Question - Staffing in General

After reading through the Staff Oath and such, I have to say it was very well written out. It covers a good bunch of the problems that I know players have witnessed and experienced in the past. But I do have one question that comes to mind with this:

With the new change over in the game, how is Staff going to change as well?

Will (A) all the people now currently serving as staffers be carried over, simply stepping behind staff alts to maintain confidentiality and remain anonymous? Or (B) will an all new team of staffers be chosen to fill the ranks needed for aiding in the new game? Or (C) will it be a mix?

Problems and benefits can be seen from each (though I am not saying these are all that there are/could be):


A.) Pros - If just simply transferring all the current staffers, you have a group that had experience and knows what they’re doing in regard to things.

Cons - When reading over the Staff Oath, I am sure some players will have occasion pop into their minds where they have heard rumors, been on the wrong or good end directly, or witnessed from the sidelines some breach or such of rules like this with our current staff. (I apologize, this is by no means an attack or calling out of the people we currently have, just an observation. ) No one is absolutely perfect, and some will make mistakes. But after a certain amount it's perhaps time to step down.


B.) Pros - An all new team brings new blood and ideas into a system, fresh eyes to take on things in new ways and enthusiasm to get things done and ask questions.

Cons - An all new team might leave things on unsteady ground. If a good number of your people are unsure of what they’re doing, things may very well have trouble getting off the floor.


C.) Pros - With a mix of both old/experienced staffers that know what they’re doing (and have proven themselves to be excellent at their job in the past) and new staffers with new ways of looking at things, a good balance could probably be obtained.

Cons - While a mix brings old and new things together from both sides, both of those sides may have troubling seeing eye to eye at times. And new people brought in would need to be the right kind, those than can stand on their own, but are willing to ask questions and learn when they know they need it.

We're currently already taking action on this, but I'll have to settle with revealing that it's a mix. We'll post our general Staff Structure sometime in the future, but expect to see some new blood and old blood. To be quite frank, one of the flaws of DH Staff is the fact that we had no standardized guidelines of dealing with certain situations (whether that be assassinations, capturing ships, space scenes, etc.), and overall procedure, which I'm glad to say will be rectified in the incarnation. It's a delicate balance, but we're being extremely careful on balancing out between new Staff and old Staff so that new ideas, excitement, and high-octane motivation will be the emphasis, while keeping chaos in check.

<Insert frustratingly mysterious answer here>

But seriously, this isn’t my department so I can’t reveal anything. Someone needs to ask a question I can answer

It's my job to give the definitive and honest answer on this matter.

We're going to be relaunching with a mostly new staff. The composition of the Wizards is not going to change, though we may add a new Wizard or two, or a Royal or two, before the relaunch. A few of our current staffers may stay on, but for the most part, we want a fresh start.

Most of our current staffers have been staffing for us for a very long time--long enough that they need a break and a chance to experience the game afresh as players. More than that, we'll need them as active, motivated players to bring the game off to a roaring start.

I think everyone is aware that there have been issues with staff in the past, hence the staff oath and the changes we've been working on. Primarily, I blame past issues on a bad system, and on my own failure to keep everyone accountable; I didn't really give the staff the kind of direction they needed to be most useful to the players, which is something I regret -- and something I plan on doing very differently in the future.

More details will be coming soon on the Storytellers, as well as on player representatives and direct feedback systems to ensure maximum accountability, performance, professionalism.

GuestWookiee's post has been deleted for violation of the Forum Rules. See Rule 3. This is neither the time nor the place to issue written attacks against players.

Let me be less specific then.

There is currently a nameless staffer who uses the +jtel system to go wherever they want, bypassing the IC grid. They also use this power to bring people to them for RP and send them back. Ordinary players have to risk getting ambushed in space or at the shuttle terminals. When the staffer does this it broadcasts to the staff channel that they did it and shows their reason which is always clear that they are using it to avoid having to travel IC, so the wizards must know they are doing it. In fact, this staffer even jokes about it on the staff channel, with the wizards.

This use of staff powers for PC IC advantage is already illegal on DH1 and the wizards don't do anything about it. Why should players trust the wizards to prevent abuses on DH2? Especially when you consider one of the most important rules that staffers swear to to be not telling anyone about what happens on the staff channel?

On the issue of the staff channel, that rule makes sense to me. Staff are human and need a place to vent like everyone else, and it just causes unnecessary tension when staff use that info to play 'Oh oh love me more' with the players at large.

The issue of JTels....lacking all the facts I'm not going to say diddly on that.

GuestWookiee, page me or mail me on the game and let me know which staffer is abusing the system in this way. We have about 1 month of staff +j-command use automatically logged, so I should be able to look for flagrant abuse, investigate, and deal with it if it exists. That's purely an aside; dealing with it doesn't really address the core problem, but that doesn't mean that it isn't worth addressing anyway.

Regarding the future:

We don't expect things to change themselves if we just run a relaunch and don't reform more deeply. That is why we are restructuring the way we do business. Staff needs to be more directly accountable to both the player and the wizards; the players need more information on how things operate and what's actually going on; and the wizards need more communication with the players day-to-day and less incentive to sweep things under the rug and hope problems go away.

Everyone in a position of authority, even on something as small as an online game, could benefit from reading Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. It's a rather insightful analysis of how smart people can do some very dumb things in a position of power. The best antidotes to folly -- action contrary to your own best interest -- seem to be humility, planning, and a readiness to change the plan if it isn't working and cut your losses if you're not getting the results you need.

I will post shortly about the specific plan of reforms we have in mind to ensure basic accountability and smooth, efficient communication. I welcome discussion of the specifics of the plan, and I encourage you to contribute any ideas that can help ensure a better future in the relaunched game.

P.S. I do think a confidential staff channel to blow off steam and communicate isn't a bad idea. It might be a good idea to keep the wizard communication channels and staff communication channels quite separate, however; it's hard for the wizards to act as a check, balance, or corrective on their staffers if the two groups are excessively entwined.

Honestly, we've made a lot of mistakes. And that's understating it. Whether that's from management to planning. As Gulp has said, we're re-structuring the way we do things, because a theme reform obviously isn't enough. We don't expect you to buy into it if we're not changing a system that clearly doesn't work.

I admit I'm not as diligent or serious in my mentality as I should've going in as a Wizard on DH1, and that's something that needs to change. While this is a volunteer job, it's still a job that's supposed to provide fun for the players. This time around, Staff, myself included, needs to take itself much, much more seriously to give you guys the fun you come here for, while being fair and honest. Trust is something that needs to be earned, and it needs to go both ways. We're hoping you can put your trust in us again to give you something badass. But bottom line: expect a plan of reform soon, and decide and judge for yourself whether it's worth putting your trust into it.

The staff channel rule was put in place after a few incidents and will likely continue. Staff members need a place to vent and to deliberate on complex issues. In real life this is the "Officer's Club" or "Manager's break room" or "Conference room 1a" or “Camp David” one of dozens of other incarnations that have found their way into use in virtually every organization. It isn’t so much a perk as a necessity in most of its incarnations and so it is here.

More Specific Precedents: Both the Model Business Corporations Act (MCBA) and the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) make provisions for these institutions for this very reason, though they also place limitations to prevent excess. The legal system uses Judges Chambers and Jury Rooms. Conversation in either of these rooms is to be kept secret--- enough so that the FBI was forbidden to conduct E-surveillance on a Jury Room when investigating Jury Tampering in the Boston Mafia cases. It is not uncommon for WHO, WTO, WIPO, and CISG Arbiters to be given similar accommodations.

(Sorry for all the short hand)

I really don't think specific examples of abuse is needed. From everything that I have read here the staff admits that abuse has taken place and that trust has gone from the game.

That said, what I am hearing is that players want something to grasp onto that clearly states that actual steps, from the top down, are being taken to ensure that abuse is curtailed and trust is restored. Gulp said it best in one of his posts on DH a while back that he would not play on a game that he didn't trust staff.

As it is now, many many players do not trust staff and I know that staff does not trust players.

I think the code of ethics that has been done for staff to sign is good. But members of congress take security oaths yet still abuse the system and can justify it when they leak security information or abuse their position of power. SWDH has in it's rules that staff will be held to a much higher standard than players already.

So the question is, what will be done, specifically to instill that trust that must occur between staff and players?

Explosive charges inside the brains of all staff members. If violations occur, the charge will be detonated.

Here's the general plan:

1) Recruit a new future staff from outside the traditional staffing circles. This process has already begun.

2) Run an open development so that both players and future staff have the chance to agree on and sign off on our game direction and policies. This includes all the specific day-to-day rules not yet posted, from the gameplay rules -- how to run an assassination attempt, how we record and retrieve vital information, how spycraft should work, what happens when you're held captive -- to the conduct rules, of which the staff oath is the first step. This process has also already begun.

3) Keep the rules public, on the wiki and in the news.

4) Institute a direct-feedback system, anonymous and otherwise, which tracks reactions to staff performance over time. This may not sound like a massive change from a player perspective, but it makes it easier to hold people accountable for their long-term performance. If the general details are visible to staff (the ratio of negative to positive feedback, the frequency of feedback, and so on), then it could prove a useful tool for self-reflection and self-improvement. If improvement is not forthcoming naturally, such a system makes it easier to retrain or dismiss unsuitable staffers.

5) Institute player ombudsmen, nominated by the players for 2- or 3-month terms, who are guaranteed weekly meetings in private with the wizards, and whose mandate is to bring issues to our attention and keep them there until we resolve them. These ombudsmen will need to have strong character and backbone, so that they are unintimidated by staff, wizards, or fellow players, and are willing and ready to speak truth to power until it is heard. Current staffers will be ineligible for ombudsmanship; current ombudsmen will be ineligible for staffing.

Without ombudsmen, it is always possible the wizards will not hear about a problem and then mistake sullen silence about it for the problem having vanished of its own accord.

Some may object that the wizards should listen to everyone and not need special ombudsmen. I agree; but I'm also a realist, and I know that we're not always going to have the perspective, the time, or the opportunity to give everyone a fair hearing. We can't simply plan on being better and more perfect administrators; when the rubber hits the road, we really need 3 or 4 effective player liaisons whose voices must be heard, who have the strength of purpose and the communication skills to discuss developing problems with us, give us all the information, and help us get in touch with anyone we may have lost touch.

This does mean that the player ombudsmen have to be really good at what they do. When we begin selection, nominate them accordingly. We'll select from among the most supported nominees. Normally, we'll select the three or four most supported nominees, but with the following caveats:
1) not everyone nominated will have the time or inclination to do it, and
2) the player liaisons must be capable not just of responding to serious concerns from their fellow players, but also of communicating effectively with the wizards.

Essentially, the ombudsmen will be ambassadors from the players to the wizards, and as such, must have the trust of both.

6) Perfect our request system so that fewer issues slip through the cracks. At this point, the major change will be allowing players to comment their +Request files, and notifying them when their +Requests are commented on. This is a fairly simple change to make. While it doesn't really concern honesty, lack of/weaknesses in request systems have been a major source of inefficiency and frustration in the past.

7) Evaluate our progress at three-month intervals, and discuss it with the playerbase, fielding suggestions for future improvement and listening to criticisms of the policies in place.

As a side note, if staff gets a channel for blowing off steam without being able to leak it to the public, can us players have pages between each other that staff cannot read on DH2?

I seriously doubt the staff have everyone set SUSPECT or have @hook'd page. That would be spammy as hell.

There's an important distinction to be made here; we don't mind you guys venting to your friends. If you need to blow off steam, do it. What we don't want to see is that venting turns into a rumor mill where you vent to five different people, and those five different people weave more tales to five other different people. And FoghornLeghorn is correct. Believe me, none of the Wizards want to go through megabytes of text just to find you saying that you think Joe Schmoe is a tool and a twink to your friend. We don't care. The only people that really concern us to go through such drastic measures is people we suspect that are poisoning the waters OOCly or abusing the game system.

Re: having unmonitored pages --

You already do, and you still will. In addition to pages, there are also the Private and Vent channels, which are entirely unmonitored and unrated. Don't hack the game, attack the server or code, or exploit/damage the game systems, and you won't be monitored.

If someone is virulently spreading rumors with the intent of damaging the game, rather than simply blowing off steam, it's fair to say that we won't need to monitor them to find out about it.

One little tidbit. A majority of our staffers are good peoples who try to do the right thing. Sometimes, the right thing for one person isn't translated into the right thing for others. Having read the code of ethics and the like, I do agree it is a good starting point. But I would like to submit this.

Back in the day of using +features and +alts, we knew if a staffer was playing a specific character. The negatives of that are obviously huge. But, I would put this out there. In years upon years of MU*'ing, one finds certain trends. I do not say our staffers all possess this, I'm merely speaking of trends.

Normal characters tend to get boring, very few people like to be average or ordinary. What I would suggest for staff is to be very open about any characters that are used by staff for 'plot driving' or approach those levels of 'very powerful' so that players can understand a bit more what is at work. There is nothing more frustrating for some people than to find out that a specially created staff alt is attempting to hunt you down and kill you. That's just crushing. Such things should be open and I think will help foster that staff/player trust and promote story rather than competition.

You raise a sticky issue, though--one of suspension of disbelief/metagaming.

The little back-alley scumbag who tries to convince you to beat up a rival gang for him. If he's flagged as an NPC, players will treat him very differently than if he's flagged as a PC. It's human nature to think, "Aha, this is a quest-giver icon. Let's figure out the quest and beat it." But it also pretty much ruins any naturalistic belief in the reality of the NPC.

Is not knowing sometimes better, or is it better to know in order to prevent OOC issues from arising down the line?

A little bit of both. Good to not know during, but at the end it needs to probably be revealed.

Interesting.

You think some kind of release schedule would be appropriate? e.g. we release information regarding past rulings, scenes, NPCs, and so on, and that release lags far enough behind the game that nobody gets sensitive IC info but close enough to limit accountability concerns?

Honestly, yes I think so.

The staff are executives for the game. Even in the US eventually executive information is released well after the fact. What this does is it keeps the staff accountable to the players, it keeps the players appraised of the method behind decisions, and it keeps communications open.

If you were to say, 1 month after a decision has been made and events around that decision have closed, release the 'details' surrounding it, or explain a plot, it might carry a lot. I mean really think how many of us have been frustrated in our gaming lives at not understanding a plot we were involved in. There's plots right now on DH that I wish would be fully disclosed so people could understand so much more of what was going on, plots that were over a year ago.

1 month is realistically not likely to happen; that's too short a time window for a catch-all, and would release information that was still "hot". It'd be pretty hard on spy characters, for example. 3 months might be more workable, or a variable release schedule.

Well what have you, but the principle remains

A variable release schedule makes the most sense. For stuff that isn't very sensitive you could release it in a month; for stuff that is still sensitive, you could put it off until it's no longer relevant. Etc.