[MUD-Dev] FW: [uodevlist] OT - Lawsuit on Lum's

[Jeff Freeman]

Dave Rickey wrote:
>    A ridiculous proportion of all the "Community" sites on the Internet use
>them in some fashion, whether for-profit or not.  In fact, it's fundamental,
>the "community" is other players, just by participating at any level above
>passive lurker you're "volunteering" in a way fundamental to the business
>model of that company.

But when posting to a tech-support forum for NIC's or somesuch, I'm not
working a set schedule and more importantly:  My work isn't being directed
by the company.  I don't report to them.  Online game volunteer programs
are fundamentally *different* in that respect.

>>Hm.  I don't know why any industry would "deserve" anything.  It's either
>>viable or it's not.  If it isn't viable without a small army of unpaid
>>workers, then why should it exist?
>
>    Online communities can't exist without small armies of unpaid workers,
>because they *are* small armies of unpaid workers.  

Uhm... no.  The players in an online game are a community.  The counselors
are another community.  The difference is that one of those "communities"
is directed by the game company.  If the company's business model depends
on that second community then there's a problem with the business model.

Relying on volunteers isn't a problem.  Relying on volunteers that report
to you - i.e. aren't really volunteers at all, they are *employees* - is a
problem.  If the business model depends on that, then it isn't viable.

I don't think that it does depend on that, personally.

>Any business model that depends on the formation and maintenance of 
> online communities is hreatened by this.

I disagree.

But I think any business model that depends on convincing a lot of people
work for you for free (and I mean work for *you*, not for the community at
large, but you, the company, as in: you will direct their work, schedule
their hours, they will report to you, etc.), probably should be threatened
by it.

>>Related question:  Do you think Dark Camelot can employ enough GMs to catch
>>all the grief-players skirting around the PK-switch code, or will you be
>>looking to implement social controls, player-policing, etc. instead now?
>>
>    Certainly we can, because the volunteers never had much to do with
>handling grief players.  The only useful response to a grief player is
>banning him, and such an action is rarely taken if a GM doesn't witness the
>activity personally.

My own dire prediction:  Gms don't know who to watch without the army of
volunteers there to tell them.  If you're going to rely solely on GMs to
catch grief players and those GMs aren't going to have any help in locating
the grief players (so that they can witness the activity and ban the
person), then you aren't going to catch many grief players.  Once the grief
players figure out that there's not much chance of getting caught (say, on
day two), they'll go nuts.  Ultima Online in the first year or so "after GM
hours":  all the one-hit weapons came out.

> They also filtered the qeue for the issues that *required* GM
intervention.  

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

>    Without them, the qeue will have to be handled the way I handled it on
>graveyard shifts in EQ (when I was the only GM on duty, and would cover 10+
>servers with no Guides on them): Ruthlessly.  Get a petition that asks for
>help you can't give?  Delete it and move on, the time you'd spend arguing
>over whether they should get help could be spent handling the petitions of
>several people you *can* help.  Get a petition that doesn't explain what the
>problem is?  Delete it.  Got a petition about "So and so is saying bad
>things to me"?  Delete it, that kind of situation takes 15-60 minutes to
>handle, during which you can do little or nothing else.  Get a petition that
>says "Help, I'm stuck in a corner!", teleport to that player, unstick him,
>and *go*, time spent chatting with him is better spent helping the next one.

Wow, if that's the customer service goal for Dark Age of Camelot, it's
probably a good thing you guys don't have a website.

--
  http://home.swbell.net/skeptack/




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