In the past while, our moderator team have brought up quite a few concerns, and some very good ones at that. There has been a bit of a lack in communication from us to the mods, and some confusion with the recent changes. We would like to take this opportunity to both apologize for the frustration that they experienced and also clear up some of the concerns brought up. The first concern was the changes in the silencing system. For anyone who wasn't aware, the first two silences will prevent you from chatting in world chat or posting in walls, but you can still talk in group chat and private messages. The third silence will ban you from messaging any users at all. This change was done in an effort to improve our new user experience, and better manage our own support load. After analyzing all the data from the last two months of silences, we found the vast majority of silences were from players who didn't know the rules and were usually new to the game. We also found that the majority of these users who were silenced once were NOT repeat offenders. The problem with silencing group/private chat on the first/second offences was that for these users, there was no way for them to ask others for help or ask feedback as to why they were silenced and where the rules were. This was a common complaint that we received, and given that the wide majority of players affected fell into this category, we decided to make these changes. We will be monitoring the support/feedback channels to see if these changes negatively impact other players in the game in any way. Some of the concerns brought up with these changes are valid, however we can see whether or not these are actual issues by monitoring the data. We are open to removing or changing these rules if the data shows otherwise. The second concern was that there was an inconsistency in the spam popup and the spam rules. The spam rules state: "Spam is sending the same message 3 or more times within 5 minutes". The developer who implemented the rule misread it as "more than 3 times", so the popup showed later and had the wrong messaging. This was a bug, and completely our fault for not addressing this earlier. Going forward, we hope that having a more open communication channel with our devs will let us catch and fix this faster. Finally, there was a concern about the choice of mods. Unfortunately we didn't provide enough visibility into the moderator selection process. While there was a vote for mods within the mod group back in September, things changed by the time we chose a mod in January. There was a bit of controversy over Eagle, but we chose him because there was a coverage gap in his timezone that needed to be filled. We still value the mods opinion, and will definitely keep the mods recommended by other moderators in higher consideration. The primary objective of the moderators is to provide a great community experience while working together. The opinion of mods may differ, but we don't find it acceptable to publicly attack other mods, regardless of any personal differences that may exist. If they are providing a bad community experience and are breaking the guidelines of being a mod, then we will demote them. One of the new things we will be introducing is solidarity amongst our moderators and with that, in the future publicly attacking other people within your team is not professional, and we will not allow this to happen. Sometimes feelings get the better of people and it's always best to discuss any differences between two parties. If there are concerns that you have about a mod's performance, we will address them within our moderator channels. We are always looking to improve the community experience. For existing and resigned moderators we are going to be getting feedback from them and acting on this feedback, as well as answering any lingering questions they had. Please appreciate that our moderators are doing their role as a volunteer service to the rest of the community, and sometimes endure and I quote "attacks of adoration." We definitely recognize their sacrifice and dedication to the community, and for that we thank every single one for their contribution. The least we can do is give them an open channel for communication and continually work on addressing their concerns. Those concerns were addressed and we would like to welcome back anyone that recently left should they choose to.
Why not just link the ToU in the tutorial for new players and go back to the old silencing system? That would get rid of the excuse of not knowing the rules.
Sorry Kaw_Admin but i think moose is gone for good, wulf just wants to be a regular user. Looks like its hiring time for staff members :v
Jesus, imagine you're starting up a new game, go through this awesome tutorial, and bam, you're thrown into a wall of legal text. What do you do? For me, its try to locate the "I agree" button as quickly as possible and continue on. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Whether any of them choose to come back or not, it still remains that you need more mods. As active as they are/were a lot of spam, bypassing, etc slipped through the cracks. More eyes on the scene will only serve to help protect and assist the community.
To ATA. How about you just suck it up dig into your personnel budget and actually hire some Mods. This would allow ATA to have a more professional Mod staff that follow the letter of the TOU. Being a Mod is a job and should not be delegated out to a volunteer staff/team. ATA is not a small start up anymore. It's time to suck it up bite the bullet and hire some more staff. If not for any other reason than you would actually have control over your employees and this PR fiasco would have never happened if the mods were employees of ATA. Just my thoughts
agreed with delphin. I doubt anyone reads them apple 'terms and condition' stuff fully. I'm pretty sure most ppl just press 'i agree' <--Im one of them :lol: But gd job devs, now u need to fill in the mod gaps for wulf and moose...may be check forums and see who is liked to get a better idea of who the community will rely onto be a gd moderator
KaW's ToU pretty clearly states that by opening the game you automatically agree to its terms. No different, I'm still agreeing without necessarily reading.
This is what sets kawcraft apart from other games. I applaud the devs on this one, pretty well handled all things considered
Moose, Wulf, and Belle (I guess....) were great mods who did it for free. There's more like them. There's no need for ATA to hire anyone when Im sure they get hundreds of mod applications from people willing to do it for free.
So they keep the same silencing system still? When you say it made it hard for new players to keep going - just translate that to - new players won't waste as much money on us... And how hard is it to implement a feature that only lets you post the same message twice in 5 minutes? I started programming about 3 days ago and could already write that? As for the part about the dev himself not knowing the ToU... I'm not sure what to say. I value that you guys explained things to the community, for that I give props. But then not listening to the players, and even mods who resigned over the silencing issue and explaining this...? What in the hell does that do?
I've seen ideas in forums that can't be abused and were great but never put through. This can easily be abused through alts as they would know the rules. For gods sake take out private messaging when silenced. A pervert can still target people if he can still talk. The likeliness of him/her creating a clan to speak is low so in reality that is decent. Although you can choose to unfriend and block the pervert what's happened has happened. Especially since there's no filter. If there's any grammatical mistakes please excuse them :roll: I'm tired.
Why have a one-size-fits-all approach? It would not be difficult to implement a system where the person silencing choses the type of silence (full or partial) based on the severity of the infraction. IIRC this was also suggested by the one of the previous mods before toys were scattered out of prams willy-nilly.
Talk about miscommunication. You change silencing rules and dont listen to the mods or community when we protest. You put Eagle as a mod even after all but one mod voted against him. The mods are like our representatives to you devs. Though you went against their better judgement. Theres only one way I can look at that. It just seems like you don't care about the community.
Agreed with long_ben. Why not implement a system in which the silencer has the choice between, "Severe Punishment" and "Smaller Infraction" or something along those lines. There are some downsides: Slower silencing rates, thus meaning a few more people do get away with it. I'd have to imagine that may take some time to program in? I have no knowledge of programming, however. But overall it'd be worth it. Better in-game safety or whatever. And I utterly agree with Bremen.