Thoughts on Anonymous Moderators

Calling an announcement bs is not respectful, plain and simple. I absolutely appreciate humour, as evidenced by my Joke of the Week, however if you're wanting to participate in a discussion, dismissing one side of the discussion as fecal matter isn't constructive.

 

Now thats some funny stuff, i had a good chuckle myself when reading your vision of pirates and vikings in lip stick.

Well, ive said my piece.....and apparently we dont agree, guessI'll just leave it at that for now. Thanks for taking the time to reply

 

I can absolutely appreciate agreeing to disagree! We do appreciate players letting us know when we they disagree, and do take that into account.

I intentionally don't participate in discussion like these very often, as I don't really have the time for it (I actually stayed after work for this) but I appreciate your concerns and wanted to have a rational discussion about them with you. I'm heading off for the night, but I appreciate our discussion and your concerns.

 

here comes the voice of reason to straighten things out ONCE AGAIN, although i doubt youre going to like it this time polish....the mods are VOLUNTEERS, and even thought they arent paid by kano, they are a part of them. if i had anyone working for me, volunteer or not, i would go to bat for them every time as should any company for their workers. is kano a bit biased towards their mods? absolutely and i dont blame them one bit, what kind of company would they be to have no loyaly towards their own and take up for others all the time? have they been wrong about the way theyve handled some situations? absofuckinlutely. can you name a company or a person for that matter that is never wrong and does everything 100% right all the time? helllll no. theyre doing the best they can with what they have and the time in which they have to do it and thats all anyone can ask and hope for. sure we'd all like to see every problem we have get resolved in the manner in which we believe it should be but thats not going to happen and thats life and life in the forum is no diff than life outside of it. you all rip into the mods like their sole purpose in life is to piss you off and do things that always suit their own purpose and opinion and thats just not the way it is. there is bias on both sides of the equation and there always will be and theres nothing anyone can ever do about it. so, as eddie murphy would say...have a coke and a smile and shut the fook up :]

 

Doesn't matter who they were. This change obviously comes from the fiasco that resulted in a MOD being banned from posting as a MOD on the forums anymore. This change won't stop those kind of beefs from happening. Because the MODs are involved in the games. They can still delete and close what threads they want.
If you want to fix this, hire 1 person.. Just 1 or even 1 developer. To take an hour at the end of each day and moderate properly.
If it's a job, preferably to somebody not playing, then it will be done properly.
Players care about the games they play and have emotions to get riled up about things. Giving ANY person power. Gives them the possibility for corruption. Your only way to win this one with finality it to remove playing MODs and get an outsider.

 

Quick message to everyone. Make sure you copy your posts to a notepad document after you post. It can still disappear.

 

@Adam As I've mentioned before, our Moderators moderate according to policies that everyone has access to, not because they want to. If you feel a post was moderated unfairly, please send a message through Support and we'll look into it for you. I do, however, approve and agree with copying down your posts.

@Demonik I appreciate your support and well-reasoned arguments, although I've removed the expletives from the post. This is a good example of something that would unfortunately have gotten deleted once we remove editing privileges from moderators.

 

Here I was thinking that swearing is okay sometimes as long as we're being civil. for example, I could say "Im having a shitty day" or "Lifes a bitch like that" but I cant call you a shit-head. or proclaim that another player is a Bitch-made ambusher.

relax, they're just examples.

If I read the TOU correctly, its very discressional. Just because somone somes the word, fucking, doesnt mean it has to be removed.

So If I prclaimed, that the battle arena was all fucked up again, would that automatically be removed?

but if I told my friend the god of bacon "you can go #&%^ yourself" , that would stay in?

 

I actually agree with you to some degree. However I dont think a business should 100% back their employees if they are indeed in the wrong. Not only is it bad business sense...its just wrong on pretty much every level, especially when the employees are the ones that are basically the face of your company and deal directly with your customers. Often times it goes a long way when a business shows that their customers come first (regardless of their reasoning). In addition....Kano has actually gone to great lengths to make themselves very clear that the mods are not employees.

Although I disagree with this policy for the reasons mentioned previously in this thread, my biggest concern was how it was presented to us as some big benefit to us, when in realty it was more of a Trojan horse ( or chocolate covered turd, whichever u prefer). I see no benefit to us as a community and further more it would seem to potentially exasperate the problems of an already overburdened support system which in return makes the quality of the product less for its customers.

I feel propelled to add that I dont think all mods are bad and that I indeed appreciate most of them and what they do and I fully understand that it be often times tough and thankless position. I would actually like to take a moment and thank each and every one of them for their time, efforts and contributions to the community. Thank you moderator team!

 

That's pretty reasonable. I think that that can be a difficult distinction to make, but I like it. You're also right that we haven't actually called out no swearing in the Code of Conduct.

I'll look to calling that out in our policies somewhere, but I think a reasonable distinction is don't swear at people, although I also think there are plenty of other words we're able to use .

Demonik, I will un-edit your post.

 

I appreciate you thanking them, and I'm sure they appreciate that as well.

I can also understand your reservations, and I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this right now. I fully believe this will be better for everyone involved, for all the reasons I've mentioned previously. I will, however, keep an eye on how this change affects the community, and I'm not against changing things back if that's what's best for the community. We're going to give it a shot, and go from there.

 

This is a pretty good example of what I was talking about previously WB. Demoniks post was edited ....not deleted or the thread closed like you said would be happening from here on in. You made it very clear that a lot of good posts with pertinent subject matter would be lost because some couldnt hold their tongue. Yet her remains Demoniks post, how are we as community members not to think that his post became the exception to the "new policy" because the body of it was supportive of Kano, its mods and this new policy? Is this not hypocrisy? This is exactly the kind of stuff I talked about when I spoke of inconsistencies and how diff people interpret thing differently especially when a person either agrees or disagrees with a topic or simply does or doesnt like the person.

Dont take me wrong here...Im not advocating in the slightest to have Demoniks post removed. I think it was well written and chuck full of valid points. Im advocating for what I always have and thats to edit more and delete/close less. It doesnt take any longer to edit than to delete or close and the useful part of the post remains where it can actually be constructive. Maybe Im crazy, but Im thinking a lot fewer community members are going to contact support and argue that their string of expletives should be reinstated into their post , and far more will complain if a perfectly relevant post gets deleted because they got a little carried away as the were passionate about a particular topic or an overzealous or non like minded mod happens to to be offended or misinterprets something.

Honestly....i just think this new policy is a way to cover up removing completely valid posts that Kano disagrees with or doesnt want their public to see for obvious reasons and a way to protect their mods from retaliation that they still can bring down on others.

 

Thanks Polish, and I want to thank Demonik for his support for the mods.

 

My $0.02...

Unfortunately I agree that this feels (from the outside) as a mod cover-up. I guess the way the last mod blowout was handled, i.e. Kano backing the mod even though he/she/it was very, very, very wrong from a community perspective, adds to that feeling. But it is water under the bridge.

Although I play both ZS and LCN (FB-only), I'm only active in the LCN FB groups (don't even know if there are such a thing for ZS) and I'll give an example of how we (the community) handle admins. In all the groups I'm in all the admins are well-respected in the game and respected in the capacity they fullfil in the specific forum. They are also given admin responsibility not because they apply for it, but because they can do the job well, have time to do the job and the community think they can do the job as well and are willing to respect them. Call it a mini vote without it being explicit. Basically people become admins/moderators when (a) they are respected, (b) are not power hungry and (c) do a good job.

Contrast this to the Kano setup where there is no community involvement into the appointment and some of the "how the hell did that one get there" players become moderators. As a result of Kano not knowing Pete from Peter and needing the help in making the forums a success, they appoint people who will never be able to fly and you find what we have here - a complete mess. (I am painting broad strokes here, some moderators are doing a good job and are also respected by the community - they are even admins in some of the forums I mentioned.)

Truthfully, there are some moderators that are just clueless about the games - I'm sure I'm not the only one that has had "how the fookity fook can he/she/it be asking or making that comment" around moderators. So if they are clueless and braindead nobodies, the community is not going to give them the respect they deserve and they won't be able to do the job they volunteered for. The result is that people do the job for mostly the wrong reasons, don't get the buy-in they should have and as a result they suck at it. Most of the "moderators" hanging around won't make a dent dealing with the groups I'm referring to and won't get into the same admin/mod position in those groups, since we know what will happen.

Doing what you are planning on doing doesn't solve the underlying issues.

 

I would like to know what people mean when they say this is going to be a "Mod Cover up"? What are kano covering up exactly?

@Joe, to me, it doesn't sound like you want a Mod team on the forum that will do the job Kano gave them, you'd rather it be a popularity contest where the cool kids are the only ones allowed to offer their help.

IMO this change was always going to happen, it's just that Dan wasn't the person who started the Mod team and by the time he came in, the hate was already pretty thick, so he has had to play catch up since.

As a Mod, i have my own questions on how this will work, but i'm open for change. I think it is funny how much power people around here think Mods have, like we tell Kano how to run their forum. If Kano didn't like the way i Mod on their forum, i can't think of one reason why they have kept me around. I don't really believe that people dislike the Mods on this forum so much as not liking someone telling them what they can and can't post. News flash! It doesn't matter who the Mods are, they will still work the way Kano want them to.

Lastly, Kano are always looking for more Mods, for those who don't like the current team, please, come and show me how it's done!

 

I would like to add that Mods are not here to help people learn the games or figure out how to play the games, there is a help section and many members here including the mods that can share others their experiences and everyone decides how to play their games,and everyone has many ways to play the games dependent on what outcome they are looking for. The mods are here in a forum capacity to help kano keep the forums running smoothly, directing players with questions about game issues/bugs and problems to the right channels , so that Kano can help them, and to keep to the best of anyone's ability , the issue of keeping the forum running as smoothly as possible and help others navigate it and how to report things to support. Most forums are moderated anonymously, and Relentless is right this is something that should have been in place since the beginning. As far as we being players we all have out own game experiences to share as everyone does.

As far as how moderators are chosen, when a call asking for moderators went out to the community, those of us interested answered it, were asked questions by kano, filled out and signed a NDA , that call is still out there, in the community,but no one else seems interested, we had a few others who started with us , no longer here for their own reasons, so yes we were chosen by Kano by going thru the proper channels.


Technically, someone does not have to even play a game to moderate a forum and the duties/job description are forum related , not game related. We just happen to play the games .


As our wonderful community manager has put it

""The forums are about announcements and discussion about the games you all love, but they aren't the games themselves.""

 

i just think that for the most part the mods do a decent job and each one may perceive things differently than the other would when it comes to certain posts...what mod A sees as offensive or abusive, mod B might shrug off and whether either one is right or not, the posting individual is going to be pissed about it in most cases and overall its really not that big a deal. i believe some of us take things a little too personally in-game and in-forum as well....and as far as swearing in the forum goes, we're all adults here and i see nothing wrong with harmless swearing as long as its not of malicious intent towards anyone....well except for dan ;p lol

 

Deleting willy-nilly is power. Closing threads is power. And a couple abuse it. There are actually mods that do a damn good job, then there is the bunch who applied to have "perceived" power, not really to help out. I sound very negative, but I'll add this - the "bad moderator apples" IMHO is in the minority. A lot I have learnt to respect since even when "this text is black", they are worth hearing and listening to. No hiding, no crap, just consistency.

I don't expect mods to be game gods, but I do expect them to be fair in their approach, both in-game and on the forums, and that approach would earn respect. Being an idiot in the games doesn't help that cause. Neither does posting crap or not knowing your stuff when your text is not green. Technically, you need to play the game when answering game questions - unfortunately some (like a moderator that participates in this thread), has proven time and time again that he/she/it doesn't have a clue about gameplay. It really doesn't inspire any confidence, no matter how he/she/it was chosen.

Step 1: Be fair on the forums and in-game (fair != liked)
Step 2: Be respected on the forums and in-game (respect != popularity)
Step 3: Become a mod

 

Ya know the thing that I always wonder about is why people choose to use anonymous names in the forum. Just something that intrigues me from time to time. Some use their real names and some don't. I guess like answers to how to play a game , which of course , there are many ways to play a game, build a character , with different agendas in the game, there are probably lots of reasons why people do. Just an observation of mine. I am always looking for answers as to why people do what they do, and not just here but in everything. Cosmic questions ughhhh




and Demonki1 be nice to Dan

 

Re Mods
i think it went wrong when Mods actually got involved with topics and discussions, i know we all play the game and have our own opinons but when we reply to a topic it looks like we are trying to tell others there business