Moderation Team Feedback

Hello, wynncraft community.

Today I am here to talk to both the staff team and community about wynncraft’s current state of moderation and the mod team. I am making this thread not because I have been punished or because I have a vendetta against one or more staff members, but because I genuinely want to see this aspect of the server improve, as I believe it is currently in stagnation. In this thread, I will go over the issues that believe are most noteworthy, and also explain how I think they could be fixed.

Issue 1: Community/Staff divide
I will begin by talking about the largest issue: the colossal rift between the playerbase and staff team. As a veteran of this server who has been active in the class community since 2014, I distinctly remember a time where the mod team and playerbase were close. Mods were venerated and generally well-liked by the community, and given their interacts, the mod team seemed to like the playerbase back and saw them as equals. Back then, people WANTED to be a mod, it was like the number one dream. But today? I’ve seen basically no active people say they’d like to be a moderator. And I understand why; they’re a group that feels so far removed from the community.

It does seem like there are more active community mods these days, for example the three new trial mods all seem quite active on discord. Their activity makes me feel like I can easily report stuff to them, and they’ll respond quickly. But a majority of non-discord mods just feel there, like they’re lurking until it’s time to hand out punishments.

I think there are two ways to improve this. The first is for management to encourage more general activity in the forums and discord. The second could be to get a mod as the community manager. Hams rules as a community manager don’t get me wrong, but I miss when pretzule served as a bridge between community and staff.

Issue #2: Unequal rule enforcement
This is where the thread will get controversial, but I do believe a lot of the community will agree with this. I believe the mod team, at least from what I’ve seen as a bystander, puts too much work into moderation of harmless, unimportant things. This refers primarily to moderation of gifs on discord, and joke threads on the forums. Yeah, they are against the rules I guess… but rules can be changed.

I firmly believe that being less harsh towards certain non-malicious activities that are currently against the rules would have an overall beneficial event for all parties. This would go a long way towards bridging the gap between community and staff, and also decreases the mod team’s workload. To summarize, I believe rules should be enforced based on the principle of “does it help the playerbase more than it harms it?”

I'd also like to address a rumor I’ve heard, which is that the staff team takes far too long to respond to issues like nsfw stuff on discord as opposed to something like harmless gifs. I’m calling this a rumor because I don’t recall seeing it myself, but the fact that I’ve heard this goes to further show the mod team and playerbase divide.

Issue 3: It doesn’t feel like you can report the moderators
A sentiment I’ve heard among communities I’m in is that reporting moderators does nothing. If you report them for an issue, it will just be shrugged off. Personally, I disagree, I do think they listen to feedback and reports but there’s no real way to tell this is the case. Maybe reports get ignored, maybe they don’t, but the playerbase nonetheless thinks their words will fall on deaf ears.

It doesn’t help that reporting a mod isn’t easy. The report form is hidden in an obscure part of the forums, and a lot of people don’t know you can report mods to managers (a lot of people probably don’t know who the managers are!). The form is also very feedback oriented, but I’m sorry to say that people would rather report mods in a way similar to player reports rather than fill out a feedback form.

My solution would be as follows: make resources for reporting mods more accessible, and also add a form centered on reporting rather than feedback.

Issue #4/Sorta Conclusion: Fear of bias (or actual bias)
Ok, this might not be an issue, but I’ve heard enough concerns from people that I want to mention it. I’ve seen some concerns lately that the mod team acts with bias towards themselves or others, not to mention I've seen some things that could MAYBE be biased actions, but I don't want to witchhunt. Like I said, I don’t know if this is true (if it is true that’s obviously really bad), but I think this potential issue brings together all of the issues I’ve previously mentioned in the thread. If mods are acting biased, they should be reported, but people don't think they can report them. Acting biased in the first place is emblematic of a divide between the two groups too, and it would obviously be "unequal rule enforcement" that wouldn't fit my proposed goal of preferably doing actions that overall help the community.

Conclusion & Final Notes:
Overall, I think these are the 3-4 issues that the mod team could improve on. I apologize if I sounded too critical in this thread, as I do not hate the moderation team, but I just want the mod team to be back to its 2014-era state, where both parties seemed happy with the situation.

I'd also like to use this thread as an opportunity to promote discussion between these two groups. This is why this thread is in the much more active Wynncraft section, rather than Constructive Feedback. I hope community members can talk about their own issues and how the team can improve, whereas moderators provide their own perspective on these topics. And please guys, don't turn this thread into a flamewar. I'd also like to ask the moderation team to not lock this thread after giving feedback (as has happened in past threads), as such an action only furthers division and a lack of communication.

From my time on this server, I believe these feedback threads can lead to change, and I hope this one has the same effect. Thank you for taking your time to read this.

 

I am rarely active talking wise on the forums, however I agree with everything said here. Especially the divide. It feels like moderators and above are so torn away from the general public that it feels like they just aren’t.. human? Sometimes. Now, this doesn’t go for all and is certainly just a small amount as many moderators I know are generally good people, I just believe that the divide makes it so normal players will never get to know- and for that not think they can speak with a moderator.

 

I'll keep this quick so I don't bore anyone with my rambling

I feel like a lot of the issue here is that they never post on the forums unless it's for moderation. It's just empty. Some of these mods have literally like a single digit amount of posts per year and it's just like ??????

I memed about this earlier but it IS an issue. Shitposts causing a double digit amount of mods to come online and enter panic mode whereas threads that cause actual harm arent being taken down or locked for hours or even days.

THIS. Any time there's any amount of criticism, public or private, they shove it off and give some lousy excuse or explanation. Mod managers believing every mod is perfect and cant do anything wrong is a genuine issue I've seen for the past several years. Stop defending your own mistakes. Own up.

These mod feedback threads almost always get locked as soon as the staff gives an official response, which prevents any further feedback or discussion. This needs to be stopped, it just prevents any further growth and contributes nothing. If you cannot handle feedback you should not be a moderator.

Most recent example I can give here was the post saying "literally 1984" on Dazzle's profile being taken down for "harassment" by Dazzle. If a mod is being harassed, it's better to let a DIFFERENT mod handle it to prevent bias. This is how it was when I was a mod and I do not see why it is not how it is now. This is just wrong.
Another relatively recent example was Doka's thread asking for free stuff and frankly being called against the rules by the mods being given a three day time to be changed instead of being locked or deleted or even moved to trade market was just awful.

This is getting embarrassing. Do better.

 

This is so true. The new trial mods (Slime, Magic and birb) just feel like part of the community who also have the ability to stop bad people. They feel like they're just another member of the community, but one you can look to for help when needed. Discord mods (namely Notafish and Frozenearth) are also pretty active. The other mods kinda just menacingly sit there, rarely talk, and only ever show up to hand out punishments. They don't feel like community members, they feel like... evil gods, or something? I don't know how to describe it. And since they only ever show up to hand out punishments, you see them as somewhat mean people since they are usually threatening someone not to do something or saying "Please do not do that." in an almost condescending manner. You don't get to see their true colours, you only see them as these strict, almost authoritarian people who come to deal with problems and have no time for fun. Of course, this doesn't speak for all moderators, but it speaks for a lot of them. Even Salted feels more like a member of the community than them since he sometimes shows up to have a regular chat with people.

This is another thing. Sometimes it doesn't feel like they have no time for fun like i said before, but rather that they hate fun. Everyone's laughing at some funny forum thread and the moderators step in and take the thread down. Are there reasons for this? Sure! A thread like the one earlier today (which i almost believe prompted you to make this thread), although pretty harmless, would have been one of the only things people reply to, therefore blocking out normal posts. However, it's probably better to move posts like this to the VIP plaza where they would fit better (or maybe even some new free for everyone shitpost forum) than to take them down outright. The only reason a thread should be taken down completely is if it is violating a really big rule, like promoting a scam or being racist or something.

 

free Timmah06

 

bumper car

 

I think the problem is promoting mods who have 2,000 hours of in game playtime but little to no discord and forum activity haha

Why not just restrict their powers to in-game only at this point

 

I've noticed the divide (not just with mods but for other staff as well), and it definitely makes the community feel less... community-y?

 

while there's like two dozen more things that can be said they're probably a little controversial and better suited for another thread. a few points i'd like to add onto fish's:

- moderating these days is quite a bit more intensive than it used to be back in those days and, if i'm remembering correctly, the description of the moderator role was something along the lines of "to enforce the rules and try to make the community the best, most enjoyable it can be" from the moderator code of conduct- when i quite frankly haven't seen that last one happen on a higher scale than an individual mod in years. it's become a bit of an inside jokes in several wynn circles to check new trial mods forum/discord messages and to see where they may come from and it's quite sad to see that a majority over the last two years have often been "who?" with the sneaking suspicion that moderators are intentionally picked based on in-game hours (or classic friend-of picking) and not much else. i suppose the community is just getting more and more fractured with forums dying and the discord becoming a worse experience but that doesn't mean that mods should just avoid stuff altogether- while i'm extremely aware of how difficult staying active can be i would still consider minor presence in at least the general community side a requirement far above being able to be a rule enforcing robot and or fetishist (you know who you are)

credit where credit is due, as sarcastic as you could say "oh these new trials i guess someone gave up on moderating the discord again", it's not invalid per se although the frustration for most players comes from the manner in which mods appear to just be expected to only enforce rules and not be type of figurehead community members that should generally form moderators. knowing some of the mods and knowing some of the management i'm expecting a sizable part of the reason for most of these problems to lie in extreme internal expectations from mods to be utterly infallible and also the "wait with what someone else thinks" and never get it done mentality

- hooking back on that, why does there appear to be some inhuman expectation from mods? anything bad they do gets swept under the rug as much as they could possibly do (even past incidents involving mod abuse and quite some players i'm aware of never went past the mod losing mod rank at some point), and any actual mistake means a mod is going to end up closing themselves off from the community quite quickly. it would also help with the fact that mod bias (which 100% exists. it's fine, it's human, it's unavoidable with the heavy "trust the mod's judgement" style moderation wynn goes for) seems to simply be either ignored as something that exists from upper management (this would be bad) or they're aware of and try to just make seem as if it's not a real thing.

Spoiler: now for a little more tangentially related rambling:

a lot of this would be a lot better if mods were allowed to talk about things. there's a shitton of false rumours and only likely to be true assumptions floating around, and the actual quality of some moderation systems put aside you generally only experience the bad sides of things if you get (falsely?) banned at which point you can't really inform people of it or validly complain about it in public (the low-hanging fruit of "ok lol u got banned" for likes on rule criticism threads of people who got banned because of shenanigans), not to mention the amount of unknowns about all sorts of moderator rulings, restrictions or general opinions internally. i'm not sure how realistic of a suggestion it is *especially* considering this likely goes against what upper management seems to want but the wynn moderation team really needs to work on bringing this "veil of secrecy" concept crumbling down to the ground. it's barely worked for the content team, it has zero reason to exist for mods, if mods are being requested to be more full community members it would be nice to see that actually being the goal internally

OR: i'd like to be proven wrong about this. you know, it gets very hard to speculate about these sorts of things when once again the information known about this is just not really there also we may have to keep into account that some mods are just not that good at being mods

 

I always thought they should have permanently stuck to the atypical system of moderators getting handpicked by owners, instead of the established and unfortunately standard system of allowing users to apply for authority moderator. I don't trust users that want to apply for moderator by their own affirmance

 

You know the topic is serious when everyone is commenting long sentences

 

By posting this message I'm in no way representing the moderator/discord moderator team or other moderators, but simply talking about my own experiences and opinions.

I think that this is the root of all the issues with moderators. At the time when I got invited into the discord moderation team (note: I never intended to become a mod before I was directly invited for trial), I was also starting to fade away from activity on Wynncraft. Honest opinion: new dialogue system ruins the vibe of the game. When I joined, the mindset I had was: "well, I suppose I can do a bit of actually good moderation work here and there, to help the community".

I think that the divide is caused by the old people simply... moving on. It got to the point where all I did was lurk around the discord and deal with some issue whenever I was pinged. I'm going to be frank here, dealing with the same trolling asshats on discord who probably have zero social skills in real life really starts to drain in the long run. In a lot of occasions I have thought: "fuck this, there are other mods online, I won't torture myself with these people today", and have rather focused on real life.

All moderators are volunteers. In the end we aren't obliged to do anything and can leave the team whenever we feel like it, at a moment's notice. I will not make the slightest effort to try and paint the mod team as the "good guys". All of us are normal people, and used to simply be players, just like all of you. Some people are moderators to help others, and some seem to be moderators just for the sake of power over others (you know who I'm talking about). Even inside the team, there are many mods who seem distant, and some whom I haven't talked to even once.

I believe the most recent change started in 2021. With many of the old players becoming inactive and new ones popping up, the forums are dying and the discord has evolved. It's incredibly difficult to find the vibe of the old Wynn community anymore outside of smaller communities like Atlas Inc., in my experience.
While writing this, I thought that I'd describe the "new discord community" to consist of simps, trolls, and new players, but truth be told, I haven't spent much time on the main discord anymore, so I can't really even tell what that community is like. Some of the moderators might, in their head, hold on to what remnants of the old community remain. This, however, is not the right way to approach what the community has become. More liberations should be given in this matter, as you suggested:

I think that this connects to my previous point. If someone is spamming gifs, that's an easy job for a moderator. Warn the guy, and if they continue, mute them or something. If there's an actual issue, ugh, you'd want to leave that to someone else. There are definitely several cases of NSFW content left unchecked by multiple online moderators, and I'm guilty of doing this myself. The only fix for this is for the moderators, myself included, to take their job more seriously.

The mute/ban durations for some offenses also seem to be inconsistent across cases. Sometimes someone may be muted for 30 minutes for the same offense that another person was muted for 12 hours. I think that there should be less (or none) punishments for minor offenses, but harder and more consistent punishments for major offenses to keep the truly problematic people away and not attack the memers.

I have never come across a case where a moderator has been reported, but that's far from my area of responsibility, so it only makes sense. I won't agree with "there is no way you can report the moderators", but the lack of mods getting in trouble makes me believe in this, at least to some extent. The role of mod manager should probably be switched around every now and then.

All I can say is that I have tried to never act biased as a moderator. I cannot speak for anyone else, and I won't. As I've said before, all mods are normal human beings, and if a moderator acts biased, even sub-consciously, I won't be surprised.

Great point. The role of moderator has become undesirable in recent times with the gap between the community and staff growing ever larger. Seeing an in-game moderator is a rare occasion, unless they're there just to punish someone. Perhaps it's the very fact that the mod team was so connected to the community that allowed it to die alongside the outside community. Many moderators are seen as (and in the end, are) rule-enforcing robots. Nowadays moderators are mainly picked based on whoever seems suitable enough for the team in the mods' opinion.

Agreed. I think it's fine to hide the exact details of our punishment system and such, but transparency between the team and the community would harm no one.


Thank you for reading all of this, there's a lot of stuff I've been wanting to say here. I don't know if I'll remain in the role of discord moderator much longer; from the very beginning, it was never my goal to become that serious of a moderator, but I've been hanging on. I've felt that being in the team restricts what I can do and say in the community, and I don't want that.

- Emolga3

 

Just to add some more thoughts and bump the thread. I feel that some, not all, mods take their job way to seriously. While I am clearly not saying you do not need to take it serious, when you are managing a community, I feel some of them treat it like it is their life work. But when it comes down to it, they are just moderators on a silly modified block game, there is no pay, no social status to be gained. Only lost. So yeah, take your job here seriously but still have a bit of fun and goofiness to you, don’t wipe your personality to a clean slate before looking at the forums or discord. The more you have an actual personality as a mod, the more real you become. And then you will feel like a person.

 

Hey! First of all, thank you for your feedback. I'd like to address some of the concerns and discuss improvements we could make.

I think you bring up a valid point here. About your second idea: what would you suggest the tasks of this community manager would be?

I understand that it may seem useless to moderate gifs for example, but at the same time it can genuinely annoy others when a conversation keeps getting interrupted by irrelevant gifs. I think opinions differ on this topic, but changing the useless content for example rule would likely result in a lot more chaos.
edit to clarify: I'm specifically referring to gifs that are completely irrelevant to the conversation here, I prrsonally think gifs that fit in the convo are fine, as long as they're not spammed

With player reports we never tell the reporter what happened to resolve the situation (what kind of punishment for example), to protect the privacy of the reported player. The same thing goes for reports on moderators: they are handled by the mod managers, with a similar level of privacy depending on the case at hand. I understand that it might seem like nothing has happened with the report, but I can assure you that the mod managers do take these reports seriously.
We've been trying to improve the visibility of feedback forms with the Moderation Information Thread, if you have any ideas on how to improve visibility I'd be very interested to hear that! About the moderator feedback form itself: How would you like to see it changed to make it more applicable to reports instead of feedback?

In some cases a moderators actions might seem like bias, but it's important to realize that there's can be a lot going on behind the scenes that impacts a moderators decision on how to handle it. For example: Player A and player B both commit the same infraction, however player B already has 2 warnings for this. Player A might get away with a warning in this case, while player B gets banned. It might seem like they were not treated the same way, but that's because the cases are not equal either.
I don't know the specific cases you're referring to, but if there was actual bias it's definitely important to report that to the mod managers.

Playtime is never the deciding factor to choose a player for trial mod. We look at activity in-game, on discord/forums, and their application if they made one (we never choose someone purely from their application though).

I definitely agree that rumours make it hard to see what's actually true or not. There are definitely things that we need to keep a secret, like specific information about cases (for privacy reasons), but we have been trying to improve transparency about our procedures. One of these things is the Moderation Information Thread that I mentioned earlier - we have a form on there where players can ask questions about rules/clarifications/procedures to improve communication and transparency. If you have any other ideas on how to increase transparency between the mod team and the community we'd be very interested to hear them, since this is definitely something we're trying to work on!

Edit: to clarify, this is a somewhat "official" response (clarifying some situations, asking for feedback etc), but also based on my own experiences and views

 

My brother in Christ, some of the full fledged moderators literally have double digit forum and discord messages.

 

Hey maybe like tell the truth here, this is just a blatant lie and it has frankly gotten worse over time. Isn't honesty important as a staff member?

You guys are too focused on being "professional" that most of your messages come off as robotic and don't sound like real people. This does nothing but worsen the divide between staff and community because it causes people to see you more as "moderator" than "human being who is part of the community and has a real personality"

This entire response just feels like one big "haha we cant tell you anything but I promise we do everything right haha" and that's EXACTLY the issue.

 

Is it… really that big of an issue that moderators aren’t big community members? Sure, it would be nice. But isn’t what’s most important first and foremost is that they do their job and do it well? You don’t need to interact with the community to do that, nor do I think it has to mess with transparency.

 

It is quite the issue because if the mods want to be cared about they need to be respected. And nobody is going to respect someone who only shows up to punish someone then leaves to whatever shadow realm they reside in until the next punishment they dish out

 

Hey, thank you for taking the time to reply here! A lot of what you said gave me a perspective that I hadn’t really thought of recently, that mods can get burnout and not reply to the community. I won’t deny that the community is… a lot sometimes. I wonder if having more mods to lighten the load would help, as right now the team feels smaller than normal, but idk if that is merely an unrealistic bandaid fix.

Also you and Bart mentioning natural bias is something I also didn’t think about, and yeah it’s probably gonna happen. In that case they should reverse or amend any punishments made in bias though.

Hey, thank you for replying too!

My idea for the roles of a mod community manager would be acting as a bridge between mods and the playerbase, so basically the go-to person to ask questions about the team and stuff. And yeah, mods can already answer those questions and make threads, so I think the most important task they’d need to do is community engagement. Replying to threads, engaging in discord convos, hosting events, etc. Basically what pretzule did.

I agree that gifs can get spammy, but they also are a part of conversations these days and imo should be enforced on a case by case basis.

You make a good point when you compare mod reports to player reports. I have heard some people in discord talk about their reports falling on deaf ears which is part of why I made that section, but I don’t know if that’s true. If there was like an easy way for mod managers to reply to the reports that might help, but some people do want anonymity in all fairness. Also you mentioned in your thread that if there’s bias then report them to a manager, but the thing is, a lot of people I know expect their reports to do nothing…

Also I forgot to mention the mod info thread in my main post - I do think it is a cool idea and I hope it helps going forward.

Finally, I’d like to highlight that while it’s nice to have a post that seems more official (judging by the lack of mentioning it’s your own opinions) on this thread, I don’t think it’s what the community wants. I think the community wants mods to be more candid and express flaws with the team and server. I think it goes a long way to show that they care about the playerbase.

 

Why is trying to gain respect from those who want to actively worsen the experience of others important?