Hello everyone! As a part of my mission to make the staff team better, I require input from those of you who see them on a daily basis. Therefore I created this poll! Feel free to take it. I'll respond to any concerns that I think need to be addressed, otherwise I will direct the criticism to whom it may concern. Please take this seriously. Troll responses and harassment will be deleted. https://forms.gle/X74SBxh4tA2hJgLe6
I will likely share parts of it with the staff team. For the most part though I will be the only one to see all responses.
Alright. I got something I'd like to respond to: This user was very disgruntled with the staff team as a whole, and I believe their major grievance was with the way we train trial mods. I will admit, I have been neglecting this issue, but it is a very real one. There are a few things that I definitely need to speak with my admins about. Specifically, we need to increase the time trial mods are trial mods. We also need to increase their rule knowledge through constant reinforcement. We use to have a quiz that was given to each tmod and then moderator to get a gauge of where they were at. I wanted to redo this, and I believe that it can be done. I also want to work on getting admins to personally train their trial moderators, as this should be a requirement of the position of admin. There is no reason that you can't spare an hour every so often to train someone YOU decided to put the effort into picking up. I'm not so sure the moderator guides are a bad thing, they are great reference points if you don't know what to do about a certain issue. Our rules can be quite complicated (and i'll even admit that they are contradictory and redundant at times) and we can't expect every moderator to know what to do. Our issue is that there is a lot of misinformation about what is and isn't protocol. Different lead admins have pushed different sets of rules, and keeping track is impossible. This use to be easier as there was only one version of the extended rules, but that has since changed. I'm putting together a comprehensive exam that will test rule knowledge, and we will use that information to figure out where the gaps are and my admins will work to fill these gaps. It isn't an easy task, but it can be done. If you have any questions about this, feel free to hmu on discord and I can explain my plan further.
Wish I read this before writing up my thing. This legit covers every complaint I have with the staff team - the contradictory and ambiguous extended rules, and the lack of proper training. Make more of these surveys in the future! They're a great idea.
Wait, what the fuck? I can think of a few choice admins before 1/11 who would promote and dump them somewhere else and come back with champagne a few days later of the promo, but nowadays I was in the mindset that all admins were playing a big role with their trials. If that's not the case it seems to be, yeah i'd agree they shouldn't pick up a new trial mod and ruin their experience by not giving them any personal training.
I mean scuffed was only there for promo to tmod, then to mod for me (albeit he did stay around for a few hours or so when I got tmod to teach me) but yes they should be required to spend more time with trials imo, especially first-time trials
I'll respond to some things said about me: Yeah. First of all, I do care about this community. Its not like i'm paid to do this job, and I hardly get any benefits from doing it. I care quite a lot about the state of things, which is why I made this thread in the first place. Getting feedback on how the community views the staff team is very important, and will help me determine where my energy needs to be placed. Specifically, I need to focus on my admins and their training of trial moderators. As far as the "not my decision" part goes? I am not the head honcho in this community. Highwon has the final say in matters. Even if I wanted to go above him I couldn't. I take responsibility for decisions I've made, and I'll stand by most of my decisions now. As far as my personal image goes? Dude I couldn't care less. No. I'm not burned out, and i'm not resigning. Also Scuffed was free to do whatever he wanted. I never stopped him from doing anything. This is something that can be done. I've been trying to get my hours up. I did two hours yesterday, and I did a bit more today. I'm at 8 hours right now, and i'm trying to get more. Could you give me an example of something I could have handled sooner? I try to get reports finished within two days of them going up, and I filled the administration in three days. I also respond to DMs within a day, usually within an hour if i'm online. As far as unbanning people that don't deserve to be banned: I wish you were more specific. Again, I can't just go and unban any person I feel like. Its not my decision (i'm sorry) and that's just how it is. It's in the works. I like to think i'm pretty down to earth but I don't know. Maybe i'm uptight or something. Working on it tz- A lot of things... I answer questions, I manage the entire administration, I deal with reports, I deal with unban requests, I look at the rules and determine if changes need to be made, I conduct polls where people can air their grievances, and I'm trying to push through a few suggestions (such as my Mass RDM change, my new extended rules and i've been actively trying to get the N word thing changed back, or at least changed in such a way that we can warn people for just saying it for no reason). The biggest issue here, and this is totally my fault, is that I don't do a lot of this stuff publicly. Its just hard to engage with the community when i'm several layers removed from it. I do try though, and my DMs are always open for anyone that just wants to shoot the shit or ask me questions about things. In actuality though, I don't do anything. I'm super inactive. Why do this? I mean, why respond to any of this? Well, its not because I give a shit about my personal image. My profile picture is literally nicholas cage dressed up as santa. I'm doing this because I find it incredibly important to respond to criticism. I am held responsible by the community, and as such I have to be the first person to explain my actions. I'm not perfect, and I'm definitely not the best lead admin there has ever been, but I do what I can.
Havent read much of the other responses I'm not really sure if post or pre 11/1 had much of a difference, true that a lot of the administration resigned or were demoted, but I didnt see much difference in attitude from the administration. In the past, I've seen tmod being trained from almost the entire staff team and once in a while I would see their admin training them. Staff evals had gone away and could be one of the reasons why some admins aren't too interactive with their mods. I would like to see admins observe their mods and give feedback rather than also having admins staff the servers.
can we make f8 logs and deathscenes public already? staff are not infallible and a lot of the rulings on SGM are very much up for debate, ex; how close does someone have to be near an UNID to be considered passing or ignoring it, there is no set distance in the rules so it's based on the staff members opinion. now i don't always agree with their opinions and i should be able to check the deathscene and log without reporting the mod or nagging him to provide me with a recording every time. if you could provide me with any negative arguments for this i would really like to hear them.
same, @Humancowcakes ❀ was really the only one that spent more than an hour training me. Other than that no training with my admin.
-1 argument x -1 argument = positive argument Make that shit happen, the reasoning of why it's not allowed, is way outdated.
I get why there’s no “What do you think of the owner” section, but I seriously think there should be one. While I appreciated the Halloween event, it really feels like the owner cares so little about the community that they can’t be bothered to be here, only doing the bare minimum to keep people around.
Some more responses (sorry if this is getting boring): This 100%. I have been fighting ever since I got lead admin to change this, but it isn't so easy. Admins fall into a funk and they believe that community engagement is beneath them. This simply is not the case. They are a member of this community, and many of them are nice and friendly, but you never get to see that because they isolate themselves so damn much. In fact, it disheartens me to see this be such a big issue when my admins are easily some of the funnest people to play with when they aren't being serious. You ever play Jaxbox with Ashes? How about Minecraft with Jabba? I bare some of this blame too I believe. Maybe if there is enough interest here we could get a game night going? If you would be interested in a game night thing just rate my post optimistic. As far as report responses go? I kind of see what you mean. To me it seems that giving a quick explanation is better than typing a paragraph, and different styles of writing reports can be seen across the administration, but perhaps we could figure some things out in this regard. I'll be way more critical of my admin's report responses from here on out. This is technically in reference to me, but I actually want to speak about the slays being added to hackers thing. Yeah, I have no idea where this came from. It just kind of became a thing that moderators could do, and I was never able to find the source of it. All of my admins believed that it was something that could be done, and most of the mods in turn believed that it could be done as well. I however knew that it wasn't protocol, and as such I made it very clear to the entire staff team that moderators do not have the power to add slays to a hacker after they have been banned. They require admin discretion to do that. This was something I clarified in house, but i'm not sure I said anything public on the matter. There may have been a QNA I responded to, I don't remember. Yeah I just said what I thought should have happened in the moment. The rules didn't specifically state that the kos wasn't valid. This was taken back after the community disagreed, and we made a rule about it after the fact. This is in reference to the moderators. Yeah, I kind of see what he is getting at. Obviously I believe he is being a bit hyperbolic, but I'd like to address some of this. It being a circle jerk and there being favoritism is almost impossible to manage. People become friends, the team gets closer, we handle reports with a bias. That's how it is. I wish I could say to you with a straight face that we are all professional and unbiased, but we aren't. I try to do what I can to fix obvious errors when they come up, but it is what it is. As far as the team structure goes? We mostly use it for organizational purposes, and to make it so that the admins aren't managing too many people. When someone is promoted to trial mod they are rarely trained by their admin (depending on the admin of course) and are often thrown onto servers with a bunch of other moderators, sometimes moderators who had different training themselves. Why one team does X while the other does Y isn't solely because of the teams, it's more to do with the individual moderators. Common sense is a bitch of a topic to deal with because it means different things for different people. The protocol for a moderator is to tell whether or not someone has 100% certainty to make the kill. This starts by logically poking holes in people's stories, but I think that we can relax a little bit on this one. I wanna have a sit down with the moderators on this and devise a way that we can be a bit more lenient. Give people more passes when there is a clear technicality at play. It is obvious to me that by enforcing these rules we aren't stopping RDM, we are just giving in to overly pedantic players. As far as the evidence part? I can get behind that one. Mic spam has always been an issue for me, as I don't record my full game. I just can't, I don't have the space to be able to do that. I will often only require that evidence be presented that the person Mic spammed once, as an 8 hour ban shouldn't be as hotly contested as an RDM ban. Reporting someone to have them show you the three instances of mic spam that lead to your 8 hour ban is just silly, and I don't want to entertain that kind of behavior. One instance to get the general idea is all you really need. On the topic of staffing, yeah, it is a lot like babysitting. You deal with a lot of children and trolls, and it can be hell at times. There is nothing more aggravating than having an entire server ridicule you because you can't just ban someone, or because you can't just mute some child. It is stressful at times, and while I personally don't get stressed out anymore, I can see newer mods may have trouble doing this. It is a thankless job, because when we are on the servers we are being told that we are useless, and then when we are off the servers we are being told we are needed. Also I mostly don't play because of college, but i'm home now so I will be playing a lot more.
