Rework Recognition Rank (discord perms)

[TheZZL]

To @Poke,

 

This was mentioned in a staff level discussion about ~6 months ago when we were discussing whether CAs should be getting supporter perks. The conclusion was it was automatically given to SM+ as they have (essentially) root perms in-game which gave them supporter benefits as well as it was a perk of the "job".

 

Giving Supporter Benefits away to a larger group of people for free doesn't make sense if these perks are intentionally reserved in the Discord for some sort of monetary compensation that the HG/VT/LG's could purchase themselves (Or boost the server). Albeit, currently Legend does have gif/embed abelites in #general chat because after @John he needed to be able to shitpost.

 

Going back to my old argument, giving more people embed/gif perms just floods #general chat. When @Phoenix_ boosted the server I just saw #general with random images/gifs that imo were stupid. 

 

Second however, I'm open to giving away these perms based upon the breakdown you put into your post. At this point, you guys have asked for it so much, and now that more of you are HG/VT you'll just be bugging me more for these permissions

 

To @Caution,

 

Like no, please. We've had a whole debacle about this two years ago, no? The currently setup of HG/VT/LG makes sense and is fine.

I read your message in two ways

 

1. If you mean removing all recognition ranks and just having a rank for players and one for retired staff, that's really lame.

2. If you mean giving all stepped down people a "Retired Admin" Role, it's just more work for something no one's asked for, no? A complaint in the second to last community meeting was coming up with ideas/brainstorming topics that had no relation to the health/success of the community. I would say this falls under that. 

 

How I see the current recognition system operating: 

HG -> Any regular player that's cool, or for the most part most people CA and below 

VT -> SM+, Managers, CAs/Multiple rank holders that did a lot of work (arbitrary of course)

LG -> BD, Longtime Senior Staff, TM

 

Edit: Hi Phoenix, Hi John, I know by pinging you I invited you into the conversation possibly. By all means please provide any input/feedback. Just want to let you guys know there's no beef I just wanted to use examples.

 

[All Ts]

34 minutes ago, TheZZL said:

To @Poke,

 

This was mentioned in a staff level discussion about ~6 months ago when we were discussing whether CAs should be getting supporter perks. The conclusion was it was automatically given to SM+ as they have (essentially) root perms in-game which gave them supporter benefits as well as it was a perk of the "job".

 

Giving Supporter Benefits away to a larger group of people for free doesn't make sense if these perks are intentionally reserved in the Discord for some sort of monetary compensation that the HG/VT/LG's could purchase themselves (Or boost the server). Albeit, currently Legend does have gif/embed abelites in #general chat because after @John he needed to be able to shitpost.

 

Going back to my old argument, giving more people embed/gif perms just floods #general chat. When @Phoenix_ boosted the server I just saw #general with random images/gifs that imo were stupid. 

 

Second however, I'm open to giving away these perms based upon the breakdown you put into your post. At this point, you guys have asked for it so much, and now that more of you are HG/VT you'll just be bugging me more for these permissions

 

To @Caution,

 

Like no, please. We've had a whole debacle about this two years ago, no? The currently setup of HG/VT/LG makes sense and is fine.

I read your message in two ways

 

1. If you mean removing all recognition ranks and just having a rank for players and one for retired staff, that's really lame.

2. If you mean giving all stepped down people a "Retired Admin" Role, it's just more work for something no one's asked for, no? A complaint in the second to last community meeting was coming up with ideas/brainstorming topics that had no relation to the health/success of the community. I would say this falls under that. 

 

How I see the current recognition system operating: 

HG -> Any regular player that's cool, or for the most part most people CA and below 

VT -> SM+, Managers, CAs/Multiple rank holders that did a lot of work (arbitrary of course)

LG -> BD, Longtime Senior Staff, TM

 

Edit: Hi Phoenix, Hi John, I know by pinging you I invited you into the conversation possibly. By all means please provide any input/feedback. Just want to let you guys know there's no beef I just wanted to use examples.

 

Your reply to Caution perfect makes sense if you think that the change to the ranks wasn't a spit in the face to a lot of people, and that a ton of people who did a ton of work around that time were kinda fucked from having a recognition rank. Shit happens y'know, sometimes you do something and it doesn't land. I don't think the intention of the team behind it was to chastise people but I think there was definitely some personal shit that got caught in the process. It was always like that to a degree but for the most part I thought it was fair. Before the rework, I stepped down after yelling at Caution in a meeting and the thing was pretty nuts & still got LG. For the record by the way, I am not talking about myself. If I had not gotten myself banned I might have been a VT post-rework if they wanted to do what they did to some others.

 

This is kind of a hot take I suppose, but I think there's some people who have done so much work that they should be an LG or who were such a huge presence that they're fitting of it. SG used to be super rich in character despite being really dramatic as fuck. I'm not going to sit and proactively nominate these people myself, but if we can at the very least admit that in hindsight many people felt they had their time at the community summed up unfairly & judged harshly for a change that didn't really need to be done I think that'd be fair. I'm sure many still do feel that way. Whether they thought they should have LG if they were HG or VT if they were LG or some people who should be LG but are a Regular lol. 

 

 

[Dominic]

Thread is gonna get derailed hard but I'm gonna throw my two cents in as someone who was apart of the Director team that implemented the recognition rank rework, and has had two years away from this place with something of fresh eyes on it now.

 

If you really wanted to, you could split the community up into 5 recognition ranks, 6 even.. to accurately categorize people. There's many different levels to the amount of time, effort, and energy someone put in here and how impactful it really was. At the time, it felt wrong seeing someone like Haggard who built the community in the same rank as a half-decent server manager that kind of just sat around for a year and messed with a few plugins here and there. But at the same time, was it right for me to be in the same rank as someone like Haggard either? Obviously Haggard has his Founder rank or whatever.. no one needs to point it out. But I didn't compare to others like Paul or Spartan either. So there's really no great formula to it.

 

If you're worried about hurt feelings, remove recognition ranks altogether. I mean that genuinely, it's not a dig at anyone. In any case where you have a set of recognition ranks, there is a potential for people to be upset about the work they did being categorized in a lower rank than they'd hoped. Before the rework, there were still arguments about who should've been LG instead of HG and who shouldn't have been. In reality, it's all up to the discretion of the higher ups at the time to judge what you did here, and there's inevitably going to be some biased ass decisions... and there has been, and lots of people have pointed them out in the past.

 

I don't want to remove recognition ranks, obviously. I thought 3 was a little better than 2, and I sort of still do. But like I said, it could be chopped down to 1, or upped to 6. Not everyone will be happy and a poll to the community 2 years ago when it happened will probably look drastically different than now, because a lot of these new faces are used to this system. People don't like change, that's how it is. So if you do recognition ranks based on what the community wants, you'll never stop altering the system. Looking back now, I think some people were poorly categorized, but that could be my memory fogging up or personal biases washing away. That's why it'll never be perfect.

 

Honestly, just chop it down to 1 rank lol. Don't call it Retired Staff.. Honorable Gamer is a little corny too imo. Make it some neutral name so you can still reasonably put those people that weren't staff but still contributed a lot into it. No hurt feelings (unless you did absolute jack shit to not even earn a simple recognition rank) and people have something to show off. It's not as special, sure, but you really shouldn't be expecting something special for when you resign. At the end of the day, the BDs could decide to put you in the highest recognition rank possible.. if you were a shitty staff member, everyone will have seen it and your shiny rank won't make people like or respect you in retirement.

 

Don't forget to thumbs up this post and follow my profile! 

[All Ts]

4 minutes ago, Dominic said:

as someone who was apart of the Director team that implemented the recognition rank rework

 

Something you should not admit even at gunpoint.

[Dominic]

3 minutes ago, All Ts said:

Something you should not admit even at gunpoint.

 

If you never got banned I would've made you an HG.

[Phoenix_]

1 hour ago, TheZZL said:

Going back to my old argument, giving more people embed/gif perms just floods #general chat. When @Phoenix_ boosted the server I just saw #general with random images/gifs that imo were stupid. 

 

I'm sure you'd rather have activity of random stupid gifs in general than less server activity at all

 

I would, at least. Who the fuck cares, it's an online discord server, who cares if there's a goofy gif in general. 

 

#GiveVTEmbedPerms

[fantastic]

8 hours ago, Caution said:

Sort of off topic here…but just gonna toss this out for feedback…

 

What if we scrapped the concept of a middle rank and just went back to giving staff the admin recognition rank and giving regular SA’s / longtime players the non-admin recognition rank?

 

 

oh god caution this topic again

 

i don't care what rank (if any) i have, i didn't volunteer for SG for a recognition rank and i don't care if there any perks or ranks associated with being former staff, whatever is easiest for the board works for me. kind of wish we just removed recognition ranks altogether to avoid the discussion of how many we should have, we've probably spent over 100 hours over the years (no exaggeration) discussing and thinking about ths topic

[Caution]

6 hours ago, Dominic said:

it's all up to the discretion of the higher ups at the time to judge what you did here, and there's inevitably going to be some biased ass decisions... and there has been, and lots of people have pointed them out in the past.

 

I don't want to remove recognition ranks, obviously. I thought 3 was a little better than 2, and I sort of still do. But like I said, it could be chopped down to 1, or upped to 6. Not everyone will be happy and a poll to the community 2 years ago when it happened will probably look drastically different than now, because a lot of these new faces are used to this system. People don't like change, that's how it is. So if you do recognition ranks based on what the community wants, you'll never stop altering the system. 

RS wasn’t like that though. While I’m not going to say there were literally no cases of bias, there were virtually none when it was RS. If you were an AO+ at any point in time and stepped down or were even demoted for inactivity, you got RS. CA and SA’s got HG, and HG was also either specially given out to people who weren’t admins but contributed, and there was another system where it was 6 months of forum time with 100 posts (or something to that effect). LG can and will have that bias, and the system right now seems to have a lot of it, just given the nature of the system itself. While HG was a biiiiiit more biased at times, RS had that virtually removed. Unless you were banned / demoted for misconduct (and even then, there were people with RS who were demoted quietly), you got it. If anything, the bias was kinda flipped and we actually gave it out more liberally to longtime admins that weren’t staff; Itch being a great example.

 

Should the bias not be taken away as much as possible? While I agree that some people are like ‘we’re not worthy’ when you start comparing yourselves to others, I don’t really like that mentality or want to encourage it from any angle, although it may sometimes be unavoidable. If I started tossing out names like bor3d, Atarian, etc, most people will have no clue who those people are, and have no clue that they probably did a lot more work than Haggard. Which isn’t meant to be disrespectful towards Haggard, but TA’s are absolutely the workforce behind the scenes.

 

I agree that people generally don’t like change and you can constantly rewrite systems to make people happy or just keep up to date with whatever the current userbase wants. The admin application process is a great example of that, and I’ve probably posted on this website at least 100 times that the system constantly changes and we have tried nearly everything, with nothing being ‘perfect’. I think changing the admin system around here and there  can be a good thing though.

 

I don’t really see the recognition ranks rework as being one of those things. It seems a lot more of a ‘ehhhhh good initiative bad judgement’ on the Board’s part. Which I’m not faulting anyone, it was an interesting spin and a good try. I just don’t think it really ‘stuck’ very well and kind of still doesn’t sit right, whereas having two ranks, one for staff and one for admins, with limited bias kind of seems better. Maybe we just kinda say ‘our bad, guys’, cause I think All T’s has a valid point. 

 

I could be dissenting from the majority opinion here and I don’t want to change shit people don’t want to see changed, but I’m just generally curious what the community thinks.

[kabLe]

2 hours ago, Caution said:

RS wasn’t like that though. While I’m not going to say there were literally no cases of bias, there were virtually none when it was RS. If you were an AO+ at any point in time and stepped down or were even demoted for inactivity, you got RS. CA and SA’s got HG, and HG was also either specially given out to people who weren’t admins but contributed, and there was another system where it was 6 months of forum time with 100 posts (or something to that effect). LG can and will have that bias, and the system right now seems to have a lot of it, just given the nature of the system itself. While HG was a biiiiiit more biased at times, RS had that virtually removed. Unless you were banned / demoted for misconduct (and even then, there were people with RS who were demoted quietly), you got it. If anything, the bias was kinda flipped and we actually gave it out more liberally to longtime admins that weren’t staff; Itch being a great example.

 

Should the bias not be taken away as much as possible? While I agree that some people are like ‘we’re not worthy’ when you start comparing yourselves to others, I don’t really like that mentality or want to encourage it from any angle, although it may sometimes be unavoidable. If I started tossing out names like bor3d, Atarian, etc, most people will have no clue who those people are, and have no clue that they probably did a lot more work than Haggard. Which isn’t meant to be disrespectful towards Haggard, but TA’s are absolutely the workforce behind the scenes.

 

I agree that people generally don’t like change and you can constantly rewrite systems to make people happy or just keep up to date with whatever the current userbase wants. The admin application process is a great example of that, and I’ve probably posted on this website at least 100 times that the system constantly changes and we have tried nearly everything, with nothing being ‘perfect’. I think changing the admin system around here and there  can be a good thing though.

 

I don’t really see the recognition ranks rework as being one of those things. It seems a lot more of a ‘ehhhhh good initiative bad judgement’ on the Board’s part. Which I’m not faulting anyone, it was an interesting spin and a good try. I just don’t think it really ‘stuck’ very well and kind of still doesn’t sit right, whereas having two ranks, one for staff and one for admins, with limited bias kind of seems better. Maybe we just kinda say ‘our bad, guys’, cause I think All T’s has a valid point. 

 

I could be dissenting from the majority opinion here and I don’t want to change shit people don’t want to see changed, but I’m just generally curious what the community thinks.

honestly I think removing the bias would be the best course of action. Some people want the clout and some people don’t care for it. But when it comes to the whole updating the policy, who’s to say what impact someone had when your looking back on it. If a handful of people weren’t here at this moment, I could most likely successfully get whosever in charge to demote Red Tampon and I know for sure raven maniac when the impact these two had combined is probably more impact than the majority of people we had in staff over the last 2 years.

 

makes more sense to update the policy when it becomes outdated or a better idea comes up, but those who are where they are should be left in that rank since they were given their recognition at the time of service. They aren’t gonna update the policy for a Purple Heart and then go back to all the vets and say sorry you don’t make the cut anymore. At least I don’t think they would.

 

s much as I’m willing to discuss new ideas for recognition ranks, I think brain power would be better spent towards having a serious and well thought out plan of attack to get the gears greased up and the wheels rolling.

[All Ts]

8 hours ago, kabLe said:

honestly I think removing the bias would be the best course of action. Some people want the clout and some people don’t care for it. But when it comes to the whole updating the policy, who’s to say what impact someone had when your looking back on it. If a handful of people weren’t here at this moment, I could most likely successfully get whosever in charge to demote Red Tampon and I know for sure raven maniac when the impact these two had combined is probably more impact than the majority of people we had in staff over the last 2 years.

 

makes more sense to update the policy when it becomes outdated or a better idea comes up, but those who are where they are should be left in that rank since they were given their recognition at the time of service. They aren’t gonna update the policy for a Purple Heart and then go back to all the vets and say sorry you don’t make the cut anymore. At least I don’t think they would.

 

s much as I’m willing to discuss new ideas for recognition ranks, I think brain power would be better spent towards having a serious and well thought out plan of attack to get the gears greased up and the wheels rolling.

I thought his fix was pretty simple. You enrich your community with provenly good personality by retroactively saying oopsie & setting up a system that that's a little more fair and can give older staff the opportunity to help without reapplying. Also, Dominic took all the blame in this thread so really we can just cough this one up to too much bureaucracy during his reign & Caution being an absent father who let him be BD to begin with.