Open Source Uru Plans, the GOW perspective

[J'Kla]

With UU because it was home hosted it had a shard owner. The owner had overriding authority the owner gave specific admin rights to trusted players an adimn could look at and change the game vault.

With remote hosting and shared ownership the clarity of the shard owner and appointed admins becomes an issue who do we authorise. There was no issue as long as we were in UU because the Shard owner became a benevolent dictator and if they did not like the situation they had the ultimate sanction of pulling the plug.

On D'mala and MO:UL this post of benevolent dictator was jointly held between Cyan and GameTap.

[Chacal]

The hardest part of running a shard is running the box around the game, and running the game itself. Configuration, maintenance, manuallly managing it using Vault Manager.

Events occuring inside the game (operating special avatars, policing) are an entirely different thing. They can be delegated to different people.

I'm not familiar with special avatars and story in Uru, but the policing part I'm very familiar with, because I have been managing teams of admins (called resEngs in MOUL) on game servers for years. Although this was for action games (different crowd), the concept is the same. Here's a quick breakdown of the duties involved:

- write rules for players, tailored to fit the game experience wanted by the community;
- write guidelines and rules for admins, also tailored to the context;

an example of admin guidelines for BF2 servers Show Spoiler

admin_guidelines_2.png (20.65 KiB) Viewed 3708 times

- if applicable, write a procedure for players to apply for adminship (unless this is on invitation only, which is usual);
- carefully selecting admins according to whatever criteria are appropriate for the community. This is the hardest part. You must beware of people on power trips, with poor people skills, or with bad judgment. Try to hire people from all over the world to ensure proper 24h coverage;
- make sure new admins know the rules and guidelines and sign off on them, along with consequences if those are not followed. This is in case of trouble. It is very hard to fire an admin for "having poor people skills" if no specific rule is broken;
- make sure new admins get proper training;
- put new admins in a trial period during which they are monitored and they get feedback and advice;
- put in place a hierarchical system with growing responsibilities (such as: junior admins, admins, senior admins, head admin) according to experience;
- give proper resources to the admins: private forums, documentation, tools;
- manage the roster, making sure there is an admin presence on game servers at peak times, problem times, and as much around the clock as possible;
- monitor chat logs, game logs, forums to make sure everything is running smoothly. Play the game anonymously for monitoring;
- provide arbitration in case of conflict;
- receive player complaints and act accordingly.

This was a different context of course, a competitive environment where strict rules had to be enforced and frequent violations were the norm. Uru is more relaxed, using the same rules would be like launching the SWAT team on a knitting club, but the framework for managing teams of admins should be the same.

[Nalates]

Chacal, great post. Thanks.

One of the RPG's I play in has a section in their forum for APPEALS. When a player feels the ResEng/Admin was wrong/unfair/unjustified and wants to have the whole thing reviewed, they post there. Admins usually respond with the chat logs. The top managers can review the situation and make a call. Of course good in-game admins usually are backed by management. But, it does give the management feedback on the kind of job in-game admins are doing and better insight into the player. I've seen a couple of players get added pentalies and others banned from the game because of their conduct in the review. Since everyone could read the responses in the forum, there was no misunderstanding why the admins/managers did what they did.

Your experience could give us an idea if this is something worthwhile or not.

[Chacal]

Absolutely, this is an essential part of the interaction between players and owners.

what we used in one community Show Spoiler

See here for an example of the "Been banned?" forum we used (warning: there is some strong language in there. Also I'm sorry for the horrible color scheme, I didn't choose it. Select "Firefly Fluid" at bottom left for a better one).

The player rules included a section on how to appeal when you were kicked, banned, or felt you had been abused by an admin. The procedure involved making a post in the appropriate "Been banned?" forum, or using PMs in case of personal issues. A polite post would get you a polite answer and quick resolution.

Our admins had tools for responding efficiently to such posts: a searchable database of all kicks and bans indexed by player name (think of it as the criminal record for a player ), a searchable database of chat logs, Punkbuster logs (for cheating offenses), Punkbuster screenshots, etc.

All of this seems scary, but remember most of it wouldn't apply to an Uru shard.

why this was a different context Show Spoiler

We ran several high-performance Battlefield 1942, BF Vietnam and BF2 servers for highly competitive players. These are violent FPS games for which the player base was 12-to-50-years-old males. A typical server would have 64 players on a Saturday night with 3 or 4 admins watching the game. We had dozens of kicks and bans each night on each server.

I use the past tense because the Battlefield franchise is pretty much dead for that particular community, although technically we still have public servers running.

A badly-admined server would lose all its good players. We had a few dozens of regular players in the community, who participated on the forums and gathered each night on the game servers and the voice servers (Teamspeak and Ventrilo). We knew each other well and wanted to keep having a good time without some stranger ruining the fun.

Adminship was granted on invitation only to trusted and level-headed players. Admins had a lot of respect. They were referees, counselors, trainers. And sometimes big brothers or father figures (on school nights I would come in at 10 PM and kick all the kids out. I routinely banned young players during exam weeks. I wasn't too popular with the under-18 crowd, although several would thank me later.)

I also ran servers for other communities such as bfpirates.com where rules were a lot more relaxed, the emphasis was on fun rather than competition.

[J'Kla]

We are going to have an issue just deciding who is top dog when it comes to shard admin issues.

As I said earlier UU it was the shard owner If he/she said a particular player or action was allowed then that was final. This sort of arbitrator of last resort needs to be a community wide respected voice. Someone with no axe to grind. Behaviour within a written age as far as game play could be called by the age writer. But for the Cyan parts and the chat interaction we really do need to have someone who can command the respect of the community.

I would suggest we need that sorted prior to asking people to join.

[Dachannien]

There seems to be a misperception concerning the US laws in force right now.

COPA was struck down by a district judge in 2007, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision in 2008, and the US Government was enjoined from enforcing the law.

On the other hand, COPPA is still in force. It regulates the kinds of information that Internet services can collect about children age 12 or lower. Essentially, if you operate a website geared toward children, or if you knowingly collect personal information (including e-mail address) from people you know to be age 12 or lower, you have several hoops you have to jump through. Most websites deal with this by either screening new registrants out by age, or by not asking for information that could indicate that a registrant is age 12 or lower.

[Paradox]

On the other hand, COPPA is still in force. It regulates the kinds of information that Internet services can collect about children age 12 or lower. Essentially, if you operate a website geared toward children, or if you knowingly collect personal information (including e-mail address) from people you know to be age 12 or lower, you have several hoops you have to jump through. Most websites deal with this by either screening new registrants out by age, or by not asking for information that could indicate that a registrant is age 12 or lower.

The only thing collected by an Uru server is a username, password, and avatar name(s). As far as I can tell, this shouldn't be a violation of COPPA. I know there were people in UU who were younger than 12, and I don't recall there being any issues with account creation and avatar creation.

A username and password are hardly "knowingly collecting personal information".

[Lontahv]

I've been subject to very bad (global) admins in other online games. They kick people off a server just for fun. And then kick people off the next server.

Shard admins should admin. period. If I'm running a server I don't want somebody coming and telling me s/he can use tools on my server that I don't have or approve.

IMO administration on a GoW shard should be exactly the same as on the forum.

[BAD]

As a former admin for an Until Uru shard, I can confirm that even at times when their were close to 50 people on a shard, the tactics used in Chacal's posts are overkill.

However it is not because they are not needed, but because the amount of problem people you get is much lower. Usually if someone is a problem, it takes a whole lot more finesse then just kicking them or banning them.

The issue with uru is that it is primarily social game. People form friendships and join clicks. These clicks will defend each other even if they are unsure that their friend is innocent. So when you get to the stage that you allow people to defend themselves, you are not dealing with an individual, your dealing with five or six people, that are inteligent enough to not only argue for their friends benefit, but to cause enough doubt and chaos on your forum to get the whole place riled up.

This kind of thing is incredibly hard to difuse.

the only sure way I have found is knowing everyone invloved, and dealing with them one by one. The more people you deflect away from the issue, the easier it is to deal with the offender.

Failure to difuse a problem in this communty effectively, leads to things like the liaison debacle, shard wars, and recently the moderation issues on the MOUL forums. The latter being less intense than the other two.

I'll be happy to help whoever gets the unlucky position of head admin for any shard. They will need insider advice.

I'll have more to say later into next week. I am on vacation, and my mind is a million light years away from the Uru boads.

[Lontahv]

BAD sums it up really well.

With battle-games everything's kinda brutal. Not that people don't have friends. Even on good battle-game servers and games I've been too, the admins usually try to "set an example" for everyone by kicking people that cause just a very little bit of trouble. Though I have seen exceptionally good admins that don't just warn people, they actually try to reason with a troll or TK-er and or calm a disagreement.