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Systematic Conflict of Interest - GMs
maouw
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
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:
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?
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?
I wish I were deep and tragic
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Your community moderators will serve to be the voice of Intrepid, answering questions, engaging in threads/social platforms and just bringing some life.
A GM is solely the hammer - deal with any requests that come in and be the tribunal. Keep on top of reports and breaches of service, while dealing with any tickets raised by the community in-game.
If you keep these roles distinct then I feel that's the balance needed. It requires more resources but I think as a community we would agree it's a necessary investment to keep the community healthy.
The moderator role ideally requires a machine-like impartialness, if we want the ban hammer to be swung in a fair manner. (Add in human level intelligence to prevent exploits though)
Meanwhile the community manager's role emphasizes interaction & engagement with players, which requires the staff member in this role to act as "human" as possible.
I guess it's rather difficult for a single person to be both at the same time, unless he has a mental switch or something that allows him to flip freely between" human" & "machine" mode.
It's more common that you think. Just as customers can suddenly flip from being happy supporters to snarling venomous creatures, a support team has to be able to flip from professional to friendly and back again in an instant.
Most companies have a team that works on in game issues (bots, exploits etc), a team that works on customer issues (account problems, client issues etc), and a team that works on community interaction (social media, occasional in game events etc).
While some small games may not have each of these, and some private servers may have some major issues with GM's on occasion, actual game developers haven't had these issues for well over a decade (EVE was the last game I heard of that had issues like this), because they have all realized that these three teams all have different skill sets and so need to consist of different people.
They need to be in their own separate guild without any alliances to non-Intrepid guilds. And to keep things impersonal and professional ingame on the server. In Alpha 1 the mods were also instructed to not join other guilds.
It doesn't really matter what team they are on, be it GMs or community managers or otherwise: If they can't be professionals and impartial because they know the people they have to manage and judge, they don't fulfill the requirements of the job. Until shown otherwise, I trust Intrepid to handle it well
The problem with that is that you then have to take them out of their work area in order to give them time in-game. Their time is better spent on maintaining and continuing production of the game. Or were you planning on trying to force them to spend time in-game in their own free time outside work?
Oh no, definitely on company time. For some of them, a couple of hours a week is fine. For the designers I would prefer they spent a bit more time. I know it's unlikely they will adopt this for all employees.
The best way I've learned from my management positions is to have the rotation go in the direction of:
1) New Recruits to Game Managers, who are taught to use the tools to resolve problems sent in tickets, this way they get used to all the situations and weird bugs and edge cases and learn not to treat players as if they player did something wrong. They also learn better solutions and have a clearer idea of where the development on any given bug is.
2) Game Managers to Experience Managers, who must interact with players, gather initial information and actually write the tickets. Now they know the sort of silliness going on in the back. They can be trained not to reveal this to players easily, but they write better tickets, for sure, and might be able to resolve some problems better, but now they're constantly exposed to unhappy people.
3) Experience Managers to Community Managers, this is similar to a 'promotion' in that it happens if you manage to handle enough irate or unhappy players, but even if you're not great at it, a break from dealing with negativity to at least help do things like build events or arrange cool things for people, is good, and you've just come from dealing with unhappy people and before that, from learning why those people are unhappy, so you have some insights.
4) Community Managers back to Game Managers (but possibly team lead or senior depending), because now you've learned how to manipulate and work the system more to deal with things people ask for and events. You may never be a programmer, but there's a lot of stuff that helps here, and it's honestly a nice break that allows people to detach from direct playerbase interaction after a few weeks or months of CM work.
5) Promote or repeat.
Proper rotations have consistently solved the problems in my teams, even with people that I would not have expected to manage emotionally when their initial reactions were assessed (e.g. people who wanted to be front-facing but had poor emotional control displayed, seemed to improve once they got a better idea of what the customer was experiencing, and whether or not their personal emotional control improved, their understanding and empathy did, making them more capable of doing the job they originally wanted to do)
This way you allow for:
This solution seems to bundle up what most people have said - helping GM's switch on/off while giving them maximum exposure to the game/community without crossover.
I'm still curious to hear if this is just a relic from the past though.
Noaani claims it's not a problem anymore, Nerror would rather see IF it becomes a problem first, Azherae doesn't experience this problem (right?) because their team is already rotating.
It sounds like a problem that only stood out in my own experiences.
Now, I’ve been a developer/GM/etc. for a small online game. It’s text-based, like a MUD, but with some graphics. I’d interact with players as an NPC but that’s different. I wasn’t an employee and everything I did was purely for fun, from helping people, to creating game systems, to writing and running storylines in the game.
I can’t imagine that sort of thing in an MMORPG.
A GM is a paid employee doing their job, period. If they enjoy it that's great, but they shouldn't be "playing" the game as a GM. This is a pvp oriented game. I think it is safe to say that the potential for drama and toxicity in pvp games is much higher due to their competitive nature. As a pvper I have a long memory, revenge is sweet, and forgiveness comes slowly. I know I'm not alone with my "kill on sight" list...it's an admittedly questionable part of the fun of a pvp game.
If a GM goes home and plays for fun, they may remember specific players/guilds and they could impact game play for others.
To be fair I don't recall this ever being an issue in any games I've played, and GM sightings are mostly pretty cool precisely because of their rarity.
As potential problems go, this is probably low on the list but the post title caught my eye.
Waaay back in the day (more than 20 years ago, I can't believe it has been that long!!!) I was "hired" as a Guide for EQ. You actually had a bit of an interview process back then and took a quiz and stuff. But I made it through and got chosen. Part of the deal was that you had to say what server(s) you played on, and then you would be assigned a position on a server you didn't play on. (I only played on E'ci, and was assigned to the Bertoxxulous server.)
Before you ask me what my experience was like as a Guide, don't bother. After all I went through to get picked, I ended up dropping out before actually doing anything. The main reason was that I broke up with the long-term girlfriend I played the game with (and met in the game) and playing was no longer fun. Other reasons were that I got a full-time job and didn't have time like I used to. And also, my living situation was a bit iffy and I didn't have a chance to set up an internet connection to play even if I had time. (Back in those days, an internet connection meant dial-up, we didn't have easy ways to get online like you do now, it was a big deal to set it up.)
But anyway, my point is that even decades ago that seemed to be a standard thing for an MMORPG, I expect that it would still be one.
Ohhh man, it wasn't pretty, was it...
And it sometimes took me 1.5hrs to actually load into the dungeon, by which time my team-mates had got bored of waiting for me and had already completed it.
I remember one time it took so long to load in that the 2hr limit actually kicked me out in the loading screen.
Good times, eh?!
I had to make do with Chip's Challenge
Awesome game
But aye - it is very annoying when the GM's begin to gather a regular clique, around them. Yours truly would greatly prefer they be non-social.