Some of you will find this interesting, some of you will already know, some of you won't care. For the latter of you, stop reading now ;)
In the past there were calls of unfair and biased modding, as there still is today. Back then people who complained that most of the mods were from the DW clan were called conspiracy nuts and laughed at. Since then, its pretty much common knnowledge that the conspiracy nuts were correct!
If people had known this at the time, there would have been riots as people would have understood certain decisions by senior mods, one of which was/still is DW-Spindoc.
So, what the mods did not want to you to know, was these DW members were all mods, and there was only a couple of non-dw mods:
Calgor
Abu
KeNn
Muat
manda
SaucyWhopper
Spindoc
Dave_Clarke
Theodor
There are suggestions there was another DW mod but as it has never been confirmed so will not be mentioned.
Now it wouldnt have been a problem with a single clan being moderators if the modding was fair. But anyone who spoke bad about DW were muted/jailed and harassed by the mods. The DW mods could close any thread they wanted that said anything bad about them too.
With Spindoc being a senior mod, DW always had one of their own guys handling the complaints. So when many people complained about the "Hail DW" greeting, nothing was done becouse DW were the mods. So you can start to see how the modding was corrupt.
But then the mods had to allow TL to use their "carp diem" greeting, to stop people complaining that DW had a greeting, and also so they could say that another clan uses a clan greeting (protecting their hails). Even though the carp diem broke the foreign language rule. The decision to allow this was made by senior mods, of which spindoc is one. To protect their hails they even allowed me to greet my own clan in Japanese (although I was muted once for it, mod mistake), and changed the rules accordingly.
Due to the many complaints about the bad modding, finally some new mods have been chosen which are from different clans. Unfortunately it seems they don't have the experiance of the older mods and thus are muting people for stupid reasons. We are told by senior mods that they are new and will make mistakes, we just have to live by their bad mute decisions while they are trained. I don't see how 'common sense' can be taught to someone though.....
Even with the new mods there have been proved cases of people being let of with stuff becouse of who they know, yet people who argue with a mods clan member gets muted. Threads pointing out mods mistakes get deleted. The mods way of dealing with people who point out their mistakes is to silence them.
Not many old DW members are still mods, we have new mods, yet the problems remain. Is this a case of power corrupts, the rules are wrong, a senior mod need replacing (personally I think LadyRaven does a good job most of the time, so should stay), or both the rules and mods need scrapping and start again from scratch?
We couldn't trust the mods before, and it seems we can't now.
As to the original point, the people who disbelieved the conspiracy nuts were wrong. Even now some people side with the mods, when they don't have a clue whats going on. Some people genuinly don't care. Some have egg on their face. Life continues....
This is just a random post with some random info. I will post specific occasions of modding corruption with proof, inside mod information they don't want you to know, and other titbits of information between other more light hearted news articles ;)
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9 comments:
Honestly, my thoughts were always that we should have those who are moderators not from the game. With that, you'd at least have little favoritism in the early stages (though it could pop up later). However, the chances of that happening are slim to none due to the fact that people would have a lack of interest in something that they are not really playing themselves and such.
Another alternative would be the dreaded bot mods. Though they have flaws, as all mods do, they really wouldn't be so bad in my eyes. Yes it would have to be tweaked and worked on every now and then, however it would give the ability to punish on the spot. This of course would only be used for chat and would be limited to either mute (which is the form I'm in favor of) or mute/jail. The problem arises when people think they're getting unfairly muted. For that though, I would say that it would be best to have a senior mod on at the time to review instances where the bot makes mistakes and such. I'm also not sure how difficult it would be to code, which brings up a whole different set of problems, especially when deciphering between words such as 'analyze' an 'anal' (as Veridis puts it).
With it though, there's a possibility of less idiotic chatting, restrictions on chat (however, the restrictions would actually not hinder chat as much as you would think, but help prevent flaming, cussing, idiocy, etc), less flaming and spam, and much more intellectual chats without the use of 'gutter language.'
That out of the way, I must also comment on something else the mods created as a rule, though don't enforce. The topic, mini-modding. I've actually seen very few players get warned or muted for telling others the rules in chat, those players though are often told the same thing: that it is in fact "a form of trying to impersonate a mod" according to the mods. However, it's lead to nothing but spam recently, especially with 3-4 forum posts saying "You're not allowed to do that because of X article" or 4-5 lines in chat stating the same thing. I'm not going to say I'm completely innocent of this, because I'm not, but it is getting ridiculous seeing this repeatedly and nothing being done with the exception of a few. Anyways, that's my rant and enjoy the rest of your day :P
Well thought out and expressed kenneth.
You pointed out some other issues and possible solutions. Although many solutions get suggested, none ever get tried out, which is frustrating.
A Mod Bot would remove all "Favouritism" and only deal with the facts, ie. Someone swore -> Mute them.
As mentioned, it can't really deal with context though, so there would still be "Unfair" mutes. ANd you know that those people whining about the Mods now would be the first to whine about the Mod Bot if it unfairly muted them.
However, i still think it would be better for all if it was brought it. With human Mods working in the background, doing the jailing, forum banning, etc.. , answering tickets, and fixing any mistakes made by the Bot.
As for the actual article. It's not really a surprise, i think most people knew that most of them were Mods.
Only ones i didn't know were DaveClarke and Calgor (I assumed that with his record it would be a bit hypocritical for him to enforce rules he couldn't follow himself..Apparantly not for quite some time..)
And while it might be a bit annoying that one specific clan basically ran the game, it is, after all, only that -> A Game. So who really cares?
I'm just glad that so many people saw the mod making a crafty edit to my post today. That one action alone has caused many people to see for themselves the situation with mods helping out clannies :)
I think that it would be good to clear the mods and to just have one senior mod for a time looking to see who would make a good mod and thusly monitoring them to make sure
Hi Poj,
Nice work, although I covered this about 18 months ago and was banned it seems people are actually taking notice this time. Perhaps I was a little early in my distrust M2H gave his brothers Dane (abu) Matt and Kenn and their clan mates.
1 mod you left of the list is Maggie and another I will not divulge as I like her.
Also despite the common theme with what I had been saying since about 2 years, Poj is not me I have a character on Syrnia but as the game is corrupt and the moding inept I rarely play it or log in. It is not hard to see through this and I congratulate those who step outside the clique and speak out for what they believe in.
I was only mentioning the DW mods in this post, figured I wouldnt expose the others. Known the info for a year or so *winks* but only mentioned it now as so much has changed and many are inactive.
If I exposed all the current mods, im not sure if it would do any good. Yeah, players would understand why some of the mutes happened, and would see why the modding was biased in some instances (think about recent core/zen threads + the fact that 4 mods are Zen members) but in the end, the only way to fix the situation is to replace the mods.
If this dosn't happen, the modding will continue to be corrupt, biased and people will continue to complain like that have for the last 18 months. Why not fix the problem all that time ago instead of letting this just continue forever?
4 aye. Bah, i only know 2 (possibly 3) :-(
I just Google'd my name and found this post..! I'll start with its obvious who I am so I hardly need to sign this. I won't comment on who was/is a mod on that list. Just that in 2007/2008 the statement that there were only one or two non DW mods was quite naive and incorrect.
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