I’m not sure if this has been suggested before but in light of all this controversy flaming GMs for their inability to do absolutely everything (wow what a shock), why not have different GM “branches”? In any given company, you have different divisions. In my retail job for example you have the operations manager, who focuses on visual aspects and everything behind the scenes, and a customer service manager, who focuses on the customers and pushing us sales associates to do our best. Could we apply the same principles to MapleRoyals Staff? A GM could be focused on one single section. For example if Kai was focused on Ban Appeals and Matty prioritized Character Issues. It doesn’t mean Matty isn’t allowed to do Ban Appeals (and vice versa), but they’re not his priority and he’s in charge of Character Issues so he should do his tasks first and worry about someone else’s tasks later. Focusing on one category is much easier than doing 2 character issues, reading 1 ban appeal, oh people need a rewarp, oh this beginner needs some advice, let’s go see who’s using fast attack, etc. It prevents any staff members from putting too much pressure on themselves to do everything. Because the GMs are looking everywhere and trying to do everything, some things slip through the cracks, which is obviously NOT what we as the real, hardworking, committed community or especially staff want. Since Staff is usually expanding, this could become one GM one Intern teams on the forums then have 1 GM on events, 1 GM on in-game support, etc. Then if a GM goes rogue or disappears off the face of the earth, it could be detected easier.
I'm pretty sure this is already done to some extent, just not entirely made public as to who does what. Tim and Kai deal with ban appeals, Yan jebaits rwt'ers, matt/karven/andreas deal with server side issues/updates, the list probably goes on but idk what the rest of em do cause we're not privy to that information. Also seems kind of counter intuitive assigning single roles to GM's when they can very easily accomplish a multitude of tasks, and then have those tasks spread over a team of people.
We do have our individual roles so to speak, but we also complement one another's work. Meaning to say, no single GM is single-handedly managing one aspect of the game.
I think with some people beginning to question the judgement of GMs/admins here, one thing GMs can do is to communicate better to the players. While we're already seeing GMs helping players more and responding more in recent weeks, it would be good to hear what the GMs and admins are doing to combat the major issues being talked about these days (RWT, AP resets, inflation in the economy etc). That would be a real step forward. Doing the behind-the-scenes work is good but the public would want to hear about them in the meanwhile to gain confidence in what the GMs and admins do here. It's always good to communicate more proactively too - it helps to maintain relationships between the GMs/admins and the players. Source: some stuff I learnt in my Public Relations class TLR: Communicate about the big issues and communicate proactively
I feel like this over complicates things. GMs have responsibilities that all of them should be partaking in and learning with. Having designated roles for certain gamemasters will only cause inexperience with staff members as they wouldn't be doing things other Gamemasters are doing. Take for example a Sales Department and an Operation Department of a company, what's more valuable, an employee that only does sales, or an employee that just does operations, or an employee who's trained in both? Obviously the employee trained in both would be more valuable to the company because they'd have more experience in general. I feel like this is something that the staff members should also be doing (if they're not doing so already), train them in all aspects and have them all participate in every aspect of staff management duties, this trains them and helps them gain experience to properly handle certain aspects of the server behind the scenes. If anything, I feel like the key to a successful staff team in any scenario, is communication. Communication will help get work done properly, and efficiently.
