Trying to get a bearing on the general consensus of a hypothetical Player Moderation system.
Please fill out this survey (simple, quick 2 question survey) for an anonymous opinion, and feel free to elaborate on your reasons for/against such a system and what you would expect from such an idea.
Thanks in advance!
Serious discussion yes. Good! Felt this was appropriate though. :p
Player Moderation already exists on EU forums through Wrenchmen and Emissary volunteer programs. I just don't understand why doesn't NA want to accept the same 'standards' since this works quite well. I can say that since I am one of the Wrenchmen and I can see that forums are a lot cleaner after some of us got these powers.
And more trusted persons in this program also have ability to ban someone (permanently), if they are highly offensive, trolling, posting scam links etc.
there are really two ways to think about player moderation - one of them I'm a fan of and one of them I'm not as much of a fan of
For #2 - I think we just have to get better at building the right team internally. It's worth it for us to hire and manage the right team, build the right tools, etc. At a lot of companies this is done as a way of saving cost - not as a way of increasing the quality of the community overall, and I don't think that's nearly as much of a priority for us on these.
I see a lot of people concerned that the general community would have moderation rights and that the GD population can be rather volatile. The community moderators would no doubt need to be chosen with care. Though, there may not be a need for volunteer mods, some of the features of the new boards are yet to be implemented so we won't really know if we need them until after this replaces vB.
First of all, I find it pretty awkward to get "anonymous opinions" on such a volatile subject. It's even worse that the survey is extremely short and is a yes/no followed by a "Choose One" for the reasoning.
Now onto topic : I feel that Player Moderation is not somethign really wanted.
First of all, players are obviously biased/subjective, because they're living beings with a brain. What this means is that the acceptable content, once player moderation kicks in, no longer reflects Riot's preferences but now reflects moderator's preferences. There is a massive margin or what can/cannot be considered off-topic depending on who's judging, and it gets even larger when you try to judge if it's acceptable. At that point, I feel that the oficial forums would no longer bear its true meaning. In my opinion it works on Reddit, because the subcommunities are basically international waters. It's not a community created/used by Riot and where Moderators are acknowledged. It's a player-driven community where Rioters are welcomed/acknowledged.
This brings the second point : backlash. Right now, when your content gets moderated, it's by either an employee of Riot Games (aka a Rioter) or a subcontractor (so still Riot-approved). You can create the backlash you want, they can always justify it by "We don't like what you are posting, if you want to post that kind of things, use another game's boards". At that point, there is no real possible answers, since it's basically the game kicking you out. If you get moderated by a player, there will always be a chance of power abuse for their self gains, removing posts from someone they don't like, self-righteous moderation (someone is flaming in game, you judge all he says on the forum much harder). All things like that, and in that case, you can appeal to Riot. This would create another dozen tickets per day.
Otherwise, we already havea form of player moderation : votes. If you feel that a post is obnoxious/useless/out of context/erc., downvote it. If it'S 100% unacceptable (an embedded video of murdering a chipmunk and feeding it to skunks), then you can try to contact Riot directly to get it out ASAP. OIne of the reason they chose to go with "reddit-style" is because it facilitates auto-moderation without requiring to elect a few elite users.
Depends on how good the person is as a mod. Some mods are abusive of their powers. Some take a lot of crap, in one art forum I've been to there is high volunteer mod turnover because of how abusive the people on that site can be.
Something I've learned is you can't post legitimate but controversial stuff without offended fans going apecrap. I modded a forum on a bigger fansite once and questioned a decision by the devs on the direction of the game in a part of the forums I wasn't responsible for. Someone got butthurt about it (I'm not quite sure who) and I wasn't a mod anymore.
It was a legitimate question that I had no problem asking and I'd ask it again. Still, once you get mod status, your ability to say things can be restricted. That's a big downside of being a fan-mod, you can be forced to shut up about things that a normal fan would be allowed to say and you need support from the top to bring up certain topics.
This means you also can't always get involved in certain heated topics because people get angry if a mod posts in favor of the other side.
So as you can guess, I'm against it for a number of reasons.
Looking at GD, this community has supported some things that are frankly disgusting and I do not ever want to see those people with power - however - I'm pretty confident that is mostly a vocal minority with a lot of accounts, and I do trust that if Riot implemented true user moderation they would be far more cautious in their selection than to let that happen. I've seen a few people here on the boards that could make good candidates, people who have shown an amount of dedication to the boards and also seem capable of objective moderation.
Coincidentally I think the separate moderation of forum and game is a huge mistake and the lack of real consequences is responsible for the majority of bad content in GD.
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Note to others: survey takes about a minute to complete, if that.
