The insane time needed to report/request...

[Trupiano]

10 minutes ago, Wuhtah said:

However, this thread does seem to be attacking from both sides. Let's go ahead and twist this thread around, so we can hopefully gain some insight from you guys (the players) on how us (administrators) could handle reports better. What advice do you guys have for us?

 

In the case of forum reports, this is unacceptable:

 

11 minutes ago, Wuhtah said:

I highly suggest that if all parties have answered and it's been a couple of days (5-7), to tag the handling administrator. If this does not help - go to the head of administrative team @Odin or the assistant head of of the administrative team @Wally. If neither of these people get back to you, go to the head of the staff team @Pillsbury.

 

In no community other then GTAW has 7 days been an acceptable amount of time to wait for a report to get looked at. On top of that, while I totally get your just giving an honest suggestion on how to get the ball rolling. Take a moment to read that back, this is a community of thousands of players and we're expected to contact one of the four server managers if we want to get our simple report looked at? Does that really sound like a system that works? To put in to prospect, in one of my last communities although I was active for close to 5 years, I only interacted with the server owner twice (Once was just steamrolling him in HOI4). On GTAW? A community I've only been apart of for 2 or 3 years I've had to contact Nervous or management about issues more times then I can count.

 

Ask yourself, what does that say to me as a player about the rest of the staff team?

 

I don't know exactly how reports are taken up by staff but here's what I've seen in other communities that has worked. 

 

1. Reports should be handled by groups of three admins to quickly distribute the workload.
2. Reports should be assigned handling admins within 48 hours of a report being posted. By this I mean a group of three have been tasked to look into it.
3. Within 24 hours of being assigned the team should have looked over the report and posted their initial questions. 
4. Admins should close out reports within 7 days of them being posted. 

It seems somewhat tedious but I promise you, it keeps the gears moving which in turn means less of a work load for staff. I get the impression that too much leeway is given to everyone in this realm. Admins are allowed too much freedom in how much of the basic bitch work they take on which leads reports to go untaken or unhandled, players are allowed too much freedom when it comes to answering report notifications which leads to trails and reports going cold which ultimately just makes reports more unappealing to take, on and on the cycle continues.   

 

I don't mean to be overly harsh or offensive, but it's time for some tough love. This staff team and this community has the potential to be great, but it's being handicapped in my eyes by it's own inability to do the job and a bureaucratic way of approaching issues that stops it from finding any fruitful solutions.  

[Phased]

9 minutes ago, Bandit0621 said:

 

 

This doesn't seem to be answer as many have pointed out in the posts above. Its not like /we/ asked y'all to become admins on this server. /YOU/ chose to apply and do it knowing the responsibility. With that being said- I've seen multiple people (including myself) apply for admin/support and get turned away because we weren't "active" on the forums. 

 

The man makes a solid point - getting into the support team shouldn't require forum activity, it should require game knowledge.  If you push away people based on these variables you push away a potential goldmine of support staff who would dedicate the time to get things done.

 

Casing point; I got tester on LS-RP with a brand new forum account, and between me and @Inked we were regularly the only people responding to things while those who had loads of posts on the forum were just flaunting the red name for their faction threads and screenshots.    Anyone can be active on the forum, and that's no indicator to whether or not they will actually work, or how good their roleplay is.  No point having a factor for your decision based on forum posts if they're gonna do the bare minimum and accept people with background stories right out of an action movie.

Edited October 3, 2021 by Phased

[Wuhtah]

12 minutes ago, GambloTwitch said:

I'm sad about this. My character who leads a faction is in prison, facing a trial with life imprisonment request. I am trying to get in touch with Faction Management (I would just need to ask a few question taking 5 minutes of their time) but I get ignored on Discord and, through private messages, it takes 24 hours or more MAYBE to get a reply. I know you are admins and all, but I just want to ask a couple of questions which is IMPOSSIBLE for me to find answers if not from YOU from Faction Management.

 

Hey! Have you tried reaching out to IFM/LFM through forum PMs? Discord messages sometimes get mixed up as I accidentally scroll through them at 3 AM and forget to reply when I have a sane mind. 

[imi]

hi can admins release in their monthly staffing update a table which shows the amount of tickets/reports they've dealt with in the month so we can see work being done

 

disregard "This THREAD is being LOCKED because you can't handle yourselves" warnings from it... only actual admin duties please

Edited October 3, 2021 by imi

[Wuhtah]

14 minutes ago, Trupiano said:

 

In the case of forum reports, this is unacceptable:

 

 

In no community other then GTAW has 7 days been an acceptable amount of time to wait for a report to get looked at. On top of that, while I totally get your just giving an honest suggestion on how to get the ball rolling. Take a moment to read that back, this is a community of thousands of players and we're expected to contact one of the four server managers if we want to get our simple report looked at? Does that really sound like a system that works? To put in to prospect, in one of my last communities although I was active for close to 5 years, I only interacted with the server owner twice (Once was just steamrolling him in HOI4). On GTAW? A community I've only been apart of for 2 or 3 years I've had to contact Nervous or management about issues more times then I can count.

 

Ask yourself, what does that say to me as a player about the rest of the staff team?

 

I don't know exactly how reports are taken up by staff but here's what I've seen in other communities that has worked. 

 

1. Reports should be handled by groups of three admins to quickly distribute the workload.
2. Reports should be assigned handling admins within 48 hours of a report being posted. By this I mean a group of three have been tasked to look into it.
3. Within 24 hours of being assigned the team should have looked over the report and posted their initial questions. 
4. Admins should close out reports within 7 days of them being posted. 

It seems somewhat tedious but I promise you, it keeps the gears moving which in turn means less of a work load for staff. I get the impression that too much leeway is given to everyone in this realm. Admins are allowed too much freedom in how much of the basic bitch work they take on which leads reports to go untaken or unhandled, players are allowed too much freedom when it comes to answering report notifications which leads to trails and reports going cold which ultimately just makes reports more unappealing to take, on and on the cycle continues.   

 

I don't mean to be overly harsh or offensive, but it's time for some tough love. This staff team and this community has the potential to be great, but it's being handicapped in my eyes by it's own inability to do the job and a bureaucratic way of approaching issues that stops it from finding any fruitful solutions.  

 

I completely understand, that guideline is for other administrators where I will not talk for them. I encourage you to message me or PM me if you think I am taking a longer time than usual on player reports. 

 

I don't believe that 7 days should be taken for that long to handle a player report, but sometimes that is what happens. This could be because we're waiting on players to respond, reading evidence, waiting on chatlogs to come through, or just get busy with IRL stuff. I agree with you - some of the reports that wait (especially for a month) is unacceptable. I may be speaking out of line here when I say that. 

 

Within the staff team, we do have a certain order of things, but perhaps it needs to be looked into more and that is something I am sure will be brought up within management for the next coming days. We can't please everyone, but we can sure talk about and discuss things that could help improve wait times. 

 

I will definitely let management take a peek at this thread (slide it into their DMs) and see if they can get any good feedback from here. 

 

You definitely don't sound overly harsh or offensive because I do get the frustrations and you are trying to offer constructive criticism - but I can only take that feedback for myself. And when I do, I tend to overwork myself while also trying to topple other things as well. 

 

But I sincerely thank you for taking the time out of your day and trying to help throw some insight.

[Phased]

1 hour ago, Wuhtah said:

What advice do you guys have for us? 

Start from the back on player reports and call out staff who cherry-pick.  There are people there waiting over 14 days for a report to even get picked up.  One at thirteen days is based of an interaction that involved an admin in game who already gave a ruling, so could easily be closed already but it's been left to stagnate.

 

I can't imagine how annoying that would be for the reporting party or the person being reported having to check back for 2 weeks to find out nobody has even taken the time to look at it.

[LilManiac]

I'm not gonna address the issues regarding forum reports or FM related reports/appeals as wutah has already given her insight on those subjects. I'm responding in regards with the RPQM reports, the process and handling of these reports.

 

First of all, yes it takes time. It does because it isn't handled like normal player report. RPQM reports are confidential and most of the time it's not an individual occurrence. The issue regarding player could be continuous and requires gathering weeks worth of evidences. This includes reaching out to the reported player, checking pages worth logs, gathering other types of evidences and all that. This process takes time and sometimes it take more than it should and we agree with it.

 

If you feel like your RPQM reports are left untouched for a very long time or not getting a response from the handling admin, feel free to PM me or anyone else from the RPQM team on discord or the forums.

[Zach..]

I dont wanna be a dick but this bleeds over to in game issues aswell. As of this screenshot there was about 600+ people on the server.

Reports don't get answered ingame? They go to the forum. So there's an obvious link here. I understand admins are players too and they shouldn't be expected to ALWAYS be on ADuty, but this trend of one or two admins on, and then 15+ off duty is a every day thing. Stuff gets ignored, so it goes to the forums.

[Koko]

2 hours ago, Wuhtah said:

However, this thread does seem to be attacking from both sides. Let's go ahead and twist this thread around, so we can hopefully gain some insight from you guys (the players) on how us (administrators) could handle reports better. What advice do you guys have for us? 

 

I think the internal bureaucracy has just grown too large. It's how it seems from the outside and I have no evidence to back this up other than the spread of paperwork exercises left for players to complete in getting anything done. I feel like you could prune or streamline some internal processes and create more guidelines to reduce the amount of admin consensus needed to make decisions that aren't massive, relatively speaking. Particularly when it comes to handing businesses to people.

 

People should be allowed to start a small business and oversight can be done afterwards if you build something monstrous. A proof of concept that takes 3 months to proofread is a bit steep, considering that these businesses are the lifeblood of neighborhood RP and they can't be accessed. For every offender that people would report (and that the request system doesn't stop because they can build anything until caught), you have donzes of people wanting to have simple projects for RP, and for which the rquest takes longer to process than the average lifespan of a character, which seems to be around 6 months.

[Trupiano]

49 minutes ago, Wuhtah said:

 

I don't believe that 7 days should be taken for that long to handle a player report, but sometimes that is what happens. This could be because we're waiting on players to respond, reading evidence, waiting on chatlogs to come through, or just get busy with IRL stuff. I agree with you - some of the reports that wait (especially for a month) is unacceptable. I may be speaking out of line here when I say that. 

 

 

First off, I want to say I appreciate you diving into the heat of this discussion and not only maintaining your composure but displaying a level of openness not regularly seen by staff. Secondly and on to the quote, those are definitely areas that can be streamlined and I brought up a few of them in my original reply. half of the things you mentioned would really be solved with a few key changes.

 

I don't know what the server keeps for logs on the backend for you guys to access but either they should be found and posted almost at the same time that the reports being taken OR we need to enforce a more standardized use of parser by players. Just like POV video evidence is required a lot of the time, so should chatlogs and they should be posted by the reporting party from the start. 

 

I've mentioned it a few times now, but the whip needs to be cracked a lot sooner on players who aren't responding or taking a long time to respond. Twenty four hours after notification without an initial response? Automatic temp ban. Ignoring staff questions for a day or two while your active IG? Automatic temp ban. This is a part of the issue that's partly staff's fault for being too soft and partly the communities fault for taking advantage of it while complaining.