@Arkandel said in Shadows Over Reno:
But they are very understaffed in general so expectations have to be managed.
Definitely true.
At the same time, there are also a number of things that could be streamlined much better to eliminate a lot of the back and forths, which would save time for both staff and players. Understaffing can be partly compensated for with consistency and efficiency. There are also some things that I've seen people ask questions about repeatedly that take time away from staff to answer, but which could be fixed in a way that would eliminate most future questions in about the same time as it would take the answer the next person who asks.
One example is the last page of chargen, which says (or did when I was in there, anyway) to put your XP spends into the job when you submit, which isn't what you're supposed to do. There is a bbpost that says what you're supposed to do, but fixing the @desc in the room would take about the same amount of time as a bbpost, and would mean less confusion for people and less time having to answer questions about what to do. People are more likely to notice the directions in the chargen room than a bbpost mixed in with a hundred others.
Plus, the room @desc will have to be fixed at some point anyway, so not fixing it triply compounds the issue; you have to write a bbpost, you have to clarify what the right process is when people ask (which just takes up more time the longer the @desc is unfixed as more people ask), and you have to update the @desc anyway. Just fixing the @desc first saves the extra work of those other things.
As for the example you gave (the back and forth conversation), in my experience it ends up making things faster for everyone if instead of saying "anything else missing?" you approve the job and say "if anything else is missing, just put in a request and we'll be happy to take care of it." The job is then closed, the staffer doesn't have to spend any time coming back to it to check if there was something else , and the player knows that the situation is finalized and they're okayed (or denied) for whatever the job was about without wondering if they're set to go or not, which can happen if the job isn't actually approved yet. If there's an issue they can just put in another job, which is really just as easy as adding a comment to the previous job is.
There have been some other things that have generated extra, unnecessary work for staff that could have been negated by taking a brief extra action earlier as well. For example, a post by the Prince got pulled down, but that was after people had seen it and started RPing about it. I understand (and agree with) the reason it was pulled, but a quick note saying 'ignore that post, pretend it didn't happen, sorry. nothing has changed except that the post never happened' would have meant people knew what was going on. Instead, multiple people ended up putting in jobs asking what was going on and needing clarification. Did it still happen, and it's just not there for new people to find out about? Did it get retconned? Nobody knew.
I'm sure that a lot of this is growing pains, and that things will get sorted out and squared away and all of that. I've been having fun, and none of this is really meant to be complaints, just my observations of ways that the staff has been making their own lives needlessly harder (and sometimes their players, but more often their own).