Forum activity & Staff Applications

This will be my longest post lately...

Good forums activity is a requirement, but not such a strict one that you can only become a staff member with it. If you excel in other areas, we might let sub-par activity slip. An example I had to cite way too often already: Cuddled. She was barely active on the forums when she was accepted but turned out to be an amazing staff member.

Yes, the whole thing is unappealing. However, what is the point of a trial time on HG right now? You would barely be able to play, moderate and gather experience because there are no HG players - so the entire trial time would basically be pointless. As far as I am aware aefrogdog is active in the CTF team scene so letting him do his trial time on CTF seemed logical.
I'm also generally not in favor of handpicking people because it means that the community and the largest part of the staff team get no chance to voice their opinions and possible concerns. If you are aware of a staff applicant breaking some rules, how are you supposed to notify us about this if they never make an application?

There is no specific point because there are various factors of varying importance that play into this. And just because we can not define that point does not make the forums activity requirement obsolete. It is still important for staff applicants to be aware that - even if they don't excel in any area - they can be accepted by meeting all requirements.
We are being less strict on forums activity exactly because of what you said: There is currently less activity going on and it would be absurd to ask for activity when it is basically just spam.

In the past I would have clearly answered this with "only if they meet every requirement". However, as we are currently trying to make lots of changes to Brawl we don't just need people who can moderate chat, but also staff members who are very dedicated and knowledgeable about servers, have ideas and the motivation to create game concepts - which can be a tedious process as it takes forever to balance out all interests.

The denial for TS inactivity was given on September 5th 2017 - so over 9 months ago. Other factors that were mentioned in the denial also played a part in this decision. In the mean time, we switched from Slack to Discord, so TS3 has become even more obsolete and we definitely wouldn't deny someone for this again. This can also be seen by the fact that the denial of Unifier's last application had nothing to do with TS3 inactivity.

This thread is the prime example of why it takes so long to decide whether an application should be accepted or denied. On the one hand, we have the applicants who expect to be judged objectively and quickly and our interest to have active staff members. On the other hand, we have the responsibility to only give this privilege to players we can fully trust with all the powers that come with it and also the need to treat all applicants equally.
After all, staff members get a lot more trust than community members and could - if they are malicious - cause a lot of damage. A prime example of this is a recently resigned staff openly admitting to hacking,

If we deny someone who is a bit below our requirements or someone we do not see characteristically fit for the position of a staff member, we are at the risk of being flamed, threads like this (more aggressive threads - not targetting this one specifically) being created and community members feeling treated unfairly. If we accept the same applicant, we risk letting someone into the staff team who abuses his power - and it is a lot harder to demote a staff member than all of you think. To do so, we would need concrete, clear and undeniable evidence of wrongdoing which barely ever exists.
Whatever we do, we take a risk. So we try to gather as much information about applicants as possible and even then it is a decision that needs to be made carefully. Which takes time I - admittedly - don't always have.

Oh, and we are at the risk of having to write extensive responses to threads about promotions/denials.

That is why he was accepted as a CTF JMod, not as a HG one. The future of HG is uncertain, so for now he will be staff on CTF.

This is not correct; excelling in one category is not enough. After all, all staff members need to be capable of moderating and helping players. Being sub-par in one area can be overlooked, but not in all but one.

Again, this is not our standpoint. All areas are taken into account, they may just be weighted differently.

Being able to code would make you a DEV, it barely plays a role for JMod applications.

Knowing you, @Admiral_Mas0n, you will probably reply to this with an even longer post, taking apart everything I said. Please just be aware that I will likely not have the time to respond with an even longer post (as much as I would like to) and don't mis-interpret me not replying as disregarding/ignoring your arguments.

 

fair enough - seems like i knew less about the situation than I thought I did :v