A Note on Staff Interactions

Hey Liciea, I appreciate the lengthy and detailed post. I'll be commenting about each section separately on this post.

As an introductory notice, generally, time invested by staff is an issue expressed all throughout your post. You will find me referring to it in multiple different points that may or may not be interlinked.

>> Ban interactions

In my honest opinion, heated discussions about bans should not be happening, period. Even when a high-profile player is banned, either the discussion should remain respectful or never happen at all. I believe many of us—staff and players alike—have noticed a similar pattern of groups of players (generally when part of the same town/nation) going after staff for an ultimate decision. What I want to stress is that in 100%, in absolute terms, of the cases that we ban for offenses regarding gameplay rules (meaning, rules that do not have to do with unhealthy player interaction or malicious interaction with the server's workings) we do not dislike the banned individual, but we ban them because there is a certain way the game needs to be played out. The individual as a player failed to follow certain gameplay rules. I think this is an important point that players miss when discussing bans of such nature, especially when it is a high-profile player being banned. And to note, I have personally observed multiple instances where, if a gameplay rule is broken and a ban comes out of it, players tend to be more annoyed or aggravated at the rule's existence than actually try to understand why the rule exists and was broken, and/or subsequently apologize, try to learn the rule and amend their stance on it. That is not to say that all rules are created equal and "feel" fair. Additionally, as you have noted, the rule that is broken tends to be explained to banned players by staff and the resulting angry groups, but when a situation is more complicated, potentially multiple staff members have discussed about it in private and pinpointed the rule that was broken, for the ban to occur in the first place; it should not be an arbitrary decision, at the minimum, the majority of cases.

A second comment, is that staff discussing bans publicly is one-sided simply because of the time and effort required. Some staff members have taken up on doing that, which is fine, but issues may arise such as the ones discussed above. Those same staff members are often also seen as argumentative and potentially irritating; myself included.* If private discussion has possibly taken place with other staff, on top of discussing prior to a ban, it is difficult to make time for this double struggle within a ban's context.

*Introspectively, reaction to an angry mob naturally leads to reaction by the angry mob, but someone has to communicate to players about why we do the things we do. We could very well have a guideline of staying silent about every single punishment, even in the channels we provide specifically for that reason. However, we choose to give players the choice to appeal, or create threads and discussions about it with us civilly, publicly and/or privately, and communicate with players about the procedure and contexts of the ban in general, where possible and applicable.

>> Community interactions

In terms of communication to players [in general], I think there really is a hole as mentioned. Many previous discussions and posts have covered this topic extensively, so I will not be adding to them in this response. I want to instead address a few misconceptions presented in this section, in no particular order, because you, Liciea, do not have much context of the communication that happens privately (between staff, as well as staff and players).

1) I think lower staff members do a pretty damn good job at organizing and deciding when and where higher staff are needed. The sole exception is when the server's administrators (yes, in the actual sense, meaning Ineusia or Zaify), are needed. What I would like to clarify is that we get a lot of requests that Helpers simply cannot handle. In fact, the majority of requests are for higher staff anyway. Helpers should have fewer responsibilities in this specific matter.

An infrequent but irksome occurrence I have also observed more recently, is that higher staff is called by the player. Players do not have the right to decide who sees their request, in certain contexts. In a ticket for example, we respect an individual's request (after clear and respectful communication) to exclude certain staff members from a ticket when the matter is indeed too private or implied that only higher staff should strictly be necessary for it. But essentially "calling the manager" on us is difficult to deal with, overall disrespectful from the player's end, leads to major frustration from both sides, and then there is again the issue of time. Which brings me to my next point.

2) It is evident that real-life responsibilities do essentially restrict the time we may spend on the server heavily, because it is our free time we choose to spend on the server. I am glad that this is widely understood, considering the small size of our staff team when compared to the amount of responsibilities that we have on CCNet. Notably, some staff members have multiple types of responsibilities in CCNet too and play multiple integral roles in the server (just like in real life!) which may weigh them down further. Keep in mind that there are also certain procedures staff must follow for each responsibility, which translates to additional time needed, an even bigger issue when more complex situations arise. Currently we also have limited higher staff members available.

From a different point of view: When considering the limited power and number of responsibilities of lower staff members, in many cases it automatically means that the obligations get filtered to higher staff regardless. This conclusion is not to be seen as an issue in and of itself—it is the way that administrators have decided for us to manage the server. However, in the context of staff availability it could be considered one. Perhaps there is a grand discourse waiting to flourish on staff hierarchies and permissions, but there is an even more grand point of trust being wholly necessary in order to provide staff with a certain number and type of tools, which is never ever easy. Therefore, for now, the issue of time and availability will unfortunately have to hold moot point status. Nobody can be forced to participate in the obligations of something they participate in, on their own free time, but let all similar discussions and points to this not go in vain and serve as important reminders.

3) I am not sure about the "ticket ghosting" mentioned. In my experience (as staff) there is an extremely small number of times where a complete ticket is essentially ignored by staff; on the other hand, most times "ticket ghosting" happens due to the submitter either being unwilling to sufficiently fill the required information, or the ticket going inactive due to no or insufficient player response/availability. In both of these cases we communicate to the submitter that the ticket is invalid and then simply close it. And about the individuals that are keen on ignoring the instructions presented to them, we can do little about those, but what we do in practice is communicate with them that a certain format has to be followed to the best of our ability; not ghost them.

>> Staff as A Community Builder

I think you hit the nail on the head on this section. It is not specifically directed towards me as a moderatoradmin, but it is strong and benevolent feedback overall. What I do want to add to your point, is that we have considered "community manager" staff members in the past, and may reconsider them in the future. A community manager is essentially a staff member that is chiefly (not exclusively) responsible for staff-player interactions regarding the state of the server and staff decisions. Once again though, due to limited staff availability (and maybe even nobody that could effectively handle this) this remains simply an idea that has not been fleshed out. Instead, it is a unilateral responsibility shared among multiple staff members.

>> Final notes

Nations has evolved into a severely complex and convoluted gamemode, evident by the long list of the gamemode's specific rules as well as the constant (even daily) discussions taking place on our Discord server and less frequently in-game. It can often be seen as a mess, and sometimes intimidating. We need more time invested into the gamemode and communication on our decisions, but only a select few hands available and/or willing to do so. The staff that are available, in their limited time, perform a wide variety of tasks on the server, often more than they should be assigned, to the best of their ability and will, with as much time as they are willing to provide. However, we have only so much of those three. While interactions about bans have a few key issues in the server overall, arising from both staff and players, formal server procedures are essentially bricked by time and willpower, and rarely by ignoring or ignorance from staff. And in the end, we do all wish that our communication to players was perfect. As an addendum for more clarity, I want to refer anyone interested to neb's post which goes more into practical depth on this matter.

We can only improve as individuals and promote capable people. Both are difficult in their own right, though. I hope you understand.