Volunteers

[Kinson001]

Add volunteer chat and forum moderators. O/c these people would need some training and limitations, but it would free up paid employees to do other things, like further game development.

They would have some Instant Messaging with real BB employees, for when situations come up, that they can ask for help, or for instant assistance at stopping something (like locking down Global 1 if something gets way out of hand.. I've seen things like this happen in other games).

The volunteers would have to file incident reports, progress reports, etc. But it would take a BB employee a couple minutes to read through a report, opposed to being online, watching everything, for 6hr+, it would free up a lot of time. And as thus, more content could be worked on (maybe).



Maybe get volunteer programmers? There are a lot of talented programmers.
Ultima Online is still a pay monthly game, but their source code has gotten out (or given out?), and there are HUNDREDS of free to play emulated servers run by players/fans. These players/fans have come up with a lot of great ideas, and completely created and tested things for the game.



Again, this is just an idea. If the people at BB don't like it, than it'll never happen. But never know unless someone brings it up

[RonEmpire]

I'm not sure if we need this or I really like having this.

I know on the .com UK forum they have these 'moderators' that are players and most of the time these guys are like overly censoring stuff out and just changing up people's postings. Often times they have their own opinion or ideas and they 'skew' other people's postings to fit their ideals/agendas.

I post on the UK forum the same thing I post here basically, and the BB here are more friendly and the MODs there censor stuff out before BBs even read the stuff.

They like to use 'rubbish' a lot as well. Words like "crap" apparently is evil. I use crap as a generic 'stuff' word. Like I have a ton of crap. And that gets censored by their moderators. I'm like dude. You make it sound like I said something really awful like the 's*h*t word. People go to Vegas and play craps all the time. Anyways, that's just one of the many harmless words in my opinion that these so called volunteers take to the extreme censoring.

[Kenolein]

I asked this when the BBs were having their Q&A session and they said because of labor laws, the US servers can not get MODs. They didn't go into detail, but it did put the issue to bed for me.

[BB_Rawren]

I asked this when the BBs were having their Q&A session and they said because of labor laws, the US servers can not get MODs. They didn't go into detail, but it did put the issue to bed for me.

This. That's not to say that moderators and volunteers can't exist, but companies have to be very careful with how it is handled, especially in light of the Ultima Online lawsuit.

[RonEmpire]

This. That's not to say that moderators and volunteers can't exist, but companies have to be very careful with how it is handled, especially in light of the Ultima Online lawsuit.

Good. We don't need any rubbish volunteer MOD anyways. :-)

[Kinson001]

Part of the rules and guidelines, could be an agreement that they understand that they do not get paid for their work, etc etc, and anything that BlueByte decides to give them, is purely a thank you gift, and not payment for services rendered. etc etc.

UO Lawsuit came to pass because a lot of things OSI gave to their volunteers were taken back, free accounts (not an issue in the case of TSO) were reversed, and other perks were also taken away. This is what fueled the fire for that lawsuit.

You just have to see the things that have come to pass, and implement things to prevent it from happening to you(or company).
For example: Lady bought coffee from McDonalds 20yrs ago and sued because she burnt herself. Thus now, everywhere you go to get coffee, you'll see on the top of the lid Caution: Contents Hot! Why? Because they are minimizing their liability as much as possible.

Just my 2 cents

[psaltery]

I've been a volunteer mod for games before. The way BB does it now, with paid mods, works much better.
They have started the 'community leaders' -- an awesome idea.
Gives players some representation, while keeping that line btwn player and staff solid.