The problem with volunteer work is that you can't be a Nazi about it. The only threat an admin can really make against someone who doesn't staff is to threaten demotion. That only works to a point. This may motivate those who are lazy, but it sure as hell wont motivate those who are apathetic. I know, I know, some people opt for the blood sports and ponder "then why not just demote them?". The answer to that is simply "Ok, but who do we replace them with?". Often times there are no suitable candidates who have filed applications, and even when we are super aggressive about it we often get mixed results. Sometimes you get lucky and you get a mod who over performs like @Sticky Bandit (fucking tryhard) and other times you get a lazy piece of shit like me who can only really staff 10 or so hours every two weeks. Should I just be demoted because I can't reach that mystical 15 hours? The problem usually falls among these lines: -Staff Members dismotivated -Too much to do, too little staff -Staff Members pre-occupied with other things -Lack of real incentive -Lack of authority to push people -Shifts are often overstacked, meaning that most staff are on at a time when most players aren't. -Admins do not utilize timezone and times you will be on parts of the application to its fullest potential You may have noticed that I haven't put the hour requirement up there. The reason we can't just jack it up is because most staff can only do 15. I know that sounds shitty, but it is true. What happens when we can't do 20 and we all get demoted? Then who staffs the servers? We can't replace the whole staff team after all. However, i'm biased because I don't want to do 25 hours every two weeks, fuck that I don't have the time nor the ambition to do that. I think reintroducing staff rewards may be helpful, or at least give shoutouts to those who do well may be the best way of going about it. I was talking about this when you were a lead admin goofball. Still, you get a +1 good job!
Exactly. If we HAD people to replace them with, they would already be here, since have plenty of free spots.
This sounds good on paper but I don't see this working in practice. From what I remember from my last tenure applications are a lot more likely to be accepted nowadays so long as someone isn't toxic. Even with most of the apps being accepted nowadays, we still have this problem. Increasing the hour requirement and demoting inactive staff won't fix the problem because those staff slots won't be replaced with more active players. They'll just stay empty for a while. If the activity requirement gets increased to 30 hours all that's gonna do is increase the number of resignations and inactivity demotions. Would you rather have a mod who plays 5 hours a week or an empty slot? The staff are taking what they can get at this point. The only real way to fix this issue is to find a way to attract more new players to the server, which is difficult given the popularity of gmod nowadays. We're at the point where we have more returning ex staff applying than new players, and those people are a lot more likely to get burnt out and be inactive. Honestly this problem might not even have a solution. Points definitely won't motivate anyone when most of the staff have everything they need. Unless Highwon comes up with another way to reward staff or a really good way to get new players that none of us are thinking of we might be stuck with this problem.
I think something that would help is to look at the staff that are below the minimum requirement (15 hrs) but also look at the staff who constantly only hit barely 15 hours and then don’t give it any more effort. They can be replaced with more active and dedicated players. But like Rhaz Stated before I think the most important thing would be to fill up the empty staff member slots
SGM does not have the capability to pull in the numbers of applicants they used to do. Top that with screening to make sure that the applicant is interested in becoming staff to help out (rather than for powers, etc.), monitoring behavior to see what kind of person they are, and so on reduces the number of applicants. You're looking at a shallow pool that won't be able to restore the lake/ocean. To expand what I have said for the staff rewards: Secondly, 15 hours isn't that super hard to reach. It takes at least 1 hour a day except for one specific day where you need 2 hours. I think the problem more lies on whether the specific people on the staff team are not actually interested on staffing any more than they need. Increasing the hours will lead to higher turnover rates, which means fewer staff. Being strict with hours can work, but rather, there needs to be an incentive for staff to keep staffing any more than they need to. However, knowing that kind of talk has been beaten to death good amount of times with no meaningful results makes me doubt that this will be fully realized because the only person who can make this approach more realistic without being a major burden on management/administration is Highwon. No offense to Highwon, but he does not inspire a whole lot of confidence nor show his presence very much to help out with this. To respond to neutral's point: Thirdly, staff stacking is fine as long as it is needed/required. I'm looking at vanilla. There has been good amount of time where vanilla get very very unruly and toxic where people take turns to mass rdm, spout out slurs, and so on, which can take a good while for it to keep the server calm. However, I think staff stacking is poorly worded for the problem. See below. Rather, this is what I think the issues are: Demotivated staff members who do not have much incentive to staff beyond the min. hour requirement. See staff reward point. Real life is a bitch. This is self-explanatory. Shallow applicant pool. People don't realize how bad it is nowaday. Timezone pickups where a good amount of staff are from the same timezone and get on at the same time rather than picking up people all over different timezones/playtime. (however, with the #3, that's harder to fix if people don't apply in the first place to help out). Lack of new players willing to stick around. Have you actually see who is playing with you? It's the same old people. Good amount of them wouldn't care too much to apply on their own free will to help out. If they won't do that, then this problem will keep persisting.
At my time as manager, I learned one key thing: Demotion is hardly the answer. Before I got into management, I always tried getting my boss to fire the really bad people. Like, the type who made the same stupid mistakes on the daily. After I got manager I realized something: Training people sucks. It costs a lot of money to train people, and more importantly, time. You can't just replace the entire staff team with new people and expect to succeed. It just doesn't work. More importantly, though, it's hard to find good replacements. At my last job, there was always plenty of applications, but never enough good ones. Most people there hardly wrote 2 sentences, much less fully explaining their potential place at XYZ company. We couldn't just hire these shit people and fall below our high standards. It wouldn't be fair to the customers, or the employees who already work their asses off. So yeah, same thing applies here pretty much. It's hard to replace people who may be "slacking". Also heck off paci
Like I said on the sb, be realistic on making solutions. There won't be a solution that magically fixes everything. Don't be idealistic and spout out things and hope that they entirely fix the problem. You have to step back to the reality and look at the problems that we have right now that is causing this issue in the first place. Then, you have to look at and recognize the limitations that there are. In this case, Highwon doesn't do too much beyond what he does atm. Thus, staff reward is less likely to happen because it would mean that Teroxa and potentially the administration would have to be willing to sacrifice some of money or points, which they may not be able to maintain in the long run. Increasing hour required will increase staff turnover. This could be fixed if we had a bigger applicant pool than the puddle we have over there. Not enough right people are applying. And so on.
I didn't mention increasing requirement, so I'll ignore that. I think having inactive staff is a extreme loss for morale. Not only for those staff that are doing everything they're supposed to do as mod/staff member. But for those who are looking into becoming staff, the trials and those who are playing on the server every day. Taking what you can get, isn't a good plan and hasn't worked out in the past, especially when its involving activity over prolonged periods.
Why did the higher hour requirement work so well in the past? Did having servers actually staffed keep people around and more people applied? Is having the servers staffed less making less people stick around and apply? A few times it's been said that you don't have enough people applying, why? I'd understand if the whole higher hour requirement was something that was never done before and walking into the unknown is scary, but it has been done, and it was when the server was the most vibrant. The main question now is why arent people applying? Why aren't more people playing? is Gmod finally dying? or is it because people leave after no mod no rules happens too much?
I think the shifting populations has a lot to do with why people aren't applying. Gmod isn't that popular, and we aren't the biggest community on TTT anymore unfortunately. While in the past we could sit back and enjoy a quality stream of applicants, we no longer have that luxory. The requirement worked in the past because we had applicants and staff members that were both more dedicated and more competitive. Staff incentives and a genuine full time oversight from admins was a serious plus to the staff team back then that you just don't see now. As much as it pains me to say, 25 is an unrealistic standard for this staff team. I guarantee you that we can't sustain at that level, and we can't replace those who we lose to demotion. Unless maybe you want to take up the bat?
What staff incentives in 2015/16? https://steamcharts.com/app/4000 It's stayed pretty consistent for average players, uphill and downhill all around. There's currently a full server and almost full server, both staffed, if those staff leave will the pop stay the same or dwindle? is there a correlation between staff and pop? If you had a staff member get on one of the empty servers right now would it fill up? Has anyone poked around to see? (Update, crash killed one server, half of the people moved to a different server, so now its 2 servers that aren't full)
There absolutely is. When a server is staffed, people flock to it. Yes, probably. This is something that needs to be fixed. It shouldn't be a random client-side thing. The crash checker should like, every minute or so, and choose a server for the players to all be dumped into should there be a crash.
So if staff had higher requirements it would result it more staffed servers, more population, more application would it not? (Sure people wouldn't be able to meet the time requirement and get demoted or leave but what would be first? the increase in applications or the decrease in staff?) The rollbacks prevented a shit ton of crashes, now it sounds like a few maps might be doing it, might need to do some trial and error on maps (Rip terrortrain)
Crashes can come from a lot of different sources. We had ddos'ers for a bit while within the past month or so. It can come from server provider (which has absolutely happened couple of times) being ddos'ed or them updating/upgrading. Or the fact that gmod is runned by a source engine, which is old and can cause things to act in strange ways such as bodies spazing out, too many entities (ammo) in one area, and so on. The reasons for crashes are vast. It's not as simple as let's remove the maps and hope it works. As it stands, the crashes is something that is simply out of our hands and something that Highwon looks into himself to see what's going on (because he has access to codes, server providers, and so on). I wasn't here for SGM during that time, but I would like to see the statistics for player base for SGM rather than gmod as whole. GMOD, as a game, holds numerous different types of games such as TTT, DarkRP, Prop Hunt, and so on. Rather focusing on the entire game itself, I would like to see how it was for SGM itself during those times. I only have decent idea on how SGM was during later half of 2016 to right now. What I have seen (in terms of observing server population) is that SGM's population is going down. It resurrected few times especially after shut down was declared, but SGM can't keep riding that wave forever.
1. For me, half my team is on holiday right now. I do not know how other teams are set with holidays, but this is a popular tine for people to go on holiday/a bizzy period on school as well. 2. Let us not forget that most staff hours happen on active servers and not on the dead one's with 4-6 players and i often notice servers who have more afk's on them then players itself, which can put indicators and judgement about when we need staff wrong or off. 3. The staff team you see right now is a lot of "old blood", New blood would deff throw in some chance so if you are interested then put up a apply i will deff appreciate it. 4. There is this old saying on threads like this. Please don't backseat us but we always try to put the time up front, sadly without a contract and people being payed to actually staff how we need it for the best we will always have trouble on some points.
