Threads like these pop up every so often, but they rarely tend to evolve beyond vague call-outs and subjective complaints towards unknown players. On that note, if any of you have complaints about specific players (even if that player is me), I’d be happy to talk about them in PMs—I can guarantee a 100% confidentiality surrounding the conversation. In any case, I’ll try to address as many of the points that have been brought up as best I can, but given my activity has been less than some of the other admins, I’m not privy to all of the information surrounding the topics that have been brought up.
JoeCoolxD:
While I personally haven’t seen this happen (at least, not for a long time), I can definitely see it being possible. To be honest, I wonder how many of the possible instances of admins “encouraging players to put their character in danger” or “turn on each other” are intended as jokes versus serious suggestions. Regardless, I’m in the dark on this one, so if anyone has specific examples they’d like to share with me, I’m all ears (again, I’d NEVER share info someone were to share with me with the intention of keeping it secret—I swear on that). At the same time though, there
is an option to report admins if you feel their conduct is inappropriate (believe me when I say we are not some massive friend clique—the whole reason I became an admin in the first place is to try and keep that sort of corruption to a minimum). One I can’t do is read minds though, so if the problems never make it to my ears either through PMs or tickets, I can’t help. This is why I personally pushed for people to take issues to tickets—that way it’s impossible for any one admin to “keep things under wraps”.
- Character importance and immunities.
Admins DO have the unique ability to spawn things in and “build the lore around them”, but it’s also strictly against the rules that we have in place. Whenever a lore prompt or event starts going through discussions, we try extremely hard to ensure that, besides it being enjoyable, players don’t feel like they’re being treated unfairly or secondary to the admins themselves. It’s gotten to the point now where often times the discussion becomes more about “will this make players mad?” instead of about the event itself. It’s unhealthy and frankly creatively stifling to be constantly worried about player reception, especially when changes are made to try and accommodate that but players get upset regardless. You can’t please everyone, and that’s something we’ve had to come to realize. One event will make some people happy and others angry, the next will reverse those positions. It’s just the nature of an environment in which someone somewhere will lose. (As a side note, I won’t name names either, but just recently an admin character had a debilitating injury occur to their character in the exact same manner that it happened to a player, so the talk of admins surviving things they shouldn’t seems like hearsay to me rather than reality. If I’m wrong on that, again, feel welcome to PM me about it—I’d be all ears.)
- Event difficulty and character trauma.
This one is hard for me to answer because I haven’t been personally involved with the last handful of events. What I can say though is that not every event is intended to be a “shoot-‘em-up showdown” event where players go in guns-blazing. Sometimes, the event is intended to involve more subterfuge and critical thinking. If an event’s combat seems incredibly difficult, it’s likely because realistically, that’s how it would be in the game world. It wasn’t a fight that was intended for the players to take—at least in that moment. From the little I’ve seen of the past few events, I’ve heard that players were often hasty in their decisions and decided to take fights that, frankly, they were unprepared for. It’s like trying to take on over leveled creatures in an RPG—of course you’re going to get messed up. At the same time though, I think we can all agree on the admin team that the last few events have injured just a few too many people. It’s not something we particularly enjoy either. If we injure too many players, we can’t even do anymore events until they’re healthy again! As for the combat system, it’s still a work in progress. Several problems with the system have already been identified and (hopefully) the fixes will be out soon. They should help to decrease the amount of time spent in combat even more and tone the difficulty down just a tad.
The point for the rule of taking complaints to tickets was never intended to stifle or limit what people hear and see—in fact it was the opposite, but there’s a difference in WHO needs to be hearing and seeing things. We’ve had this problem for a long time—whenever a player is upset in some manner, often times they take the problem to PMs with one admin or another. This has become a major stressor for several of the admins, because when drama goes down, it isn’t just you PM’ing that admin—
it’s everyone else that was involved too. Sometimes things get out of hand that at the same time that people are complaining to admins, they’re also complaining to other players. Like the telephone-game, those complains are often exaggerated or conflated to be bigger than they really are. Then the rumor-mill starts turning. And, if an admin decides they’ve had enough of the nonstop messages of drama, they’re called out for ignoring or stifling “conversation”. It’s probably been the single biggest killer of admin motivation to date. It sucks to work hard on an event or something and have multiple people blowing up your private messages when something goes wrong or doesn’t go their way. Then, they message their friends, and then their friends ALSO message you about the problem. It’s overwhelming sometimes—and it got to the point where we decided to address the problem by moving the complaints to a location where each of the admins can see exactly what the complaints are and have easy discussion. It’s not a matter of admins being unable to accept criticism, it’s a matter of being able to have a legitimate discussion on the issues when emotions aren’t riding high, and not wake up in the morning to a red (50+) in the corner of your discord. In a perfect world we’d like to handle complaints in PMs just fine, but it’s rarely been productive versus being a battleground where players shout “you did this to me!”.
I can say with absolute confidence that the recent bombings were entirely unrelated to any OOC influence. They were consistent with the motivations of a non-NPC character and was NOT in any way an “admin planned” occurrence in regards to furthering story plot or get back at players. The RP that occurred the night of the bombings and the situations leading up to it were such that any player in the community could have performed the deed given the proper character motivation. The items used to conduct the bombings were obtained legitimately (I.E., not just spawned in by admins for no reason), roleplay was done as is required by the rules (public and out loud emotes as in the case of claim theft) and while I can’t metagame, I can say with confidence that it was a situation entirely proper given context with the character motivation behind it. Again, I’d be happy to discuss this more in PMs if anyone wants to know more, but I will say that it’s a two-way street.
piggs:
- Admin characters sometimes have too much story importance.
As stated previously, I haven’t been in any of the most recent events, so I haven’t been around times that instances of this most likely occurred. I can say though that if you feel that admins are playing into themselves too much or are making themselves too important, that’s DEFINITELY something that you should report. I know that there’s the feeling that reporting it will bring retaliation your way, but if it isn’t reported, how can any of us ever do anything to address the problem? As I said, we’re not some super-clique as a team where we collectively look down on the player-base while we plot our special character plots. If I knew an admin were giving themselves the spotlight too much, I would absolutely have a problem with it. At the same time though, there are instances we have no choice, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. Every once in a while we’ll have an admin participate in an event on their player character (NOT admin NPC or such) because they want to experience what it’d be like as a player or because they’re burned out on dungeon mastering. Often when this is the case, that admin has to clarify that they want to participate as a player, and when that happens they are
not involved with the development/construction of the event with the purpose of not allowing them to metagame—even subconsciously. Despite this, every once in a while we’ll identify a problem or a discontinuity that could disrupt the event or make it stretch on for hours longer than intended (such as a poorly designed puzzle). In those cases, we’ve had characters being played by admins “step up” to solve the problem and speed the event along in the interest of not keeping the players until 5 A.M. in the morning. Unfortunately, this also has the unintended side effect of appearing like admin favoritism or admins trying to play “the important guy”. We could definitely handle these instances better, and probably the best way would just be to artificially speed things up AS admins, instead of as an admin’s player character. This might break immersion, but personally I’d prefer broken immersion to seeing a character I know is played by an admin magically solve the problem and save the day.
- Admin characters feel like they are playing out a power fantasy, under the precedent that no one will dare challenge them OOC.
Once again, I personally haven’t seen evidence of this, but I’m not omniscient (and if an admin WERE doing these things, I highly doubt they’d be bragging about it to the rest of the team). This is one of those things where if you feel like it’s a problem, it’s imperative that you report it. I don’t think admin retaliation is even something to fear at this point if you were to feel that this were a problem, because the point of this problem is that they’re basically already doing that. If it’s reported and you’re treated poorly, at least then you have proof that it’s a legitimate concern and can take it more public. I will say though that this lore we have been freer with granting player requests than we EVER have in a lore before. We’ve given players entire basements, exclusive lore info, cool solo events, unique items, and many other things WITHOUT donations or other incentives. We’ve been doing it because it’s cool, and it helps the players that request that stuff to feel more involved with the lore. It’s also something that probably hasn’t been advertised as well as it should be. We added a “Lore Authorization” for this purpose, to try and show players that if they want cool stuff/cool info, all they need to do is ask. It’s been under-utilized I feel, and that may be a contributing factor to how it seems some players get favorable treatment.
Going back to the original point though, I’ve long advocated for the idea that admins need to restrain their roleplay as much as possible and not disturb the “natural flow” of players, so to speak. I’m extreme enough that I’d even suggest admins shouldn’t have player characters AT ALL. Unfortunately, the reality is that if that were implemented, we’d have no admins. We’d return to The Road Ahead days where the admin team was virtually just Mindgate and I. That situation was bad enough that Mindgate and I got so burned out that we basically just gave up and passed it off onto other people. There has to be an incentive for people to want to stay as an admin, because while “constructing and building the lore world for the players and dungeon master-ing it”
should be enough of a reason, history has proven that’s not the case.
- Admins should avoid punishing the players through IC means.
Again, this seems like something subjective. If any player feels like they are being targeted by an admin IC for OOC reasons, you MUST report it. Believe me when I say that the admin team wouldn’t pull any punches when it comes to admin discipline. If it’s not reported, then it just seems like rumors and hear-say, and we can’t do ANYTHING about it. You guys shouldn’t feel like you can’t name drop us, we actually encourage that you do. There’s no better avenue of honesty and player-admin transparency than just getting it all out there.
- Admins should adapt to what players want.
I agree that this is a tough one, because very rarely is there a “general consensus” on what players want from the team in a given moment. If players universally respond poorly to something though (such as event fights that are way over-tuned), we DO listen and try to adapt, though. We’re not perfect, and we won’t always get it right, but we try. There ARE times though that the complaints
are related to how the player(s) approached a scenario, and it’s not our fault as a team for their own mistake. An example would be approaching a scenario such as a giant zombie horde guarding a building and then complaining that the horde is too big to fight. We
agree that the horde is too big to fight—that’s a problem that your
character should figure out. Lure them away! We try not to railroad the players into a single solution during events. If you want to fight, fine, but we won’t purposefully nerf fights just to allow the players to Rambo their way through. Sometimes, luring the horde away is the proper play.
- There is no need for every single event to be a harrowing near-death experience.
I’ve already covered this point above, but I’ll gloss over it again one more time. If an event becomes a life harrowing experience, it’s likely because the player base approached the situation wrong or made bad decisions in the moment. Very rarely do we design an event with the purpose of killing or maiming players—that type of event is usually reserved for serious plot moments or for lore finales. Regarding events such as ones involving the Miller’s, while those events may have had combat in mind, the RP that led up to those events occurring didn’t
have to go the way of resulting in combat, as I understand it. Sometimes that’s just how it works out.
- Don’t tell people to take things to tickets whenever they list a concern.
Again, I’ve also already addressed this point, but just to reiterate: tickets are the only way we can guarantee that everyone on the team sees the complaint and can engage in open discussion about it. If you PM an admin, there’s no guarantee that the admin will pass that discussion on to the team, especially not if it’s a more intimate discussion with a friend. I do agree with the point of making a dedicated place in the forums for this though—discord chat tends to get flooded and clogged when multiple people start chatting in real time, so a slowed down pace on the forums would be ideal.
Once again, I don’t know of any circumstances of players getting blatantly disrespected, but this is the danger that admin’s face when engaging in PMs with players. We’re not perfect, sometimes emotions get the better of us too, and sometimes it goes too far. I’ve always said that if there’s drama, the players and admins involved should wait a day before engaging in discussion about it—otherwise tensions often get in the way and nothing productive gets done. If anyone feels like an admin is being insultingly disrespectful, report them.
We WANT feedback. In a perfect world, I’d prefer everyone just name-dropped the people they had problems with and expose the exact root of the issue and get it out of the way. All the dancing around names and stuff bugs me, but that’s probably just my personality. Not everyone feels that way, which I get. I can say for certain though that if anyone has a problem with me personally as an admin, feel free to just lay it into me—I’m not going to shy away from it or try to shut you down, but I
will defend myself if I feel like you’re in the wrong. Feedback doesn’t just mean you tell the admin team stuff and we bend-over backwards to fulfill your wishes—I doubt any of us have the full absolute context and proof to every issue that has cropped up lately. Personally, I feel like a lot of these problems have only become as big as they have because of a lack of communication from players to admins, and I don’t mean communication in the form of emotion-filled PMs towards the same admins that already have five other people doing the same thing, I mean genuine attempts at discussion with the team at length either through tickets, forum posts, or otherwise.
We barely get tickets regarding server or admin issues from players. I can count the number we’ve gotten this lore on one hand—considering the apparent amount of drama that’s been going on behind the scenes, that’s a big red flag for me.
IN SUMMARY:
That’s about all I have to say. I only responded to JoeCoolxD and piggs because they were the first two I read—I can’t keep updating this post with every single point every single person brings up, but I feel like these two covered the vast majority of the feelings some players have been having. Hopefully I’ve been clear on a lot of my answers, but if you have questions/responses, I’m all ears. I wish there were a way I could prove that everything I’ve said here is true and not just “admin corporate talk”, but unfortunately I don’t think there is any way. Trust is a two way street too—if the player base wants to be taken seriously, we can’t get called liars or untruthful every time we respond with our own side of the story. Besides, if the admin team were as corrupt as some players fear, then this entire post would be pointless and I wouldn’t have bothered with engaging in it at all—it’d probably just have gotten deleted outright.
Otherwise, I hope any further discussion can be kept simple. In the interest of transparency, I don’t want this thread to disappear as a whole, but if someone’s post is purposefully antagonistic without providing meaningful discussion, that specific post will probably get removed in order to minimize further drama.
