MCGamer's Problems Part 1: Staff don't ask for the communities input enough.

[arsenal]

I was going to do a thread with a bunch of issues that MCGamer needs to resolve along with my solutions, but it was going to be way too long. So instead I will post each issue in a separate thread to break up the reading and allow for a more focused discussion. I will post the next issue when the pervious one has been thoroughly discussed. To start off I will provide a little background as for the purpose of doing this series of threads, and then we will get into our first issue!

One of the prime reasons that I resigned from the staff team after over a year was that I lost my motivation. Why did I lose my motivation? Well I thought at first that it was because that after 365+ days of performing the moderator duties I had just got bored of doing them. Well, it turns out that while that was probably certainly part of the problem, I am not realizing that the bigger reason was that I had little to no motivation to log on and play on this network in general. Since resigning I have played a few games of SG and I played a few rounds of BG as well. Here and there I have logged on form time to time, but I think sadly I am getting bored of what this network has to offer in general. I know as well from reading threads on this forum as well, I am not the only one. Others can relate to this.

While new players are certainly still joining the community, the reality is that about just as many people are quitting as are coming in. This network is not growing. This network is staying the same in terms of size, if not slowly declining. This is not something that most of us who have been a part of this community for a long time like to see, so it is time that we do something about it. Here is my first problem, along with a solution. While problems like the one I am brining up today may seem as if they should have no direct correlation with player interest in the network, engaging with the community so that people feel that they have a voice helps keep people interested and involved. And so with all that in mind it is time for our first problem! Like I said at the start of this thread, more problems will be posted in a future thread.

Problem: MCGamer takes very little input from the community. Networks like Badlion are constantly running polls to gather data from their community. Then they take that input and put at least some of it into action. MCGamer is capable of doing this. We saw them run an in-game poll using a rebuilt in-game polling system after Solo SG was release. The question was would you prefer the games to be 12 or 24 players? After seeing that a lot of people were split, MCGamer went with both to satisfy everyone. However, while we did get one good instance of this with the one in-game poll, along with one or two questions within the MCG Awards when has the Sr. staff gone out of its way to collect the date since the Solo SG poll? Fun fact: If you do /poll in-game it still has the Solo SG poll from 6+ months ago. Even though they already added 24 player servers! Maybe MCGamer knows the community too well and already knows what we want? Well, I guess if that was true then UHC Worlds would certainly have turned out a little different. Anyway, my point is that MCGamer hardly ever goes out of its way to get our feedback. Instead the network has created an environment where we have to write threads like this to get our voices heard. Not to mention that it can also make us feel as if MCGamer doesn't care about our opinions, even though I am sure that that is not the staff's intentions.

Solution: Well, if my memory is correct (and it is) this issue was brought up at a staff meeting a month or two ago. Nothing has changed since then, even though the Sr. staff did admit this was a problem. So while I hope that the staff team make this a priority, I am going to take some initiative here. I have created a survey to collect some data! For full transparency I would like to make the data public in a future thread, however if the Sr. staff don't want it made public I will send it to them privately. I don't think this should be an issue though, I stayed away from the more sensitive topics. My goal is to show what kinds of questions MCGamer should be asking, rather than create a bunch of questions that will provoke responses that make MCGamer look bad.

Edit (The survey is now closed):
MCGamer Feedback Survey: http://goo.gl/forms/S2KYgwwZEi

Edit 2: Results - http://www.mcgamer.net/threads/mcga...e-not-so-shocking-results-from-part-1.256865/

 

[ThatTyle]

I'm glad that you put constructive criticism (to say the least), and that you are smart enough to not have mixed discussion with threads, and try and let topics that which people are interested in can comment without any issue. Large props to you, arsenal. Hopefully people who make hate threads learn from this, and civil discussions will rise.

 

[arsenal]

I'm glad that you put constructive criticism (to say the least), and that you are smart enough to not have mixed discussion with threads, and try and let topics that which people are interested in can comment without any issue. Large props to you, arsenal. Hopefully people who make hate threads learn from this, and civil discussions will rise.

Awww, ty! Yeah, the hate threads generally go nowhere. They just end up getting locked and/or moved away due to the drama they cause, and always do more harm than good.

 

[KR0N0SAU]

MCGamer's Problems Part 2: Staff don't do what the community asks for (fns fix, a much better anti-cheat).

MCGamer's Problems Part 3: Staff takes to long to do what the community asks for.

 

[arsenal]

MCGamer's Problems Part 2: Staff don't do what the community asks for (fns fix, a much better anti-cheat).

MCGamer's Problems Part 3: Staff takes to long to do what the community asks for.

I can guarantee you that neither of those things mentioned in part 2 will be brought up as future threads. The anti-cheat and FNS have been pointed out enough. As for part 3 well that may be touched upon here and there, I don't think it is as simple as you make it sound. The staff as a whole are very committed to meeting the communities needs. We must remember that the moderators have little to no power in where the network goes, and they make up the majority of the staff team. I do think that especially Chad himself should be doing things slightly differently, and I may make suggestions in a future thread. However I am not just going to complain about things, while providing no advice as to how to fix it. No point complaining about something, if you don't have an idea about how to fix it.

 

[Joey]

You're absolutely right! The staff team in general has a hard time communicating with the community. Part of the major issue when I was a Sr. Staff member was that there weren't enough Sr. Staff members to get anything productive done. I was overloaded with work (one of the major reasons I left was because I was managing not only my events but the ones that other people sort of abandoned even though they weren't dead), and I'm pretty sure many others felt the same.

Now, I know for a fact that that isn't an issue anymore. There are plenty of Sr. Staff members to collect simple data like you have done here. With more admins than before, and every Sr. Staff member specializing in one thing or another instead of juggling EVERYTHING, that should also clear up a lot of schedules to focus on some community management and relations

Also, when things are brought up at the meeting, unless someone takes the initiative to continue to bring it up, it probably will be forgotten. Not because they don't care, but because Saturdays are the busiest days for the Sr. Staff because that's when the bulk of the work gets done.

Continue to bring these things to light, get sufficient data, which I am sure you will be able to do with your handy poll (I totally resisted that one answer), and bring that to an admin or a Sr. Staff member that you know will remember to relay.

 

[KR0N0SAU]

I can guarantee you that neither of those things mentioned in part 2 will be brought up as future threads. The anti-cheat and FNS have been pointed out enough. As for part 3 well that may be touched upon here and there, I don't think it is as simple as you make it sound. The staff as a whole are very committed to meeting the communities needs. We must remember that the moderators have little to no power in where the network goes, and they make up the majority of the staff team. I do think that especially Chad himself should be doing things slightly differently, and I may make suggestions in a future thread. However I am not just going to complain about things, while providing no advice as to how to fix it. No point complaining about something, if you don't have an idea about how to fix it.

Chad hasn't been on any of his platforms for almost 2 months. So should he stay afk permanently. 'slightly differently' isn't enough. As Jusser states in his thread about chad.

"No point complaining about something, if you don't have an idea about how to fix it." The community doesn't care how or who fixes it. We just want a working server. That doesn't have bugs the constantly that affect our gameplay. I would rather see the server be taken down if the bugs that have been pointed out over a thousand times by multiple players aren't fixed. So you probability say 'better now then never '. The now is here. We have had enough of things being broken for almost 9 months. The player base slowly moving on and dying. It is expected when players get bored of the game. Not when its the server malfunctioning.

Moderators job in a nutshell. They are the coppers. Call 911 get the bad guy. The bad guy is the hacker/rule breaker of the server.

In part 3 why touch upon that topic a little bit? Why just knock the main causes straight on the head ? You don't want to annoy your superiors (admins / snr staff ) resulting in flame etc.

 

[arsenal]

Chad hasn't been on any of his platforms for almost 2 months. So should he stay afk permanently. 'slightly differently' isn't enough. As Jusser states in his thread about chad.

"No point complaining about something, if you don't have an idea about how to fix it." The community doesn't care how or who fixes it. We just want a working server. That doesn't have bugs the constantly that affect our gameplay. I would rather see the server be taken down if the bugs that have been pointed out over a thousand times by multiple players aren't fixed. So you probability say 'better now then never '. The now is here. We have had enough of things being broken for almost 9 months. The player base slowly moving on and dying. It is expected when players get bored of the game. Not when its the server malfunctioning.

Moderators job in a nutshell. They are the coppers. Call 911 get the bad guy. The bad guy is the hacker/rule breaker of the server.

In part 3 why touch upon that topic a little bit? Why just knock the main causes straight on the head ? You don't want to annoy your superiors (admins / snr staff ) resulting in flame etc.

I think complaining about Chad not being on the forums for two months is just wrong. Someone could have passed away in his family or something bad like that. It could easily be some personal issue going on right now. Until we know the facts lets not jump to conclusions. Like I said I think that in general things could be done better, but lets focus on the topic of this thread.

 

[KR0N0SAU]

I think complaining about Chad not being on the forums for two months is just wrong. Someone could have passed away in his family or something bad like that. It could easily be some personal issue going on right now. Until we know the facts lets not jump to conclusions. Like I said I think that in general things could be done better, but lets focus on the topic of this thread.

We need an active owner or leader who checks up on the server weekly

 

[Jusser]

Oh come on now, there's only room for two of us in the 'MCGamer is dying' world...






Fite me irl

 

[KR0N0SAU]

Oh come on now, there's only room for two of us in the 'MCGamer is dying' world...






Fite me irl

missing the quote to challenge

 

[arsenal]

We need an active owner or leader who checks up on the server weekly

Jusser made lots of valid points in his thread. I agree. In general we need more communication from the administration and Chad. But that is not the topic of this thread. Please drop this sidetracking.