~The MCME Times~ #46/16 - Staff Meeting #20

Opening statement

So, once more, I am really sorry for not being able to delight you with a regular edition of the Times this week! As small compensation I can present you a short breakdown of the staff meeting we had last saturday. I happily invite you to voice your opinion on the mentioned matters, or even bring forth an all new topic you would like to voice your stance on! Everyone's voice, regardless of the rank, counts the same to me, as long as it is a seriously meant statement, so speak up!
​

Summary of the 20th MCME Staff Meeting

1. Guides
   As some of you might agree on, is that the Guide rank in it's current state does not live up to it's full potential. In this meeting we gathered and quickly discussed some new ideas to give the Guide rank a new twist and potentially improve it.
   
   The discussed ideas were:
   
   Bring the perms of Artists and Guides closer to each other:
   A reasonable amount of Guides of the present and the past had to decide on either serving as a Guide or an Artist, while in fact they rather would have performed the tasks of either rank. Thus the idea was brought up to grant either rank some perms and tasks of the other, such as giving Guides build perms, which can be used to build simple things handed out by Designers, or have Artists sporadically host minigame events and similar.
   The main downside of this idea, and the reason why we won't focus on this for now, is, that this would mean that future applicants of either rank would have to prove skills of both ranks, which obviously makes getting them harder.
   
   Give Guides access to the Job plugin:
   As Guide's anyway have to prove social skills to be able to make successful tours, the idea is not far away to allow Guide's to host build-wise simple jobs on a regular basis.
   
   Temporary Foremen:
   A third idea was to introduce a new staff rank, which might be called Foreman, as it would be very similar to the former Foreman rank whose main task was hosting jobs. The special twist about this idea was, that always only one Artist and Guide each would hold the rank, and having to step down again after one or two months. The idea behind that was, that the limited timeframe would inspire the rank holders to be very active during that period, and host a good number of jobs while having that rank.
   
   We decided to focus on the idea of the temporary Foremen for now. Please be aware that so far it only is an idea, and I did not yet get to spelling out the specific identifications, or discuss with q about the technical aspects of it, so don't reckon with this within a few days yet!
   
   
2. Artist Jobs List:
   Last Staff meeting we decided to establish a new experimental way of getting jobs into Artist's hands. That was through a Google Spreadsheet, namely the Artist Jobs List. In the meeting we had to state that the list was used only rarely since it's creation, and due to the only limited interest of the Designers to use this tool, we will not continue this.
   
   
3. Textures / Plugin changes overview:
   Eriol and I summed up the recent technological projects. If you want to learn more you can find an almost complete summary in the MCME Times #44: ~The MCME Times~ #44/16
   
   
4. Project reviews:
   Lastly I presented my recent project reviews, mainly I just noted some rather detailed feedback to the project leaders.
   

Rank Updates

Unfortunately I have to bring you the message of Enforcer @Milarwen having stepped down due to personal reasons. We really hope you find the strength to return to MCME soon again!

Additionally, @SmaugJuice, who has been on a trial period as Guide over the past weeks, has now been promoted to a permanent Guide, as has been decided by the Guide meeting which also took place last saturday.​

Closing statement

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

- Henry Thomas Buckle

 

[Daddlio]

To be honest, i havent seen much minigames happening lately and close to zero tours... Maybe the problem is not the "potential" of the rank but maybe the rank could use some more devotion and activity. Thus making the rank more attractive at the same time.
As allready clearly stated in P1eters Thread about that Youtuber-Tour i think we have the problem of many people joining once and never coming back.
By giving Guides the "job" to actually be welcoming and inviting, we could kind of solve that problem and at the same time enriching the range of tasks for guides.

With all this i dont want to offend any Guide as in "why dont u do, what ur ment to do". What i wanna say is that it could happen more often and active

I really like the Idea of reintroducing Foreman. Could be a good compensation for former-artist-guides who miss building.
Also it would adress the people-only-joining-once problem, as there would be more motivation to stay with us, if more jobs would be happening.


Oh and... RIP Joblist ...


P.S. Fin, dont feel bad for forgetting the Times This is a Hobby after all and should be fun, not forced necessity

 

[_Drayz_]

Why can't only certain artists/guides who fill roles of both ranks have perms to do them. So if a person is purely artist they just apply for artist rank. But if an artist wants to do some mini games (and can be a guide e.g. Spent a period as a guide or has shown they could be one) then they are allowed to start minigames, Vice versa for a guide wanting to do some building.

 

[Indorilian]

To be honest, i havent seen much minigames happening lately and close to zero tours... Maybe the problem is not the "potential" of the rank but maybe the rank could use some more devotion and activity. Thus making the rank more attractive at the same time.
As allready clearly stated in P1eters Thread about that Youtuber-Tour i think we have the problem of many people joining once and never coming back.
By giving Guides the "job" to actually be welcoming and inviting, we could kind of solve that problem and at the same time enriching the range of tasks for guides.

With all this i dont want to offend any Guide as in "why dont u do, what ur ment to do". What i wanna say is that it could happen more often and active

Coming from a former guide, the reason the devotion issues and lack of tours is, at least to me, because you're expected to do the same thing over and over again since your amount of permissions are so small.

You've got the ranks of artist and designer which are dynamic and changing and get to create concepts and do creative, cool looking things while the guides are sort of shooed off to take care of the new arrivals and give the same tours and answer the same questions for the 100th time. And then you have a special occasion come up, like Jesse cox coming in 2014 for a tour, and you'd think guides would get to be a big part of that, considering it's literally their job to show people around the server. But no, they get thrown under the bus and aren't allowed to participate, only the staff members get into the locked channel that it's happening in.

The only thing dynamic the guides got to do was the summer event, and even that was constantly supervised by higher ups and we were sort of at their mercy since we didn't have build perms to actually set up and make events ourselves. And even that' only once a year.

Overall the lack of devotion and activity came not from the fact that they just don't care, but from the fact they're given the most monotonous job and never given a chance to shine creatively adding to the server due to the lack of permissions they're allowed, at least in my experience.

 

[JordD04]

Coming from a former guide, the reason the devotion issues and lack of tours is, at least to me, because you're expected to do the same thing over and over again since your amount of permissions are so small.

You've got the ranks of artist and designer which are dynamic and changing and get to create concepts and do creative, cool looking things while the guides are sort of shooed off to take care of the new arrivals and give the same tours and answer the same questions for the 100th time.

I think this links very tightly to what Finrod said

1. Guides
   As some of you might agree on, is that the Guide rank in it's current state does not live up to it's full potential. In this meeting we gathered and quickly discussed some new ideas to give the Guide rank a new twist and potentially improve it.
   
   The discussed ideas were:
   
   Bring the perms of Artists and Guides closer to each other:
   A reasonable amount of Guides of the present and the past had to decide on either serving as a Guide or an Artist, while in fact they rather would have performed the tasks of either rank. Thus the idea was brought up to grant either rank some perms and tasks of the other, such as giving Guides build perms, which can be used to build simple things handed out by Designers, or have Artists sporadically host minigame events and similar.
   The main downside of this idea, and the reason why we won't focus on this for now, is, that this would mean that future applicants of either rank would have to prove skills of both ranks, which obviously makes getting them harder.

Back in the day Guides had all permissions that Builders had and a few more. The introduction of the builder rank brought a shit tonne of new and inexperience (many of which are immature) players to a position where they got a bunch of new permissions to play around with, this resulted in a lot of abuse and caused permissions to be trimmed off all ranks, guides were probably hit the hardest especially with the #/putInjustice

Going back to the Jesse Cox thing, not all guides were kept out of the loop .

 

[Credoo]

Indo, I've known you for a while but how come I never remember you saying these things. Every job can become monotonous. Doesn't matter how much permissions you have, you can still lose "devotion". All those permissions I had when I was Valar didn't make my job more dynamic and/or creative. In fact the permissions/responsibility's felt like a heavy weight that limited me in terms of things I had to do to things I wanted to do.

Everyone wanted to be part of the Jessy Cox tour. We could have asked the guides for more input but cant quite remember how it went since it was a while ago. I remember Ryan telling me Jessy Cox was coming and him saying me that i should do the tour. I winged most of the tour with the help of Jord. Me explaining how we created it and Jord dropping the "Lore Bombs". We locked the channel so that the recording wasn't interrupted by people joining. In retrospect we might have done a better job by planning it more and discussing it with guides how to proceed. But in all honesty it was already a big hassle to arrange the visit on a time that suited Jessy Cox and picking who and what was going to be in the tour that the thought did not cross my mind at the time.

I remember you building and even trying to learn voxel on freebuild. You didn't lack the motivation to create stuff. But that couldn't be said for the entire guide rank. Some of the guides (back in those days) became guides because they where self proclaimed "bad builders" but they still wanted to help out.

However those times have gone by and in my opinion are no longer relevant. We got some guides who want to build and some artist who want to do tours. I think it might be good for something new and I believe that exactly that is being worked on.
In the end I believe everyone is important to this server. From the so called tourist that joins and visits us only once or twice to the person that decides where we go as a community as a whole. And if there is a group that feels somehow less important then the rest then that should be addressed and looked into.

But if there is no to little communication then you cant expect change to fall out of the sky. I want to emphasize that every job can become monotonous. It is easy to let it become like that but much harder to change it. However you cant shove all the responsibility to change that to the "people in charge" that is in my opinion just simply not fair.
My suggestion to everyone who feels their role/rank is underappreciated or to boring please voice those concerns and help by suggesting solutions. I know I would have appreciated that when I was Valar even if i might not have agreed with the suggestions. Communication is the key.

My apologies for the long post but I had to get this of my chest.

 

[ooitsbirdo]

So is guide and artist rank being made more linked together

 

[Eriol_Eandur]

So is guide and artist rank being made more linked together

No, we will try the Foreman idea instead:

...
We decided to focus on the idea of the temporary Foremen for now. Please be aware that so far it only is an idea, and I did not yet get to spelling out the specific identifications, or discuss with q about the technical aspects of it, so don't reckon with this within a few days yet!
...