As mentioned in the previous post, allowing these type of posts would make it hard to follow and pick out the constructive feedback in this thread. Especially if all 50 people that liked some of these posts decided to post +1! without adding additional feedback. We’re more lenient on this in the suggestions subforum because there are separate threads for each suggestion, but that’s not the case here. This is why it was listed as one of the rules in the original post. We’re not trying to fully suppress your conversation; you’re free to discuss your thoughts about staff elsewhere on the forums if you don’t wish to provide ways to improve, but please keep posts in this thread limited to constructive feedback.

If you don't allow us to discuss stuff here that is completely relevant to the topic, edit your OP to let us know this is not okay. Don't expect people to understand what they can or can't do if you're not being consistent. The time that has been spent moderating all of these posts could have been used to address Etoile's post. For some reason it hasn't received a staff response for a week where other posts have been adressed pretty quickly.



from the OP:

Here's my suggestion: is it necessary to moderate harmless comments on a forum that belongs to a game for 13+ year olds? It feels like its users must walk on eggshells, please consider being more lenient towards harmless actions.

It’s reasonable that constructive feedback should be clear and concise without drama or conversations in between, but when there is more than one person responding what is said can run the risk of contradicting one another. I think it’s important to take into account where everyone stands and what they do or disagree. Thus, by allowing conversations to flow gives people the chance to discuss matters to a greater extent and allowing critics to review each other’s feedback to see whether a problem exists or not. For me personally, this is a more efficient way to sort criticism and decide what critiques/feedback are most needed rather than receiving them in a list of comments which sometimes lack structure and clarity. Just my two cents, feel free to moderate this comment if it’s off topic.

This is a response to this post from the whole team that we've been discussing as a group.


I think burnout is a big issue with moderating this community. Everyone who applies writes about how they want to help out the community, and I'm sure that's true for all. There's little power or fame for a long time during training, and the ones who aren't up for it usually don't advance. When you first go public, everything is cool and new, and the nice people are really nice! However, the negative comments can really add up. Everyone starts out with good intentions, but if we removed those who grew a bit tired, we wouldn't have many people at all. We're all encouraged to take mental health breaks, but that's more up to the individual.

Venting about things that bother you to people who can empathize can be cathartic; I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a customer-facing job where the employees/volunteers didn't talk about customers/users in private. However, I do agree with your points and I felt similarly about some comments when I was on the team: sometimes people did go too far. I do think it has improved more recently, since your time as staff. We have had a discussion about it, and hopefully now anyone will feel able to speak up about it if others are getting out of hand.



I like this idea, I think changes should be more clear. Sometimes a staff member misses a new change or discussion, and falls back to the old way of doing things. Having updates written down in one clear location would be helpful. For the public, we should be posting any updates to the rules in the Recent Changes thread. I don't think that has been kept up though, so that's definitely something we should remember.

Some problems arise because of human error or different interpretations of words in the rules. Like "advertisement" is against the rules, so someone might think advertising a discord is not allowed. But "advertisement" refers to advertising websites to make yourself money, so discord servers should probably be allowed. But if they're spamming it in multiple rooms/threads, maybe someone considered this as advertisement? People make mistakes, and it's okay to ask for clarification about a sanction. Specific cases like this should definitely be clarified for everyone, but we can't think of every possible case ahead of time, so there has to be a noticeable issue before we can fix it.



I don't feel right about dragging someone's name through the mud when there are multiple sides to the story. If there were any danger to members of the community, I think we definitely should say something. But this was mostly a personal matter between two people, and I don't think it's suitable to publish one side of the issue. We don't make players' sanctions public knowledge. We would be willing to talk about the situation in private with you though, since you were somewhat involved.



I'm not sure what you're suggesting we do with this one. On the surface, it seems like a lot of your points suggest that we remove staff who don't love talking to people all the time, completely ignore all negative comments, and don't ever get anxious. But of course that's not realistic, everyone has bad times and good times. Those who are easily burned out by too much people time can help in other ways, like taking care of mindless hacking reports that never end, by reviewing applications, discussing rules, etc. Really with the amount of reports, I think we haven't found the limit of too many people to help out.

I would say that being upset about constant criticism isn't a sign of mental instability. it's more that people who truly care about the community take the criticism to heart, which can be really demotivating. It feels awesome to help players and make that connection with the community, but when you have that connection, the rude comments can affect you just as much. For example:

Link a dit :

Coming from someone who works in one of the most under appreciated professions, it gets frustrating when you’re constantly faced with criticism. Sure, in every job there will always be someone who is appreciative and someone who criticizes you, which is understandable. But for someone who really cares about the community and takes criticism to heart, it can be really demotivating to face constant criticism despite trying your best to please the community. At the beginning, I loved being a moderator. Seeing the impact I had on the community was great. But being slightly less motivated from when I started doesn’t mean my convictions were never strong in the first place, nor does it mean I don’t care about the community. Seeing constant criticism (not constructive or recognizing the strides we are attempting to make) despite trying my best to please the community just makes me want to log in less after already being under-appreciated at work

We created this thread in order to become more involved with the community. Many posts here are suggesting that we find things to do that are positive for the community and to take suggestions on how to expand the role to more than just sanctioning. These are the types of things we would like to see suggested in this thread. What could we realistically do while being flooded with whispers and banning hackers from other communities to better connect with our community? We would love to interact positively with the community more, although sanctioning rule-breakers who ruin the game experience will be our top priority, because we are the only ones in a position to do so.

Whew, that was a lot. Thank you for all the points you've made, I'm glad we can clarify our thoughts from different perspectives and have a civil discussion ^^

I would like to bring up a very annoying issue that I've experienced lately a lot. My friend is Ban on Sight, which is against the rules of the game and I'm aware. I do not condone them still logging in and using VPNs. I think they should get banned if they do that.

But my issue is, there have been other BoS players and even HACKERS in the same room that did not get banned while my friend did. Again, my friend SHOULD'VE gotten banned. But so should the other BoS people and the hackers?

The situations seems to have become that the first priority of the EN2 mods is to ban my friend and leave out all the culprits even when several people, not just myself are providing evidence to go towards the situation. But you're supposed to enforce the rules on ALL the players.
I won't state any names, but when that occurred one time- myself and other people who were in the room reported the other BoS person a countless amount of time and even whispered the online mod about them, and they did nothing but continued to ban my friend only disregarding the situation at hand. There was literally a hacker in the room at the same time flying from wall to wall but they didn't bother dealing with the issue and I can recall their name clearly too.

I would like to AGAIN state that I do not condone my friend's actions, and think they deserve to be banned for breaking the rules - but if there are other people in the same room who are ALSO breaking the rules, why are they not dealt with appropriately? Why has my friend become the first priority to the EN2 moderators?

I am pretty sure the person guilty of this knows who I am referring to. I understand that whispers can be missed, but I had messaged them several times as you can see on the timestamps INCLUDING other people not just myself. Another thing I would like to briefly bring up is that childishness with the disconnecting and shadowbanning options. I have seen moderators shadowban and disconnect my friends whilst sharing their screen on a discord call and then pretend that the option does not exist. Can you please be VISIBLE with your actions and own up to them?

Attachment: https://imgur.com/a/4AjaY7t

Good evening.

I have never commented on this topic, but I definitely read and liked posts by both the community and the staff team.
Today I have decided to respond to this issue in order to raise awareness of major and growing problems - sexual harassment, violation of privacy, pedophiles claiming false identities in the game and harassing minors, etc.

Personally, I have heard of and talked to people within the game who had suicidal intentions. Players in this game have harassed them, invaded their privacy, and publicly shared information about them.
I have to admit that I didn't know these people beforehand, but I reached out and talked to them because I wanted them to know that there are people that care about them.

It's just sad to think about these issues, and once you talk to them you feel pity and think, "I really wish I could help this person." So you try to help them improve their moods and raise their confidence as much as possible, because it's not a secret that words are powerful.
These people need someone who will pay attention to them, someone who is kind. They only get insults, get blackmailed, and become more vulnerable and only bad things, really. It's just awful. I acknowledge that it's difficult for them to find good people.

In my opinion, the members of the team are not paying enough attention to this problem. It seems they are trained to be "sanctioning machines" for the financial interests of the game.
However, I think the Admins need to change their ideology and consider these issues as important as other issues of the game like banning hackers. This game allows minors to play and therefore it is incumbent upon them to take care of their safety at all times while playing and prevent any threat and harm to them or their privacy.

Ignoring and not placing enough importance on such things is unethical, and it does not contribute to the improvement of the game and its players.
Atelier801 must put more effort into eradicating these types of things and teaching its volunteer team members to pay close attention.

This is one of the main reasons that the game is declining. Admins and most of the staff are not taking responsibility for these things that are happening in-game.
Proof of this is that entire communities today are barely active, including my community. In the past, my community was large, multifaceted and united. Over time, due to the absence of community staff, many people left due to vulnerability, toxicity, and people threatening to find and post personal information about them.

I have also witnessed cases of minors from other servers who threatened to commit suicide, and even those who actually began to physically harm themselves.
Indeed, in such cases, the team probably doesn't really know how to help and support them and it's not their role to do so, but I believe that if there was enough awareness among team members and Admins about these experiences in the game, it would be resolved as quickly and effectively as when someone says the N word and / or speaks the wrong language on a certain server.

From my point of view, if Atelier801, with how much I love it and the company's games, invests solely in the interests of the game such as making furs and new items, the company will continue to decline. This is not because it is not a good investment idea, but because players need Atelier801 to provide security to its players by taking firm actions against sharing personal information and providing fair punishments for anyone who harms the community and the privacy of its users, especially minors.
If this does not change, people will still feel unsafe in this game and continue to leave, and the company will keep dying.
I'm pretty sure that when players feel that their privacy here is considered important, they will return to playing this game and will continue to introduce new players to the game.

I have some suggestions that I believe that if Atelier801 takes them into consideration and implement them as soon as possible, they might help both sides: the company will get more players and the community will feel more safe.

• Create the unique option "Harassment / Violation of Privacy" in the /report command.
• Training the staff members to react harshly against any breach of privacy by users against other Atelier801 users.
• Strict sanctions on players who sexually harass / collect players' private information / threaten minors within the game and allow even a permaban of users who share personal info about others.

I hope there will be improvement from the staff members in the fight against such things. I wish there could be a decrease in the number of injuries and an increase in the safety of each player who plays this game.

Ori a dit :

Text

Atelier801 already has rules (Game Rules and Terms and Conditions of Use) specifically targeting "severe insulting" and "Content that is unlawful, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, suggestive, harassing, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory, fraudulent or otherwise objectionable."

What you're suggesting seems to be stricter enforcement of those breaching these rules, but do you have any specific examples of moderators or other staff failing to adequately punish offenders? Currently, what you're discussing seems handled as best as the staff already can.

Rutabega a dit :

Ori a dit :VoirMasquer

Text

Atelier801 already has rules (Game Rules and Terms and Conditions of Use) specifically targeting "severe insulting" and "Content that is unlawful, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, suggestive, harassing, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory, fraudulent or otherwise objectionable."

What you're suggesting seems to be stricter enforcement of those breaching these rules, but do you have any specific examples of moderators or other staff failing to adequately punish offenders? Currently, what you're discussing seems handled as best as the staff already can.

Go to any regular room with a bunch of statpadders in it, and sooner or later you will get a whisper telling you to kill yourself when you beat them often enough. Go to any random room with foreign players in it (on the EN server) and at one point in time you will be insulted in their native language, because they think you don't understand them. It's quite common to see racist or sexually inappropriate remarks thrown around because people are aware they can get away with it. It's also quite rare to see these kind of people actually get banned or muted. Prioritizing these cases can solve the issue, even though I am aware they take more time to process compared to banning a simple hacker.

While this thread has good intentions, a part of me wants to think that it's too little too late.

This is a game approaching ten years old now, many of these problems are not new problems from months ago, these are issues that have been persistent and prevalent for many, many, many years. Is it good to finally have an open discussion on it? Sure, but with the incredible amount of resentment that has built up among the community, the lack of new players going forward, and what many feel like is a lack of care from everyone involved, there's no surprise that a majority of these replies are cynical and dismissive.

That being said, I do have some changes that I've been thinking about, long before this thread ever existed. I'm largely avoiding points that others have already brought up, so it mainly focuses around community engagement and retention. Many feel there's been a lack of community involvement for a long time. Rooms, communities, servers have run rampant with whatever discussion they seem fit with little to no control. People act like bullies, publicly air their laundry and discuss things not really suitable in a game with kids running around.

1) Giving power to the people. You do not need to centralize power to maintain a community. You need responsibility to be shared between members. The ability for players to pass 1 hour mutes, temporary shadowbans, etc. these are things that could significantly help players who care about the others they play with and the game they invest their time in to. People care and people want to take action, and it shouldn't have to come from the one or two people online already inundated with hundreds of whispers per second. Not everybody applies to be a moderator because they want to have a cool yellow name and write in pink text. Many people apply because they want to be able to do something about the communities they play in, and this is a great way of passing down small powers that don't need major oversight to players who want to make a difference. Many forums, games, servers already do this.

2) Community managers/community ambassadors. It has been a long time since art has been shared on the main page, it has been a long time since there has been community involvement & community activities, it has been a long time since there has been anything that has brought the community together (aside from small private events on discord). Whether it comes from moderators or others, there should be better community interaction, and it shouldn't have to be hunted down for in niche places like subforums or various discord channels. Some mods have been better than others at this.

I might have more thoughts later on, but these have been on my mind the most. While I can say thanks for listening and attempting to do something, it is going to be a long and uphill battle to regain trust in an aged community.

Rutabega a dit :

Ori a dit :VoirMasquer

Good evening.

I have never commented on this topic, but I definitely read and liked posts by both the community and the staff team.
Today I have decided to respond to this issue in order to raise awareness of major and growing problems - sexual harassment, violation of privacy, pedophiles claiming false identities in the game and harassing minors, etc.

Personally, I have heard of and talked to people within the game who had suicidal intentions. Players in this game have harassed them, invaded their privacy, and publicly shared information about them.
I have to admit that I didn't know these people beforehand, but I reached out and talked to them because I wanted them to know that there are people that care about them.

It's just sad to think about these issues, and once you talk to them you feel pity and think, "I really wish I could help this person." So you try to help them improve their moods and raise their confidence as much as possible, because it's not a secret that words are powerful.
These people need someone who will pay attention to them, someone who is kind. They only get insults, get blackmailed, and become more vulnerable and only bad things, really. It's just awful. I acknowledge that it's difficult for them to find good people.

In my opinion, the members of the team are not paying enough attention to this problem. It seems they are trained to be "sanctioning machines" for the financial interests of the game.
However, I think the Admins need to change their ideology and consider these issues as important as other issues of the game like banning hackers. This game allows minors to play and therefore it is incumbent upon them to take care of their safety at all times while playing and prevent any threat and harm to them or their privacy.

Ignoring and not placing enough importance on such things is unethical, and it does not contribute to the improvement of the game and its players.
Atelier801 must put more effort into eradicating these types of things and teaching its volunteer team members to pay close attention.

This is one of the main reasons that the game is declining. Admins and most of the staff are not taking responsibility for these things that are happening in-game.
Proof of this is that entire communities today are barely active, including my community. In the past, my community was large, multifaceted and united. Over time, due to the absence of community staff, many people left due to vulnerability, toxicity, and people threatening to find and post personal information about them.

I have also witnessed cases of minors from other servers who threatened to commit suicide, and even those who actually began to physically harm themselves.
Indeed, in such cases, the team probably doesn't really know how to help and support them and it's not their role to do so, but I believe that if there was enough awareness among team members and Admins about these experiences in the game, it would be resolved as quickly and effectively as when someone says the N word and / or speaks the wrong language on a certain server.

From my point of view, if Atelier801, with how much I love it and the company's games, invests solely in the interests of the game such as making furs and new items, the company will continue to decline. This is not because it is not a good investment idea, but because players need Atelier801 to provide security to its players by taking firm actions against sharing personal information and providing fair punishments for anyone who harms the community and the privacy of its users, especially minors.
If this does not change, people will still feel unsafe in this game and continue to leave, and the company will keep dying.
I'm pretty sure that when players feel that their privacy here is considered important, they will return to playing this game and will continue to introduce new players to the game.

I have some suggestions that I believe that if Atelier801 takes them into consideration and implement them as soon as possible, they might help both sides: the company will get more players and the community will feel more safe.

• Create the unique option "Harassment / Violation of Privacy" in the /report command.
• Training the staff members to react harshly against any breach of privacy by users against other Atelier801 users.
• Strict sanctions on players who sexually harass / collect players' private information / threaten minors within the game and allow even a permaban of users who share personal info about others.

I hope there will be improvement from the staff members in the fight against such things. I wish there could be a decrease in the number of injuries and an increase in the safety of each player who plays this game.

Atelier801 already has rules (Game Rules and Terms and Conditions of Use) specifically targeting "severe insulting" and "Content that is unlawful, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, indecent, lewd, suggestive, harassing, threatening, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, abusive, inflammatory, fraudulent or otherwise objectionable."

What you're suggesting seems to be stricter enforcement of those breaching these rules, but do you have any specific examples of moderators or other staff failing to adequately punish offenders? Currently, what you're discussing seems handled as best as the staff already can.

Showing that the Game Rules prohibit it doesn't really help. We have to see it enforced in the game and the rules should be the reason for the enforcement.
I have never said that the rules permits this kind of thing, but I said that Atelier801 and its staff team do not bring enough attitude to such a frequent big problem in the game, despite contravening its rules.

Regarding the second paragraph, yes, this is one of my suggestions for Atelier801, tight enforcement and severe punishment have a clear deterrent capability. If Atelier801 severely enforces this kind of thing, I have no doubt that players will feel safer in this game and it will not be as frequent as it is now.
Players' (especially minors') security is one of the things that Atelier801 needs to place on it, and enforce it in everytime in every community. They need to prioritize it almost or even more important than some interests of the company itself such as hackers banning.
Is it already known that the company is losing more and more players, have you ever tried to think of other reasons besides hackers?
So if not, I'll tell you one reason that I try to raise awareness of, that a big part is leaving because of things like that - [Sexual] Harassments.

"do you have any specific examples of moderators or other staff failing to adequately punish offenders?"
I'm an example of it, I've been sexually harassed when I just joined this game, I've been stalked since I joined this game up to nowadays, people always stalk me seeking to find information, more than I share (nowadays).

I tried to contact the admins (throught form) and moderators (using whispers and /report) using Google Translate and friends' help to translate into English, but these things were never treated or resolved. However, I'm one who has strong self-love, it happened and it's behind me, I don't let it influence my life, but I care about these who are not like me and let these to drop them down!
I'll not detail more than this publicly, and at all for outsiders without good reason. Hope this was a good enough example.

"Currently, what you're discussing seems handled as best as the staff already can."
I'm not sure in it, I'm pretty sure they can refer at least half of their work to handle such harmful things. And if Admins will fulfil my first sugggesiton of special point in /report for Harassments and Invasion of Privacy it would be even better to take care for such cases instead of watching them late in "other" or "insult" section. (I don't know exactly how the report system works you know...)

Anyways, there is one other suggestion that concerns small communities that I did not advertise it because once I publish it, the post will be moderated.