Broken Toys

This is what happens when a company staffs with fan boy bloggers. Then again, it is SWG and it is very surprising that anyone cares enough and is passionate enough about the game to get banned. Good thing for SOE that forum bannings = game bannings, the last thing SOE needs now is customers.

@taodon

I’m more surprised that people are still working on SWG than people are still playing it.

Metagame drama > game itself…. hit game detected.

Gordon Wrinn was not a bad Community Manager. Most of you noobs weren’t even playing EQ at the time nor do you understand that Gordon was Brad’s sock puppet… Abashi was not and is not guilty of 9/10 crimes you noobs would charge him with.

I played EQ for 5 years. Abashi was a tool. Aradune was a tool.

Telling your players “You be nice or else I won’t grace you with my presence” is the same thing as saying “I don’t want to do my job.” Hint: There will always be new jerks whining and trolling. Ban them and move on. Communicate like a professional, because like it or not, you are one.

Oh yea, and have skin like a rhinoceros, because like I said, there’s always going to be new jerks.

Being paid not to feed the trolls is apparently not enough incentive. And that’s *with* ban power.

Say what you will about Abashi, he was better than Milo’s, “Shut up and give me my ten bucks per month, little man. My Porsche needs some performance upgrades.”

Most people who work in development aren’t really people persons. Perhaps it’s too many days in dark rooms grokking computers, or perhaps it’s because having practiced the computers’ stark logic they realize most people aren’t really that rational. But these are just theories, all we know for certain is that their preferred method of dealing with customers’ complaints is, “Known issue. User is annoying. Closing ticket.”

Enter the CSR rep to give everybody a happy candy-coated experience. They’re lairs and spin-masters at heart, feeding the masses the truth only if they’re 100% certain they can choke it down. This is deemed ethical because they’re there by popular demand – the company goes down in flames if all they do is tell the truth because the customers by and large can’t handle the truth.

This SWG Community rep was merely being more honest than most, explaining to the customers that they really are being bratty little self-entitled twats to leverage their unrequited desires as an excuse to troll the boards, and his honesty is why he gets to be mocked for incompetence in CSR.

I see they have “introduced” him on the CM Station Blog (which still uses the ’stationbrenlo’ URL, which must seem an error in hindsight), but I am not sure they needed to after his big Friday performance!

http://stationbrenlo.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/introducing-roger-draakull-pilney/

It was nowhere near as interesting as I’d hoped. There’s no mention there of anything to do with this meltdown, or anything out of the ordinary. He does appear to still be working there.

He was an IT recruiter floating around for years who ran a military-themed shooter fansite on the side.

If you want more creepy internet stalking, just google. He hasn’t censored his myspace or linkedin yet, etc.

Personally, I wouldn’t fire him. I’d give him a good whack behind the ears and say, “Hey! Tone it down!”

If we canned CSR every time they were feeling out the community, we’d perpetually have people who made mistakes just as bad or worse. The question is more a matter of whether or not they learn from these mistakes. If whacks behind the ears fail to produce results, then is when you pull out the boot.

This is assuming he wasn’t under instructions. It’s entirely possible somebody in SOE looked at SWG’s boards and said, “what a wretched hive of scum and villainy – do something about that.” Away he goes – hopefully not to be sacrificed as a scapegoat, as that’s about as underhanded as corporate policy gets.

Moderator meltdowns are my favorite kind of e-drama.

@geldonyetich Your summary of the chain of events on the first page here is absolutely golden. Thank you for the carpet burns from rofl-ing so hard.

This is probably the one community more than any other (hi2u Eating Bees) where I will get ripped to shreds for saying this, but why not have a CM that only:

(1) Closes gold spam/porn/racist etc. threads and bans the occasional personal harrasser of other posters,
(2) Merges redundant threads, and
(3) Pretty much does nothing else?

I mean, literally nothing else. Never responding to posts asking why that thread was closed, never responding to patch day flame threads, never explaining himself or saying a single word.

If you combine that with posting the occasional STRUCTURED dev content (a pre-recorded interview, a dev blog, MAYBE a dev chat once in awhile where the questions are screened, MAYBE saying in very thoughtful threads bringing up known issues that “the devs are aware of this, I’ve passed it on”) I can’t help but feel that nothing much would be lost, and maybe even there would be a gain.

Can someone post me to something where Lum or Sanya or another luminary has explained why this doesn’t work? I feel they have addressed it and can say why I am horribly wrong. I wish someone would just TRY it, because the new-CM-gradually-devolving-into-a-quivering-wreck-of-rage-and-melting-down-in-public act can’t possibly be worse for creating a positive and well-reputed community.

Triforcer :
This is probably the one community more than any other (hi2u Eating Bees) where I will get ripped to shreds for saying this, but why not have a CM that only:
(1) Closes gold spam/porn/racist etc. threads and bans the occasional personal harrasser of other posters,
(2) Merges redundant threads, and
(3) Pretty much does nothing else?
I mean, literally nothing else. Never responding to posts asking why that thread was closed, never responding to patch day flame threads, never explaining himself or saying a single word.

Hell, no. I want my CM’s and moderators to explain themselves, and to be in fact forced to do so. I’m sick and tired of forums where you get warned or banned with no reason given, because it’s almost as if it is being done surreptitiously — especially if threads are liberally locked, worse if they are routinely deleted.

For example, I’ve lost all patience with the MMORPG.com site, not only because the average level of conversation there would make a fourth-grade class look like a MENSA meeting by comparison, but because the moderators seemingly have loose double standards, where abusive behaviour is okay when coming from a select group of users, while everybody else gets warned/banned for trivial reasons. And the moderators never ever explain themselves, even when called out (they just respond with more warnings/bannings), and because of that, they won’t ever change their minds on any decision they make. They’re little midlevel bureaucrats with power trips, only answerable to those above them, and they do it all their work stealthily, so that nobody except the person(s) affected ever knows what is going on. That’s why I’m done with that site.

This is different from, say, Scott starting to delete posts he disagrees with, because this is his blog, and he can do what he wants with it. I’d probably not agree with his stance and move on if it became endemic, but I’d realize there is not much I can do. But CM’s/moderators, especially those who do not respond to criticism except by exercising their powers to delete, lock, and ban, are faceless, and just hired hands, so they can’t ever be held to account by the community, for if they were to be they would just be replaced by new elements by those who should be held to account.

Hehe, those CSMs crack me up. Reminds of me the European CSM who told all of the WAR beta players that they were ‘overreacting’ and should get some perspective when they couldn’t register on the GOA website. He was, of course, completely correct, but I think Mythic booted him.

Thinking it well, this form of communication its better that “Its working as intended”, although i still think that SWG its going to close shop. Which must suck if its your first week on the job.

Guys like this last the better part of a month.

Wrong temperment.

I was noticing that Tom from Dantom over on the BYOND boards was talking about his choice of moderators lately. It’s a smaller scale operation and so they can afford to be a lot more frank about the issue.

The moderation team was not chosen based on friendship because I am not friends with most of the people here. They were chosen because they seemed like intelligent people who were familiar with the community. They also (and this is the important part) expressed an interest in helping out. If a guru here keeps noting that certain posts need moderating, and he’s right, then, yeah, I think he’d make a good mod. Why not?

I am a results-oriented guy, so that’s what I look at. Like I said, the mods do a fine job. The logs consist mainly of spam/idiocy deletion and moving posts to the correct places. All I want is this forum to be a place where people (particularly novices) can discuss DM design & coding in a cordial environment. Looking through those applicable sub-forums, they seem fine, and it is a credit to the mods for keeping them that way. I don’t require mods to be a beacon of integrity to do their jobs; it is more akin to being a garbage-man than a priest.

Puts an interesting spin on this entry. So what if he’s mouthing off? Just so long as he keeps taking out the garbage.

@Please
Yes, by all means, it’s their forums and they can do what they want with it; I don’t disagree on that. However, we get problematic cases like –ahem– Darkfall, where the forums are notorious for the amount of stuff that vanishes. Blame it on the community if you want, but the double standard there is that trash talk that is positive about the game is a lot more welcome there than trash talk that is negative. But since I don’t play that game, I can’t see if what gets deleted was deleted for a valid reason.

A classic example I’ll never forget is Age of Conan, where the board moderators maintained arbitrary standards based on guidelines so vague that they could get rid of anything negative by a more or less convoluted stretch of logic. One moderator back when I played AoC actually closed a thread with this justification: “Thread locked for encouraging to cancelling your accounts, and violating the Terms of Agreement, the EULA, and the Rules of Conduct.” Encouraging to cancelling your accounts? So what does that include? Goodbye threads? Saying the game was incomplete? Exposing bugs? The thread where that lockup excuse was used was actually about comparing the launch of AoC to that of Anarchy Online.

Adding insult to injury, it was verboten to discuss the forum moderation itself. Here was my contribution to that discussion at the time: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=99201 . I did not get a warning, let alone a ban, but the thread was locked within half an hour. However, you read the CM’s message at the end, and you can see that the guy is a professional, unlike those hall-monitor fanboys that they appoint from the community to patrol the forums.

Compare that to the MMORPG.com forums (does it show I have a beef against them these days?). Right now I’m serving a three-day ban, for posting rather mild stuff. Meanwhile, some prolific posters can seemingly get away with anything, so I don’t hang around there much nowadays, and I can picture myself putting together an account of my dealings with that site one of these days.

@J.
I’m all for board moderation, but not when it turns into a double standard based on who is posting and what the views are. I’m expecting “f*** off” on a game forum to be dealt with in the same manner whether it’s positive or negative about the game.

And I have seen cases where certain players would know exactly how to game the moderation to get rid of threads they didn’t want to see around. And it was astonishingly simple: Just start flaming, just enough to get the thread locked or deleted, but not enough to get into trouble yourself.

Holy crap, this post is about the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks. Responses like those from a poster on my boards would have had me watching that person pretty closely, and not in a good way… and he’s the one in charge?

This is the sort of job I was born for.

Where do I sign up?

Personally, I don’t hold a whole lot of respect for the MMORPG.com moderators ever since I ran into one moderator who wanted to argue with me (like any other typical forum goer who sparks arguments out of some kind of testosterone-fueled desire to prove their mental superiority) and when it turned out in a way that he just made himself look foolish, he compensated by deleting several messages out of the thread and giving me a warning.

MMORPG.com is not a great board. It’s a little too mainstream, flooded with tweenage free game players, and the moderators lack of objectivity is generally overlooked in favor of the excessive amounts of garbage duty there is to do. Consequently, anyone who can come off as half-eloquent can probably secure moderator access over there.