Preamble: This issue was briefly touched on in
this thread, but resurfaced more deeply in conversation with
@JustVine - I think it's worth wider discussion.
GMs are great. I want them.
However, I have seen time and again, that GM's both in large-scale MMOs and in small Private Servers tend to walk a moral dilemma that either sees them develop either an in-crowd who seem to be shown favouritism or they disengage from the community and interact at arm's length.
I'm not convinced a payroll changes this.
Traditionally, GM's are given 2 main responsibilities:
- Community Interaction - responsibilities tend to include things like Talking/Interacting with players and Having an open ear that is always (*) accessible to the playerbase. To help them do this, GM's need privileges like Teleporting, Spawning Bosses, Ghost mode for hide-and-seek, ... all that fun stuff.
- Community Moderation - responsibilities tend to include Direct Intervension, Catching botters/hackers/spammers/the like. To help them do this they wield a Ban Hammer, etc.
This puts a GM in a difficult position because if a GM has to reach for their tools it's usually not for happy people, they can't possibly befriend everyone on the server, the power dynamic creates a swathe of sucking up - all of which seriously undermines their percieved ability to be impartial.
It is a conflict of interest for a GM to both befriend the playerbase AND moderate it.
IRL we tell our attorneys and judges to back down if they have personal ties to their cases - but we tell our GMs to do the exact opposite. It spawns a ton of drama that has the GM team walking on egg-shells.
My question is - is this only my experience, or have others seen different?
