Characters, Characters

I have been following this game monthly since early 2008 and I’m looking forward to the close beta. I have been telling others in other game forum about this game and am even thinking about starting an fan site once the close beta begins. Looking forward to next month’s article.

Yeah, agreed. Looks really awesome. I also want to get in closed beta. I’m gonna write about this Game on my blog. Just found out about it today, accidently. :D

I’m extremely glad that you guys have been willing and able to step back and make all these massive changes and improvements even if it meant scrapping weeks or months of work, I’ve been following the development blog for ages and it’s been a blast watching the game evolve!

Quick question: Do you plan on having active moderators in-game? If so, will they be pulled strictly from the internal dev team or will that role be outsourced to active game community members (or a combination of both)?

Hi Femur, thanks a bunch for your ongoing support! As for in-game moderation: this is not yet fixed. Personally, I think that in-game-moderators are important and I like the thought of having the community involved as much as possible. Mostly, modalities of how Coobico is going to published will have a deep impact on how moderation will look like. Please feel free to leave us your opinion on the matter, though.

Don’t mind if I do
My issue with having a completely internal team of moderators is their relative scarcity.  I imagine this is because studios would rather pay their employees to fix bugs and develop new content than to babysit players and therefore try to minimize the amount of manpower dedicated to such tasks (but that’s just my guess). As a result, legitimate complaints and cries for help may go unanswered for long periods of time. If this becomes commonplace, it can generate a heap of bad will towards a studio and player retention may plummet. A prime example of this is Champions Online: after getting stuck in an instance due to a glitch, I didn’t receive reply from a GM until five hours after I submitted my help ticket. Needless to say, this experience was a contributing factor (but far from the only one) in my decision to cancel my subscription.

On the other hand, recruiting active community members allows studios to have a scalable, round-the-clock (given a geographically diverse player base) tier one support team without spending a dime. But I feel there’s a potential drawback to this approach. As an example, I play a number of games that allow clans and players to host their own dedicated servers and recruit their own server administrators/moderators. Their powers usually fall along the lines of kicking/banning players or changing maps upon request. This is great when it works; exploiters, trolls, and griefers don’t tend to last long in servers with active admins. However, the problem I’ve run across more times than I care to think about is abuse of power. By outsourcing GM positions to the general gaming community, studios run the same risk of recruiting people who lack professionalism and maturity. Their subsequent abuse of their abilities will reflect poorly on the organization they work for, as they are the “face” of the studio that players will likely see the most.

So if you do decide to outsource a number of GM positions, perhaps provide a method for players to easily report them for abuse without fear of repercussions or keep a log of actions performed by each moderator to monitor potential abuse.

Just my fairly unqualified thoughts on the matter.