My concerns about Moderation

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My concerns about Moderation

Postby jamescfm » Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:09 am

Let me begin by saying that formulating a post like this is not a decision I take lightly. As anybody who has done the job can tell you, being a Moderator is tiring, thankless and frustrating at times and I appreciate that we have people in this community who are willing to commit the time and energy to fill the role. With that said, it is a position of responsibility which comes with certain duties and any member of Moderation must meet certain minimum standards. In my opinion, the current Moderation team is failing to meet those standards.

Since I returned to actively playing the game just over a month ago, I have perceived a pattern of behaviour within Moderation which is characterised by poor response to criticism, dismissal of legitimate concerns by players, lack of communication between Moderators as well as with the wider player base, failure to follow proper processes and a general culture of complacency. At various stages, I have raised these concerns with the Moderation team but it seems that there has been no effort to change this behaviour and that is why I feel it is necessary to raise them in a very public manner.

It would be impossible to properly address these matters without acknowledging that a lot of this behaviour has related to one player in particular and that is Aquinas. At times it has felt as though Moderation has consciously decided to ignore requests made by Aquinas, such as in this instance of a cultural violation report which took five days to receive a response despite all three Moderators responding to other players requests during that period. Eventually I took that particular issue to Moderation and neither cm9777 nor Mr.God acknowledged that there had been a delay and in fact both chose to deflect the blame back to Aquinas as him being "impatient" or "demanding". From my perspective, that seems to confirm that this was not a case of Moderators accidentally overlooking a request but that it suggests there was a conscious decision not to respond.

The problem is not limited to requests by Aquinas, though. In the case of Zardugal's renaming, I first brought the issue to Moderation's attention on 2nd December (around ten days ago) and yet there has still been no response at all from any of the three Moderators. It should be noted that neither of these incidents (or the handful of similar ones which have occurred) have been cases of players "criticising" Moderation but rather of players making enquiries and requests in the dedicated threads on the forum. Even so, the response from Moderation (when there has been one) has been dismissive or deflective.

The lack of communication from Moderators can be epitomised in the Security Council saga. The numerous threads and questions about this are spread out across the forum but the clearest example can be seen in cm9777's update on the matter, in which Auditorii (the World Congress coordinator) is not even clear on what is happening. Moderation has dragged its heels over what could've been a simple and quick process. It is now a month since the new rankings were implemented (i.e. a quarter of the way through their period of effect) and there is still a lack of clarity. It would seem that Security Council votes have now been reset, though the default option has not been set to abstain and there has been no official announcement about this.

Two recent incidents highlight the lack of communication between Moderators and the failure to follow standard procedures. Both, unfortunately, involve Mr.God. The first was the rule changes instituted, it appears unilaterally, on 5th December by Mr.God and the subsequent response to player queries of this process. In a highly unorthodox move, these rule changes were approved without a public consultation, without consulting the Global Role-Play Committee and I suspect without consulting all Moderators or Wouter. When this was brought up, there was a complete resistance to holding a public consultation and instead, the Global Role-Play Committee was asked to help improve the "wording" of the changes- after they had been implemented! In this case, it seems there was a total lack of coordinated approach from Moderation and a total rejection of the standard procedure for making changes to the rules.

The second instance relates to Cildania's cultural protocols. In this case, it seems that Mr.God has once again taken decisions against the proper outlined procedure and without consulting his co-Moderators (Luis1p confirmed that he was not aware of Mr.God's actions). In the linked thread, Moderation's tendency to dismiss and deflect is clear and Mr.God even refers to the "tone" of the player raising concerns rather than simply admitting he had made a mistake.

I believe this also highlights the complacency that has crept into Moderation and which can be seen most clearly in the continued ineffectiveness of the Global Role-Play Committee. My experience of the Committee has been pretty atrocious in all honesty and much of that comes from Moderation's willingness to allow players to do nothing in their roles. For a significant period of time, the Chair was a player who had not posted any role-play for months and we currently have several players who are simply doing nothing, not even responding to my repeated attempts to engage with them in discussion. Frankly, some of these players do not deserve their positions.

All of this paints the picture of a very poor state of affairs for the game and it is extremely personally disappointing to me to see a game I have dedicated dozens of hours to falling into decline. If this situation is to be turned around then it needs some serious changes to be implemented to the approach of the current Moderation team. The first step to achieving that is for Moderation to accept that these are valid concerns, not just bitterness from individual players, and to set out what they are going to do to improve, which I will leave for them to determine. Apologies once again for such an impolite and public essay but it is my opinion that there is very little else that I can do to vocalise these concerns. I look forward to a response.
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby Auditorii » Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:39 am

jamescfm wrote:The lack of communication from Moderators can be epitomised in the Security Council saga. The numerous threads and questions about this are spread out across the forum but the clearest example can be seen in cm9777's update on the matter, in which Auditorii (the World Congress coordinator) is not even clear on what is happening. Moderation has dragged its heels over what could've been a simple and quick process. It is now a month since the new rankings were implemented (i.e. a quarter of the way through their period of effect) and there is still a lack of clarity. It would seem that Security Council votes have now been reset, though the default option has not been set to abstain and there has been no official announcement about this.


As of this date, the options have been reset, unfortunately not to "Abstain" but it's a start. Also of note, we have added all past rankings Great Powers back to the voting variables as apart of the World Congress reform that will largely be carried out in the new year. Dorvik, Istalia, Kazulia and Vanuku have been added and can be voted for.
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby Kubrick » Fri Dec 14, 2018 1:50 am

Hear, hear. I don't have the time or energy to write lengthy posts like this but I'm glad James did it.
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby Urien » Fri Dec 14, 2018 2:09 am

Man things have declined since I was in charge...
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby cm9777 » Fri Dec 14, 2018 3:10 am

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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby Luis1p » Fri Dec 14, 2018 3:28 am

Hey,

First of all, I appreciate that you took the time to write this extremely long paragraph. I see that there are many concerns and I will input my thoughts on them. (I see Lewis might have some competition in long paragraph writing ;)

Anyways, this paragraph, after I read it, is basically a list of things moderation has not addressed properly. Now, I am not speaking on behalf of moderation (Cm and Mr.God), I am presenting my thoughts, as a mod.

It's been a rather tough transition to become a mod. It's taken some time for me to get adjusted. This explains the time it took to get the SC votes reset and such. Sometimes, it is hard to get some time to log into the game. Mainly because of school,that explains some of the missed requests in the game moderation section; however, I do manage to be online throughout most of the day. I will say that I will try to do better in terms of addressing complaints and requests that are presented in Game Moderation. I do believe that is a result of my lack of being online, which, I will try to fix. It does become frustrating at times when we are presented with many IG concerns. Sometimes it is a lot to manage, especially when I don't have time to log in. Although, I do believe that when moderation is presented with these concerns, we do respond rather poorly. Now, I'm not putting this on Mr.God or Cm, but I think moderation needs to focus on addressing player concerns without being "ignorant" or "dismissive". I am willing to work that out with the rest of moderation so that player concerns are handled better.

I believe all other problems regarding the GRC's inactivity, the SC, and changing game rules can be fixed with a concise talk with the GRC and community consultations. I understand that moderation has been silent on these matters which is because of poor communication within the moderation team and our inactivity at times.

I understand why the community is becoming frustrated with moderation and I am more than willing to change that. I can assure that moderation will improve its communication in regards to player concern and role play changes (GRC & SC).

I hope that you all understand my position, my goals, and my thoughts with this post.

Thanks. :mrgreen:
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby Reddy » Fri Dec 14, 2018 5:39 am

I think that the problem is less malice or laziness on the part of the Mods and more unwieldiness and possibly inexperience too. You guys need to work out a system on how you process your requests and update relevant threads and also, better communication between the members of the Team. You also need to clearly delineate the decisions that an individual Mod can take and those which require the consent of the whole Team.
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby cm9777 » Fri Dec 14, 2018 6:03 am

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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby jamescfm » Fri Dec 14, 2018 3:00 pm

Thanks for the prompt responses, both from Moderation and other players. Reddy, cm and Luis are fair in pointing out that this is a relatively new Moderation team and I appreciate that that has been a factor in some of the matters discussed in my original post (such as the Security Council situation) but it fails to account for some of the other concerns raised. At this point, it would probably be unfair to continue to refer to Moderation as a homogeneous group because there have been two clearly different responses here.

Luis, I actually disagree with you on activity because I think you are already very active, both as a Moderation team and you personally as a Moderator. In fact, it has been the case many times that I have simply directed my requests to you privately, particularly for GRC administration tasks, rather than use the forum because I knew that I would get a prompt response from you. Other than that though, I think that your response is considered and addresses almost all of the concerns I raised. If this was the response of the full Moderation team then I would be reasonably happy that things would improve going forward. Unfortunately it isn't.

cm, your response is far less reassuring. Linking to Lewis' resignation post might be easy but that post doesn't address any of the concerns I raised, in fact your linking to it reinforces the idea that you would rather dismiss and deflect these concerns rather than face up to them because it seems to imply that these issues aren't legitimate problems but just an excuse to harangue Moderators. The second response you posted is exactly the sort of deflection I was referring to in my original post.

As I have acknowledged, I have no qualms with Moderation's activity levels at all. Between the three of you, I have found that response time is generally shorter than it had been under previous teams however this only makes it more obvious when you are deliberately evading the requests or queries of certain players. If you're going to assert that "tone and manner" are the problem then I need you to clarify what exactly the problem with the tone of the examples I referenced. Aquinas' cultural protocol violation report read:
Aquinas wrote:http://classic.particracy.net/viewparty ... tyid=35990

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Walter Taylor
Ministry of Trade and Industry Sonia Martinez

What part of that "tone and manner" is so poor that it necessitated a five day delay in responding to it? Since when is it even the case that Moderation decides whether to respond to queries based on "tone and manner"? Who is this "small minority of players" you mention in your post? How have they acted? It's hard for me to see this as anything other than an attempt to push the blame on to someone else when you are so vague about what you're referring to.

Personally, I do endeavour to treat other players how I want to be treated. If I wasn't meeting the expected standard as GRC Chair, for example, then I would want someone to bring that to my attention rather than let it continue unaddressed. It comes back to one of the key points of my original post, which is that Moderation (in all fairness, I would argue this doesn't apply to Luis) doesn't seem to treat feedback or criticism as a catalyst to improve but rather as an attack against their character and that's part of the reason why there is no attempt to fix these persistent problems.
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Re: My concerns about Moderation

Postby Reddy » Fri Dec 14, 2018 4:44 pm

Despite acknowledging it, I think you are underrating mere dysfunction and inexperience, James. I've also had a couple of requests related to the Barmenian CP replacement process which Mods failed to address for a few days. I had to remind them before they were dealt with. I have no reason to think that it had anything to do with tone or whatever grudges they might hold. The reason as far I could tell was exactly what Luis said - they simply read them and then failed to revisit the request. This probably comes out of using the "view new posts" function exclusively. It's something I used to do myself until I realised how inefficient it can be. My advice - check the Game Moderation section in full each time you come to the forum to handle requests.
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