Some Days, I Hate These Servers.

[Sekh765]

Jinx posted?!

*checks his little card and marks something down*

BINGO!


I believe I have won Admin bingo good sirs. My prize please?

[Helios]

And for our winner we have, a lifetime supply of...JARATE!!

[Stormcaller3801]

First and foremost, I want to make this clear: I don't ask for an admin and then go spamming that an admin is coming. But there are people on the servers who will threaten to call an admin, or demand someone call an admin, usually without ever bothering to actually do something. And honestly? I fail to see the long-term problem with having the mere threat of admin showing up being enough to get people to calm down or leave. In fact it strikes me as a tremendously good thing, if only because it solves the original issue of someone screwing it all up for everyone else. They leave, the game goes on merrily without problems. It also strikes me as being far more effective and useful of a thing than hoping that in a game of, say, 20 people, nobody gets angry enough to ever say "admin" or "moderator." Given that these people typically are trying to frustrate people to the point of irrational anger, hoping that people then respond calmly and rationally seems like a poor tactic. Especially en masse.

Second, I call bull on the idea that you don't have enough people. There are seven servers, last I checked. Those seven servers each host one game. I work from home now and I can check Steam through the day, and I know there's large chunks of time when people aren't on there- generally speaking throughout the work day Eastern US time. It isn't until mid afternoon you start seeing European players showing up, and then proceeding from there. Most of the time not all of the servers are active at any given point.

For two years, I was the moderator on a company's forum. Roughly a year ago we added another person to the rolls simply because I had to sleep sometime and we were getting porn spam posted when I couldn't be around. It meant responding in a matter of minutes instead of six hours later. Three months ago we added four more people to the mod list. Right now we're averaging over 2800 active accounts in a 30 day period, and 50 active members in any 20 minute segment. We average around 20 reported posts per day, plus whatever happens to be found through regular reading of the forums. And our standard for reporting is this: report a post, we'll decide whether or not something needs to be done. No explanations, no details, you hit the shiny button, make a wish, maybe I hit somebody with a hammer.

I did that around a full-time job and full time school, and I have a signed sledgehammer as an appreciation gift to prove I did it right.

If you're telling me you don't have the time or manpower to investigate every little complaint in seven servers, with a grand total of 23 server admins and moderators? I find that hard to swallow.

Ditto with the names-as-topics thing being too much work. I'm not speaking out of my ass, I'm speaking from experience.

[Witchiebunny]

Stormcaller,

Do you realize how many complaints we get on a daily basis?

Do you realize how many members there are in this group?

Do you realize how many people pass through the servers every day?

Do you know each of our schedules?

Do you know the intimate little details of each of our daily lives?

No?

Then don't assume that number of admins equals the ability to personally investigate every single little thing. That's REALLY fucking insulting from someone who has no idea what our job is like. For example, yes, I'm on in the evenings. And I know I'm putting TMI out there, but here's a taste of the things I have to deal with on a regular basis (and these are broad subjects, under which are a host of smaller problems I deal with)

Getting readjusted to moving in with my parents again
Making sure everything is cleared out of the house I moved out of
My work and my sales goals (I can't check the internet from work too, it's an instant termination, so no checking Steam or the forums there.)
Getting ready to go back to school
Fixing my credit
Preparing to get a divorce
Commissions
Gift pictures
My webcomic (currently on an indefinite hiatus)
The Furry Pound
Visiting my biological father (especially when my mother wants nothing to do with him and he's not allowed over here)
Helping my sick grandmother
Helping my Aunt
Getting my Driver's License switched over
Simply BEING online and the drama that that, in and of itself brings.

None of us exist SOLELY to check up on TFP and the servers. And I'm sorry, a forum and not just one, but SEVEN servers are two completely different things. We have several mods in high school and college, trying to keep up on that. We have admins looking for jobs IRL. We have admins who have odd hours. We have admins who have to commute FOUR HOURS a day to and from work. And not all of us want to devote every second we're home to The Furry Pound. We do NOT get paid for this, we are doing this because we want to and because, for some of us, it's a labor of love.

Servers must be dealt with in REAL. TIME. Unless our members do something like, oh, I don't know, SEND US A FUCKING DEMO OF A SITUATION then we need to be around in real time to deal with the problems going on on the servers. A forum is a much slower environment, and nowhere near as hostile.

You may THINK you have an idea of what our jobs are like, but until you've done it, you DO NOT. You have NO fucking right to judge any mod or admin here who gives of themselves, their time, their energies, their mental and emotional resources FOR FREE to these servers and to it's community. NONE. If you don't like the job we're doing then you're free to seek your gaming experience elsewhere, but I will NOT sit here and let you decide that we're not doing a good enough job because YOU say so. NO.

The moderator and admin team is giving of their time, their energies, THEIR MONEY freely to the community and for you to have a fucking server to play on. And you dare decide that because you had two years experience on a company forum, where things are kept to a professional standard, where the action is slower, where posts don't disappear when you decide to call an admin, where evidence stays up and where you're not in a real time communication with troublemakers, that you are qualified to tell us we're not doing a good enough job?

I will NOT allow you to malign the admin team of TFP like that. You do NOT get to decide that they are not devoting enough time to TFP. You do NOT get to decide they are not doing a good enough job because YOU don't like what's going on. If you feel that way, feel free to GTFO and don't let the door hit you on the way out. This team devotes more than you know to this community and this is tantamount to a slap in the face for all of their hard work. How DARE you.

[Sekh765]

[Kellervo]

Put into perspective, we have... at last count, 26 members.

26 divided by 7 is 2-3 people per server. 24 hours a day divided by those 3 people means every single one of us would have to be playing TF2 for 8 hours a day in order to ensure each and every server is constantly watched.

This is not a full-time job, this is something each of us does on a volunteer basis. We don't get anything out of this. If we were being paid? Yes, it'd be a very different matter, but as it is, most of us have jobs that DO pay us, or we are students working towards our Bachelors and getting a real paying job. We can not afford to be on the servers ever vigilant 24/7, though we try our damndest to do so.

[Sekh765]

Addendum: Because this thread doesn't have enough people posting in it already!


The guy in question, the one that you asked Caigan to deal with and caused this whole thing four days ago? He was caught last night by another one of our players ON A DEMO which you seem so determined to avoid. The demo was watched within 5 minutes of it being sent to me and was determined to be enough evidence to warrant action. The point of this is, if instead of complaining about what we DON'T do, you could be like that other player who took the half second to get me both a demo AND a steam id and we could have avoided this entire mess all together. And NOW we have proof of the things he was doing and we will be able to keep track of him if he decides to not shape up.

[Stormcaller3801]

If you think I'm holding you up to my hours, you're wrong. I'm not saying that you should be available 16 hours a day. I don't expect any person to be available that often. I happen to be- but I don't expect such things. However, you have what's equivalent to seven locations where problems could exist at any given point in time, and 22 people who are able to do something. At any one moment, there can be no more than seven incidents that need to be dealt with. If there's a problem, it's not due to the fact that you don't have enough people on staff to handle it. It's that your staff are not online when that happens. That's a matter of recruiting moderators and admin who have hours that fill in the blanks on everyone else's schedule, not a matter of too few people on the rolls in total.

And that's exactly what Arcalane was stating- that you get so many complaints in so fast that you have to decide not to investigate some of them. If you're not there, you're not there. That happens. Telling me that you don't investigate things because there's too many to follow up on? That doesn't make sense given the math.

And no, I don't know how many reports you get per day. People keep asking that but they don't provide an answer. I do know you have 2010 members at last count, and I am willing to guess that given there's 7 servers with a maximum population of 24 per server that you have 168 people to deal with in game at any given moment, plus whatever happens to be going on in chat (and given that chat seems to be the primary way to report things, I expect any active admin and/or moderators are likely watching that when not doing anything else). I don't know the turnover but I'd guess that the upper limit's around 4032 unique accounts active on the servers in a given 24 hour period. Given how many names I recognize from game to game I'd be surprised if the answer even approaches that, but it seems like a safe number.

And yes, there's parallels. There may not be parallels in interests, but there are in how you respond and handle people, and what needs to be done to get people to follow the rules. And there's parallels in terms of figuring out when you need someone around, whether that's to respond to a griefer screwing up a game on server #5 or a spambot adding porn and phishing links to every active topic in the general discussion, new members, and unofficial events sections. I also understand dealing with people who have a feud going and no way to determine responsibility, and I understand that there's distinct advantages to moderating a forum, such as the fact that everything's automatically recorded due to the nature of the medium. Much the same way that Steam ID's provide an advantage over the fact I can only ban account names that can be replaced with five minutes of work and no monetary outlay.

I'm not trying to say that I know how to run the moderation of the servers. I'm saying the current system doesn't work, and I have experience moderating gamers. And just to try and cut off a line of argument, yes, I do that in real time, whenever possible. The methods aren't ones available here, as far as I'm aware, but I have an average response time of roughly 5 minutes. And I deal with gamers. So I'm fully aware of the potential hissy fits they can have, and I understand what it means to deal with things as they show up.

[unseen]

[Owashii]