@Entropy said:
I think somewhere along the way my message of optimism got misconstrued to a call for utopia. I'm not that naive. I understand that there is no way to create a perfect game, or anything ridiculous like that.
But certainly I can help create one that is better than the choices we have at the moment. Which is all I'm trying to do.
Sure.. Staffer A is always not going to like Player B. They might have some bad blood. I just want Staffer A to be able to let Staffer B take over things for that player so that their personal issues don't negatively impact the game.
Here's the thing: you can do that, and obviously that is what one should do and what I'd do and what every sane staffer ever has known needs to be done, but that is absolutely zero guarantee of the result you're hoping for. Why? Because staff behaving badly are not the sole cause of trouble on a game. Bad players are the other side of that coin. And a bad player may still not be satisfied with that outcome, or may be convinced there's something shady going on behind the scenes, or think Staffer A still made the call but Staffer C just signed their name to it, or Staffer C is just Staffer A's lapdog, etc. -- and said player decides to tell everyone with ears exactly this. They may scream and kick up a fuss, demanding they will never get fair treatment so long as Staffer A is staff at all for any number of reasons from the reasonable to the ridiculous.
You cannot overlook this source of strife. As someone who went through more or less exactly the above for months of genuine insanity, I can tell you from first hand experience, this player is as common as the actually malicious shady staffer is -- but they are equally toxic to the environment of your game.
You keep focusing on 'good staff', but you can actually have good, ethical staff, and still encounter these problems, these accusations, and a whole pile of completely crazy bullshit that's just as unreasonable and broadly damaging as the Elsa example described above.
You need to be prepared for this, and accept the reality of it as something you will absolutely have to contend with -- and unfortunately I'm not really seeing any evidence that it's even a part of your understanding of the kinds of actual problems one can encounter as you're considering taking this all on. I'm not saying this to be a cunt here, I'm saying this because I know from experience that all the sincerity and transparency and honesty and good intentions and best practices in the world cannot prevent this or other problems from the player side from emerging.
If you are only looking at 'staff being a problem', you're only seeing half the picture.
Think of it as a math problem written on a page in front of you. Cover half the equation with your finger, and try to come up with the right answer, while missing half of the mechanics required to arrive at that answer. Maybe you can? But you're going to get a lot farther a lot faster if you're looking at the whole thing.
You need to look at the whole dynamic and you need to be realistic.
Or when Staffer B makes a judgment about Player A's request, and Player A isn't satisfied with the result, Staffers A and C might take a look at it and open a dialogue with Staffer B so that it's not just "Oh, this is my call and I don't need a reason for things being my way".
And some people are never satisfied until and unless they get their way, exactly. This is another area where you're going to have to get realistic and understand that sometimes it's staffer caprice, and other times, it's that the player asked for something that's completely batshit cray cray, because both things happen.
You talk about digging in on situations like the above, but in the example you've presented? We have one side of the story. We don't know what the app entailed. We don't know if it was asking for restricted or forbidden things. We don't know if special exceptions were being requested, if there were special criteria that needed to be met, and so on. We're just supposed to assume, I gather, that everything asked for was above board, and you can't do that as staff.
Is that a giant pain in the ass? Damn right, it is. But that's the reality on the ground, and it isn't so cut and dried as one might think.
And unfortunately I know a handful of people in the real region the place is based on who, in their niches, are actually known world-wide. It's just that they're known for things that the vast majority of people have probably never heard of -- creating an especially sought after microbrew, being an internationally-known yarn-dyer, one I know of no longer there but had been for a while was/is the heir to a major DuPont patent... niche for that level is super niche and I really have no objections to people making characters like that.
