Savi a dit :

There are not many dedicated players now so finding (enough) good staffs would be problematic.

To add to that, the current staff team is pretty inactive to the public eye. I know they have stated that there is a lot of interaction behind the scenes but I’d like to actually know what’s going on. It seems like once someone is hired, they’re active for about a month then suddenly disappear.

I understand they have their own lives but volunteering for something when you know you won’t be able to fulfill expectations, what’s the point?

When I applied I did so because not a lot else was happening and I had the time and motivation to help out with tfm, knowing full well what I was getting myself into. But as Retrouvaille said, a lot of things can change in a year, things I never expected and suddenly tfm was so far down the list of priorities that I mainly used private alts. Not because I wanted to avoid any responsibility, but because I simply didn't have the time or motivation to dedicate myself fully to the community anymore, when I saw this wasn't going to change I quit.

We all want to help, but we're not psychic, we can't predict everything that's going to happen in our lives that might make us lose interest in moderating.

To add on to this, being able to see what will happen a year in the future is basically impossible. Obviously everyone’s worst case scenario would be that they aren’t going to be able to help out the community—but why would I expect the worst case scenario? I would rather help out the community while being trained and step down if the worst case scenario actually does happen.

Having a private mod alt doesn’t mean that we are avoiding our responsibility. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite. EN/E2 gets very little reports, and a very large majority of our whispers are from members of other communities. When we are on our alts, we’re able to more efficiently handle reports for our community without having 20 whisper tabs open from members of other communities who are insulting us because we don’t understand their language and aren’t able to help them. This is why we ask people to use /report.

Well, I was commenting on Anythin's post, not expecting anyone to be a psychic...but I do think mods who have real-life priorities to tackle should step down and let those who can offer more to help out.

To what Link's saying, the problem of having excessive messages to the point where it's difficult to concentrate is because not enough mods are using their public accounts, making the ones who actually do receive more than they should. Just imagine how much work you put off on other mods so you can have a sweet time on your alts. Besides, tfm communities are a lot smaller now it can't be that bad just by showing that you're online. Mods aren't obligated to act on or even read whispers from other communities anyway which, obviously, you won't understand a thing. So the best method is to avoid, it's not much different from using alts since they still wouldn't get a response either way.

Here's the point though, while using an alt its great that you don't have to deal with those 20 whisper tabs from other servers, but you're missing an important aspect of being a mod. Many reports from EN/En2 deal with trolls and harassment rather than hackers which using /report doesn't always solve the case. Being present and approachable in-game for players who are in need is everything. When encounters an unpleasant environment and needs immediate attention from mods, but having none show up online is just frustrating. Notice those crazy mad whispers from other servers that you have no clue what they're saying? Well, I'm sure their mods have just enough of crazy mad whispers from our servers just as well.

I'm not saying don't use alts at all but fewer alts could definitely go a long way towards making the game more enjoyable for everyone. And of course, just seeing more mods online could prevent some of these matters from happening in the first place.

It's easy to say public mods should use their public accounts more often, but even in a perfect world where all public moderators would be online the ratio between online moderators and online players is still very much out of proportion. Since we don't live in a perfect world, I hope you can understand what this means for the workload that moderators face when they log in. While it is understandably frustrating for a player to see there are hardly any moderators online, you should know that it is equally as frustrating for moderators to realize they cannot help players all at once, if at all. An online moderator that is not responding to you due to a big amount of whispers is not any better than a private moderator that has the peace of mind to handle your report through the report feature, I would say.

As I’ve already commented on this thread—what’s the harm in having mods that are slightly inactive ingame on the team? It’s not like we have a specific maximum number of mods on the team at any one time. Once people are trained, it’s pretty hard for them to forget what they’ve learned. We open mod applications about every 6 months, so it’s not like the number of mods on the team is holding us back from accepting new members. All mods are adults which mean they likely have a minimum of about 40 hours per week of responsibilities (about 80 for me, thanks pharmacy school) which of course come first in order to survive. This is of course a volunteer position after all.

Coming from experience, very very few reports can not be handled via /report. The only ones I can think of would be reports for cafe posts or messages in community chats such as #us. Of the thousands of whisper tabs I’ve had since becoming a mod, maybe 10 of them were reports for these places. While having a mod appear in /mod may prevent some players from breaking the rules, the players who break the rules consistently usually check /mod so that they think they can get away with it.

I understand where you’re coming from, though. I was a player not too long ago too and I remember being frustrated when there was not a moderator online when I needed to report someone. Following my training, I learned that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was, as a lot of the people I thought were breaking the rules actually were not, or I was the only person that cared enough to report them. You may know these already, but just a few things to point out:

• Trolling and favoing are not against the rules
• Moderators do not have access to whispers and are thus not moderated
• Players must be reported by two different people in order for the report to show up
• There is a Discord server where you can report players to moderators who may be able to help you or find someone who can
  

Bottom line, moderators have been using alts since long before I became a mod. The admins are the ones who give us these alts, and they see it as beneficial to moderation just like we do. While I understand where you’re coming from and how frustrating it is not to be able to have a conversation with a member of our team every time you need to report someone, I don’t think having alts is as big of a problem as it’s being made out to be.