TW Staff Applications anyone?

[Attacks]

Sounds good but how about a short list from the applications, where a interveiw can be done for those on the short list, by a mod upwards perhaps, and the logs posted to pure_luck where he can have a final say yes or no

[Riesen]

How much does one of these Staff positions at the prestigious Trench Wars pay?

[Dethdefire]

Well, you could start off with the general questions such as age, location, past online staff positions held, and time availability. Being that staff is much like a managment position in a real life job, some one could come up with a "what would you do in this situation" question list. It may also be a good idea to create a few "mach trial" situations that every day staff go through. For example, start the applicant off with friendly players who need help in variose areas that a current staff could walk him through. After that, or maybe even durring, have a player that is "extreamly upset" start harrasing him with questions and / or accusations. This would be pre-stagged and done by a trained staff member. You could test the players multi-tasking abilities this way. Possibly, it would be good to continue doing this through the players <ZH> period on a random bassis. You would need voulantary staff to handle a tasks such as this. I also think that if a current staff member has continued absence he needs to be replaced.

But the point is, what are the requirements and how do you establish a process to help understand if a person meets those requirements?

What makes a good staffer? What kind of questions do you ask on the application that will help with making decisions about who to recruit? How do you gauge things like patience, maturity, ability to tolerate, ability to contribute, activity? How do you ask questions to be able to sort though those who are drawn towards a staff position for the wrong reasons?
Most importantly, how do you figure out if a person isn’t going to burn out and/or catch an attitude after donating so much time and effort into a thankless job?

I can tell you this much, putting a nebulous ‘application’ without answering these questions would be a complete waste of time.

[Dethdefire]

Well, I read some of the posts for this thread and noticed a majority had mentioned that there would be a flood of e-mails if applications were accepted. I see no reason, being that there are 100 or more staff, that a group of 5 to 10, or more, staff members can not form a comitte to view and scan through incoming applications. It would only require between 1 and 3 staff to actually hold the interviews. There could actualy be two diffrent interview stages. The first could be held in a private chat room where a pre-made list of questions would be asked. If the applicant passed that interview a second, live, interview could be held over the phone, or on teamspeak. Another method that would help reduce the amount of applications, as I may have mentioned, would be to set an age limit for apllicants. Persons who pass the "application" phase and move on to the "interview" phase could be required to faxed or scan a photo ID to the people managing the interview. Sure, this method is not compleatly fool proof but I think that between a voice interview and picture ID verification the persons holding interviews could determin who is being honest. I know most of you may think this to be a too tediouse for an online game but this is a process that has been done in past online games, that I have been apart of, with great success. Like in all games there are mature players under the age of 18 who could prove to be a valuable support to the Trench Wars community. These players could be invited by the dean of staff to the interview comitee reguardless of age. The question might arise, what about players over the age of 18 that have the same qualities? Well, these players could also be asked by the dean of staff to submit an application that could be personaly forwarded, ahead of any current applications, to the interview comittie. If the staff in TW are seriouse about improving the quality of staff in Trench Wars then I think more extreme measures need to be taken to achieve that.


PS:sorry for double posting but im at work so I have limited time to look over my post.

[NaiLed]

Well, you could start off with the general questions such as age, location, past online staff positions held, and time availability. Being that staff is much like a managment position in a real life job, some one could come up with a "what would you do in this situation" question list.

yeh, when PUSH wanted to talk to me about being hired, he asked me to a priv arena (the deans still do that?) and he asked me a few questions. one of them was a "what would you do if..." questions. i said something, which turned out to be the totally wrong answer. he (obviously) still hired me.

anyway, the moral of the story is that even if the person doesn't know what to do in a particular situation, it doesn't mean that s/he wouldn't make a good staff member- it means that as long as they are willing to learn what to do, they will be fine. this is why i don't think staff application will work- the deans shouldknow themselves who would make good staffers and who wouldn't; i don't see how a form is going to change that but create more hassle for themselves.

[Dethdefire]

The point of applications would be to find people who already have these skills. This would save a lot of time that would otherwise be used to train a person with little to no basic "people skills" that could easily just go through the motions and eventualy abuse any powers given to him/her, rather than finding a person that already has these skills and putting them right into staff training.

yeh, when PUSH wanted to talk to me about being hired, he asked me to a priv arena (the deans still do that?) and he asked me a few questions. one of them was a "what would you do if..." questions. i said something, which turned out to be the totally wrong answer. he (obviously) still hired me.

anyway, the moral of the story is that even if the person doesn't know what to do in a particular situation, it doesn't mean that s/he wouldn't make a good staff member- it means that as long as they are willing to learn what to do, they will be fine. this is why i don't think staff application will work- the deans shouldknow themselves who would make good staffers and who wouldn't; i don't see how a form is going to change that but create more hassle for themselves.

[Kolar]

I think mostly we will go by recomendations and reputations. I see no need to make the process hard, PL just wants to know who would want to be on staff and from there I guess he'll take recomendations and the reputation of the person aswell as other things. If someone is going to abuse their powers, it takes roughly 4-6 months to go from ZH to ER. As a ZH you can not !ban, zone without someone checking it or *warn, without someone checking into it. As an ER, yes there's some parts where you could but PL will find the newbies doing it, maybe the main thing needed is another Dean to watch over staff, not more systems.


Most of the staff stuff is learning to use RoboHelp and other commands. Maybe i'm just different then most staffers, I knew a lot before becomming staff so it wasn't a big learning experience but it was slow at first because of the amount of text and because of some procedural stuff.

[Spikester]

Talk is cheap

[Dethdefire]

Staffing in Trench Wars has always been based on a popularity contest. This has not been an effective method for hiring staff, and I don't see a time that it ever will be effective. There are good reasons why 80% of online games use an application process for their staff programs. You can find players who already have the "know hows" to be a successful staff member. Any one can suck up to the smods or act "cool" just to be noticed by staff, but finding players, with the right attitude, that already know how to staff will save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent training these "cool" players, who dont even know how to use the /*lock command, how to become staff members.

[RoDNeY]

hmm deth actually has quite a point, Most the time it Is a popularity test, sometimes the Oldest most popular ppl can act much more Worse and Immature than the Not as popular players, take NeMo. for instance, hes not too mature but hes been around for a while and Most of the people know him

[Kolar]

It's not really a popularity contest Deth. The recruiter will find people who know enough about the game, it's pretty easy to test them aliased and for those players to do stuff outside of staff for the zone to demostrate that. 99.9% of the stuff learned on staff is for TW only things, like TWD, Bots ect.. I don't see how a small application (which would never be as extensive or burocratic as you've suggested) could show that people have the game knowledge. It will always be a hands on thing to be the Dean of TW Staff, PL just wants some general knowledge and to see if the player actually wants to be on staff so he doesn't waste time.

I've suggested an application private sub forum so that all levels of staff may be involved in the process, it would help get a better picture of who the player is and what he/she has done plus take some of the work off PL and any future secondary Dean.

[Diakka]

I agree this Staff Application shouldn't really be a test. Just basic info about ones self. I think we should go ahead with it.

[Jeenyuss]

I like Kolar's idea.

[SaucyKing]

SaucyKing <ER>

[Dethdefire]

Yes, my idea could very well be too exstensive for a game such as Trench wars. I will stand my ground on my point that staff have been, in the past, hired because they have played Trench Wars for four a long amount of time, joined the right squad, or were friends with a lot of people. As far as I understand it, the application isnt just a test of the applicants knowledge of the game. It is a test of the applicants personality, ability to multi-task, and ability to handle stressful situations. Apllications allow you to find people who have real life managment skills, as well as staffing knowledge from other games. By finding these players who already have professional managment skills, you can greatly improve the quality of staff, reduce the chance of abuse, and in time, maybe even reduce the amount of staff needed to run Trench Wars. The main point I want to make is that bot and zone commands are not hard to learn. Acting professional and non-abusive after you have recieved the staffing position is not something that can be learned. People will already have this quality, or they will not. I do think a small application, such as kolar suggested, along with some short testing could easily find this information.