The Guards - A calm discussion about existing issues.

Funny, I've never heard that term before. The term makes sense, though. ^>^

I'd just like it much more if guards were more friendly, most of the guards here try to be really professional and it comes out as being uptight and strict.

 

I find that the guards tend to be very friendly, sometimes they have to be strict when dealing with players in-game just to get their attention. Considering what they do, they are very friendly. As far as I'm concerned the guards do their job just fine for me.

 

Being "well acquainted" with almost all the forum guards, I can tell you they are thoroughly decent, most are friendly and you can tell they are just trying to do there jobs.

It's easy to tell whether you're dealing with a bad community member or merely a charming rogue such as myself who just needs to be put in line sometimes.

I've been banned before, it's easy to contact staff when banned to dispute it, they are completely reasonable and if you really are decent you wont have any problems.

You'll just have a mailbox full of warnings :D

 

Yes everyone please do not forget that we are frequently doing said guard duties in a game where we originally joined to play and have fun. When someone is disrupting the game, and I (and likely every other guard) have to stop to take care of it, it is at that moment the exact opposite of fun. And if it happens multiple times in one gaming session it starts to feel like work.

What Im saying is we all try to be as friendly as possible, but if we come off as less than cheerful now and again please look at it from our point of view.

Sorry for the somewhat offtopic post.

 

Seeing as how we already have forums many people cannot access unless certain conditions are met (premium, guards, purgatory, etc) why not separate forum-ites into two more categories: banned and unbanned. The unbanned forum-ites would suffer no consequences whilst the banned ones will only be able to view the "help" sub-forum. Since they only have access to two features, they will be limited to appealing their ban on the help sub-forum and PM.

 

I think the guards do a hell of a job. They do it for free on their own time, often stopping their own games ( having fun! ) to go to another server and do the duty they volunteered to do. It must suck to be 'pulled away' from something they are doing, but they wanted to be guards and went in knowing this and we should respect and thank them for it.

 

Disabling KAG guards and putting your own trusted moderators in charge would be the intelligent thing to do if you have trouble trusting the guards with your server, as some guards don't always fit in to the server too well.

Other than that they do a fine job responding to your needs for nothing in return.

EDITED

 

Thank you Shad. I'm glad good came of this topic. You're a credit to the KAG team. Chin and all.

So. I am not shitting on the guards parade. You guys have done a great job from the perspective of me putting myself in your skin, and I mean fully in your skin. Truly placing myself in your shoes I cannot see any other decision you have made individually and collectively to be out of order or unfair.

With that said as King Arthurs Gold grows there will be a growing need for proper customer support. You can make the argument that KAG is still currently a donation funded project but the reality is that the people who can potentially be stiffed over by the current system consider themselves paying customers and will happily shit all over this game if they are wronged. One bad press release from any source could do a significant amount of damage, obviously KAG as it stands is in the stage where it is a success, and the question is now how big?

MMs detachment from the community already has and will continue to hurt the game. There needs to be a dedicated member of staff to overseeing the community. Geti does a great job handling what he can but the reality of the current situation is that if KAG continues to grow at the rate it is currently growing shit will hit the fan. And nobody really knows how hard it will hit or when or how it will turn out, depending on how it is handled could shape future sales of the game.

In the modern era of social networking websites game companies in particular are judged by how well they treat their customers. If one story of treating your fans like a boss hits the front page of reddit or some similar site you could see thousands of sales and your game being hailed as the second coming of jesus. However likewise if one negative situation hits that same websites you could see popularity drop, outright vehemence, rage and venom towards your game and all future productions.

I've seen Indie developers walk this tightrope unknowingly so many times only to fall and sputter out right when it was their time to shine that it saddens me. I truly love the game and the community and I would hate to see it devastated by a potential shitstorm not due to stupidity but ignorance of the rules that the global internet world is run.

And the worst part is that with the benefit of hindsight people will call the creators of this game outright stupid if it fails. Or hail them as genius if they run it well.

 

Even though I haven't been banned yet, I would say that this is a very good thing, but the fact that there hasn't been a ban appeal page so far, is not so good. I think it's a pretty obligatory feature to have if you have a ban feature as well.

And at potato, I think the fact that MM is detached from the community is not so weird. He is working hard on this game and every second he is on the forums is a second less working on finishing the zombie mode. When the game is out of alpha he will probably be more active towards the community. Also, if MM had the time to do that kind of stuff, we wouldn't need any guards. They are here as ''MM-replacers'' because he doesn't have unlimited amounts of time =p

 

Ask John Carmack - he does not post in forums as he sees it as 'pointless waste of time'. MM needs to focus and not get caught up in the forum whirlpool as it can suck the life out of a person at times. :p

 

This isn't about John Carmack. Hell, this isn't really about opinions, its about looking after your customers. You know a huge amount of people who play and bought KAG heard about it through word of mouth right?

However, if MM considers interacting with his customers and fans a "Pointless waste of time" then let me pre-emptively say "screw MM".

There is a vast wall of difference between a technical person who programs and does the real legwork trying to keep up and manage a community than some dedicated community manager who oversees the management of the forums and community. I'm not calling for MM to use up his time which has much more value spent actually working on KAG. I'm saying that without a member of staff taking responsibility of the forum management then problems can and will arise that could potentially hurt the sales and community of KAG.

A lot of people who have paid for this game feel like they've been left in the dark. I'm not demanding a daily update on whatever chunk of code MM has worked on or what he ate for lunch. I'm saying that there is a real hole in the management of the community from the developers that is starting to be felt and the problem will only get worse.

 

You're really going too far man. You say ''screw MM'' while he is busy working on a game that YOU play and which YOU could play for free if you wanted!?

Well sir, screw you.

 

Yes, forums and the community develop in to a mess when they have no confidence in the developers words, an example would be shadowtale, where the community were promised a huge update that just never happened, worse thing is these people invested money in to the games cash shop system and were in a way cheated.

8 or so months later (After about a year or two of waiting) the developer made a post on their forums saying that this huge update will instead be a whole new game, and the fate of the current game (shadowtale) would simply be death.

It is understandable that MM and Geti should be working on the game rather than responding to each and every one of us, but it wouldn't hurt to take just take a few minutes out of their day every few days just to inform everyone on how the game is doing and how the testing is going.

The fact that MM and the rest of the team is basically telling us to be quiet and wait like some sort of problem that won't go away makes it appear as if they do not care about the community of people who have allowed this game to see the day of light, we have been waiting for a long time now (some more than others) and lots of us are losing confidence since they set up estimated release dates but keep failing to meet them dates.

But we don't want release dates or spoilers, what we want is information on how the game is doing and how the testing is going.

 

Actually shad has been saying in IRC literally 10 minutes ago that there's a bug that causes in-game bans to extend to the forums :/

 

At least 1 or 2 big blog post every week or so should be enough.

 

You try work on a game then go on the forums to see people complaining they ain't working on new updates yet theres odd threads about these things being reversed.

Choose one be happy with it, the volunteers do a great job of helping in the forums when the devs slave off, i wouldn't be too happy if i worked for a few hours straight to see people complain about them


See my examples