Addressing a few concerns
First of all, I'd like to start off by thanking everyone for all the feedback on this thread. Threads like this one are excellent for getting feedback directly from our playerbase to see how the public views our community and to air any concerns or issues so we can address them.
What I'll address here in my post will be staff-related as I'm a Supervising Administrator (With HR role) who's responsible for all staff-matters. I feel concerns on this topic are the ones I'm qualified to address so that's what I'll do to hopefully shine some light on a few things that the public might not know.
1. Inactive staff members and promoting more moderators
Having an active staff-team is something that's a priority on any community. A server will quickly deteriorate without the constant supervising of staff (that being administration, development and whatever else).
Internally, Brynn and I post monthly posts containing activity stats on every administrator. We track ingame activity, amount of forum-posts per month and how many PRs the admin has reviewed. This is to give us an overview on how every staff-member is doing, if anyone are "slacking behind" or if there are any admins who's going above and beyond with their activity on these areas.
I view your concern as more than valid when you express how there aren't enough staff-members on; especially during peak hours. This is something we're looking to improve and we're in the middle of getting a few other things on track again (such as the Contributor program).
One suggestion in this thread mentions us having a moderator-team of 10-15 members to ensure that there are enough staff-members to keep the staff-presence at an acceptable level. I understand why this idea is appealing but I also see a few issues by solving our issue this way. We've always tried to have a quality-over-quantity approach when it comes to staff-members. Any current staff-member on our team has been properly reviewed under a microscope as well as been discussed with other staff-members before promoted. We've had to make some adjustments in our past when it comes to Moderators and that's because we've felt that they weren't right for the job. We're very strict when it comes to putting someone in a staff-position because we know how much responsibility and power that comes with that position. While promoting 10-15 moderators would ensure that our servers would be better populated by staffmembers, this would only work short-term and could bring issues in the future as we've seen before.
Internally, we prefer to not have too many staff-members on our team. This is to make sure that we have the right quality and not only quantity of staff-members. We've had a few staff-members who've resigned recently which have opened a position or three, but I don't view a moderator-swarm as a good solution. Moderators tend to be promoted to Administrators after X amount of time, and we'd prefer to not keep someone in a Moderator position if they're Admin-material, but we can't end up with a team consisting of 40 Administrators after X amount of time either. That's a logistical nightmare and too many chefs in the kitchen leaves a big mess and slow progress.
We'll always have a quality-over-quantity-approach when it comes to staff-members, so we can't promote people just for the sake of promoting people. While some people might stand out as moderator-material in my head, I don't see enough qualified people that I could justify putting in that position without us being desperate. There are also a few other issues and concerns with promoting a moderator-swarm like suggested, but these are concerns that I will not discuss here. We're trying to sort out the activity-issue on hand and we thank you for your patience during this. We've all been players at one point and we know how frustrating it can be to play on a server that's poorly administrated.
Another concern here is administration during US timezone, and I understand how this time can be lacking when it comes to staff-presence. The truth of the matter is that the majority of our playerbase is from Europe and that our peak-hours are at EU daytime. We have a few staff-members who are available during US timezones, but I'm often told that the servers are very empty at this time, and that we rarely need more than one staff-member to keep this server in check at this time.
We're trying to sort out this issue with staff-presence and we thank you once again for your patience during this.
Another point against having 10-15 extra moderators is that we currently only have one server up. There's a limit to how many staff-members we can expect to be active, and we can't have a server where 30-40% of the server-population are staff-members. We don't need 30 staff-members for one server. We can adjust in the future as we expand but there's no need for this at this time. Promoting moderators just to have moderators is reluctant, especially considering that the old moderators are now administrators, and the number of total staff-members doesn't drop just because a moderator is promoted to administrator.
2. Staff bias
Staff who are biased in one way or another is to be expected from Staff-members but we're doing our best to prevent this affecting a staff-members judgement and actions. If this were to occur then the Administrator in question would be reviewed and handled by HR. I'll get to this later. If there's anyone who observes a staff-member to be biased then this can only be sorted out if it's reported to us otherwise we won't know of this. The best way of doing this is to post an Admin Report-thread (with sufficient evidence) or by contacting
or myself, either on Steam or in a Private Forum Message. We ask that you supply as much information, context and evidence as possible so we can handle it properly. As I've said before, if you have any concerns or criticism when it comes to a Staff-member then and myself are always available to look into this and act accordingly.
3. Bad attitude from Staff
As I mentioned regarding Staff Bias, if you observe any bad attitude from a staff-member then we ask you to contact us so we can handle it. We can't handle issues or incidents that we aren't informed of and we always strive to have the best when it comes to our staff and how we act. Getting criticism from you is how we can improve ourselves.
4. Staff punishment
A concern that was brought forward in this thread was that players get punished for breaking the rules while staff do not.
As HR, it's our task to make sure that staff-members are acting as they should, and we're there to step in when a staff-member hasn't. Punishments are internal and won't be visible to the public, but admins won't get away with breaking the rules. As mentioned, HR starts an investigation and we go from there. We talk to the administrator in question when there's an issue and we have multiple ways of punishing a staff-members (luckily something we rarely have to do). A staff-member can either be given a warning, a suspension, have powers revoked or be demoted. HR keeps track of these incidents and if a staff-member keeps messing up then they are dealt with accordingly. The internal punishment depends on the situation, severity and if this has been a problem before. I won't get into details but HR talks to the staff-member in question as soon as an issue comes to our table. As Soviet mentioned, warnings go a long way with staff-members and we rarely have to escalate it from there.
We're quite strict when it comes to staff-members following the rules and not abusing their powers, so you can rest assured that HR is there to "smack some booty" when we need to.
5. Bans and blacklists not being consistent
As mentioned, there isn't a preset when it comes to a rulebreakage because there are so many factors that come into play. A few of these factors can be how severe the rulebreakage was, if it was done with intent or if the player in question was unaware of the actions he or she committed was against our rules. The players track-record and attitude also comes into play when punished. Has this player broken this rule before? Has this player broken a lot of rules in a short period of time? Has this player been warned already? Is he honest about his actions or is he attempting to lie to get himself out of trouble?
There are a lot of factors that come into play when a player is punished, and we try to keep this as fair as possible. We can't always get it right and this is why players have a right to appeal a punishment they feel is wrong or excessive.
If you read through my entire post then I salute you. I wish that I've helped to shed some light on these topics, and that you have a better understanding on how we handle things. All concerns mentioned in this thread will be reviewed and we'll take the appropriate steps to ensure that we can offer the best and most fair service we're able to give you.
I'll mention it again, if you feel a staff-member is not acting how he should then feel free to contact or myself and we'll look into it.
Thank you once again for your feedback on this thread.