Alright, so this is something that needs to be discussed. We currently have 30 staff members (7 Admins, 23 Moderators) We also usually only have 2-3 servers populated at one time. We used to have 6-7 servers with the same amount of staff and everything was fine. Now it's just chaos. And I'm not even sure what's going on... Sure people have lives, IRL things to attend to, get bored of hopping on to play. But I mean out of 30??? Across 2-3 servers??? What's going on... This is all poorly structured and leaves the servers un-staffed for most of the day, which most of our playerbase is now used to, and even some of our beloved regulars have started to not play within the margins of the rules anymore because of it. So staff team, what are we planning to do about this?
I believe it may be a result of when the required staff hours got sat down to 15 hours Bi-weekly and that some staff tend to staff together. But its hard to say whats going on in peoples lifes, the Newer staff may be busier than the previous staff and therefor might not staff for more than the 15 hours. Only staff can tell. There is some staff that I barely ever see on the servers and then there is the same staff that I see very often o.o
Their hour requirement is still like 15 or something bi weekly isnt it? I thought there was a thread about it but I guess it was in shoutbox. you need 168 hours covered for a week for 1 server, there's about 2 servers on average that need staff, so 336 hours for a week. Staff's hour requirement a week is 7.5 (might even be less, i forget what it was exactly) so if all the staff did their requirement it only comes to 225 a week which is 111 hours short of what the servers need to be fully covered (and thats only 2 of the servers, and sure theres downtimes where there is no one in the server, and theres even times when people are spread between 4 different servers, this is just averages.) Easiest solution is to raise hour requirements, 30 was easily done back in my day for bi weekly, and if you make it 25 bi weekly then 2 servers would be covered with extra time for overlaps (25 bi weekly is only 1 hour and 45 minutes a day, it's nothing) Raise hour requirement, be a bit more strict about it, and most of the un staffed problems would be solved.
Recreating staff activity awards might be a good idea. Not too sure if the ideas been discussed and shot down recently, but it does help add an incentive.
It's soon to be may and so some of us, players and staff alike, have exams coming up. I personally have taken a few days off to stop burnout and I'm now back up to staffing, others have had holidays, we all have real world considerations to balance with staffing. We will of course try and staff whenever possible, but this time of year is not ideal for all of us.
Knowing some things behind the scenes, this idea won't work because it will lead to higher staff turnover, and SGM does not have that kind of manpower to maintain it in the first place (aka the applicants). Could be a bit more strict, sure. Increasing the hours won't work. This will happen once hell freezes all over and pigs grow wings and fly. It's being discussed forever. It's all bark and no bite. Wake me up when Highwon actually does something related to this idea that has been beaten down good amount of times in the past.
Cut the people slacking and not making requirement. they are of no use. You're settling on less than mediocre. You can be the best mod/admin ever but if you aren't active, once again, of no use. You're not picking up applicants, you're not delegating, and discord staff chat cant be that wild and filled with server goings, due to them not being in game and having less than half the hr requirement. Staff Activity has been down longer than "the season", "that time of the yr" and "just coming back/returning" At this point if you don't have your hours, you shouldn't be staff. pt mod isnt a thing anymore. Take chances on new applicants that are active already and show that they enjoy being on the servers currently. And stop the 4week+ trial period. That's a start I guess... Mods are easy to blame, but it's you admins that should really be looked into.
It hasn't been shot down. If leadership is going with the plan, something like that may be in the works.
One of the problems with this is that a lot of the current staff, or really staff at anytime are players who have been playing on SGM for ages, or play regularly enough that really... points isn't a strong incentive to staff. We ran in to this issue back when I was in leadership-- staff just didn't care about points. They already have plenty of points, or majority of the upgrades. We had some ideas about doing some custom skins for staff only, but it never came to fruition. Even staff picnics got endlessly delayed because Highwon wasn't able to get the server up to allow us to host this for various reasons (some super valid) at the time.
Increasing the hour requirement won’t help. You’ll just end up with less staff overall because everyone is burnt out over being forced to play a 10+ year old game for longer than most teenagers work weekly at a regular job. I had a plan that was working pretty well but it got scrapped when Mango and Teroxa took leadership. *shrug*
You also have issues like what you see now where both @Lordyhgm and @Glyph are double staffing vanilla for over half an hour while West needs staff. Trust me- hour requirement isn’t the issue. While I believe that majority of Falcor’s post is pretty dumb and near sighted, there’s some truth in that the admins really are the problem.
In my defense, when I joined Vanilla I was not a mod. I literally just got promoted. (I'll hop over to West now.)
As Glyph has said above, double staffing was for the duration of a map while I set up perms and promo'ed.
I can't say I see any real "deficiency" to start with, not nearly on the level that people try to make it out to be anyway. Mountains out of mole hills and all that. I've been lurking around during the more active times of day and I never really notice any absences by the staff, not absolute absence anyway. There might be one mod on multiple servers, but that one mod still does go out of their way to hop around in my experience. Past that, there isn't really much downtime by the staff 'till everyone is starting to sign off and there's not a whole lot going on for them to take care of anyway Things are being handled relatively well, at least in-server. I wouldn't know about issues with team management and all that, but they don't get in the way from players' perspective, not normal players anyway. Things are rather peaceful. The staff not being as active as they used to be and a couple questionable forum reports don't change that.
That's a shit ton imo. If I was mod, that would burn me out. Devoting almost 2 hours of your day, that could be 25% of your free time, to playing Garry's Mod because you HAVE TO just isn't possible for many people. I know that you could say that the people who can't do that just shouldn't be mods, but then we'd just have fewer mods. That said, I don't have a solution of my own lol Except maybe this one. How many applications are coming in anyway?
