Interesting idea. We have been toying with re structuring some of the channels.
We want a channel that is ideal for people first coming into the discord (with rules to achieve that), but one does begin to wonder if maybe something called "Main lobby" is not ideal for that.
"reception" channel eh....not a bad idea at all.
A few things at play here.
A new game, still in early development, is more documents and design ideals than actual gameplay code or assets. This is true for any game. They start in the mind, then move onto the page, and finally into the engine.
Em-8er is unique in that it's being shared with the world at these super early stages, and has a pretty sizable community built around it. (far bigger than most non-sequel games in early dev) a lot of people coming in asking questions, and a lot of people try to answer them. Cool right? Well, historically this creates an awkward situation: peoples answers can range from super accurate answers to sort of confused answers to completely inaccurate answers. As you can imagine this leads to a lot of misunderstandings between people. A lot of muddled expectations about what the game will be or what it won't be. etc. keep in mind there is no playable game for them to go and find out for themselves, and most folks aren't to go and readthrough tons of stuff hoping to find the specific answer to the specific questions they have. It turns into a game of "telephone" where accuracy suffers. lol
Now, as you can imagine the people who give good answers are appreciated. Unfortunately we have no way to know when one of the people who give good answers will happen to be around. It becomes a randomizer of what questions will get good info answers vs bad info answers.
To solve this problem the Greeters were created. People specifically selected for personality and/or em-8er knowledge, then trained on how to give official answers from a proper base of data. Answers taken directly from official sources like Grummz himself. And they are held to the highest standard of accuracy. (yep, there is a lot of work involved!)
They are then put on a schedule so we can make sure that at practically any time a person has a question they can get the properly vetted official answer. This avoids confusion, avoids false expectations, and avoids as many problems related to that as we can. That's why greeters are there.
Officially speaking there is no rule against other people chiming in to answer questions, in fact the greeters are trained to add to or clarify existing info if present, though most times people simply let greeters answer because...
Well if a person is being helped why pile on with more people? If someone is being helped, everything is good right?
For some perspective- over the years we have had A LOT of feedback on the greeter system. It has been overwhelmingly positive. No system is 100 percent loved by everyone, that just doesn't exist, but when comparing the Yays to the Nays, we are at an extremely hard slant toward the Yays.
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As for times when we actually ask people to hold off on responding.
Most of those relate to moments where someone comes in, is very skeptical about the game, and we want to make sure they have a chance to voice their concerns without anyone jumping in to quickly to defend Em-8er, and accidently making people feel like they don't have the chance to even state their case.
This started to happen more because we began to get feedback from several people saying "anytime I try to voice a complaint, people white knight for the game so hard that I can't even get any words out" and stuff like that. We don't want folks to feel like they can't complain, so we ask that when someone does that everyone let them speak.
I don't really know how someone would define favoritism in this context.
For any game community people should be selected for community team rolls based on the idea that we think they can do a good job at it. When choosing between two people for a roll, you pick the one that you think will do a better job at it. Is that favoritism? I wouldn't call it that.
For what it's worth, people have stood out over the years for various reasons.
Some folks are just super friendly and wish happy birthday, some folks are super technical and offer cool insight to game design questions, some folks are just super generous. etc. All kinds of things make people stand out. Some recognition comes out in rolls, some recognition comes out in things being named after a person. It really depends.
Some stuff we have systems in place to recognize it, some stuff we don't.
I look forward to the day where we can get the discord to the point where we can have the same amount of recognition capabilities that we have on this forum. On here, we have more options to create specific titles to showcase their contributions. That is partly because it was more set up for it and partly because the code tying it to peoples accounts is already set up. At any rate....
----
Hopefully everyone understands that we are primarily part timers here taking time away from our families in the after hours to make all this as good as it can be with the time we have for it.
We will keep on grinding. keep on looking for ways to improve on these systems.
Anyway, keep on sharing the feedback and we will keep on listening.
We want a channel that is ideal for people first coming into the discord (with rules to achieve that), but one does begin to wonder if maybe something called "Main lobby" is not ideal for that.
"reception" channel eh....not a bad idea at all.
A few things at play here.
A new game, still in early development, is more documents and design ideals than actual gameplay code or assets. This is true for any game. They start in the mind, then move onto the page, and finally into the engine.
Em-8er is unique in that it's being shared with the world at these super early stages, and has a pretty sizable community built around it. (far bigger than most non-sequel games in early dev) a lot of people coming in asking questions, and a lot of people try to answer them. Cool right? Well, historically this creates an awkward situation: peoples answers can range from super accurate answers to sort of confused answers to completely inaccurate answers. As you can imagine this leads to a lot of misunderstandings between people. A lot of muddled expectations about what the game will be or what it won't be. etc. keep in mind there is no playable game for them to go and find out for themselves, and most folks aren't to go and readthrough tons of stuff hoping to find the specific answer to the specific questions they have. It turns into a game of "telephone" where accuracy suffers. lol
Now, as you can imagine the people who give good answers are appreciated. Unfortunately we have no way to know when one of the people who give good answers will happen to be around. It becomes a randomizer of what questions will get good info answers vs bad info answers.
To solve this problem the Greeters were created. People specifically selected for personality and/or em-8er knowledge, then trained on how to give official answers from a proper base of data. Answers taken directly from official sources like Grummz himself. And they are held to the highest standard of accuracy. (yep, there is a lot of work involved!)
They are then put on a schedule so we can make sure that at practically any time a person has a question they can get the properly vetted official answer. This avoids confusion, avoids false expectations, and avoids as many problems related to that as we can. That's why greeters are there.
Officially speaking there is no rule against other people chiming in to answer questions, in fact the greeters are trained to add to or clarify existing info if present, though most times people simply let greeters answer because...
Well if a person is being helped why pile on with more people? If someone is being helped, everything is good right?
For some perspective- over the years we have had A LOT of feedback on the greeter system. It has been overwhelmingly positive. No system is 100 percent loved by everyone, that just doesn't exist, but when comparing the Yays to the Nays, we are at an extremely hard slant toward the Yays.
--------------
As for times when we actually ask people to hold off on responding.
Most of those relate to moments where someone comes in, is very skeptical about the game, and we want to make sure they have a chance to voice their concerns without anyone jumping in to quickly to defend Em-8er, and accidently making people feel like they don't have the chance to even state their case.
This started to happen more because we began to get feedback from several people saying "anytime I try to voice a complaint, people white knight for the game so hard that I can't even get any words out" and stuff like that. We don't want folks to feel like they can't complain, so we ask that when someone does that everyone let them speak.
I don't really know how someone would define favoritism in this context.
For any game community people should be selected for community team rolls based on the idea that we think they can do a good job at it. When choosing between two people for a roll, you pick the one that you think will do a better job at it. Is that favoritism? I wouldn't call it that.
For what it's worth, people have stood out over the years for various reasons.
Some folks are just super friendly and wish happy birthday, some folks are super technical and offer cool insight to game design questions, some folks are just super generous. etc. All kinds of things make people stand out. Some recognition comes out in rolls, some recognition comes out in things being named after a person. It really depends.
Some stuff we have systems in place to recognize it, some stuff we don't.
I look forward to the day where we can get the discord to the point where we can have the same amount of recognition capabilities that we have on this forum. On here, we have more options to create specific titles to showcase their contributions. That is partly because it was more set up for it and partly because the code tying it to peoples accounts is already set up. At any rate....
----
Hopefully everyone understands that we are primarily part timers here taking time away from our families in the after hours to make all this as good as it can be with the time we have for it.
We will keep on grinding. keep on looking for ways to improve on these systems.
Anyway, keep on sharing the feedback and we will keep on listening.
