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Figured some of these points should get a decent response.
I get the critique several of you guys have, which is, "Staff are generally useless," but the point is, in the parlance of our times, every one of us does it for the hotpockets. That is, we do it for free.
Many people make the mistake of evaluating an all-volunteer staff by comparing them to a paid staff of employees, or other group at least hoping to make their livelihood via the work provided.
He does it for free.
I'd like to propose that this isn't a very good comparison. The reason we've always had a large number of staff members is because people volunteer what they can, when they can. Some days they can't put in any time at all. Some weeks they have to go on vacation or go inactive because their jobs (the work they do to actually pay bills) require more time or they have to take care of family members.
In contrast, we could essentially have one paid staff member handling all calls: answering questions, enforcing rules, taking TWD calls, etc. Legally we'd be forced to pay this person a certain wage in rich countries, so we would probably outsource the work to India for the lowest possible cost. We'd need 3 employees working 8 hours to cover each day. On average a full-time customer support rep in India makes about 15000 rupees, or roughly $300. The agency that manages them charges about the same. So each support rep will cost us about $600 a month, or $1800/mo total. That's about as good as we can do in terms of offering affordable staffing, and remember, that means paying people the equivalent of about $1.25/hr. This is assuming they work every day of the week as well (and they won't for that wage!). So we'd probably need 1-2 more to cover weekends. I'd estimate about $2500 would be the cheapest we could get away with.
He does it for $300/mo.
Then we'd have presumably the one dev guy left. Me? No offense, but if it's just me and the paid tech support guy from India, I'm not really interested in volunteering my time for TW. I'd either look at getting compensation, or (much more likely, as I'm doing fine) pass it on to an Indian programmer. They make around $1100 a month. But, you need someone who is close to "full stack," meaning they can do programming, server maintenance, web development, database administration, etc. So you're probably looking at something closer to $2000 a month. You could maybe get someone to work half-time, which is probably all that's needed. So let's estimate the dev cost at $1000/mo.
Then you just need to find some fair way to decide what the programmer does based on ideas from the community. I assume you'd need a volunteer to arbitrate the process, or else it would devolve into forum bickering. Maybe they could be elected. That'd be cool to see.
That's still $3500/mo, though. So we need to either find a way to monetize the game to an already small playerbase. I'm thinking a $10/mo subscription to play, 350 players signed up? I don't know if we could get 350 ... Maybe getting 70 players to sign up at $50/mo is a more reasonable goal. They could gain access to event bots and other special commands. Or rely on large donations from our wealthiest players. And if the funding somehow fell through the game would need to either shut down, or the players would need to form a volunteer staff, which is what they've done now.
I'm not saying staff isn't without literally hundreds of problems, but the reason that it works the way it does isn't because of total incompetence. It's largely because it's a staff made up entirely of players, working for free when they have time after work, after school, or on the weekends. If anyone's livelihood depended on staffing this game, you can bet it would be about 50 times more efficient and active. But if anyone's livelihood depended on staffing this game, it literally means you'd also need to pay them. Therein lies the paradox. I'm really not sure what to tell you when you get salty over other players not facilitating the kinds of activity you'd like to see in the zone, except, "become independently wealthy and then outsource to India." After that, all that's left to say is: Enjoy SSCU Trench Wars! :^)
I get the critique several of you guys have, which is, "Staff are generally useless," but the point is, in the parlance of our times, every one of us does it for the hotpockets. That is, we do it for free.
Many people make the mistake of evaluating an all-volunteer staff by comparing them to a paid staff of employees, or other group at least hoping to make their livelihood via the work provided.
He does it for free.
I'd like to propose that this isn't a very good comparison. The reason we've always had a large number of staff members is because people volunteer what they can, when they can. Some days they can't put in any time at all. Some weeks they have to go on vacation or go inactive because their jobs (the work they do to actually pay bills) require more time or they have to take care of family members.
In contrast, we could essentially have one paid staff member handling all calls: answering questions, enforcing rules, taking TWD calls, etc. Legally we'd be forced to pay this person a certain wage in rich countries, so we would probably outsource the work to India for the lowest possible cost. We'd need 3 employees working 8 hours to cover each day. On average a full-time customer support rep in India makes about 15000 rupees, or roughly $300. The agency that manages them charges about the same. So each support rep will cost us about $600 a month, or $1800/mo total. That's about as good as we can do in terms of offering affordable staffing, and remember, that means paying people the equivalent of about $1.25/hr. This is assuming they work every day of the week as well (and they won't for that wage!). So we'd probably need 1-2 more to cover weekends. I'd estimate about $2500 would be the cheapest we could get away with.
He does it for $300/mo.
Then we'd have presumably the one dev guy left. Me? No offense, but if it's just me and the paid tech support guy from India, I'm not really interested in volunteering my time for TW. I'd either look at getting compensation, or (much more likely, as I'm doing fine) pass it on to an Indian programmer. They make around $1100 a month. But, you need someone who is close to "full stack," meaning they can do programming, server maintenance, web development, database administration, etc. So you're probably looking at something closer to $2000 a month. You could maybe get someone to work half-time, which is probably all that's needed. So let's estimate the dev cost at $1000/mo.
Then you just need to find some fair way to decide what the programmer does based on ideas from the community. I assume you'd need a volunteer to arbitrate the process, or else it would devolve into forum bickering. Maybe they could be elected. That'd be cool to see.
That's still $3500/mo, though. So we need to either find a way to monetize the game to an already small playerbase. I'm thinking a $10/mo subscription to play, 350 players signed up? I don't know if we could get 350 ... Maybe getting 70 players to sign up at $50/mo is a more reasonable goal. They could gain access to event bots and other special commands. Or rely on large donations from our wealthiest players. And if the funding somehow fell through the game would need to either shut down, or the players would need to form a volunteer staff, which is what they've done now.
I'm not saying staff isn't without literally hundreds of problems, but the reason that it works the way it does isn't because of total incompetence. It's largely because it's a staff made up entirely of players, working for free when they have time after work, after school, or on the weekends. If anyone's livelihood depended on staffing this game, you can bet it would be about 50 times more efficient and active. But if anyone's livelihood depended on staffing this game, it literally means you'd also need to pay them. Therein lies the paradox. I'm really not sure what to tell you when you get salty over other players not facilitating the kinds of activity you'd like to see in the zone, except, "become independently wealthy and then outsource to India." After that, all that's left to say is: Enjoy SSCU Trench Wars! :^)
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