Reducing Staff Labor

[Windstorm]

Ahoy, fellow Arm players and staff!

The response to Arm coming back was probably more than anticipated but it's always important to look to the future and the sustainability of the game we're enjoying. One of the longest running problems Arm has had though is staff retention, staff burnout, and staff consistency.

I can't emphasize enough, this problem leads to a lot of the other problems we all run into. It's important the staff has fun and not another job that's endless or thankless labor.

I'm a little worried personally, after we've lost two STs so early on and the playerbase is larger than expected that this will continue to be a major issue. On top of that, staffers can no longer play the game they love enough to support with their free time.

So I want to ask the room, ourselves, and even the staff and former staff:

How can we all make staffing less laborious?
What can we take out of the equation even on your end that would make there be less tedium and more fun?

To me, the sustainability of Arm's success is more important than the current player count. It will not last if we don't have happy staff getting to have fun with what they do.  Let's take a little time to stop talking about our toys and what we want and try to find out what would be better for them.

[Windstorm]

Off the top of my head:

Automated application approval, at least at a minimum for purely mundane roles? Minimum karma requirement for this? Etc. But, the less oversight and hair-splitting required, the better. IMO, let it all through. It's easier to correct the small amount of declines (10%? Less) than have to go through 100% of them.

Automated custom crafting, possibly within certain boundaries.

A general movement toward the loosening of rigid rules so everything will require less oversight. Nitpicking takes your time, nitpicking takes our time, and it needs to go.

A continued path towards increasing Storyteller agency and finding ways to automate or eliminate simple but laborious reading, documentation, or other tasks.

A general increase between trust of Storytellers, trust of players, and a willingness to listen and correct if something really is out of place.

Inceased transparency and reduced obfuscation across the board of literally everything, especially coded systems. Some of you don't like this. You also don't like the OOC networking and the Shadowboards. Obfuscation empowers those things and furthers their existence.

Yearly event where we beat up Riev.

[FamousAmos]

Add an automated Kudo option. Is that even possible?

[Trevalyan]

I think staff should seriously consider senior clan leads be the point of contact for character updates. Not because Sergeants/ nobles should handle all PC wishes themselves, but because it would be nice to have a broad picture of what's going on. I can't imagine how hard it would be for staff to handle character reports for 40 (!) Bynners, and I'm glad the workload has been reduced in that respect.

[Windstorm]

Adding!:

Automated Kudos! Preferably in-game.

[helix]

I think Karma reviews could be done a little differently.

Change the Kudos system to be two types - one is a normal kudos, another is a Karma kudos. The giving player writes (for the receiving player) a kudos, selecting the specific karma category that they have consistently noticed the receiving player having, and attaches a log. This gets noted on the account, and during karma reviews, staff can simply review the attached logs and kudos a player has garnered, then add karma for the most-often submitted category that the player doesn't have.

You could 'game' this system, but with only 1 karma being awarded per review, I think this cuts down on staff having to be on the watch for something that you could reward that player with and note it down, and lets them use the playerbase to gather that information.

I haven't played a GMH Agent/Merchant since the late aughts, but, if they don't have this already:

A vendor in the GMH warehouse that 'sells' all of the clan-specific gear that House possesses, but only to Agents/Merchants. This means staff don't have to handle load requests for gear/items - it can be bought freely by the Agent or Merchant.

Autoapproval of apps when a player has 2x more karma than the app requires - for instance, if Amos has 4 karma and apps a completely mundane character, even if they're a dwarf/elf/half-elf, we trust that app to be correct. But if they want to app a Vivaduan (or whatever the 4 karma class is, I can't remember) then that still has to go through approval. That also means that all really powerful classes/races will still be reviewed, and all new-ish player apps will be reviewed. Spec-apps being an exception - spec apps are always reviewed.


Honestly though, I'd be interested in hearing from staff what takes most of their time. I'm an automation engineer by trade, and I try to automate anything that's repetitive, whether it's time consuming or not. But I always do that by looking at what a team does more than once, and then cross-reference it by the things that take the most time. If it's high on the list, it gets automated.

[Patuk]

This is a good thread, but staff is historically extremely quiet about the stuff they even do, with most their hours. I'd much prefer hearing from some of them myself and adapting to that.

[Halaster]

I'm happy to talk about what I do.  But mine and Usiku's experiences are going to be very different than most of the rest of staff.

Today I:

- spent about an hour plugging crash logs and code functions into ChatGPT to see if it had any insight - it didn't provide anything useful 
- discussed about 8 different topics with various staff ranging from karma, to pclans, to what just happened in the desert tonight, to prices on items, to the economy at large, to weapon quality.
- observed a duel so I could make sure no one got crim flagged
- tweaked a couple of lines of code for an easy fix (release notes tomorrow)
- spent about an hour or so on requests in the morning, answering questions, looking for requests that other people haven't looked yet
- compiled the list of staff applicants and started the thread for staff to discuss
- spent a little bit of "face time" in general Discord chat
- answered a couple of items in #help
- looked a few things up on our internal wiki, saw something was out of date, and updated it.
- awarded 1 karma to a couple of accounts who had 0
- talked about some possible fixes to some code bugs

I have a lot more free time the past few weeks due to being between projects at work (I'm on the bench), but that will change any day now as a new one starts up.

But for me, as a Producer, that's how it typically goes.  I'm all over the place being pulled in a many directions.  Some days I can't spend near as much time on things as others, today I could.

But yeah, ST's would be better to hear from, as they're who really keeps this game going.

[Valkyrja]

Today's work consisted of:

• Wrote up a couple NPCs for plots and upcoming animations.
• Discussed staff apps.
• Talked about some of the stuff that went down last night and today in the game.
• Discussed a plot and coordinated with a Producer on who is animating what this week, etc.
• Approved some character applications!
• Observed some PCs roleplaying.
• Animated a couple scenes for my clans.
• Responded to some requests from my clans.

Some days I just only get 1 animation in, or some request tool work done, depending on my amount of availability. Some scenes take 1-2 hours or longer! I try to focus on animations, though, as I think that's where we get our most bang for our buck with providing a quality experience to players (beyond helping them with their requests).

As for like, building and everything - I'm very much taking submissions from my clan members to get things done faster. If I have an area that is under construction in game, then I ask which player wants to help me write it. I'd rather spend as little time as possible building and get back to animating. Plus, players like to do stuff like that to leave their mark on the game. Because of the nature of Arm, sometimes that can be the only legacy a group leaves - I want to have more of that in the game.

[Windstorm]

Is there anything tedious that could possibly be either automated, reduced, or passed onto the likes of player helpers or volunteers that might make things easier? It seems like if it can't be automated, character apps at least could be handled by someone that isn't responsible for so much else.

A good example I can come up with, though it took awhile to quite get into place, is player moderators, who I think are doing a great job now.

But ideally I just think we should simplify and automate everything we can while taking down excess barriers and rules, and let both players and staff alike focus on the things that are fun and enrich the game itself.

I'm sure we'd all love to hear from more STs, too, or Usiku. What would make stuff more fun for you?

[talos]

Today I:

- Went over my clan requests.  I'm lucky because the Guild doesn't exist, Urbais answered the Temple Clan questions and House Salarr is the best.

- Checked for new characters in the queue - none.   @Valkyrja probably snagged them before anyone else.

- Went over the Immortal Discussion Board and realized I missed a few items @Usiku asked me to do.  I did them.

- Tinkered over a couple NPCs I am making.

- Migrated some talk scripts to discuss scripts on some npcs.

- Answered wishes about people getting stuck, npcs doing weird things, npcs duplicated in some area, npcs having the wrong sdesc to their ldesc, helping PCs navigate the new recruiter PC Temple Clans (because I modified the script, and I want to make sure it works).   Also people have been renting their mounts at the cart storage facility for some reason..  Maybe if I change the name of the room or change the ldesc of the NPC they won't try and rent their mounts there.

- Fixed some bugs and typos that players reported using the bug/typo/idea command.

- Submitted a helpfile or two for approval.

- Read the staff discord channels.  A lot was discussed while I was at work, and I had to scroll back loads.

- Figured out how to remove an NPC from another NPC's hated list.

- I added a bunch of people to their GDB clan forums and removed a few people's access too.

- Updated some guard NPCs to allow a new clan to enter spaces.

I love fixing typos.  I love adding discuss scripts to NPCs.   I love approving characters.  These things are a joy to do.


The biggest things that take my time are questions in the request tool that I don't know the answer to.  Stuff like - "If I cast this spell, will I get wanted in Allanak?" - takes a few hours to answer, because I'm cross-referencing what is correct, what has been previously stated in various clan forums, what is incorrect in those statements, what the correct answer should be, and what's currently listed in the 'Allanaki Laws In-Character Board Post'.   Does it need to be updated?   Is it incorrect?


Meanwhile, I'm monitoring my clans, jumping in when I need to, watching new players emote and have fun.


If I were to calculate it all out, the activity that takes up the most amount of time is the request tool, specifically 'Clan Related -> Question / Request' or 'Game Related -> Question'.  And it's because these activities aren't simple actions, like object creation / room creation / character approval.  Typo fixing takes less than a minute, and it's extremely rewarding to accomplish.


That's the nature of the game.   Players (and staff) don't know everything about the game and its history and ongoing storylines.  That's the beauty of the game, at how deep the worldbuilding is.

[Valkyrja]

Talos is really great at problem solving and fixing stuff that's broken.    (When he's not breaking stuff, heheh.)

[Usiku]

From where I am, there are two main factors contributing to staff burnout that I see:

• When staff invest a lot of time, energy, and creativity into supporting the game and players, it can hurt a lot to see complaints on the GDB and Discord. This really damages staff morale, especially newer ones who come in happy, excited, and enthusiastic. It's sad to watch this reality set in for them. It usually takes thick skin to survive long-term on staff, or at least it used to, and that's unfortunate. A big part of the cultural changes we have undertaken, and will continue to undertake, is to try and alleviate this, but more player empathy, appreciation and buy-in would definitely help.
• Personally, dealing with challenging or negative interactions is incredibly draining. Handling staff complaints (historically, touch wood), spending hours investigating things like potential consent issues, or reminding veteran players about our standards can be particularly taxing. Those are the things that burn me out.

Pretty much everything else is fun, easy, and what I want to be doing. NPCs are the hardest thing to build, and sometimes that feels like a drag. Approving applications for experienced players takes about 30 seconds and at worst it's a single word or name that needs changing. Apps are usually only challenging for new players because crafting a rejection message that helps them understand can be really difficult and time-consuming, and they often still don't get it. It's much easier when we can reach them outside of the app tool for support.

My time is split between lots of discussion and support for other staff and their projects, building, ideating, problem-solving for the game, and developing new features, developing new plots. I also spend time going back and forth with players about concepts, ideas, and questions, writing documentation, teaching new staff, reviewing builds, and then also supporting my own clans, plot running and animation, which is lovely.

The player moderation team are incredible and I can't imagine we would have gotten to where we are now if we were still trying to do community moderation as well.

There probably are some candidates for automation, but there isn't anything that stands out to me as something that would be worth taking dev resource away from other projects for. I'm open minded though, if you manage to squeeze something out of this thread that would be a quick win!

[Halaster]

Yeah, to specifically address some ideas brought up:

- Automatic Char approvals
It doesn't take much time and we have writing standards, and theme standards, that we stick to.  Of course we're not perfect and someone like Dobby slips in, but if it was automated our quality of characters and writing would take a nose dive.  And has been hinted to, this just doesn't take much time (except the first two days after we launch a new season!).

- Automatic Custom crafting
It's really the same issue, automation would mean things get in the game we don't want for either thematic reasons or quality reasons.  The reason these take as long as they do is because it's just not a high priority of staff's to address.  Actually making the items isn't super time consuming overall, because of low volume of them.  The only automation I could see doing here is a form that players filled out and staff could approve/reject/edit.  But really it would probably take a good while before the time saved would outweigh the time spent developing them.

- A continued path towards increasing Storyteller agency and finding ways to automate or eliminate simple but laborious reading, documentation, or other tasks.
We are already doing that, too, that's a big part of what eliminating the Admin role was about.  As for less reading and documentation... reading and writing are pretty core to a text-based game

- Increased transparency and reduced obfuscation across the board of literally everything, especially coded systems.
We have already made a lot of changes in regards to increased transparency, the Player Committee is a great example of this.  Us being more open about a lot of things we do is another example.  We have loosened the rules a little bit about coded system, and been a little more open, but we have no interest in more transparency of coded systems, unless it's required for players to use it.  I have to admit too, I'm not seeing how this is something that even addresses the idea of "reducing staff labor".

[Windstorm]

- Automatic Custom crafting
It's really the same issue, automation would mean things get in the game we don't want for either thematic reasons or quality reasons.  The reason these take as long as they do is because it's just not a high priority of staff's to address.  Actually making the items isn't super time consuming overall, because of low volume of them.  The only automation I could see doing here is a form that players filled out and staff could approve/reject/edit.  But really it would probably take a good while before the time saved would outweigh the time spent developing them.

I disagree. A player of a crafting PC who's taken the time to increase crafting skills (not the most exciting feat) is probably someone who's also doing a higher degree of roleplaying and interaction than others. If combat isn't the main focus, my experience is that other things will be.

Part of this is referenced in another of my points: trusting players. If the red tape around this was cut and things didn't take a month to do, I don't think the game would be filled with the One Rings and lightsabers, and the once (if that) a year incident where you had to correct it would be less time consuming, while the whole process would be more satisfying for the crafters.

Having easy access to unique item creation by PCs for whom their entire unique feature is unique item creation - and in most other ways, they are simply low-powered PCs - would be a serious boon to a section of your playerbase that, for my entire time playing here, about has been largely overshadowed because it's easier for PCs to just dump money on Salarr and Kadius instead.

- Increased transparency and reduced obfuscation across the board of literally everything, especially coded systems.
We have already made a lot of changes in regards to increased transparency, the Player Committee is a great example of this.  Us being more open about a lot of things we do is another example.  We have loosened the rules a little bit about coded system, and been a little more open, but we have no interest in more transparency of coded systems, unless it's required for players to use it.  I have to admit too, I'm not seeing how this is something that even addresses the idea of "reducing staff labor".

I actually have to point out for you what I said in the blurb because that was hinting at how it reduces staff labor and helps the culture around here.

For a long, long time, Arm has struggled with its internal culture of "staff vs players." When you conceal information from players related to their play and their goals (branching spells for example) they do not simply drop the issue and spend 100+ hours finding excuses to spam spells while hoping they get something useful at the end of it, they turn to Arm's dark underbelly of DMing people and going to shady websites that have this information because Arm will not provide this.

In turn, they are now exposed to the bad side of Arm's culture that has been created over a history of obfuscation and shutting down discussion. These are often the disenfranchised former-players who spread rumors and hearsay and OOC gossip. You are now not just someone trying to find information on how to get to the fun part of playing for you - instead, you're now a part of the OOC grapevine, Arm's Worst Enemy(tm).

If you are keeping these players, especially new players, on your website and above board with what they seek, they do not become a part of The Problem. I'd argue that providing what people want to know on your own website will not only better Arm's community vastly, but it will improve roleplay. People who have to spend less time figuring out how to not waste their time will spend more of that time emoting. It's true in other games. It would be true in this one also.

In turn, staff burnout like what Usiku mentioned above - negativity, complaints, conspiracy theories about the evils of staff behind closed doors - becomes less and less. I know you know lies and hearsay spread have affected perceptions of your staff and enflamed issues between players that need not ever be. They've even stressed me out and affected my play before and I'm pretty hard-headed.  I know it's taken up staff time and generated stress and complaints that might not even be founded but were blown up beyond proportion.

Taking the power from Arm's dark underbelly would, in my opinion, be better for Arm than almost any change you could make, for staff and players alike.
 

Thank you for discussing, by the way, and for everyone with their input.

[Tailong]

If you are keeping these players, especially new players, on your website and above board with what they seek, they do not become a part of The Problem. I'd argue that providing what people want to know on your own website will not only better Arm's community vastly, but it will improve roleplay. People who have to spend less time figuring out how to not waste their time will spend more of that time emoting. It's true in other games. It would be true in this one also.

This is ultimately true. Once I, or most people, max out our skills, or learn to efficiently, to an acceptable level, what's left to do but delve deeper into our characters, and our roleplay in the world. Not sure any automation or overt information will help this along, but doesn't make it any less true.

[val]

I don't have the stats on what amount of custom crafts are gone back-and-forth on in terms of the item meeting the theme of the game or realistic quality standards of the tools and materials available to the character. If there's some concern about new players, it could be karma-gated. I'm not sure how it's that different from expecting players to submit their descriptions of art appropriately when using the... shit whatever that art command is called.

However, I don't see how having the custom craft form automated would reduce staff work. Someone would still have to read a submitted item for typos and approve it, because even staff have to do that with their items, last I knew when I was a builder. And what makes item creation easy is that you just copy an item that already exists and tweak the descriptions. We players don't have access to the existing-item lists, so someone would have to make a bunch of blank templates for us to use.

[Halaster]

I realize from a player's perspective it's easy to say "just let us have autonomy over custom crafts and you'll only have to clean up messes occasionally".  But from a staff's perspective that's just not how it actually ends up working out.  New storytellers have to get approval of items to go in the game by Senior Storytellers or Producers.  Senior Storytellers and Producers have to get approval from other Senior Storytellers and Producers.  This is a part of quality control.  Despite that, items still might make it into the game that shouldn't be because someone made a mistake, or didn't understand something.  But automating it would mean the many things we do catch would make it into the game.

Let's take violins for example (lol).  I'm not going to judge the decision to remove them, as I wasn't the one who made nor was on staff when it did.  But, the belief by staff at the time was that violins didn't fit our game's theme.  Agree with that or not isn't the issue here, it was a call they made for their reasons.  But, another staff didn't understand this and put one in the game.  Another staff saw that and put another in game.  Then suddenly there were several.  Finally it was caught by those making the decision and they had to retcon it and remove them, and thereby piss off some players.  This is an example of cleaning up a mess later by not having quality control.  It became a bigger mess than it needed to be (again, let's not debate whether violins are thematic or not, it's just an example!).

I agree we won't have "One Rings and lightsabers", as that's kind of an extreme example.  Rather, what we're trying to protect against are things that don't conform to standards like "don't use phrases such as 'perfectly balanced' in a weapon that's only average quality".  We see things like that showing up all the time.  That's not to say players are trying to pull one over on us, rather they just don't know the standard, or made a mistake.  It's easy, and very understandable, when you're submitting a custom craft to want to have some awesome, well made item.  It's staff's job (Senior ST's and Producers) to do our best to catch these things.  Full automation takes those checks and balances away.

Again, a form to fill out that staff could edit/approve/reject would be nice, but as I said earlier, custom craft simply aren't a large enough issue where making a tool like that would save much time.  It doesn't fit the criteria of this thread of "Reducing Staff Labor".

[Trevalyan]

- A continued path towards increasing Storyteller agency and finding ways to automate or eliminate simple but laborious reading, documentation, or other tasks.
We are already doing that, too, that's a big part of what eliminating the Admin role was about.  As for less reading and documentation... reading and writing are pretty core to a text-based game

Cool. I haven't been on staff so my suggestions don't terribly matter. Actually, you have to be feeling pretty good about the fact your plans for Seasons have been totally vindicated by popular interest. Various people had various problems, but being able to have a large and relatively satisfied population?

Well, it worked. No need for more second-guessing from outside.

[Windstorm]

For sure! I'm really glad to see the resurgence and it's way bigger than I think anyone anticipated.

And at least me a big part of what's showing things have improved is also that we can have these kinds of conversations productively over it devolving into mudslinging.

The cultural improvement, where staff are plainly listening and - ideally - players can get to a point where they trust the staff is not out to get them, is the biggest, most important and relevant change to lasting success in our little niche corner of the internet.

Being able to break down problems, if and where they exist (or existed in the past!) is huge. I'm always going to be about that, myself. When we couldn't even talk about it, it could never be made better.

[Dresan]

A bit of an aside, apologies for potential derail but in regards to lessening the needs...

Having to ask questions and wait for answers is time consuming for both players and staff, within reasonable limits more effort should be done to clear old documentation and improve systems already in place to provide important information to players.

More on the subject:

1. In a number of cases the helpfiles within the game are different, missing or out of date between the website and in-game. (ex. parry, floristry) We should consider having one definitive source to avoid confusion and redundant work.

2. Significant updates to the game can only be found in the forums buried under posts (combat overhaul).

3. We could use a repository of previously answered questions as well. I've had a question for a while now about whether holding more than one weapon that slow you down slightly stack in reducing attack speed, only way to answer this without extensive testing would be to send a question to staff. As an example, if the staff feel comfortable with answering this, it could be added to the repository of staff answered answered questions.

4. Its not always easy to tell from the descriptions which items/tools help with which skills in this game. I know some staff have made effort to improve this through descriptions but this isn't always apparent, and we should not depend on a subjective method. More effort should done to clear this up, especially with weapons and gear. Also, does quality denote how good an item is at helping improve a skill? If not, it probably should and cost should be added accordingly. At the moment some higher quality tools seem to be less expensive than lower quality ones that help the same skill.

Additionally, community committees should be expanded. Much of the work above could be taken on by player team committees with ability to submit/update certain in game files, without them needing to be fully on staff or have access to the direct code/plots/secrets/character bios.

[Lizzie]

I'm confused by the topic. Can someone link me to the staff thread where they're asking for ideas on how to reduce staff labor?

Also - how does adding more things that staff should/could do,reduce staff labor?

If it really is about reducing staff labor, then I suggest - not offering ideas, until staff asks for them.  The more ideas you post, the more they read, which is more "work" that they have to do, and then they have to work even more by answering them, and then Halaster says "oooh shiny" and starts to work even more on new ideas that he never asked for (that's a neener neener to Halaster for bringing up Dobby again, moderators leave it alone).

I think we could do the staff a great service by not informing them that they're broken and need fixing.

[Usiku]

Also - how does adding more things that staff should/could do,reduce staff labor?

  

[Windstorm]

Lizzie,

Neither you or anyone else is required to participate. It's a discussion board, for discussing things. The proper response to a thread you don't want to participate in is to not participate.

If Halaster or anyone else finds ideas here they like, they can take them or leave them of their own accord.

We're here to discuss, no one is ordering them to the mines to code them in immediately.

Also - how does adding more things that staff should/could do,reduce staff labor?

To address this specifically, the same way Armageddon shutting down and coming back gave it a resurgence. Upfront projects aimed at improving the longterm.

[HazelHomewrecker]

I don't think this is an entirely fair response, Windstorm. Lizzie's question is legitimate, half of the suggestions in this channel include even more work for staff to do, which is counterproductive to the entire point of the thread itself. The better question is, what can we as players do to minimalize the workload we dump on staff, rather than "you guys on staff should code all of these automated system (which is more work for you to do) so that you don't have to do more work."

This is a good thread to have, but it's not hitting the mark it's intended to, I don't think. No hate to anyone participating, obviously, just my 2 sids.