Staff Capacity

[Tez]

@SuspectHound said in Liberation MUSH:

This actually happens a lot over there, I can count three times where there was multi month freeze on jobs in the past…what two years?

No plot movement, no sheet adjustments (i.e being ghouled but still presenting as mortal, or getting embraced, awakening etc), no xp spends, no grid builds.

This bit caught my eye on the Liberation thread because it’s something I’ve seen on other games. While to some degree it is a perennial, forever issue – it also feels like it’s gotten more and more pronounced. Am I crazy? Have we seen a skew to more players and fewer staff? Is staff just at lower capacity as the hobby ages despite keeping the same ratios?

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Tez At a guess, it’s a combination of several factors.

One factor is that with Ares games at least, the whole behind-the-curtain operations have become significantly simpler and easier, assuming that you’re not running huge amounts of custom code to be maintained.

Another is probably that by now, we’ve all seen a lot of games go down in flames due to interpersonal fights on staff. Sometimes, it might feel safer to have just a few people.

For us on Keys, the magical number has been three.

[hellfrog]

@Tez the best ratio is any staff to no players

as you well know

[Pavel]

@hellfrog said in Staff Capacity:

@Tez the best ratio is any staff to no players

as you well know

It’s true. All of my code works perfectly if no players come in and touch it.

[Tez]

@hellfrog and @Pavel you are both objectively the RIGHTEST.

@L-B-Heuschkel
I definitely agree about the behind-the-curtain automation already being in place for games using fairly standard Ares / FS3 setups. Automation fixes so much. The idea that some games don’t even have automated xp spends is so wild to me.

I know that Keys tends to move more asynch than live. Does that reduce request overhead? How many requests are you usually getting? How much time is staff spending GMing?

[Pavel]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

@hellfrog and @Pavel you are both objectively the RIGHTEST.

That’s just a universal truth, you know.

[Roz]

I’ve been mulling lately over seeing an issue that looks particularly prevalent for WoD/CoD games, which is “we have to keep this questionable staffer because we don’t have anyone to replace them to run this sphere.” I saw it mentioned recently in regards to Liberation (where there was some quote about letting Polk staff Mage because they didn’t have anyone else to do it), and I’ve also seen it on at least one other CoD game, where a staffer was being inappropriate with a player, and the headwiz kind of hedged around about not having someone else to run the sphere (and not actually knowing the sphere well themselves); in the end, a friend of mine stepped up because they knew the sphere and they didn’t want someone questionable like that to remain in authority.

It feels like the splat/sphere system can be especially difficult for managing staff, because – from what I’ve seen, and my experience in WoD is admittedly limited!! – it seems like oftentimes, staff just don’t know all the other spheres. Which puts gamerunners in a position of “well I either have to close or freeze this sphere with PCs in it, or I let this super sus staffer remain.” Neither is fun option, but I think the former has to be the right one to pick. But the whole thing does mean that you can’t just deal with a need for more staff as “anyone can help triage this”; sometimes these games are dealing with needing people who know a specific rulebook well enough that they can make arbitration calls on situations.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

I know that Keys tends to move more asynch than live. Does that reduce request overhead? How many requests are you usually getting? How much time is staff spending GMing?

First off, async is not a requirement on Keys. If you want to run live scenes, that’s fine. It’s just that the majority of our playerbase are people who for various reasons aren’t able to sit down all night in US prime time and play.

We really don’t get a lot of requests. I’m talking 2-4 a week, most of which are along the lines of can I change my PB or would it be okay to replace that spell with this one since I never used it, and similar. Occasionally, there is an admin issue – a player conflict or somebody who needs to be politely asked to not do that thing. It’s not bad at all.

A major part of the reason for this, obviously, is that we are in no fashion whatsoever PVP. There is nothing to compete from – whether in terms of boons in the game or from sucking up to staff or IC leaders. I think this is a big part of why many WoD and similar games struggle at times – there is something to be earned for your character by steamrolling others, whether it’s IC power or experience or titles, you name it.

Another part we don’t feel quite so overburdened is that we don’t have story telling staff.

Wait, what? It’s true. We have a frame plot – this is the island, this is the reason you’re on it, this is what’s going on, yadda yadda – but beyond that, anyone who wants to be a GM is a GM. Every player can create their own realities and settings and take people on adventures there. Some of the player created realities and campaigns in those realities are very complex and long-running (and as staff, it’s a delight to be able to participate on equal footing).

We basically set all of Ares’ story teller commands to the regular player role and told people to have a party. It’s my experience from many past online games – muds, mushes, you name it – that the GM role tends to be viewed by many players as a ‘final’ level, the ultimate achievement. Whether you get taken on as a story teller or a junior wizard or whatever the local term is – a lot of these people are then never seen again. They’ve accomplished all there is to be accomplished and now they get bored. That’s what we wanted to avoid.

Personally, I am usually GM-ing 3-4 scenes at a time which means I have to write poses as a GM about 3-4 times a day.

[Polk]

Liberation fundamentally had a harder time than most hiring storytellers because game policy required you to give up all related PCs.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Polk said in Staff Capacity:

Liberation fundamentally had a harder time than most hiring storytellers because game policy required you to give up all related PCs.

I’ve had that situation on another game in the past. It leads to fast staff burn-out. After all, this is volunteer work and taking away the things the volunteers enjoy tends to go to a bad ending.

[Pavel]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Staff Capacity:

taking away the things the volunteers enjoy tends to go to a bad ending

Not only that, but running a sphere is all ‘high-level’ stuff, so one generally doesn’t have a great deal of contact with, or knowledge of, what’s actually going on for the players. You can get thrown right out of the loop so whatever you want to do and whatever the players want to do are frequently very different beasts.

[Apos]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

This bit caught my eye on the Liberation thread because it’s something I’ve seen on other games. While to some degree it is a perennial, forever issue – it also feels like it’s gotten more and more pronounced. Am I crazy? Have we seen a skew to more players and fewer staff? Is staff just at lower capacity as the hobby ages despite keeping the same ratios?

I kind of see it as general boundary setting by a lot of game owners, head staff etc for the kind of scale they are comfortable dealing with. I think in most cases, the more staff you have the higher general upkeep there is in terms of administrative work in just coordinating with different staffers, resolving blockers, figuring who needs what to answer which questions, and just solving the issues of people all waiting on each other before something happens. So people add staff to more quickly respond to players, and generate activity, but most people are really only comfortable dealing with stuff they have personal knowledge of, so there’s always this administrative tax of work that incidentally develops as you have an accumulation of stuff no one really knows what to do with.

As that happens, either the people in charge give up, and you have a really stagnant environment where things just keep piling up, or you have central figures putting in more and more and more work to try to resolve those kind of cross staff issues. So I think a lot of admins just are more quietly choosing to not add people. They know good staffers will create a better experience for players, but the effort of vetting people, and then dealing with the secondary work created by them, just gets too much for a lot of owners.

From a lot of head staff’s perspective, there’s nothing worse than a super energetic person that comes in, creates a ton of stuff for one month then immediately quits, and you’re left trying to awkwardly make shit up every week to answer questions about it for 3 years afterwards.

[MisterBoring]

My personal preference is that staff to player ratio should be around 8-10 players per staff member with some level of power over IC activity. Staff who aren’t directly responsible for IC activity, such as those in purely building or coding roles, can be at a higher ratio to the players, stretching to 40-50:1 if they’re really good at handling their workloads quickly.

Also, I would love to see more games set a cap for maximum numbers of players and PCs. I think one thing that can lead to burnout is when the population of both players and PCs stretches faster than the staff would really be able to handle.

[Pavel]

@MisterBoring said in Staff Capacity:

I would love to see more games set a cap for maximum numbers of players and PCs

I don’t know about ideal ratios or anything, but this is absolutely something I want to see more of. The era of games with hundreds of people on them is over, and the expectations from that era should die, too. We’re not blessed with unlimited free time, and those who are are often more trouble than they’re worth.

[Pan]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Staff Capacity:

@Tez At a guess, it’s a combination of several factors.

One factor is that with Ares games at least, the whole behind-the-curtain operations have become significantly simpler and easier, assuming that you’re not running huge amounts of custom code to be maintained.

Another is probably that by now, we’ve all seen a lot of games go down in flames due to interpersonal fights on staff. Sometimes, it might feel safer to have just a few people.

For us on Keys, the magical number has been three.

Sounds like we need a community project to get a couple of good working WoD plugins (if that’s what it’s called on Ares) going for cWoD 20th, and maybe nWoD 2e. Then games potentially could move to the codebase and thrive?

[Roz]

@Pan While I think that someone coding CoD or WoD for Ares would be great and get a lot of mileage, I don’t think it would necessarily remove that much overhead. It’d remove some administrative lift maybe, especially if gamerunners could feel comfortable reducing things like approvals of spend and whatnot, and just be okay with having logs of stuff in case things need to be checked. But my experience of WoD is that there seems to just be a fair amount of ST oversight needed for running story/plot/etc., and that part of things will be exactly the same.

[Tez]

I heard a rumor that someone is working on WoD/CoD for Ares, which is, I think, sorely needed.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Staff Capacity:

First off, async is not a requirement on Keys.

Fair enough! Sorry to paint with a broad brush. I was mostly just turning it in my head if that impacts request pacing as well. It seems to me that scene pacing and plot / staff pacing would go hand in hand, but then you hit me with this shocker:

Another part we don’t feel quite so overburdened is that we don’t have story telling staff.

Wait, what? It’s true. We have a frame plot – this is the island, this is the reason you’re on it, this is what’s going on, yadda yadda – but beyond that, anyone who wants to be a GM is a GM. Every player can create their own realities and settings and take people on adventures there. Some of the ,player created realities and campaigns in those realities are very complex and long-running (and as staff, it’s a delight to be able to participate on equal footing).

We basically set all of Ares’ story teller commands to the regular player role and told people to have a party. It’s my experience from many past online games – muds, mushes, you name it – that the GM role tends to be viewed by many players as a ‘final’ level, the ultimate achievement. Whether you get taken on as a story teller or a junior wizard or whatever the local term is – a lot of these people are then never seen again. They’ve accomplished all there is to be accomplished and now they get bored. That’s what we wanted to avoid.

OH MY GOD YOU WHAT?! I think this might contribute more to your lower staff overhead than anything else. Many games keep a fairly tight leash on who can be storytellers. The fact that you made the decision to open it so widely is – in the context of other games – wild.

Is it the way your game is set up and your theme is laid out that allows you to do this? Compare to a game like Arx where staff are bogged down for years in answering story requests for someone because it is something where it is impossible for just anyone to GM, for example.

@Apos said in Staff Capacity:

I kind of see it as general boundary setting by a lot of game owners, head staff etc for the kind of scale they are comfortable dealing with.

I definitely think this is part of it too. Shout out to @Tat for being a shining example of boundary setting. The number of games that look neat and get flooded is out of control.

[mietze]

I too think that the solution is very much less “add more staff” and more “cap players/PCs at a level that allows the staff team to function and enjoy themselves.” If the decision is made to hire more staff because that would aid the staff team (vs. praying that the new person will actually ease the burden rather than just expanding the staff list) then that cap can be raised. Or if a problematic or just unpleasant player needs to be tossed, then there’s another spot for someone else (or wait until you’ve had to boot a few or the 8 week after opening time period has passed where you get the sense of how much sustained interest the game really has, to cull unused/unplayed PCs and then open up again.)

I know nobody likes to be seen as being exclusive or disappointing people, but expanding beyond the reasonable capacity for a happy, involved staff and well integrated non-starving PCs means that the attention is pretty exclusive and it will be noticeable and everyone will be disappointed anyway.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Tez said in Staff Capacity:

OH MY GOD YOU WHAT?! I think this might contribute more to your lower staff overhead than anything else. Many games keep a fairly tight leash on who can be storytellers. The fact that you made the decision to open it so widely is – in the context of other games – wild.

Is it the way your game is set up and your theme is laid out that allows you to do this? Compare to a game like Arx where staff are bogged down for years in answering story requests for someone because it is something where it is impossible for just anyone to GM, for example.

That bogging down is exactly what we wanted to avoid. The way Keys works is that we have a prime reality – the one where the game is set in – that players aren’t allowed to make more than superficial changes to without staff approval. You don’t go shoot the mayor or blow up Chincoteague’s Main Street.

But beyond that, we have infinite realities that people can access with magical keys that players can learn the spell to make. This means that any player can design a reality where things works exactly the way they want and they themselves are the judge of how the story goes. They don’t need to wait on staff requests and verdicts because they are the designing power of that reality.

This takes the onus away from us to moderate campaigns and it lets players participate in more than one storyline at a time. The last part is very handy when some GMs are slower movers while others respond with lightning speed.

[Pavel]

@Roz said in Staff Capacity:

But my experience of WoD is that there seems to just be a fair amount of ST oversight needed for running story/plot/etc., and that part of things will be exactly the same.

Basically this.

And every additional sphere you add increases this in an almost logarithmic way. You’ve got different mechanics for every group, different story needs, figuring out how that story interacts with the stories for the other spheres and any metaplot you’ve got cooking… WoD/CoD games are often three or four games wrapped in a single framing device.

@mietze said in Staff Capacity:

I know nobody likes to be seen as being exclusive or disappointing people

I think it’s a combination of this and the (fear of) entitlement of potential players. Woe betide those who stand between a thing and a bunch of entitled prats who want the thing.