vjek said:Again, if their business model is predicated on volunteers for success, they should fail. That's economics 101. Unless you're a tyrannical despot and you literally own the people, don't rely on slave labor for success. :)
Slave labor? Tyranical despot who owns people? Give me a break man, this is just a stupid, stupid statement. There are plenty of businesses that use volunteers, interns etc. Isn't is obvious that you are being unreasonable? I know you aren't usually that extreme in your posts. That has nothing to do with what is being discussed.
But to your point, philo, if griefing, cheating, RMT's and exploits will run rampant, with the current design and implementation, they need to fix the current design and implementation. Regardless of whether or not volunteers are involved, griefing, cheating, RMT's and exploits are solved problems. As an example,currently, it's possible to grief other players with Feign Death. They've demo'd how to do it in the videos. Maybe a good first step would be to fix Feign Death so it can't be used for griefing? That would reduce CSR ticket burden. The other issues have been addressed on these forums for years, if VR is willing to step up and implement the solutions. They probably aren't, but even so, the solutions exist.
Another example is selling loot rights or permitting players to loot items if they weren't present and participated in the fight. Change the game so they can't do that. One less RMT tool, poof, gone.
Push the RMT problem to the account level, and solve it with geoip, restrictions on CC changes, restrictions on phone number locale changes, and 2FA required for anything unusual. Just like Google and many other online companies & MMO's already do today.
If the actual goal of having the volunteers there is to reduce the load of paid employees by reducing customer service tickets, then fix the game so there aren't as many customer service tickets.
If exploits and cheating are the problem, then set the policy to be permanent bans of the account, credit card, address, phone number, and name on the account, once exploits and cheating are proven. No second chances.
If certain countries are causing your billing department an inordinate amount of chargebacks? Ban those countries from playing or change your billing policies for those countries.Each of those steps reduces CSR ticket load. And none of them have anything whatsoever to do with whether or not you have unpaid volunteer guides. If the supposed unique value of unpaid volunteer guides is mediation? Normal players already do that, and will /petition when it doesn't work. Just like an unpaid volunteer guides would escalate if players didn't listen. If you want to give a Guide tag to normal players and prioritize their /petitions? Great. Do that more. At least they have no special powers to abuse, despite adding to the CSR ticket burden. ;) And as others have suggested in this thread, assigning very helpful players a "Helper" tag harms no-one, and is also not prone to abuse.
I agree with basically everything you are saying. Griefing, cheating, RMTs and exploits will run rampant and should be handled. This is an issue that every mmo has had to deal with. There are definitely steps that can be taken to reduce the number of issues . Reduce the number of tickets, Yes, reduce the load on the CSRs as much as possible without hurting your bottom line, Yes...but the part about "without hurting your bottom line" is always a main concern and the reason why some of your extreme examples aren't a good solution. If the way you are regulating your servers results in losing so many accounts that the game takes a hit financially then it is time to start looking at alternative solutions.
But the thing is, none of that actually changes anything. Regardless of all that ^, even if they take steps to diminish the problems as much as possible and reduce the load on the CSRs, there is still a load on the CSRs.
It is still in VRs best interest to utilize volunteers who are willing to help the game. It is a cost effective way to aid in monitoring the servers. Is it the end all solution? Of course not. But it should be utilized in conjunction with many of the ideas you present above. These things are not mutually exclusive.
An acknowledgement of inevitable corruption (by your statement of "a handful of guides profit behind the scenes") provides the justification for NOT having guides, as most other north-america-developed fantasy-themed MMOs have decided over the past 20 years. I'm not being facetious. You and others apparently know the problem will happen, yet are willing to implement a system that will guarantee it happens? I'm not seeing the logic there.
Again, it's a positives outweigh the negatives thing. We have to have a reasonable assumption that the majority of volunteers aren't going to abuse their power and will help the game and the community. There are always bad apples, even with paid employees who might abuse their power. You have the option to fire volunteers the same way you have the option to fire paid employees.
Is the issue that you don't think there will be a screening process and that anyone who volunteers will be given guide priviledges? There are ways to minimize the bad apples just like in any job.
When you find someone is stealing from the register you fire them, of course. That doesn't mean we should be so unreasonable that we consider only having management run the cash register...that isn't cost effective.
It's quite astonishing how much people are concerned by exploits that are marginal and will anyway be done with or withouth guides. As said, there are a lot of tools now that allow for better monitoring of things, including suspicious movement, special abilities usage, chat messages, etc...
I'm pretty sure you can even trigger specific warnings if a guild, a certain amount of players, or even anyone enter a zone soon after a guide "checked them". It's no longer 1999 with rustic tools and bad connexions, with self made engines that often didn't even carry most functions we have now.
Past abuses, are they really an argument due to modern tech evolution ? If power corrupts (which is probably true), then even paid GM will be corrupted, so what's the difference ?
MauvaisOeil said:It's quite astonishing how much people are concerned by exploits that are marginal and will anyway be done with or withouth guides. As said, there are a lot of tools now that allow for better monitoring of things, including suspicious movement, special abilities usage, chat messages, etc...
It's only marginal when it's not happening to you.
it's a slippery slope when you start parsing what exploit is less an issue than another.
There may be lots better tools, but there are lots better hacks as well. And in some respects the hacks have outpaced the tools.
In my experience, many so-called devs are not that savvy about security. And unless a business or game company specifically invests in security and some expertise, it usually gets much less attention. Companies seem to be more reactive than proactive. Only spending the money after it's too late.
SoWplz said: In EQ I was always under the impression that the GM were EQ employees. ( I do not remember the company before ) I can understand in game GM as volunteers, but I do not see why they can not hire 2-5 in game GMs for each server. Almost like managers to handle in game issues, bugs, discrepancies, or player issues. I could see most of the smaller stuff to be handled by the volunteers. But big deals like I have been working on this quest for a week and last part just bugged out, where the paid employee could maybe check the logs, make sure the proper items were turned in and say yes, this quest is bugged, we will fix it, here is your reward for the quest. Of course the " managers " would be responsible for any corruption and can stop the issues from getting out of hand. I am sure not many will agree. But this is a business, a lot of players time and money is dumped into the game and it should be watched, not just completed and tossed out to the community and left to it's own.
I believe you are correct that those with an actual title GM in original EQ1 were employees.
But remember, that can be any kind of employee. An artist, an intern that just works on itemization, or filling out values in item tables. The sound guy, etc.
These would be employees that might have little to zero understanding of the actual game mechanics and internal functionality. They wouldn't know a bug from a planned event result. Typical companies are not putting their high-priced code jockeys out to play CS in their games.
And knowing how many support people you might need in any given game, on a given server at a given day or time is near to impossible. And largely a major waste of time and money. Typically a pool of CS would simply be handling tickets that players might be able to file from within a game. And any high priority issues such as maybe racism, griefing would go to a higher level support. The better the tracking tools and logging there is, the easier it is to handle issues without having a in-game GM presence. But, once again, logging, tracking takes works and steals performance.
The last game I worked on had a fairly robust logging system built in, largely for monetization of course. But still useful to see where bugs and errors manifested.
To handle all the data we had to create a data-warehousing system. We were collecting over a billion records a day in logging. And our game was not as big as an MMO. Although probably many more players than most.
So you can see how it's easy to say, oh just check the logs. But when you have hundreds of millions of records, you better have a nice reprorting system in place.
zewtastic said:You cannot turn over policing of an MMO (especially one that is not FTP) to unpaid volunteers. Giving so-called unpaid volunteer "CSR's" any kind of enforcement power over other players opens more potential for issues and lawsuits.
Any business accepting payment to provide a service also accepts the responsibility of supporting that service. It should be part of the business model.
You using some sketchy scare logic to seemingly rationalize your opinion just exposes it for it's fallacy. Having unpaid, volunteers will never stop any of the issues you seem to say it will.
Pretty sure a lot of that sort of thing gets escalted to GMs. Guides by and large I think tend to assist with gameplay issues such as stuck players, missing items, and other specific things of that nature (because if we're honest here, there's a ton of stuff that gets petitioned that's just little things that doesn't warrant a GM and just clogs up the system for the limited number of personel available). That's not to say that they might not assist in some minor player dispute issues (gold seller reports, spamming, ect.) but anything major I would expect would more than likely get escalated to a GM for review. The guides themselves I'm sure would be under constant checks as well to avoid any misuse of their positions. It's all down to implimentation and keeping it in check.
zewtastic said:MauvaisOeil said:It's quite astonishing how much people are concerned by exploits that are marginal and will anyway be done with or withouth guides. As said, there are a lot of tools now that allow for better monitoring of things, including suspicious movement, special abilities usage, chat messages, etc...
It's only marginal when it's not happening to you.
it's a slippery slope when you start parsing what exploit is less an issue than another.
There may be lots better tools, but there are lots better hacks as well. And in some respects the hacks have outpaced the tools.
In my experience, many so-called devs are not that savvy about security. And unless a business or game company specifically invests in security and some expertise, it usually gets much less attention. Companies seem to be more reactive than proactive. Only spending the money after it's too late.
So basically what you are saying, is that guide or not guide hacks would be stronger than any offered status, right ?
Which means the guide role and functionnality has simply nothing to do with how people will try to exploit the game.
Kittik said:vjek said:But personally? I wouldn't want them in Pantheon. The risk of abuse is just (historically demonstrated, repeatedly) too high.
If a player guild or group wants to organize into a "Welcome to Terminus" type of thing, where they have no powers whatsoever, and are just there to help and assist new players? Sure, great idea.
Beyond that? Not a fan. Without the risk of dismissal for abuse (as in, you're an employee making your living from VR) I can see any Guide system just repeating history.
I agree, they are not needed in Pantheon. EQ was a different time and it was a new type of game that completely lost people. Guides made sense. Now a days, everyone, well, almost everyone will already know what they are doing.
Another thing that can absoultly ruin a game for me. Is the forums community managers. We all know the type and what they are like, and I've completely avoid game forums and games because of them.
Agreed. They are not needed. There will be tons of websites with any information a new player would need to know within the first couple of months of launch. No reason to risk abuse of any kind.
We cannot stop an employee of VR from abusing/leaking info to a friends guild but we can easily stop the public from doing it. I see no reason to have guides. There was mention of someone running an event and handing out "goodies", why do you have to be a guide to do that?
I remember a role playing guild that would run events all the time I.E. Have as many people as they can get create a level 1 gnome and run off a cliff like a bunch of lemmings.
MauvaisOeil said:zewtastic said:MauvaisOeil said:It's quite astonishing how much people are concerned by exploits that are marginal and will anyway be done with or withouth guides. As said, there are a lot of tools now that allow for better monitoring of things, including suspicious movement, special abilities usage, chat messages, etc...
It's only marginal when it's not happening to you.
it's a slippery slope when you start parsing what exploit is less an issue than another.
There may be lots better tools, but there are lots better hacks as well. And in some respects the hacks have outpaced the tools.
In my experience, many so-called devs are not that savvy about security. And unless a business or game company specifically invests in security and some expertise, it usually gets much less attention. Companies seem to be more reactive than proactive. Only spending the money after it's too late.
So basically what you are saying, is that guide or not guide hacks would be stronger than any offered status, right ?
Which means the guide role and functionnality has simply nothing to do with how people will try to exploit the game.
Hacking and exploiting will happen regardless of guides. I think that is fairly obvious.
Volunteer guides with 'special powers' just add to that problem as they will be exploited in ways unintended.
Guides with 'special' powers are unnecessary in a modern game of the nature Pantheon professes to be. All players are potential guides. Custom chat channels for classes, crafting, quests, etc. make it easy for any player to ask the playerbase at large anything. Custom chat channels of this nature were used extensively in Vanguard.
Players getting stuck? Recall, teleports, unstuck commands. All very common now.
What other functions would "guides" need that cannot be handled organically or ingame functions?
I would just add, it is my understanding that the goal largely for Pantheon is to be as 'sandbox-like' as possible. If there is a comprehensive "play-nice" policy in place, then in-game policing will be a much higher requirement.
But as I have heard in many streams now, most if not all the development team are big fans of PVP. This would tend towards a "let them play" attitude. Which means there is a fine line between griefing and what is acceptable interaction. Nobody has said PVE servers will be carebear.
Most modern MMO's like AA and BDO simply outright ignore players and let anything happen. This is partly because they are PVP and FTP. But this mean players are constantly subjected to blatant racism, griefing, bigotry, mysogyny, everything. Which is why those games quickly turned into cesspools played by scumbags.
It gets tricky when you want to be a sandbox yet still allow aggressive interaction between players. We all heard in many of the streams groups instantly talk about training other groups that showed up. Some in jest of course, but obviously that is going to be a major issue in the actual game. In a non-instanced world, the fight over covetted camps and resources will be intense.
Nobody want's 'volunteers' being able to tell them what they can or cannot do in the game. It's just not going to happen.
Thus, it's not a matter of Hacking. Since VR's tool can be tracked easily. Putting guides with minimal tools and triggers that start an investigation won't make more or less hackers to try their antigame dump, in fact, it can even add to the difficulty of thoses to bypass the system, with observers avaliable during game sessions.
MauvaisOeil said:Thus, it's not a matter of Hacking. Since VR's tool can be tracked easily. Putting guides with minimal tools and triggers that start an investigation won't make more or less hackers to try their antigame dump, in fact, it can even add to the difficulty of thoses to bypass the system, with observers avaliable during game sessions.
I frankly do not see any rationale for a guide. What function are you saying a guide is needed that cannot be performed by a player?
- reporting an issue? Players can do that.
- answering questions? Players can do that.
What 'special' tools are you envisioning? And why does some special person have to have them only?
I'm not saying I am favoring the guide level, power, or functionnality. When I started EQ they were already very rare and inexistant, I think the guide program was already fading, or their tools and visibility were too thin or SOE stopped recruiting or accepting them.
There is a mechanic on FFXIV that is similar to the guide system, but very bady designed. A player that has all classes max level of one genre, with numerous max level missions done, they can show the "mentor" status that is supposed to mean "I'm good in the game, ask me question".
However, it just became a way to show some restricted tag, as most mentor I crossed were indeed, extremely bad and absolutely unconcerned by others. Of course a few of them were volunteers, but so few in the end. That's the problem with automated systems tracking nothing but in game achievements.
I simply think, players willing to help others could apply to a program that shows "I am willing to help people" and would be supported by VR. Not to ensure, enforce, or police things. But to be avaliable for questions, help, or counsels. Of course everyone can help withouth a title, a tag, or specific account. But when you are surrounded by thousands of players, who to ask ? Who could know ? who will have the time to answer ? Who will not trap you with trolling information ?
I don't see it as a negative thing, and not as a gamebreaking as some claim if done properly (EQ was like the Wild west of MMO's, pretty much like UO, a lot was learnt on human behaviour between 1999 and now, especially on videogames), and I wouldn't lie : It's not either a major beneficial feature. But it's a way to tie the community with solid ropes and help holding it together by the will of thoses who want to give time to others with no compensation.
MauvaisOeil said:I don't see it as a negative thing, and not as a gamebreaking as some claim if done properly (EQ was like the Wild west of MMO's, pretty much like UO, a lot was learnt on human behaviour between 1999 and now, especially on videogames), and I wouldn't lie : It's not either a major beneficial feature. But it's a way to tie the community with solid ropes and help holding it together by the will of thoses who want to give time to others with no compensation.
Well I was one of the original dozen or so players in the UO early alpha/beta in 96 I think. And UO was by far a true sandbox at release. It was amazing what you could get away with. But that game was so badly broken. So many bugs and hacks. So many unintended results that the coders had never imagined. And saved on a flat file DB. those roll-backs were ridiculous.
I jumped to the EQ1 beta in 98 immediately when I got it and never went back to UO. And yes, EQ1 was very rough in the start. Very crazy.
Just make a chat channel that fields in game questions.
I submit the question, it goes into a channel and allows people (who volunteer to field questions) the ability to answer them. If its something that cannot be answered via regular players it can be pushed to a higher entity. This will eliminate a ton of garbage petitions and allows people to become known on their server as being helpful. Win/win.
This, combined with various improvements in things like /unstuck, would all but eliminate the need for guides.
Then GMs can focus on actual issues.
Also, creating an "official" pantheon discord will allow for questions and such to be fielded by players all day.
Porygon said:Just make a chat channel that fields in game questions.
I submit the question, it goes into a channel and allows people (who volunteer to field questions) the ability to answer them. If its something that cannot be answered via regular players it can be pushed to a higher entity. This will eliminate a ton of garbage petitions and allows people to become known on their server as being helpful. Win/win.
This, combined with various improvements in things like /unstuck, would all but eliminate the need for guides.
Then GMs can focus on actual issues.
Also, creating an "official" pantheon discord will allow for questions and such to be fielded by players all day.
All these things have already been covered extensively. Just go back and read.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:I even remember this one time a Vendor in a low level zone got trained away from his spot and wouldn't path back home. Somehow the game was coded that if the NPC wasn't standing in just the right spot he wouldn't open his Vendor window for you. So even when players found him they couldn't buy or sell stuff from him. Since we didn't want to 'insta-kill' and wait for it to respawn since we didnt' know the respawn timer, I had to 'agro' the NPC onto myself with my nifty invulnerability and have him chase me back to his spot and then 'memory whipe' him to clear agro. Once he was back in his spot he went back to normal.
It sounds like Goofy may have been one of the few of the honest guides amongst hundreds that were absolutely corrupt. For this very reason is why I agree with @Vjek. What stops a guide from activating their non-agro powers to teleport a guild to a safe area in the zone and pull a boss mob to that guild (or even for their own character if capable of soloing it)? If a person is not being paid to perform a job, what incentive do they have to NOT give their friends (or themselves) a small boost here or there (because having an account banned is trivial in today's MMO world... if that was even a disciplinary action considered).
Not to mention that just from my personal experience, there are far too many "yesmen" in these forums to employ guides capable of making unbiased decisions or being reliable class guides. There are only a handful of people with enough "unbiased views" to contest the decisions of the developers without being absolutely compliant to decisions made in opposition of some of the community's concerns.
I sincerely hope Chris/Joppa takes community conerns into "serious" consideration going forward (unlike SoE reps which I worked for). Class representatives will be crucial to the future of the game and having people that just agree with everything you recommend breeds failure. Exclusively listening to "yesmen" is good for boosting your ego, as well as destroying your company if your objectives aren't based on math/science and your "yesmen" aren't just proofreading your work.
Edit: I'm not trying to call everyone a yesman on the forums (there are many that give their honest unbiased opion), but I am saying that if there are class guides, they need to be people with a level of professionalism and enough backbone to present the concerns brought up by the community without "immediately appologizing for even considering questioning the decisions of the unfailable developers!" Some of you know what I'm talking about, and some dont...
Perhaps guides worked as described above in EQ but that doesn't mean they have to work that way in Pantheon.
They do not need to have the powers of a semi-GM.
A bully platform to encourage people to play nice (follow the code of conduct) and maybe some power with respect to chat may be all they need.
zewtastic said:MauvaisOeil said:Thus, it's not a matter of Hacking. Since VR's tool can be tracked easily. Putting guides with minimal tools and triggers that start an investigation won't make more or less hackers to try their antigame dump, in fact, it can even add to the difficulty of thoses to bypass the system, with observers avaliable during game sessions.
I frankly do not see any rationale for a guide. What function are you saying a guide is needed that cannot be performed by a player?
- reporting an issue? Players can do that.
- answering questions? Players can do that.
What 'special' tools are you envisioning? And why does some special person have to have them only?
The guide program in EQ1 worked great! Guides were awesome and they helped keep ease the workload on the paid GMs. Guides could help research exploits (they could invis and shadow players as well as monitor convos), they could help with stuck players, they could kill NPCs that were glitching, they could summon you.
Why does some special person have to have them? To keep the game flowing and fix problems.
zewtastic said: I frankly do not see any rationale for a guide. What function are you saying a guide is needed that cannot be performed by a player?
It seems that some of the people in this thread are under the assumption that because they were called 'Guide' this implied they were just there to give people advice or answer questions about quests or stuff. This was not at all in their pervue. Game knowledge was not supposed to be given by GM's or Guides. Yes there will be 3rd party sites that may contain spoilers for you, but if you made a petition and said "Hey were do I go to find this item for my quest." the Guide would suggest you figure it out on your own.
So if you were just asking for advice or 'where do I find this' or something like that. You didn't petition a GM/Guide. They would just say "Sorry we can't help you with that" and close your petition.
Kratuk said: Guides by and large I think tend to assist with gameplay issues such as stuck players, missing items, and other specific things of that nature (because if we're honest here, there's a ton of stuff that gets petitioned that's just little things that doesn't warrant a GM and just clogs up the system for the limited number of personel available). That's not to say that they might not assist in some minor player dispute issues (gold seller reports, spamming, ect.) but anything major I would expect would more than likely get escalated to a GM for review. The guides themselves I'm sure would be under constant checks as well to avoid any misuse of their positions. It's all down to implimentation and keeping it in check.
This is basically what it was about. Guides were there to deal with issues that didn't require an Authoritative decision by a true GM (ie Employed Game Master). Kratuk is wrong though about 'missing items'. As I explained in my previous post, Guides were NOT authorized to deal with items that disappeared. If a player petitioned and said "My item poofed when I zoned", the Guide would verify that it wasn't a 'NoRent' item (items that are flagged as NORENT meant that it was temorary and would disappear if you zoned or logged out) and then would escalate that petition to be reviewed by a Full GM, who could look back through the game logs to see how and when that item disappeared.
Guides couldn't deal with any issue that required internal logs to investigate.
But any issue that didn't need an Authoritative decision from an Employee of the game company, it fell on the Guides to help sort it out. If your character fell under the world. Or you glitched through a wall and then got stuck somewhere with no exit. Perhaps an NPC monster warped into a rock and it is out of line of sight for you to attack it and it can't find a way to path out of the rock.
Sometimes, people would die due to these glitches, and if the Guide felt it was a death due to this glitch, they could ask for permission to grant the player a full 100% experience back Resurrection. If the Full GM wasn't online at the time, the Guide may still grant the Res without permission. But when this was done, the Guide would need to log this on the petition and in his report on the website when he was done for the day. The full GM's could see the Logs of the Guide ressurecting the player and if it wasn't in your report, you would usually get talked to the next time you logged in asking about it.
These are the types of things that Guides did that required these 'special powers' that you mentioned. These are Not things that any normal player can deal with.
When it came to the issue of disputes, guides were there to be the first line of contact before a Full GM gets involved. Sometimes we would simply remind people of the play nice rules, and often the offender would back down and/or move on to another place. But if it was a serious issue that might require mediation or lead to disipline, the Guide's role was to only to gather the statements of those involved. Think of it like a street cop taking statements from witnesses of a crime, asking questions, and getting everyones story. He then writes up a report and passes it on to the detective(s) who gets assigned the case. The Guide would gather info and talk to each of the sides of the dispute and then would ask the Full GM to take over and deal with the situation. Everything would be logged into the petition and the Guide would no longer be involved and would go on to dealing with other petitions.
Darch said: What stops a guide from activating their non-agro powers to teleport a guild to a safe area in the zone and pull a boss mob to that guild (or even for their own character if capable of soloing it)?
The crux of this situation is not 'What would stop them', but rather 'Would they get away with it'. Just like real life crimes... it's not about what stops somebody from commiting a crime. It's about if they will get away with it. Most of what deters crime is the consequences that come, and the likelyhood of getting caught.
This is why various posters have talked about 'modern tools' that will help them monitor this kind of action. Even back in EQ1 days, it's very unlikely a Guide would ever get away with something so obvious as what you are suggesting.
In your hypothetical situation. If a Guide character used his 'Summon' ability to bring a raid group into a safe spot near to a Boss. Then he agro'd said Boss using invulnerabilty and pulled it to this safe spot in for the raid. This would be noticable in the game logs, and a Full GM could see what he did. In fact it's quite possible that their would have been scripts in place to notify the GM imediately any time a NPC tries to hit a Guide and he is invulnerable. So the GM could be just hanging out reading a petition and 'PING' he gets a notice saying 'Gigantor the Slayer tries to hit GuideName but he is Invulnerable'. And suddenly you have full GM sending that Guide a /whisper saying "So... Gigantor eh? He having a problem?" and he's starting to check the logs to see what else that Guides been up to in the past 10 minutes and see's Guide summons RaidDude1, Guide summons RaidDude2, Guide summons RaidDude3, etc... and the GM now has a pretty good idea what is going down.
Even if the GM isn't online at the moment it's happening, he probably would get those notices as soon as he logs in. Heck, now days the game might even message him on his phone when he's not online with notices like this.
When I was a Guide, there were many times the Full GM asked me about what I was doing while I was helping people out. All of it was legit and I could answer him honestly. But I knew there were times he was checking up on things he was getting messages about and wanted to verify that actions taken were warrented.
Darch said: It sounds like Goofy may have been one of the few of the honest guides amongst hundreds that were absolutely corrupt.
Many of you keep talking about these 'hundreds' of corrupt guides, all making tons of money abusing their 'powers'. But in my memory of my time as a Guide I never once heard of any of this. The other Guides I worked with were all very helpful people who were doing it because they actually cared about making sure other players were able to play the game and have fun. Yes there was times Guides made mistakes and the GM would council us on things we could and couldn't do for the players. But if there was rampant corruption of Guides abusing their powers for personal gain, they must have been dealt with swiftly and the rest of us didn't get told what happend.
I also remember the process of becoming a guide was quite lengthy. You didn't just apply and within a week was a Guide dealing with petitions. There was a vetting process, and interviews, etc... Even then I had to wait for like a month or so after all that before I got approved and assigned a server. Then there was an apprentice period (you had 'the Apprentice' tag on your name) where a Senior Guide was always online with you before you could start reading petitions. If the senior guide was not online when you logged in, you would speak in the GM guild chat saying what time you logged in and that the senior guide was not present and then log out again. You'd then come back later to see if the Senior Guide was around. Even with a Full GM online, you still had to log out if the Senior Guide wasn't arround.
For the first while, if you needed to travel to the player to help them, the senior guide went with you. Eventually you could do stuff on your own, but the senior guide would be in constant communication to help you make the right calls. After enough time had passed where the Senior Guide was confident enough that you could handle things, he would recommend you to be promoted to a full fledged Guide and if the Full GM agreed, you'd lose the 'the apprentice' tag on your name.
As mentioned by somebody else earlier on... There was a website where you had to write out a report on, any time you handled any petitions. You kept track of all the petitions you handled, and typed out what actions were taken for that petition. If the GM's saw you doing actions like summoning, or stuff like that in the game, but there was no mention in report on the website later of those actions, you could assume they would ask you about it the next time you logged in. And if you didn't even write a report at all you'd catch serious heat. I remember I forgot one time because I was very tired, and the next day I remembered and I went and wrote my report and posted it before logging in. When I got in the game the GM came to me right away and asked me about my lack of report from the previous day and I explained what happend. He wouldn't let me do anything that day until he checked the website and read my report I had just submitted.
Also remember... a Guide had the ability to be 'hidden' from the players. But Guides could not 'hide' from a full GM. On the contrary, a full GM could and did 'hide' from the Guides sometimes. You never knew when one was online and watching you. I actually remember a situation where I was on site with some players dealing with their problem and suddenly the full GM appeared and started talking to us about what we had been discussing and I knew he must have been right there watching it all while invisible and I didn't know he was there until he wanted me to.
Conclusion:
I'm not trying to make any statements about if there should be a Guide program in Pantheon. Some of you have some valid points about ways that Guides can abuse powers even with tracking tools in place to monitor them. So maybe you guys are right and VR should avoid it.
I just wanted to pass on my experience with the program and show that most of what the Guides did were valid and fair and did help a lot.
As Kratuk put it: there's a ton of stuff that gets petitioned that's just little things that doesn't warrant a GM and just clogs up the system for the limited number of personel available
In a perfect world, a full GM employee of VR would be able to handle everything, and if the game is a success they should have enough paid GM's to do so. But in the real world, people petition GM's for tons of small things and it clutters up the petition queue and it causes a lot of delay in a GM getting to the real problems they are needed for. Having volunteers who can sort through those petitions and pass on the ones that really need a GM employee, and then deal with the smaller stuff themselves. Well I hope you can see how this can really help.
As I said before, if VR does decide to have a volunteer Guide/GM program I would apply and be a part of it if they choose me. If not, I'm still going to enjoy playing the game. And I'd definately apply to be a paid GM if they allow for people to do that from home. I live in Canada and have no desire to move to the states for a GM job no matter how much I'd enjoy the job.
On a side note... just because Guides handled all the smaller stuff, does not mean the Full GM's didn't still help with some of that stuff too when not busy. It's not like they felt that stuff was beneath them or something. They just sometimes got busy with stuff that required their special access to logs and stuff and didn't have time to handle the stuff that guides did. But when they weren't doing that, they helped us Guides work through the petition queue and handled the small stuff too.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Kratuk said: Guides by and large I think tend to assist with gameplay issues such as stuck players, missing items, and other specific things of that nature (because if we're honest here, there's a ton of stuff that gets petitioned that's just little things that doesn't warrant a GM and just clogs up the system for the limited number of personel available). That's not to say that they might not assist in some minor player dispute issues (gold seller reports, spamming, ect.) but anything major I would expect would more than likely get escalated to a GM for review. The guides themselves I'm sure would be under constant checks as well to avoid any misuse of their positions. It's all down to implimentation and keeping it in check.
This is basically what it was about. Guides were there to deal with issues that didn't require an Authoritative decision by a true GM (ie Employed Game Master). Kratuk is wrong though about 'missing items'. As I explained in my previous post, Guides were NOT authorized to deal with items that disappeared. If a player petitioned and said "My item poofed when I zoned", the Guide would verify that it wasn't a 'NoRent' item (items that are flagged as NORENT meant that it was temorary and would disappear if you zoned or logged out) and then would escalate that petition to be reviewed by a Full GM, who could look back through the game logs to see how and when that item disappeared.
Guides couldn't deal with any issue that required internal logs to investigate.
Thanks for pointing that out Goofy. Not sure why I added it as in hindsight I've had that exact issue where I was missing an item due to a bug be answered by a guide and that guide told me themselves it had to be escalated to a GM. So we'll write that off as a minor brain spasm. ;p
Also, I'm pretty sure that in most cases it's also a big no, no to even tell anyone you're in the guide program. Doing so can get you jetisoned. At least as I recall that being one policy Funcom had when they did it with Age of Conan. I could list about a half dozen reasons why that's a good idea off the top of my head.
Kratuk said:Thanks for pointing that out Goofy. Not sure why I added it as in hindsight I've had that exact issue where I was missing an item due to a bug be answered by a guide and that guide told me themselves it had to be escalated to a GM. So we'll write that off as a minor brain spasm. ;p
Also, I'm pretty sure that in most cases it's also a big no, no to even tell anyone you're in the guide program. Doing so can get you jetisoned. At least as I recall that being one policy Funcom had when they did it with Age of Conan. I could list about a half dozen reasons why that's a good idea off the top of my head.
And IIRC, you could not guide on your own server, so chances of helping out "guildies" and "friends" was minimal at best.
Fulton said:Kratuk said:Thanks for pointing that out Goofy. Not sure why I added it as in hindsight I've had that exact issue where I was missing an item due to a bug be answered by a guide and that guide told me themselves it had to be escalated to a GM. So we'll write that off as a minor brain spasm. ;p
Also, I'm pretty sure that in most cases it's also a big no, no to even tell anyone you're in the guide program. Doing so can get you jetisoned. At least as I recall that being one policy Funcom had when they did it with Age of Conan. I could list about a half dozen reasons why that's a good idea off the top of my head.
And IIRC, you could not guide on your own server, so chances of helping out "guildies" and "friends" was minimal at best.
I have seen this stated a lot, but it is actually impossible to stop.
Players having a second and third accounts was/is quite common. No way for any company to know if a guide or otherwise had alternate characters/guilds on the same servers they had sudo-GM powers on.
Imagine a player having guide access to a server, and runs a guild with a second account on the same server. Now that guide character can easily pop around and see who is where, what bosses are up, etc. and so forth.
And both accounts could be online simultaneously of course.