MOD ANNOUNCEMENT

[theearth]

As many of you are aware, there has been a recent incident involving ourselves and a few players. We wish to address this matter here.

Firstly, we apologize not only for our delay in speaking on this, but for our own behavior during this. We do take fault for having been too inflexible on the matter which started everything. All of us are to blame for this inflexibility and we all take responsibility for it; not just one mod is fully to blame for anything which happened. The plot the player desired should not have been dealt with in the way that it was. Our reasoning had been that we had not seen evidence that the plot had been set in stone, we had not been given reason why change was necessary to reconcile the plots, and that the details behind this plot/what was needed to occur to bring it to fruition were not brought to us. We offered one compromise, it was not taken, and we should have been more flexible about offering further compromises. We are, again, sorry for that inflexibility on our end.

Secondly, to prevent any risk of this sort of situation ever happening again, we are discussing a frankly overdue new system of accounting for, organizing, and simplifying coordination between planned plots, both meta and player. Details on it will be coming soon.

And thirdly, the mod with the most concerns voiced about her has been issued a warning, and will be taking far less of a stance involving plot-related issues for the time being. We will monitor her behavior to ensure a repeat of this kind of situation does not occur again and, should it, she will be dealt with. In line with those concerns, while she will still be involved in plotting and whatever issues may come to us, the other mods will have far greater a say, and will be considered the figures of authority where directly addressing player concerns and needs is concerned.

However, what we stand firm about is that ganging up on a person while refusing their own comfort is not permissible. The mod in question had become extremely uncomfortable having so many people, including one not in the game, on her all at once while she was not feeling well. This was the reason warnings were issued. We do, however, concede to having been too impulsive in issuing warnings to all involved, and once more, we do apologize to the parties who had been warned without having acted severely enough to warrant a warning. All but one of the warnings has been lifted.

Finally, not all the mods are experienced mods, and even the more experienced mods will acknowledge they can always use some help. So please, we ask that if any of you have any suggestions on how we might improve to come and tell us.

Thank you and, once again, we all apologize for our respective parts in this situation.

Comments to this post are enabled. At request, they have been unscreened. If you have left a screened comment and would like it unscreened, please indicate so! As per the suggestion of Guin, if you would prefer to leave us a screened comment, please do so on the Mod Contact post.

We will make a second post addressing those concerns, resolutions, and invitation of a second round of feedback as soon as we're able.

UPDATE - 5/3:

The StE modteam is currently planning to come together as a group and discuss all the issues brought to them on this post. Linda and Guin will be present while we are all on to continue discussion as a full team in order to ensure that all points and issues are thoroughly addressed.

This discussion will be happening as soon as possible - but coordinating schedules has proven difficult, so please bear with us.

This post will be edited accordingly once the discussion's day and time have been set.

UPDATE - 5/3:

The discussion will begin Sunday, May 4th, 5:00 P.M. CDT/3:00 P.M. PST.

UPDATE - 5/4:

The discussion has begun and is underway; it's proven to be more intensive than anticipated and hasn't yet ended, but will resume tomorrow and continue until concluded.

In the meantime, screencaps of the discussion thus far are posted at Linda's public Plurk; further updates will be made on this post and the linked Plurk, including the date, once set, of the second post.

UPDATE - 5/5:

Discussion has now concluded - we're sorry for having been quiet for so long!

Formal address of the points brought to this post as well as a second OOC post and a mod apps announcement will be coming by the end of tomorrow - Tuesday, 5/6.

- THE STE MODS: Anduin, Blue, Mini, and Olga

Comments

HOLY FUCK I BROKE THE CHARACTER COUNT

[justkingreally]

• Write a Mod Contract for your game that all of the mods (and probably the players) can see. Include in it things such as general guidelines for dealing with complaints, how long to let apps sit without any response to them, and most importantly what the code of conduct is for all mods that needs to be adhered to when acting in the name of the game. It can be as long or as short as you wish, but having this and making people agree to it before they become part of the mod team will at least give you a solid backing in what to do in various situations. It's an easy way to avoid having to use "precedent" when someone made an honest, or even a deliberate, mistake in the past and will cut down on the number of "Well I don't know..." problems where everyone more or less has their own idea of what to do. Definitely leave room for deliberation and unplanned-for circumstances (such as the car crash one of my friends was in several years ago), but day-to-day dealings will go faster if the answers are clear-cut and available for all the mods to see with the click of a button. As an addendum to that...
  
  
• Do not go to anon comms or Wankgate. I'm not here to make a decision on whether these places are needed or not, but it's one hundred percent black and white that they are toxic places for mods. Any complaints people have with the game need to be brought to the mods, and not aired in a space where there is no accountability. People can and do say whatever they want under the idea that no one will know it's them; that's part of what makes the internet in general so hard to deal with, and why the assclowns come out to play in cyberspace. We all know the stories of how someone who's nice and fairly mild in real life can turn into a raging douchebag when given access to the world wide web and the realization that really, no one can hurt them there, and the anon comms and Wankgate are much the same for the general RP population. Now, you've made it very difficult for people to have faith in you dealing with complaints fairly, if at all, and that is definitely one of the things you need to turn around the most. But you need to show your players that you can do that as well, so make it a rule for yourselves to not go there and avoid letting your blood pressure rise. It really does relieve a lot of stress when you decide to cut yourself off from constant negativity. There's always going to be people that react badly to you; I know of literally no one who is universally beloved. You don't need to invite trouble by deliberately going and looking for it. And especially do not comment on it and encourage it yourselves. Any mod stirring up wank in either place should be immediately banned.
  
  
• Have both screened and non-screened Mod Contact posts to allow people to contact you in what ways they feel comfortable with. There are definitely instances where Player A has problems with Player B and doesn't want Player B to know and immediately jump in and get defensive or start screaming about it or insert unhelpful reaction here. While it would be nice if players could solve all their personal problems with just the two of them, we all know that's not a truism even in real life, and it's even worse online. That's the reason why most mod contact posts are screened. But you've also alienated so many players from seeking your help/advice/whatever else that you need another way to do it, one that allows others to see - and yes, monitor - how you handle problems. Make another one and leave the comments unscreened to give your players both options. Don't be surprised if for awhile everyone uses the unscreened instead of the screened, but you do need to pay your dues for awhile to regain their trust.
  
  
• Set up a Discussion Post on the mod journal for your private use if you don't have one already. Plurk is a great tool for immediate discussions, but its nature hinders it from long spiels like the one I'm making now and can end up limiting needed conversations, especially since everyone needs to be online at the same time to actually talk. AIM is a great tool for longer discussions, but it still requires people being online at the same time and possibly setting up an AIM Chat, which are just getting more and more finicky the longer the software is out. Having a central place for any sort of discussion that needs a more complicated mod talk than "I'm going to approve this"/"Okay" lets you share all the information with everyone at once so there's no crossed wires, and everyone can read all of the prior talk as well. Don't delete a discussion thread until it's fully resolved (or never delete it, if it's a really important or complicated thing). Require everyone to check it at least every couple of days to see if there's anything new that came in.
  
  
• Set up a Calendar for plots and update it regularly. Someone mentioned this upthread and this is definitely an idea that needs to be implemented in the immediate future. It can be a table/HTML construction like Paradisa's, or it can simply be a text-based list with bullet points under the months, but get it up and have it constantly available. Possibly ask people to submit plot ideas there, or at least "soft plot" like if someone wants to have a weekend art festival or something. Use color-coding to mark whether something's a Game Wide Plot, a Locke-or-Vegas Plot, or a Optional Plot. If you want the nature of the plot to be a surprise, then that's absolutely fine - just mark down the days on the calendar as something like "June 5-11: Big Game Plot!" You can even use :), :(, and :o faces to indicate whether an unknown event's going to be happy, sad, or shocking if you want. But make and update this calendar frequently, checking it over at least once a week, and keep it updated for at least two months in the future. That is more than enough time for most plots to be developed and ready to set sail, so if a player wants to do something in ten days, they'll be able to look at the calendar and see if that specific day, or any days bracketing it, is free. It will help clear up confusion in the future and open a few more options in the future for players to do things like Kotetsu's party, or that arts festival I made up earlier.
  
  
• Bring in new mods... It's become painfully obvious to a lot of people that this game has outgrown the modteam, and I'd venture to say that it's outgrown almost any modteam. It's a large game with a lot of things to oversee, fairly frequent applications, and made more complicated by the reincarnation and echo aspects. Absolutely no one can blame a mod for needing some time away from all of that, since modding really does become a second job for any game as complicated as this. But that's when you have to throw your hands up and admit you need more help. While I haven't seen your behind-the-scenes work and how it's structured, I'd say you need at the very absolute least one more person, much more preferably two, in order to take some of the burden off the shoulders of the current mods. That way if someone has a final or a thesis, or an excruciating day at work, or gods forbid a medical emergency, the game isn't unduly slowed down by one missing member. Even if all they do is update lists or approve echoes, it would be one less thing for the mods that have to be really deep in the plot/world stuff to have to worry about getting done.
  
  
• ...and Delegate. I honestly can't tell who does what here as a mod - from what I've seen, it seems to be mostly Olga and Blue responding to apps, but the rest of it seems to more or less just be whoever's available, and I could have one or both of those suppositions wrong. Sit down among yourselves and decide on specific facets of the game that each of you is going to be in charge of individually, or group into teams of two and split the work into general areas such as "Plot/Story/World," "Data (accepting journals to comms, running AC, updating calendar/taken lists/etc)", and "Apps/Echoes." Or maybe put Echoes in Data; you'd know better than I would which of those sections is easier to get through. If everyone has a specific area to concentrate on then no one person is burdened with all the work across the game, with appers clamoring to know if they're accepted and other players wanting to know if their echoes are approved. This combined with more mods would probably also speed the echo approval rate; given that this game halfway runs on echoes, having those approved quickly is essential for a lot of threads and especially between-character plots. There's been times for everyone when echo requests have taken only a couple of hours and other times when it's taken, on occasion, five days, which is a lot of time to leave a thread in limbo waiting on an outside source.
  
  
• Learn when to step away. One of the smallest problems that lead to this was the fact that Olga simply didn't tell Batty and company that she's heard their problem and she'll get back to them after further discussion with other people, which is ironic given that they were insisting on it after she told them she wasn't feeling well. Mods need to be emotionally detached from what's going on around them, because they have signed themselves up to be the eye of the storm, the boulder in the tornado, that one spot of peace where someone isn't losing their mind. Does that mean a mod can never get angry, or frustrated, or upset? Does that mean they can't scream and shout and cry buckets of tears? Hell no. I know I certainly did all of that and more several more times than I care to admit. One memorable occasion involved a player who didn't know my personal history (and therefore didn't know my triggers) making a cutting remark that sent me into a full-blown panic attack. But when those times happened, I stepped back. When they happened for other mods, other friends, they stepped back themselves or our comods pulled them back. If you find your passionate emotions rising, you need to disassociate yourself from the situation, because you're getting way too invested in it to be rational and, more importantly, impartial. A mod needs to be impartial, and it seems to me the biggest thing that's come out of this is that the mod team as a whole is currently incapable of being so. Many others are saying you need to listen more to your players, which is entirely true, but you need to listen to all of your players and not just your friends or yourselves. A mod's duty is to the game, not to a small group inside the game.
  
  
• Take stock of whether you're truly capable of functioning as a mod. Everyone has done this: joined a game, planned for the long haul with it, and slowly fallen behind as things just get busier in your life than you expected them to be. Maybe it's school, maybe it's a job, maybe it's family, maybe it's a fire-breathing dragon descending from the heavens to carry you away to an Island Paradise. Whatever the reason, there always comes a point where what you can do in simply less than what you want to do. And, frequently, other people notice it before you do. Many, many comments have been made here and in other places about Anduin not doing anything, and indeed, the only time I ever saw her poke her head out was last year during the major wank and that immediate aftermath. Since I've actually joined the game I've yet to see hide nor hair of her around in a mod capacity, although I have not looked at each and every mod post made to find her icon. If she doesn't have the time or the will to mod a complicated game like StE anymore, than she should step down. If she doesn't want to step down, then a vote should be taken among the remaining mods as to whether she should remain on the team when she isn't pulling her weight.
  
  Similarly, many complaints have been made about Mini, but for different reasons. She's most definitely around, she seems to respond to things with the mod journal pretty frequently, but we've long since reached double digits in players that are afraid to talk to her at all or have anything to do with her. She is, unintentionally, holding players hostage through the fear that they'll say something about her, or to her, and she'll fly off the handle or be incredibly acidic in return. Her reaction to this ordeal, at least as told by Batty and Linda, showed her incredible determination to be inflexible in the movement of a more or less personal plot that was not time-sensitive, whereas her plot made Kotetsu's party very time sensitive because, see, Batty was right. The brutal murder of a Numbered person would override (almost) anyone's urge to have a fun little party to celebrate the conviction of their enemies. Even if you incorporated her death into the overarching plot in Vegas, this was not a situation that could only have happened on that specific day and could easily have been moved one or two days into the future to let people have a little fun first - and yet every proposal Batty made was shot down. Absolutely unacceptable. This is far from the personality that a mod needs, and she needs to have a good hard think about whether she is mod material. I, and apparently several other people, don't think she is.

I hope at least some of these suggestions are helpful, and I hope that we can move past this and continue on with an awesome game. But I'm going to finish this with two caveats you need to apply right now because you are continuing to be unfair to the people that began this whole incident in very, very different and ridiculous ways.

One - Take The Warning Off Batty. Going back to my initial comparison, Batty's "crime" wouldn't even count as a petty misdemeanor in the real world, and in RP Land it certainly doesn't deserve a warning and a ban threat. Did she include too many people in a private plurk to talk to mods about a problem? Yes, I would say four people for "moral support" is too many. It's an implicit trust that private communications will be kept private, which was obviously the logic Batty was operating on here, and so I can see having one in-game friend in with her to make sure the mods kept the snap reactions to a minimum. But Anduin never responded, which is on Anduin. Olga chose to keep engaging the situation when she should have promised a resolution at a later date, especially when people were telling her to do so in consideration of her health. The players are not the problem here - the mods most certainly are. And the players should not be held accountable for mod fuck ups, especially not because the mods refuse to see that they did fuck up.

Two - Suspend Mini. Or Ban Her From Modding. Her inflexibility about this situation is what started this whole thing, and her refusal to move a plot that literally wouldn't affect her after it happened because her character would be dead is, frankly, infuriating. Many, many people are uncomfortable with her, and she has done nothing to endear herself to the game at large. Her actions have stabbed the game in the lungs and put it in the hospital. This will be tough for her to hear, maybe impossible for her to accept, but even on the internet actions have consequences, and she's more than earned hers. When you have this many people who don't like a mod and want her gone, it's time to bow to public opinion. Whether she's salvageable or not, I don't know. I don't know her. But she's earned more than a warning.

It's time to straighten up and fly right, kids - else you won't have a game to run soon.

+1

[centurian]

As someone who HAS been in the game for a bit but recently just had some IRL problems and is trying to catch up on everything, this is an incredibly detailed and comprehensive post, and I really think the mods should take it to heart. Adding my piece here.