Staff team changes

While I agree completely with almost all of the the points that you and Johnny have listed out, I do want to engage in a discussion on two major concerns I have with the current state of the server:
1. Inexperienced players joining the staff team
2. Seeming lack of a consistent or democratic process in decision making

#1

Why should having game experience, moreover end game experience, NOT be a compulsory prerequisite for someone to join the staff team? This is not to say that all historic GMs without end game experience have not made meaningful contributions to the server. But time and time again I fail to understand why someone who has not even engaged with all of the content in the game should be appointed a decision to have a meaningful impact on the long term changes and development of the server.

To me, this is what directly drives some of the critique you mention in your initial post about staff

My intent is not to argue that all GMs need to have multiple 200 level characters in the game to be qualified. However, as player who has enjoyed this server on and off since 2014 it is concerning to see that for the time being game changes and decisions are decided upon by a majority of staff members who are inactive or lack end game experience.

#2

The playerbase is frustrated across a multitude of issues, as clearly evident over the flurry of posts and feedback threads throughout the past few weeks. A clear root of this is the lack of a democratic process between the playerbase and within the staff on grey area conflicts and changes to the game. Even as an outsider who has never been (or want to be) a member of the staff, there are clearly disconnects with what the community and even members of the staff express vs. what is implemented in reality.

What is disappointing is that this is a clear pattern that many ex-staff members and veteran players of the community have raised time and time again. I see two downstream impacts of this issue:

a. GMs are at an impasse between enforcing an authoritative bans against anyone out of line with the current ToC, or doing what they feel is right and leading to inconsistency and community backlash.

b. Development and changes to the game do not align with the direction for a vast majority of the community
(read: why do we STILL not have an up and running autoban system, but new events/ content/ low level mob exp changes are being prioritize and implemented?)

For long time players on this server, there isn't a surprise that once again our valuable experienced player members of the staff team have all chosen to resign from their roles due to how they are being treated, and how decisions are being made. Matt continues to lurk and issue forum bans when he feels offended, but its not clear to me that he is taking or actioning upon these valid points of criticism which have been raised repeatedly over the past few years by members of his team.

 

i quite literally acknowledged your personal situation in my previous post. in case you missed it, please see below

your point about friendships and relationships between teammates who work together are also hugely redundant. there is absolutely no correlation between the two, in terms of carrying out one's basic duties. yes, it might make the process more enjoyable and fulfilling, but us not being friends does not in any way prevent you from doing what you need to do. so please stop making such fallacious, emotional statements because it does really serve to undermine your outlook and image even further

while i do not appreciate your passive-aggressive comment about how i did not get to know most of the Staff team on a personal level, i do appreciate that you're willing to take a first step towards improving. that's been a recurring theme amongst most of you guys who keep disappearing here and there though

case in point, this guy didn't even last a day:


so will it really materialise? only time will tell i guess

 

I love how Josh articulates the problems, everyone agrees, including dead weight and being unaware. Then the example shows up, proving everything Josh said was correct just by his very excuses.

Kudos.

 

To be frank and crude, I have no idea what's going on inside staff and this is mainly an observation from me as a player
Things started going downhill when
- Becca joined staff (not sure what you are contributing in staff behind the scenes. But with whatever information that i have access to, you are barely contributing at all)
- GM blogs regarding auto ban were initiated. (maybe the community's pressure on the auto-ban is stressing staff out or smth, idk)

My suggestion
Like what was mentioned by OP, remove people that are not contributing. Staff is here to regulate the server. If and only if GM blog is too much to handle, just keep it brief.

 

to respond to this directly, i think there are many other ways to contribute to the server, even if you're not entirely the most experienced player with multiple level 200 characters. this could be for an example, through artistic means or contributions to actual game development. i think June, Joong, and Kai are prime examples. they are not super hardcore players in any sense of the word, but they bring a variety of skills and knowledge that are beneficial to the team and server as a whole

i think the main issue i have with the less-experienced players currently on Staff is that they hardly ever backed down from a discussion, even when they were spewing absolute nonsense. it was very tough to for anyone else to get through to them because they backed each other up through numbers

 

I don't recall making any excuses. An excuse is something to lessen the blame. I was taking blame for when I was less active, and stating that I would try harder.

I mean it just seems to me like everyone is out to discourage us from even trying. Why?

 

I have to respectfully disagree with this; Becca joined at the same time Johnny, Gert and Josh did and in the first few months the server enjoyed the most staff engagement it has in a long time. GM events in 2019 were mostly done by Ray and ?anyone else when he feels like logging on every few months. Ban appeals were being left for days to the point where it literally looked like Shane was doing the bulk of the work.

Things unfortunately did spiral downhill as Becca started dating Matt and frustrations started escalating amongst staff that nothing meaningful was being done. Then of course that all materialised into an avalanche when ex-GMs resigned because who would want to work in a completely tone deaf environment when all you want is for the game to be a better place for its players whom you care deeply about?

 

I appreciate the response - I definitely don't disagree that players without veteran experience can contribute (and have contributed) lots to the server. But I think the critical, and most frustrating concern is the issue you are raising here as well.

I don't see any way to resolve this until staff consists at least in majority of individuals with sufficient levels of game experience. What other job in the world looks to hire people to make decisions they do not have relevant experience or expertise to speak on?

 

No worries. But from further reading what you wrote, I have to agree with you instead.

I was referring to Becca as an individual GM, not the entire batch of interns that were appointed. From an outsider perspective(my perspective), staff started leaving 1 by 1, or in groups after god knows what reason. Which maybe as you stated, their relationship? Honestly, who knows?

I made multiple reports on hackers back then, some were roaming free for days. I recalled Johnny being one of those who closed the majority of my hackers reports, at one point I was thinking if Johnny was the only one working.

 

Josh.Well done.Im showing my great respect to you.

 

How I feel about this (some of which was repeated umpteenth times by almost every breed of players), some points are just very generic or staff might already be doing it. I don't know and I'll just list out what I feel can be done better based on what I've read.
Priorities should be dedicated to
- When auto-ban is implemented, this will result in less manpower for certain robot-like activities.
- Having a team of mascots workers, that is actually contributing.
- Make it a rule that goes something along the line of - "Please step down first if you have other priorities that require your immediate/short term attention, feel free to reapply when your priorities are dealt with"
- Getting more interns to deal with the lack of an auto-ban system.
- If the vote is a tie/ +1 from a tie, make it a necessity to gather more information (maybe from the community?) before proceeding.
- When there's a meeting/discussion, state the objective of the discussion beforehand. When the vote is finalised, actually ACT on it. If not, what's the point of the discussion?
- Do not let conflict of interest affect your professional judgment. Be it friends or lovers.
- Having a minimum number of reports/ban appeals handled per week/fortnight.

I will add on when I think of more things.

 

If I may just clarify one thing -- autoban is and will only be purely worked on by our dear @Karven, and no one else. So I hope the community can go easy on him. He's really working hard on it and sometimes even lost sleep and gave up his personal free time over it. So it actually won't reduce any manpower per se. Other than that, yeah you're right. Those are some suitable changes that can be made to improve Staff as a whole.

 

You guys could create a group of beta testers from veteran players, no need to make them GMs. Every game has a beta server... league of legends, world of warcraft, etc. I'm sure many people would be super happy to try new content and help you guys get it out faster.

A couple good requirements to join this group could be being a high lvl attacker (180+) (So you know this person knows about the game's meta and is involved in it) and having a good history on giving feedback on forums.

 

I vaguely remember proposing this to Staff, not really certain, but I think I did. The idea was not really attractive all in the name of confidentiality, which is also why Staff don't reveal much until the day of patch itself.

 

Sorry, maybe I worded my point poorly. What I intended to say was that when auto-ban is out, it will reduce the man power for many things. I'll edit my original post. Thanks.

 

I don't think I could ever get mad at Karven for carrying the autoban ALONE and we're sorry If the pressure we give you can be immense but we have to get real that it is taking long for the greater good. I'm not saying he should slave himself so the autoban can be finally out but is there anything else we could do? :c It's fine to call me dumb for this but why does he have to do it alone and doesn't have someone to help him?

 

No worries about that. We tried our best to convey to the community that we need to give Kevin the space and time to work things out, and we were actively helping him refine his work.

Unfortunately there's really nothing anyone can do. Because to really help him, one must first get access to the source code, which I believe not even Matt has access to. Of course his workload would be lighten if we had recruited more developers, but it's really complicated because MapleRoyals (i.e. new source) is actually Kevin's project for almost a decade where he rebuilded everything from scratch, with reference to official source code (don't ask me how and where he got it, but it was apparently leaked a few years ago). So it involves alot of reverse engineering and being well-versed in multiple programming languages. And with all these, comes trust. Who can we trust to give access to the source code to? We don't have an answer.

 

Go Karven, go Karven!



I mean, I get where you're coming from, but it's still kinda wild to me that auto ban development is a one man operation by Karven. The dude deserves a team.

 

I don't think an autoban that randomly bans BMs in boss runs should be released. However, looking at the old false autobans, most were for fast attack and damage hacking, while both problems, I don't believe either are the core issue of what's plaguing the server which is the conjunction of vac hack and map rush allowing hackers to quick traverse the world and make a lot of money very quickly. I understand that Karven wants to release a great product, but I hope he is not letting perfection be the enemy of progress here. If an autobanner that only targets vac and map rush hacks could exist for now, I believe it would greatly alleviate both the GMs' burden and the address the player's concerns.