AshBorn wrote:With all due respect, I think I'm being misunderstood if my posts showed my focus is help with player run events. It's not. My focus is helping new players get accustomed with the server so they don't hang up their newbie dagger and move elsewhere.
I was just observing what the focus of your posts had been about, and the last two posts have focused nearly entirely on what Counselors could to to help new players, and how they could also help with player run events. Our Companion system provides about as much practical help as can be expected from other players, where volunteers can help newer players with questions and show them some of the tactics that they have learned for starting out, should the newer player want it. They also help with answering some pages in a more timely manner, which not only helps to reveal anyone who may be a newer player but also improves the general response time we have to page requests. These tasks don't require any more power than we originally gave our Companions, which means that any discussion that involves the expansion of power is squarely within the second category of your response, which is the ability to help with player run events.
When I first started here, after I left being a counselor at IPY, I met Stranger who showed me the ropes. If not for him, I likely would have moved on quickly. The idea of starting all over again and learning a new server was very daunting even for a UO veteran. He turned me into a server vet of three years who helps new players each time I possibly can. He answered my questions and much more. Players do help now, definitely. But I think there is room for some improvement from the staff, and I gather that you agree with that point.
I certainly understand the idea of finding a mentor, but that is the type of thing that squarely falls on the shoulders of other players, and the Companion system allowed players to help in that particular role by showing newer players the ropes (much like morgan was explaining), or by simply showing an entirely green player how to do basic tasks, and explaining how they could get ahead. Beyond that point, and the reason I bolded your last sentence, staff should not permanently interfere with the game, as this directly interferes with the T2A mechanics. So in short, no, I don't really see what practical improvements can be made on the staff side of things that don't greatly interfere with the mechanics at large.
I appreciate the long response in addressing everything. It seems to me that whatever happened in the past with counselors has had quite a lasting effect. Ultimately it seems you want to help the paging problem with only giving the bare minimum of trust (the trust required to appropriately answer pages without trolling new players, and whatever else the companions could do - the help stuck thing you mentioned and anything else I don't know about).
As you said, very small powers were abused in the past. Well they may have been but that doesn't mean they will be in the future. I think there are people here who could be trusted with more than just the absolute minimum. You guys are extremely weary of trusting anyone. Im not judging you for this but merely attempting to point out that it could be time to keep moving forward and try again. (As you did with blaze, roadkill, and anarcho. That worked out very well, I'm sure you agree)
While some of this philosophy was already in place before I came on board, I had a large hand in crafting our overall policy for exactly what our separation of power are, so I can speak to exactly what we will and won't allow. On UOSA, if you have any elevated privileges to manipulate the world in any way, you MUST be at GM level, and MUST have no player accounts. Simply put, this is a hard line on the separation of players from staff as a way of reducing the potential for abuse and promote impartiality. This issue of abuse, which has a lot of historical examples of abuse on virtually every shard out there (UOG, Defiance, Metropolis, IPY, etc.) is the entire reason we got rid of the actual Counselor position. Given that, there is no practical way to allow Companions to have any real effect on the world, and as a result, what they can do must necessarily be limited in scope. The obvious corollary of additional GMs is not something that we are currently looking for, and is a process that we are
very careful with, as we expect a large amount of responsibility from our staff members, and want to reduce the potential for abuse as much as possible. Unfortunately, even with this system in place, we've had abuses both at the companion level with the most basic of power, and we've had abuse at the GM level as well, so we're not willing to take any associated risk with elevated privileges for Companions (ever) or new staff (at this time).
To reiterate, my focus is helping new players. Whatever that may entail. From the simplest form, answering pages as a companion or counselor, to a more complicated form - GM who creates an intriguing new player quest line that expands on the current tutorial system or creates other things with the sole focus of new player retention. (I think a lot of good could be done here) gargoyles are great, but they don't exactly help new player retention. They help current player, who already have skilled up quite a bit, retention. Very good thing imo, but not really for fresh recruits; other than giving them something really cool to look forward to.
This is generally what I was referring to above when I referenced the lack of ways that staff could improve things in game. The gargoyle quest line isn't designed as a permanent quest line, and is intended to replicate the large Seer run quests on OSI servers. At some point in time it will be done, and the game will return to normal operation. What you're proposing, is a permanent quest line that is intended to assist new players with acclimating and perhaps even establishing themselves on the server. This is something that is akin to the quest lines found during mid to late UOR on the island of Haven, and they fall well outside of what we as staff members can or should do. The idea of helping newer players get started falls nearly entirely on the shoulders of other players, and we must necessarily take a hands off role in this regard, as we are dealing with the T2A era.
The things I would like to see, in order of priority:
1) Pages being timely answered (if population increases, this problem will expand)
This is something that can likely be partially solved via Companions should we choose to have them around, but the practicalities of life will get in the way of these things. We can't be at the keyboard all of the time as this isn't our job, and this means that sometimes pages will be answered after being in the queue for a long time, and sometimes this means that pages will just go unanswered.
2) New system for acclimating new players to the shard - storyline, a staff member showing up to greet them, answering questions about why the shard is different, and being on hand as a new player needs assistance (a lot of this is similar to the paging priority).
I addressed this particular issue above, but I'll restate it here. We cannot add in a quest line that is intended to help newer players, as that is enitrely out of line with the mechanics of the era.
3) Expanding on what Boomland does. Everything he has done has been a hit with the community. Double down on what works. Gargoyles, bagball, potion wars, monster bash, etc. I don't necessarily mean double the frequency. Doubling the types of things however would be great!
There really isn't a need to expand on what Boomland currently does. There are two separate quest lines being run, and fairly regular and varied types of events are already being run. We don't need more of that, arguably less.
4) Marketing. Boom does do this, but it deserves its own category. Hell, staff a marketing specialist. Someone who's soul job is marketing. Give them a red name on the forums so they feel special and their title is respected. They can take over this part so the rest of you can focus on what you do best. From Facebook, to search engines, to compiling a deserved YouTube channel, this category is infinitely expansive and could use its own specialist. This person could also forum moderate if that is lacking at all. No in game powers are needed.
I'll address this point at the bottom of the post, at least in part.
To reiterate an idea from another member of the community, as marketing goes -
Chicanery wrote:
i think with the resources we have at our hands today, we can greatly improve the efficiencies of getting the right information to the right group of people who need it by utilizing YouTube. if we can set videos up on relevant stuff such as how to use razor, how to cycle a halberd (with a video that doesn't have a duration larger than 3 minutes), and other useful information.
i challenge you to reach out to the appropriate staff member and take the lead on creating a UOSA learner's YouTube channel and compile videos that are necessary for new people to come in and enjoy the shard at 90% less the hardship
5) Updating the website, wiki, etc. I know boom and the rest of you have been working on this but it's still not finished. The wiki is the most crucial. At least change the link on the site to forward to Booms wiki. New players will have no idea Booms wiki exists. Perhaps a client for Macs posted in the download section. Apple is huge now and we are missing that entire base. I tried to get it to run on my Mac and it's basically up to VMware. This would take a lot of effort for sure, so maybe it's something to look into down the road.
Updating the website is something that we are certainly working on, as well as the wiki. Once we do roll out the new website, the links will point to the proper locations for the wiki. As for an apple client, there is no practical way to natively run such a client on a Mac for the exact same reason that there is no practical way to run it on a Linux machine: The client binaries are compiled to run using Windows APIs and making them natively compatible with either system requires coding an entirely new client from scratch. Needless to say this is well outside the scope of what we or any other server can or should do, so players are stuck with the various virtualization solutions for running the game on other operating systems. A good alternative could be an entry into the wiki from someone who has actually installed their client under these operating systems, but that's about as much as can be expected.
6) Assisting players in whatever kinks they need worked out to try new, player ran, event ideas. As for me saying boom could answer what this means, I merely meant to say that he could tell us what he does on this subject so we could be more specific to what is required.
Short of offering suggestions, there is little that we can do to facilitate events for players beyond what we already do with announcements, broadcasts, and gates to the event location. We can't unreasonably interfere with the world at large to allow players to run their events, and largely the only additional assistance we could provide would be to manipulate the actual environment in a way that a player could not do on their own.
** I apologize if some of this is off topic to the OP (such as marketing and website work). But it all seemed to tie together in a general theme.
I'd like to point anyone who reads this post to
this post that I just made regarding the intent of this forum. I think that this is a very important message to consider, because this particular statement suggests that this thread, and in some sense this forum, isn't supposed to be about these sorts of things. This forum directly exists to tackle these issues, and threads like this that focus on changing (at least somewhat) the game at large don't have a lot of bearing on the issues of trying to build up resources and strategies to support the game itself.
Given that, your suggestion regarding marketing is generally what Boomland specializes in. Effectively he's already filling the role of marketing and community specialist, and this forum is part of his efforts in that regard.