I think the picture that Maelstromicus is painting is that while bad apples could be sorted out quickly, it is actually the job of being moderator that eventually turns otherwise reasonable people into bad apples.
So you end up with a churn of volunteers who are promoted to a job (and it definitely IS a job, except for the lack of wages). And their “passion for the game” is supposed to sustain their largely thankless responsibilities, and neverending pressure of having all their moderation actions being reviewed. And when they REALLY mess up, they get demoted/replaced and they either hate the community, or the community hates them.
I would feel very poorly for these volunteers if the very act of serving the community is what ends up distancing them from it in the end. Certainly it seems that EHG wants to be hand-holding for more severe moderation actions, and that could help the moderators feel more supported, but they might quickly run out of capacity to do that when the game gets ever more popular.
No, no, & three times no imho. What I said was about PLAYERS nominating people to be community mods, not the appointed community mods themselves.
In fact, I think once a player becomes a community mod, they should forfeit any rights for commenting on the possible addition of another player to their ranks, as it causes the very problems that Auroraclaire highlighted above. If the mods are not excluded from the “hiring” process then it creates nepotism & an “old boys club”.
The whole idea, I will repeat, I believe is a good one and will help LE greatly once MP goes live but it’s also a massive hand grenade and needs to be handled with the utmost care. Again, just my opinion.
Players nominating can work, but it has to be done in a way thats not about quantity; but rather used as a means to give some form of voice to the people who aren’t in the majority in a community.
For example:
Form for someone to nominate another to be a moderator, require a reasoning to be given, and note that explaining what that person would offer that isn’t already there in the moderation team (bonus points for providing examples from what that person has said/done in the community before). Then use that reasoning to influence decisions on who becomes moderator, as opposed to ‘this person has so many more nominations though’. and explicitly don’t allow the current moderation team to have any knowledge or input on any of this process, and explicitly tell current moderators they can’t nominate someone.
Theres still potential to abuse a system like this, but at the end of the day it’s for the devs to make the final say, and this should exist to allow a better approach to reducing bias in the moderation team. (Of course most of the time player nomination stuff is implemented, it just ends up with the same end result, because the people in charge of picking moderators tend to not think about other voices as much as their own, but nothing solves that so hey-ho, at least people at ehg have accountability whereas community moderators don’t (because its not a job for them, there’s no consequence, which is also why community moderation is less than ideal))
It also needs to be confidential. Posts on the forum/discord/etc “XXX for Moderator” probably wouldn’t be a good thing & I could imagine them going to hell in a hand basket fairly quickly.
Totally. I’ve seen some of those threads in other games I played over the years and almost all of them devolved very quickly into Troll Wars.
Only the actual Dev Team should have access to any of it imho.
To put it bluntly, I think this is a somewhat naïve approach.
I’ve been moderator and/or super-moderator in a few games in the past, I had complex tools to seek cheaters in my hands and full admin access to forums etc, believe me I know what I am talking about.
So, moderators will not have any kind of benefit from doing a job? Even if is something symbolic/small mods should always be rewarded. With a bit of premium currency, access to early content, help with balancing/testing if they are interested you name it.
The thing is that moderators don’t have any sort of reward, you will quickly gather two kinds of people, absolute fanatics that are willing to help to death with nothing in return, and people searching for power, by any metric you imagine (from just a different color in the title, to be able to abuse their position). Those criteria don’t offer any quality selection, so is up to EHG impressions. Not good.
With moderation, you will quickly fall sooner or later in the worst case scenarios (usually rather quickly), so IMO the player report system should be: 1. never with automatic punishment. 2. track back the reporter to be able to spot abusers of the system.
As it is laid out in the initial post, this will consume far too much EHG resources and time. With all the tight oversight and involvement in all directions, that is not practical, ideally EHG should delegate work into the moderators sequentially as trust with them is built, and their work should be reduced by just some inspections into all the moderation components from time to time.
So true. Well in my situation I just happened to be friend of a country super-admin in one of my moderator jobs. He forced me to be a moderator… Luckily I hide well my connection with the country super, so I avoided the expected favoritism criticism… but only for some time. That’s another story.
Truly rotten apples with good oversight, yeah, but some bad apples are harder to spot, specially when their motivation is power, and they play mostly by the rules and have great social skills…
A lot of concerns are defenitely valid and it’s ok to be sceptical about it. But you can have bad apples in a dev driven mod team, too.
With volunteer mods people will say these guys have power fantasies or are brown nosing or white knighting.
With payed mods people will say that they just turn down valid criticism for the profit of the company they work for.
I’ve seen complaints already on the LE reddit because it is NOT run by the community but by EHG directly.
And let’s not forget that it’s not only the mods that play a role here. It’s also us as the community. It’s important how we react and communicate with each other and the mods. If we jump on them for the slightest reason, we will force the exact bad climate everybody wants to prevent.
The difference is theres accountability to paid moderators/moderators on the dev team. They have a reward for what they’re doing, they have consequences if they abuse the power they have. Community moderators don’t have either, the reward they get is either the joy of helping a community, or the joy of having power. They have no real stake. Its very wrong to compare the two as being in similar situations.
Edit: Also using a community moderation team is because it costs less, and (maybe unintentioanlly) allows the devs to ignore situations that happen to/with the mods (theres plenty of examples of this having happened). Neither of those things are true if its a paid team. So the point that if its a paid moderator people will say its decisions based on money, well that’s true no matter what.
Also please don’t already say its about the community forcing bad apples, thats just sweeping so many issues under the rug by blaming community members (preemptively) on the potential for mods to abuse their power.
I’m not talking about the situation they are in. I agree that these two types of moderators function on very different bases. So when it comes to what the incentives and driving forces are behind the job, you are right.
But I’m was talking about how it will possibly be received by the community or especially by members that get moderated.
This is true, but you can’t say “it’s not the community’s fault that there are bad apples” if the moderation team is mainly drawn from the community, is what I was trying to ham-fistedly get across. But I agree with you that just saying “it’s up to us as a community to be less of a bunch of dicks to each other”, while true, can also be used to sweep crap under the carpet (but not always).
The community isn’t gatekept, its the devs/studios etc… responsibility to avoid bad apples being in a position to actively be bad apples. You’ll always have bad apples (who are unable to really do anything) unless you allow people into a community, as opposed to removing people from a community and have unobstructed entry.
Again: I agree with you. But this is not what I’m initially talking about.
I’m saying that we play a very important role here. In a very toxic community the moderation will be very harsh. In a nice environment it’s also easier for moderators to be friendly.
And if you already have the opinion that everything a moderator does is driven by bad faith, you are also 100% biased and non objective towards these people. All I say is “give it a chance and don’t be biased against it right from the start”.
I certainly understand the concern with such a highlighted case scenario where a community moderator program didn’t pull through for the community. However there is many cases where community moderator programs have flourished. One of which I’ve seen grow and flourish for the last eighteen years without any major incident, and continues. It is a program which will require a significant amount of oversight, and we will need to adapt as we grow.
We like to keep very close with our community, with open channels of communication, and always try to be as responsive as we can. I believe that with this approach, we can see the Beesfriends be one of the community guide systems that flourishes. The important part is that we listen to not just our community moderators, but to our community as a whole, so we can address any issues occurring with the community moderator program before they become significant issues. And I like to think we’ve shown that we have that commitment to openness with the community.
I dont think anywhere i’ve shared the opinion that everything a moderator does is driven by bad faith.
I do think that everything done towards creating a moderation system/structure should be done based on what someone acting in bad faith could do, and mitigating the potential damage there as well as ease of getting into a position to that.
That point also seems to be extensively shared based on the other posts in here.
And all I did was stating that it also partly depends on the community itself how bad moderation is needed. I don’t see how these two statements interfere with each other.
