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I won't go into too much details, but here is a short answer that might suffice for now.
I have not touched public at all, so there is no point swinging that sword of yours in front of my face. Although, regarding that department I did try to get a new tutorial area added to the public arena which was shut down by the Head of Public of that time and that progress we tried to make can be found on the forums. However, as there is a thing that I prefer to call respect, and considering the changes we have made to the staff structure on a fundamental level this past year, there was absolutely no reason for me to start stepping on other players toes as it is their ultimately responsibility, and area of expertise, to improve their department.
To clarify, all of the current public changes made throughout this year have been by Zreqdf, who was the Head of Public for a short while, and later on by Bkgmjo! who will soon return to his duties after an extended leave that he had requested. Bkgmjo! will be the person to go to if you have ideas to improve the public area, or complaints to file, as he currently has full authority over the public arena and will be the man to decide which direction we want to go with it. In the past, we would have had several staff members touching public arena and other areas of the zone, constantly adding their ideas to the mixture and creating a huge mess in the progress. That lack of coordination and vision in the past actually drove away some of the most loyal and active demographic populations away from the game.
It will take time to heal and recover from those past events, but with the right attitude, vision, and calls, it is still possible to revive our once flourishing public arena back to its former glory. It is going to be a matter of making our public arena as enjoyable and balanced as possible, all while working on our player retainment rates with the help of our newly established department focused in the new players by making sure their first experience in the zone is a positive one. There is definitely still room of improvement, and I have my fair share of ideas and plans that could be executed with relative ease without burdening the development staff.
One of the biggest change we have made, one could say, is finalizing the staff structure changes that had been attempted for a long time. Nowadays this position is more focused on running our zone staff on a macro level by ensuring that everything is running smoothly from top-down. We provide assistance, guidance, and give motivation to our members of staff all while having that hawk-eyed approach to ensure that nothing is failing too miserably, and finding quality replacements to the departments that are not faring too well while acting as interim leaders of the underperforming department until we find the right replacement. In a sense, one could say that we have lowered the power this position used to hold by sharing the responsibilities to other members of staff, and trusting their calls while reminding them of our vision about the zone and trying to get motivate them to work towards that goal.
System operators used to have an iron grip over all of staff and their departments, having the final call on everything which lead into everything running ineffectively and at times extremely poorly. This position used to have the power to overrule every staff departments decision, and they had to come to us to get the permission to work on even the smallest of projects. That kind of leadership had lead into a lot of good projects collapsing, and several bad changes had also been implemented for the exact same reason, as none of us are perfect.
As we have finally moved away from the tyrannical way of running the zone, something which clearly did not work the past several of years, we are now finally on path of recovery. We are hoping to restore the faith of our players, but that can take a long time after all this time.
Naturally, there is still room for improvement, and some departments may still need better, more motivated members and leaders to take them to the next level, but overall we are in far better state than we were in the past few years. We do acknowledge that not all staff departments are in great shape, but the solution to fixing those is not quite as simple as one would think. The core problem most of our department heads run into is the lack of active development staff as they have too high expectations of what can be done on a timely manner, and that snowballs into motivation problems and quality people wanting to leave staff in disappointment. We can't offer anyone the solutions on a silver platter, and finding good and hard-working individuals with the right kind of vision and personality is a challenging task to say the least in present day.
Heck, I should probably correct Wark in his statement above as it is not true in the slightest.
We wanted to improve staff as a whole by making it a more friendly place to work in, and that was done by sharing the responsibility we had to other members of staff and this in return made it easier to run the staff organization on a macro level. There was no reason for me to start brute forcing changes and upsetting staff departments after the changes and promises we had made the past year. It would have simply lead into a lot of arguments, and we would once again have a terrible atmosphere within staff. We would have essentially moved back to the old structure which is something we are trying to avoid at all cost. It is not worth it. We would once again start losing useful and motivated people, and at this point in time, we simply can not afford that to happen. There were several projects that ended up being fruitless, but that is partly my fault for not selling the idea well enough to the department heads.
We have moved away from the old days where we had system operators virtually trying to micromanage every aspect of the zone while continually adding more and more ingredients to the cooking pot and disregarding the rest of staff. That kind of attitude had greatly contributed in the fall of staff, and it also made a good portion of extremely useful members of our community to quit the game for good. We might disagree on this one, but I feel like it is better to create and run a staff organization that is friendly to one another and fun to work in all aspects of staff. This can be done by giving recognition to those who are hard-working individuals with motivation, and actually giving them power and responsibility rather than making them into expendable sources and puppets.
Thus, as an end result, I ended up focusing most of my efforts on other projects and acting as the interim head of the league departments while sporadically helping other departments with whatever troubles they were facing, all while listening to the complaints and directing them to the right people.
I do consider myself to be a jack-of-all-trades, but I would also like to believe that I am not a jackass and that might be the main reason why I could not accomplish everything that I wanted during my short visit. Alas, as I have always been an advocate of transparency within staff and about staff, and if there are any questions or something is unclear, feel free to ask and I will try to respond if I have the answers to your question.
And to respond to Fork at the same time, System Operators are no longer fully responsible of the public arena and the development of it.
However while I could have taken over the interim leader position of public and done some of the changes that I would like to see such as providing some incentive to create and form public squads, and giving recognition to the active players and teams on a monthly basis by providing simple leaderboards that could be see in the arena, it would have been overwhelming. I was already micromanaging other departments and running TWDT and TWL with virtually no help in the latter. There is no point for someone to bite off more than they can chew -- you generally want to focus on one or two things at a time as having too many projects will greatly lower the quality of your work while increasing the chance of a burnout.
We have complete faith in the current head of public, and when he returns, he should be able to make the right calls and decisions to improve our most important arena.
I have not touched public at all, so there is no point swinging that sword of yours in front of my face. Although, regarding that department I did try to get a new tutorial area added to the public arena which was shut down by the Head of Public of that time and that progress we tried to make can be found on the forums. However, as there is a thing that I prefer to call respect, and considering the changes we have made to the staff structure on a fundamental level this past year, there was absolutely no reason for me to start stepping on other players toes as it is their ultimately responsibility, and area of expertise, to improve their department.
To clarify, all of the current public changes made throughout this year have been by Zreqdf, who was the Head of Public for a short while, and later on by Bkgmjo! who will soon return to his duties after an extended leave that he had requested. Bkgmjo! will be the person to go to if you have ideas to improve the public area, or complaints to file, as he currently has full authority over the public arena and will be the man to decide which direction we want to go with it. In the past, we would have had several staff members touching public arena and other areas of the zone, constantly adding their ideas to the mixture and creating a huge mess in the progress. That lack of coordination and vision in the past actually drove away some of the most loyal and active demographic populations away from the game.
It will take time to heal and recover from those past events, but with the right attitude, vision, and calls, it is still possible to revive our once flourishing public arena back to its former glory. It is going to be a matter of making our public arena as enjoyable and balanced as possible, all while working on our player retainment rates with the help of our newly established department focused in the new players by making sure their first experience in the zone is a positive one. There is definitely still room of improvement, and I have my fair share of ideas and plans that could be executed with relative ease without burdening the development staff.
One of the biggest change we have made, one could say, is finalizing the staff structure changes that had been attempted for a long time. Nowadays this position is more focused on running our zone staff on a macro level by ensuring that everything is running smoothly from top-down. We provide assistance, guidance, and give motivation to our members of staff all while having that hawk-eyed approach to ensure that nothing is failing too miserably, and finding quality replacements to the departments that are not faring too well while acting as interim leaders of the underperforming department until we find the right replacement. In a sense, one could say that we have lowered the power this position used to hold by sharing the responsibilities to other members of staff, and trusting their calls while reminding them of our vision about the zone and trying to get motivate them to work towards that goal.
System operators used to have an iron grip over all of staff and their departments, having the final call on everything which lead into everything running ineffectively and at times extremely poorly. This position used to have the power to overrule every staff departments decision, and they had to come to us to get the permission to work on even the smallest of projects. That kind of leadership had lead into a lot of good projects collapsing, and several bad changes had also been implemented for the exact same reason, as none of us are perfect.
As we have finally moved away from the tyrannical way of running the zone, something which clearly did not work the past several of years, we are now finally on path of recovery. We are hoping to restore the faith of our players, but that can take a long time after all this time.
Naturally, there is still room for improvement, and some departments may still need better, more motivated members and leaders to take them to the next level, but overall we are in far better state than we were in the past few years. We do acknowledge that not all staff departments are in great shape, but the solution to fixing those is not quite as simple as one would think. The core problem most of our department heads run into is the lack of active development staff as they have too high expectations of what can be done on a timely manner, and that snowballs into motivation problems and quality people wanting to leave staff in disappointment. We can't offer anyone the solutions on a silver platter, and finding good and hard-working individuals with the right kind of vision and personality is a challenging task to say the least in present day.
Heck, I should probably correct Wark in his statement above as it is not true in the slightest.
We wanted to improve staff as a whole by making it a more friendly place to work in, and that was done by sharing the responsibility we had to other members of staff and this in return made it easier to run the staff organization on a macro level. There was no reason for me to start brute forcing changes and upsetting staff departments after the changes and promises we had made the past year. It would have simply lead into a lot of arguments, and we would once again have a terrible atmosphere within staff. We would have essentially moved back to the old structure which is something we are trying to avoid at all cost. It is not worth it. We would once again start losing useful and motivated people, and at this point in time, we simply can not afford that to happen. There were several projects that ended up being fruitless, but that is partly my fault for not selling the idea well enough to the department heads.
We have moved away from the old days where we had system operators virtually trying to micromanage every aspect of the zone while continually adding more and more ingredients to the cooking pot and disregarding the rest of staff. That kind of attitude had greatly contributed in the fall of staff, and it also made a good portion of extremely useful members of our community to quit the game for good. We might disagree on this one, but I feel like it is better to create and run a staff organization that is friendly to one another and fun to work in all aspects of staff. This can be done by giving recognition to those who are hard-working individuals with motivation, and actually giving them power and responsibility rather than making them into expendable sources and puppets.
Thus, as an end result, I ended up focusing most of my efforts on other projects and acting as the interim head of the league departments while sporadically helping other departments with whatever troubles they were facing, all while listening to the complaints and directing them to the right people.
I do consider myself to be a jack-of-all-trades, but I would also like to believe that I am not a jackass and that might be the main reason why I could not accomplish everything that I wanted during my short visit. Alas, as I have always been an advocate of transparency within staff and about staff, and if there are any questions or something is unclear, feel free to ask and I will try to respond if I have the answers to your question.
And to respond to Fork at the same time, System Operators are no longer fully responsible of the public arena and the development of it.
However while I could have taken over the interim leader position of public and done some of the changes that I would like to see such as providing some incentive to create and form public squads, and giving recognition to the active players and teams on a monthly basis by providing simple leaderboards that could be see in the arena, it would have been overwhelming. I was already micromanaging other departments and running TWDT and TWL with virtually no help in the latter. There is no point for someone to bite off more than they can chew -- you generally want to focus on one or two things at a time as having too many projects will greatly lower the quality of your work while increasing the chance of a burnout.
We have complete faith in the current head of public, and when he returns, he should be able to make the right calls and decisions to improve our most important arena.
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