Players and Mods – Open letter
To all players:
The moderator program was implemented by Blue Byte, and is active on all the other servers; the USA servers is one of the last to have it implemented. All of the moderators are volunteers, and have now been active for at most a week. They are responsible for making sure the Terms of Service agreement and chat guidelines are followed, and do not have the option of disregarding rule if they don’t agree with them. However, the main reason they were started was due to the demand of the players, and we Community Leaders were not able to do anything when there was an active problem. And to be quite frank, many of the people complaining about the Moderators are the same people who complained when the CL’s were unable to deal with a problem. The program has been running for less than a week, and it seems there are new colors coming online; so for some, it is their first day. This is just as new to them as it is to you, and training does not really replace experience. Since moderators were taken from both servers, it is likely that most of them will be unfamiliar with the culture of one of them. From many of the reports I have received from players, many of the bans happening are because players are being just warned of behavior and the player escalating it until they are banned. This is the game equivalent of a police officer pulling someone over for a vehicle warning, and the person ending up in jail for battery and resisting arrest. If there is a problem with a mod giving you a warning, submit it to customer service so they can look at what the mod is doing. If you have other concerns, please bring them to one of the Community Leaders so one of us can address it through our channel. But please, I would really rather have to bring forward a problem with a moderator giving inappropriate warnings than a problem where a player got banned because they started a fight with a moderator.
To all moderators:
Welcome to the world of moderation. Meet the players, we are the reason there is a game. There are many individual reasons for the players to be in the game, but they generally can be summarized by the ideas of “escapism” and “fun”. The game something many of us do to relieve stress and to help wind down. Many of us have invested a great deal of time and/or money for what is a “free” browser game. Every player received a copy of the Terms of Service and signified that we understood them; but unless there was a specific problem, most of us have not looked at them since we started playing up to three years ago. Until last week, most of the rules were not enforced at the level that apparently you have been told to expect. So, please forgive us if we venture into the same subjects and use the same words we have used throughout our time here that are only now being called into question. As many of us have long days before we log in, we may not take what may be reasonable warnings lightly. Being effectively the volunteer part of the game’s customer service team, many times it will be your responsibility to prevent things from escalating. I hope you understand the seriousness of having the ability to disconnect one of us from the rest of the community, and while it may be necessary at times, it can ruin the fun of that player and possibly many others. Hopefully, as all of you are supposed to be experienced players, you will remember how it feels to be on the receiving side of such attention.
To everyone:
The reason we are in the game is to play; while there has been a lot of a stress over these changes, that is the one thing that should not have changed. Personally, that is what I would prefer to be spending more time doing. I would hope more people will chose to do the same, and let the game continue.
