was only witness to memes and half hidden jokes against the staff members and the rules that were being enforced. That, again, is harmful to the community on all sides.

I did not ask Tim to send you a message on my behalf. I asked Tim to approach you on the subject as he and you know each other much better than the other staff members, and I wanted it to come from someone you have respect for. If I had been the one to personally message you on it, I felt it would have come off as reprimanding and belittling, coming from someone you don't know, and I didn't want that to be the case.

As for communication, inside and out, hell that's something everyone struggles with in every aspect of their daily lives. If anyone did respond with saying that any side communicates well, that's a utter fallacy. But that is something that would only improve with stronger bonds and relationships, throughout the community.

My biggest goal here is to try and help everyone get along and have fun. I would love to join together with everyone else on the same cause.

 

Most of the people who used to speak up are no longer part of this community. They've packed up and moved on to other servers. So far you've had 3 former staff members and staples of old Royals chime in and make suggestions. All 3 of them have long since quit MapleRoyals for similiar reasons. I'm sure if I brought this topic up to the other dozen or more former staff members, almost all of them would chime in and agree with Dimitri and Chris's feedbacks. Those who used to provide feedback no longer care to do so because after years, next to nothing has changed.

 

It's interesting that you mention that if anyone told me that any side communicates well, it would be utter fallacy, because from the few Staff members I've discussed this thread and discussion topic with, there were ones that told me communication internally is good. I'm not going to bash it, but I do want to mention a few things I noticed as a forum access only player that I find rather strange.
The argument I've been having is that you guys have an okay amount of resources, since you don't have perma mia GM's at the moment, but that Staff's resource management is kind of crap.
I will not mention names out of respect, but I've been told last night that the way Staff works is that we focus on big things and then clean up the rest when time allows it. But then I have to ask, if members of Staff have time available to discuss this issue with me in private, in the shoutbox and in this thread, how comes there are simple moderation jobs I can list that have been completely neglected for a long period of time?
How can it be that in Character Issues there are 3 pages of open tagged threads dating back to march, and how can there be awaiting player feedback tagged threads dating back to august 2018? How can it be that there are Ban Appeals open from a month ago that should've been closed out already since nothing was left to be discussed? How can it be that Voting Whitelist applications have not been soft deleted since Jen and Kat's departure like 4 years ago?
The answer is very simple to me, and was confirmed to me by the Staff members I brought this up with: Things pile up left right and center, get neglected for a long period of time and some of you aren't even aware of these things piling up. Things were piling up years ago as well, and then one or two Staff members get reminded of it and they have to work really hard to catch up, and then we would stay up to date for like 2 or 3 weeks, and then the cycle begins again. This is also why Staff members burn out, they work too hard in a short period of time because there is no consistency in the daily routine work. This is why I suggested you need to have someone internal to just lead on a daily basis, whether it be current or former staff, I am not to believe you guys can do it without that kind of help. If you tell me you can, I will tell you it's utter fallacy (borrowing that from you Muff, ty).

 

I agree, getting community managers of, I guess 3 different time zones would do the trick. With a server this big, I could imagine the loads of work the administration has to deal with. I don't understand why there are so little people taking care of the forums. I hope they could find someone like @Katsuruka ...

Perhaps they could at least take the time to either explain why they can't or haven't done it yet.

Thanks for this thread

 

Many times I am mobile and just on my phone. Which is fine for Discord and Shoutbox, but did you ever try clearing a page of Whitelist applications from a mobile device? It's hell.
That goes for many things, it isn't that it takes so much time, but that it does require a decent block to sit down and sort through things. And if we are only answering one appeal here, and one there, maybe two or three a day, the ones that don't get answered get angry. It's impossible to please everyone but some of us sure do try our best at it.
Your first paragraph makes me seem you both want a constant presence and availability from all staff, as well as them working hard behind the scenes to take care of 'technical' matters. That's asking a lot from volunteers. Some of the 'simple' things you may have in mind will be fixed by the 'big things' we are focused on. A good metaphor would be that sometimes there is a landslide. A slew of new threads come up, ban appeals, whitelist apps, character issues, etc. To clear that landslide you have to start with the big stuff. Maybe there was a bug in a recent update that caused people to get stuck, character issues threads incoming. Well, fixing that bug is paramount, like unblocking a road covered up. Then helping the players comes in. Some staff have different methods to approaching things. Some start replying to ban appeals and the others don't want to encroach on them and jump in on it.
It would be really hard to tag a daily routine to forum work since that comes after our real jobs and day to day activities, which for most vary greatly every day. Just use me as an example. Some days I work 8 hours, go home, and work on home maintenance for another 4 hours. Some days I'm in and out for 7 hours, get home and pour through Ban Appeals for a few hours. Some days I just get home and want to spend time with my family, can you blame me for that? So putting an itinerary on day to day forum moderation tasks would be hard, it would give us a requirement to fulfill every day and that's even more to ask of volunteers.
It seems you are really on this idea of a GM/staff manager, but I'm not sure if that's what you want this feedback to focus on or not.
There has to be a happy medium, but I'm glad this thread is staying on a friendly manner so we can all work together to better the every day experience.

 

All I can say to that is those staff you've talked to have yet to bring that up in Discord- which would have been nice so someone could handle them as (i assume) the ones you talked to didn't do it themselves?

A lot of this is simply because either the person posting has their issue resolved (and is therefore closed) or they never respond/no fix is found and it gets left. It's messy but they're still technically open but I do agree someone could go through and fix it. Some of it requires admin intervention which, as I am sure you are aware, is a valuable resource as we've lost more admins than gained.

As far as feedback goes- we don't have tags so it's not possible to open/close/finish those. I would argue those mostly exist as open discussion and not 'tickets' into changes- if that makes sense.

Since people can only see their own post- and not all staff can see them- they were probably left un-softdeleted because there was no real reason to despite Kats post saying they would be. Not entirely sure why that's a big issue but I just spent 5 minutes soft deleting 1,300 or so "Accepted" applications. So we can cross that one off the list. FWIW some staff who were handling the applications were deleting as they were going along. Some weren't.

 

I can generally imagine that in terms of player issues, especially complex ban appeals and technical fixes, the workload can be extremely tiresome when extensive investigation and communication is required and lots of time is taken up.

Though I'm not sure if its justifiable to set such high expectations when the work is on a volunteer basis. I just think that no matter what, whatever work they do will always be appreciated.

 

So wouldn't that break the philosophy of having good internal communication? I mean I'm sure it has improved and that it isn't horrible overall, but there's still tons of issues on that department and some blind eye it. Keep in mind that this thread is not targeted to any individual of Staff, but only to Staff as a whole. I'm not asking any individual to step up and work harder, I'm asking you if you can agree that your resource management is poorly. It may sound like I'm super keen on a community manager as Muff mentioned, but that isn't quite the case. I'm keen on the idea of finally seeing the problems that have been there for as long as Royals exist, to finally be worked on. They aren't problems that require your developer, they are problems that just require you guys as a team to communicate better.

Yes, but there are also plenty of cases where a GM starts to reply to a thread and just doesn't have the time to finish it, or forgets about it, and nobody else picks it up after them. Even if no fix is found, it would help to just tell the player, instead of just not replying and leaving it open for months to come and hope it naturally resolves or they forget / move on. I'm glad you are willing to agree though that it looks messy and that someone could go through them and close out the ones that no longer require your assistance. The problem is, I tell you this today and you do it, but will Staff keep up to date with this kind of stuff at least once a month without my reminder? From my experience not, and it's not based on the last 2 years, it's based on the last 4.5 years I've been here. We can't blame this on being volunteers, because what I'm asking isn't even that much, though some make it sound to be. In an ideal world where these things are up to date, it's 5-15 minutes of work a day to maintain, maybe 2 hours a week if you can't have at least 1 member of Staff moderating it daily. Is that really that much?

But you're proving my point right here. I call Staff out on certain issues and you go ahead and solve them immediately. You had the time, you had the resources, but it wasn't brought to your attention and thus you didn't use these resources. I'm not angry at this neglection, but I want you guys to admit that you're not doing as great as you romanticize it to be, and after admitting you guys can start working out what can be improved upon. But right now I have multiple GM's telling me Staffs priorities are shit, and that the communication is demotivating.. while I also have Staff members telling me it's going great and better than ever, and that minor optimisations have to be done at most. Which one is it? Which one am I to believe? Because based on what is presented to me for the public eye, I would believe it's not the latter unless you prove me wrong.

Whitelists not being soft deleted is actually a huge deal because you're breaching people's trust and their privacy for that matter. My whitelist application from early 2016 that was promised by Staff to be deleted right after being accepted or within 3 months at most, just got deleted by you 3 years overdue. I thank you for having done it, but I hope you can understand that during this 3 years, if any settings would've ever been fucked up (like Kat's thread mentions), everyone could've seen a picture of me, my account details, my date of birth and more. I think that's unacceptable, but that's just me.

 

Anything on the forum could fuck up at any given time. I'm not arguing that it couldn't be a big issue- but soft deleting only removes them from view for the person who made them.

If through a mishap the entire subforum was made available to the public having them soft deleted is a huge +, but current applications are still vulnerable and to the best of my knowledge we can't plan for issues like that (and luckily we haven't had that problem).

A more pressing issue is the trust we put in staff- we have seen time and time again former staff breaking that trust, or having access to things they shouldn't after being removed from staff and we have no way of seeing this or anticipating it as soft deleting doesn't prevent staff from seeing the thread. To me, this is a more serious and significantly more likely to happen scenario as a rogue former (or current) staff member could do much more harm with the information they can see than any "hiccup" showing the subforum could ever do.

The only acceptable alternative is moving all completed apps to an admin only subforum, but that only puts the trust in a higher position which can also be breached- nothing is perfect.

I don't mean to sound... pessimistic though. Shit always happens when you least expect it.

This is subjective- I can tell you from my end discussion now is significantly cleaner than it was in previous years. The discussions are smoother and without major hiccups.

A lot of the problems you present are longer-termed, and persisted long before changes to staff (people wise) was done, and I don't know if that's a top-down managerial issue or just something that plagues a forum like this. Could we do for better flow and management? Of course! But we're only people and the few who are in a position to prioritize us are currently inundated with issues which (are, objectively) more important and it sucks but that does mean certain lower-totem-pole issues are left on the back burner.

What I think needs to be done is a new admin or two needs to be added- we have senior staff who by all measures I can tell are as trustworthy as Tim (I leave Matt out because he's by default top of the pyramid and wasn't appointed) and this would probably help with a lot of the issues because then Tim and Matt aren't the only ones handling problems.

 

As suggested by @Karven

I have an additional (small) task that could be added to the list of helpful additions the community manager would hypothetically tackle.

Server check/patch time estimation updates! Allow me to explain.

Here is how it tends to work in the current situation (arbitrary numbers, not meant to be reflective of actual times):
-Server check is estimated to take 30 minutes
-30 minutes has passed
-No updates are given in the shout box (or anywhere for that matter)
-1 hour is approaching
-Server finally goes up
-Players were ready and prepared (some returned) for a 30 minute SC, and remained wasting their time for the 30 minute-1 hour time frame because they were unsure if the SC/patch was extended, delayed by only a few mins, or by a long period of time


My proposal is to have the community manager actively observing the discussion among the staff (or in contact with them) and to have him/her provide us with updates/estimates on the shoutbox. I would also like to note that Matt has said the staff often lose track of time while working on updates and will mistakenly go past the estimated time without even noticing (completely understandable), hence why we are often left without time related updates despite the time it was estimated to go up at having passed us by. This is why the job is better suited for a CM instead of the current staff who will be occupied by the SC/patch (as they should be, that is a far greater priority).

Here is how I would like it to work instead:
-Server check is estimated to take 30 minutes
-30 minutes is approaching (20-25 minutes deep)
-Community manager checks the staff chat/posts in the staff chat seeking an estimated ETA, if things are on time, etc.
-Community manager hops on the shout box, lets everybody know that there was a delay (and possibly why, if applicable) and the server is now estimated to be up at _:__ (or in X minutes) instead, addresses any questions/concerns/inquiries taking place by the players (what is the patch about, are downloads available, are name changes being done, etc., you know, the normal stuff that happens every SC)
-If things continue to be extended, the CM (community manager) repeats this process with new estimated up times to keep the players in the loop and the staff from needing to burden themselves with providing any updates/answering questions themselves
Voila


Disclaimer: I do not want the input from people who "don't care" about this. I am not saying that this is something everybody cares about -- it isn't, but it is something that some people care about (myself and plenty of others, as I'm sure y'all have seen in the shout box over the years). There is no downside which would impact those who do not care, so your input is not needed here.

Additionally, thank you to both Kevin and Tim for seeking to address this and discuss it with me. I look forward to hearing why this can/cannot happen from a far more involved and knowledgeable perspective than that of my own or any other player. You are both awesome.

 

You do enough for us, Kev, the apologies for anything just aren't necessary. You are the foundation of our server. Thank you for responding and providing so much detail, including insight into what's to come (automated SCs sound AMAZING!). Additionally, for understanding my concern and hearing me out. I know how valuable your time is and any time we get a post from you-I think I speak for a lot of us when I say-it's always a pleasure to read.

One thing you mentioned is that it's either one of two things: give longer estimations, or shorter ones during instances where y'all simply don't know how much longer it's going to be. I don't think it has to be this black and white. In cases like those where y'all feel a re-estimate isn't going to be near accurate, just have the CM go on the shout box to let us know that it's being extended until further notice, and have him explain that he will follow up with a real ETA closer to the time of completion when the staff (you?) feel comfortable saying like, oh yeah it's 10, 15, 30 minutes from completion (whatever it may be, again, arbitrary numeroz). When somebody comes on to say it's indefinitely extended, we're naturally going to expect it to be longer than a mere 5-10 minutes, but if it says it'll be done in thirty minutes, and it's been thirty-five, forty without any update, we naturally assume that the game will be up any moment since it's past due and we haven't heard about any extension. Had a CM come in to tell us "Yo fellaz, we've got a ton of extra name changes and the issue with a glitch fix ended up needing some more changes, we're extending the SC until further notice. It's nothing to be alarmed about, Kevin is just unable to provide us with a reliable estimate at the moment. I'll keep everybody updated as soon as I hear anything and you can rest assured the server won't go up without notice being posted here ahead of time" we'd be all apples and oranges. Granted the CM would actually have to follow up with that re-estimate when the time comes, but that would be a part of his/her duties given this is actually something y'all implement from.

Regardless of that, thanks again for addressing everything and more. Kisses :*