Implemented Designated Gamemasters

[Sagsworth]

It seems like we're going into feedback mode to build towards a new launch which will hopefully have resolved many of the issues ongoing. One of the things that continued to be an issue from the start was the perspective of group bias from gamemasters, this existed on TerraNova where staff were accused of being biased towards the White Doves who retrieved a gun from an event ran by one of their members. On Willard there were events where one group received an antlion extract, something that you would presume to be one of the rarest items in the game, there are also reports of guns and other such items being distributed. I was a member of a group which received absolutely no events/handouts from the admin team. The only thing that we had admin help with was setting up our contraband stashes (which required us to use container locks).

I think a good way to avoid these claims and ensure everyone is catered to would be by designating groups with gamemasters.

The way I imagine this would work is that there would be a sign-up sheet for a dedicated GM that a group can go through, they would need to state:

The name of their group​

The type of group (black market, resistance cell, crafters guild, organised gang, etc.)​

The backstory of their group​

The goals of their group​

Why the group is notable enough to warrant a gamemaster (this would not be available to a bunch of blue suits, this is for established groups)​

The names, aliases, steam profiles, discord tags and forum accounts of all members​

Presumably, the GM lead would look over this and (provided the group is notable enough to warrant a gamemaster) and then allocate someone to be the contact for the group.

So what is the job of a designated gamemaster?

1. To be a point of contact for authorisations and questions
2. To help facilitate events that the group wants to organise (e.g., a group wants to raid a warehouse, the gm might set up some requirements, confirm authorisation, have some pre-events where they get info. and then oversee the actual event to ensure that rules are followed)
3. To pro-actively create events for the group, this is not their prime role - nor does it have to be frequent.
4. To communicate the wishes and/or frustrations of the group with the rest of the staff team so that complaints are accurately represented
5. To ensure that the group is roleplaying to a high quality and obeying the rules (groups that fail to roleplay and are clearly only interested in items should probably have their GM revoked)

Being a designated gamemaster does not overtake the priorities of a normal gamemaster, they are still a standard GM and will likely spend more times doing their general GM job than being a designated GM. Ideally, the intensive stuff (writing/planning events) should be infrequent enough to not get in the way of their normal duties. Ideally, the DGMs would be in contact with the GM lead if they're not sure what to do with their group or any questions that needed answering. Additionally it would be 100% necessary for the DGMs to be unbiased, they could not be a member of the group or an antagonist of the group.

edit: while this is designed for illegal groups, there is no reason you couldn't do something similar for notable groups of citizens e.g. loyalist clubs, store owners and employees, or groups of civil protection units who frequently work together.

 

[araskes]

i like this

 

[Bodger]

I think this could work if the GM's who performed this sort of role weren't allowed characters that had interactions with the groups, either good or bad, as it could create bias. On the other hand, just working with people can lead you to have bias towards them as you'll likely know whats going on with them rather than other groups, and even if it doesn't result in bias just by working with them, you still have the issue of the GM thinking they have to do events for their group because they're the designated GM.

 

[Sagsworth]

I think this could work if the GM's who performed this sort of role weren't allowed characters that had interactions with the groups, either good or bad, as it could create bias.

Big agree, hence:

Additionally it would be 100% necessary for the DGMs to be unbiased, they could not be a member of the group or an antagonist of the group.

On the other hand, just working with people can lead you to have bias towards them as you'll likely know whats going on with them rather than other groups, and even if it doesn't result in bias just by working with them, you still have the issue of the GM thinking they have to do events for their group because they're the designated GM.

Every faction lead works with their faction and is in charge of way more important stuff than this, despite being potentially biased by proximity. I don't think this is as big of an issue as you make it out to be, especially considering just like faction leads, DGMs would have oversight from the GM lead who can overrule them if they're being biased. And of course, it's less of an issue if a GM is biased and creates more events for their own group, because other groups would have events made for them by their own GMs. It would still be important to have independent GMs who make events for everyone. But if your point is "they know them better, so they'll make more events for them" - good, that's kind of the point. Groups will get more events, and these events will be more tailored to their specific group and therefore appropriate and good. Because you know your group is a black market organisation, you can tailor their events about this - and if one of the members has a fear of the dark, you can put them in a situation to create this environment. When the Duchy gets all the events because they're the loudest group, but my group and other groups get zero events - you kind of want there to be someone who'll be there to make sure you get something. Even if this is a flaw, this is far less flawed than the current system imho.

 

[Gr4Ss]

I think we were talking about making resistance groups more a semi-official thing - this would work with that as well.

And before people go apeshit over 'semi-official': it is not mandatory for you to do it and anyone is free to form a group. Just those who apply for it get recognized by the administration and can receive some additional support from the staff team (like a proper base, GM's to support them as suggested above, ...). In return they will be expected to adhere to some quality standard and should be promoting RP rather than just scriptwhoring or whatever.

 

[AdamCF]

I do like this. A similar thing happened on reunited gaming, with Ineu Pass being a depot for resistance equipment. A GM left notes around the city w/ a radio frequency and got in contact with a resistance group. Then dead drops and events were organised from there. The character was mainly just in /radio, although he once got his boat destroyed after docking at the i17 beach and interacted with the group for a while as a semi-well armed character (although, a USP was like 250 tokens there so)

But yeah, I like the idea as long as it doesn't create a sort of.. resistance gatekeeping

 

[Madcombat]

I'm all for Designated game masters and this in general is a good idea for cases including outside of groups. You want to form a close attachment to your players? This is how to do it.

Here's the issue:

I don't trust most of the staff team to run a fair event at this point. We've seen countless gear hand outs for minor achievements. We've seen rail Roading on a extreme level. There is only a few people in the staff that I trust with their ability to GM and I can count that number with half my hand blown off.

Whilst I might get a perfectly capable and fair dedicated GM for my group, what stops another group getting a absolute shell-of-a-GM in this current iteration who showers them?

Now, on the assumption the Admin-Quality issue is fixed, I'd be perfectly fine with this, however naturally as I am sure everyone else probably feels to some degree, I have some reservations about the Administration Quality.

Here are some general expectations I'd personally expect out of a GM:
*The Ability to awnser questions OOC'ly
*The Ability to Awnser IC questions posed through actions.
*The ability to be reasonable.
*The Ability to gauge what the individual character is about.
*The Ability to respect a groups intentions.
*The Ability to execute balance.

^ Most GM's have already failed this basic test sadly starting with the first two requirements.

Edit: I see the usual suspects have reacted to my post!

 

[Fabulous]

Great idea. All for it.

 

[Mendelevius]

Amazing! I completely agree to this as it establishes a far better approach to communication and creates transparency between players and staff. However, as @Madcombat stated. Doing it this way could create a bias from said designated GM's. Having spent time catering to a specific group will form a friendship which could give them an unfair advantage over other newer groups with GM's.

As I stated before, I am all for this, what was proposed by @Sagsworth but finding people that will do it correctly will be difficult. We tried it one way and it failed, the quality was not there and having so many shows a clear error in our application process. We can write it into the application, for them to not be bias, but human nature will take it's course whether they intend to or not. We need people with restraint, that have consideration before they act and importantly, Integrity.

Which is something most of our current staff does not have, yet the players do. Strange how that always seems to be the case, and yet so disappointing Willard was no different. As stated before. It will come down to OUR ability to put in better staff and we need a new, better way to do so. The old way of doing it did not find the best people suited for the roles they applied for.

I want to apply this system for the future, but it will only work with the right people. It will take time.

 

[Mullin]

It seems like we're going into feedback mode to build towards a new launch which will hopefully have resolved many of the issues ongoing. One of the things that continued to be an issue from the start was the perspective of group bias from gamemasters, this existed on TerraNova where staff were accused of being biased towards the White Doves who retrieved a gun from an event ran by one of their members. On Willard there were events where one group received an antlion extract, something that you would presume to be one of the rarest items in the game, there are also reports of guns and other such items being distributed. I was a member of a group which received absolutely no events/handouts from the admin team. The only thing that we had admin help with was setting up our contraband stashes (which required us to use container locks).

I think a good way to avoid these claims and ensure everyone is catered to would be by designating groups with gamemasters.

The way I imagine this would work is that there would be a sign-up sheet for a dedicated GM that a group can go through, they would need to state:

The name of their group​

The type of group (black market, resistance cell, crafters guild, organised gang, etc.)​

The backstory of their group​

The goals of their group​

Why the group is notable enough to warrant a gamemaster (this would not be available to a bunch of blue suits, this is for established groups)​

The names, aliases, steam profiles, discord tags and forum accounts of all members​

Presumably, the GM lead would look over this and (provided the group is notable enough to warrant a gamemaster) and then allocate someone to be the contact for the group.

So what is the job of a designated gamemaster?

1. To be a point of contact for authorisations and questions
2. To help facilitate events that the group wants to organise (e.g., a group wants to raid a warehouse, the gm might set up some requirements, confirm authorisation, have some pre-events where they get info. and then oversee the actual event to ensure that rules are followed)
3. To pro-actively create events for the group, this is not their prime role - nor does it have to be frequent.
4. To communicate the wishes and/or frustrations of the group with the rest of the staff team so that complaints are accurately represented
5. To ensure that the group is roleplaying to a high quality and obeying the rules (groups that fail to roleplay and are clearly only interested in items should probably have their GM revoked)

Being a designated gamemaster does not overtake the priorities of a normal gamemaster, they are still a standard GM and will likely spend more times doing their general GM job than being a designated GM. Ideally, the intensive stuff (writing/planning events) should be infrequent enough to not get in the way of their normal duties. Ideally, the DGMs would be in contact with the GM lead if they're not sure what to do with their group or any questions that needed answering. Additionally it would be 100% necessary for the DGMs to be unbiased, they could not be a member of the group or an antagonist of the group.

edit: while this is designed for illegal groups, there is no reason you couldn't do something similar for notable groups of citizens e.g. loyalist clubs, store owners and employees, or groups of civil protection units who frequently work together.

Very nice my friend, this is something we'll strive for; Mendel pretty much saying everything I want to say.

 

[cunt]

it's a big shame something like this has to be suggested

if only some of the current GMs had any semblance of what the RP in HL2RP represented then we wouldn't have the issue of groups having excessive items or people leaving because a GM wanted to ruin their day

big agree either way

 

[TheDeNuke]

As Mendel had stated, we would love to do this but its a matter of finding competent individuals who are capable of doing this without bias. Which from my experience has turned out to be extremely hard, with just about everyone that I've put into the position to do event team related activities either falling into one of three categories:

1. Inactive or low quality

2. Too overt or dangerous event ideas

2. Abusive or biased

The problem is that its very hard to metric inevitable bias or abuse when the application process almost always fails to show the bias. A individual could show off a hundred event documents of increasingly high quality and by all accounts seem like the best event team/GM to ever exist, but in reality all they will actually do when they receive the position is turn their designated group into the best-group-ever-tm.

I'd prefer if we were to entirely keep the admin team away from the resistance, mostly because any attempt to get involved is likely to end in horrible bias.

 

[Vochtig]

I mean, in regards to the topic of including/attracting new players, promoting player freedom and avoiding all-powerful and abusive groups,

wouldn't appointing 'semi-official' groups and actually appointing dedicated staff to support/manage them further alienate potential new players and heavily promote the 'established' groups further isolating themselves and dictating what happens on the server?

 

[Sagsworth]

I mean, in regards to the topic of including/attracting new players, promoting player freedom and avoiding all-powerful and abusive groups,

wouldn't appointing 'semi-official' groups and actually appointing dedicated staff to support/manage them further alienate potential new players and heavily promote the 'established' groups further isolating themselves and dictating what happens on the server?

It depends on how this all operates, giving a group a game master does not make them all-powerful or abusive. Events can result in permanent deaths and losing valuable equipment, this is to provide a narrative tool for progression - not a "i run event and give gun every two weeks" machine. There is absolutely nothing stopping a new group of players forming their own group and going in the same direction, or joining another group to work with them and contribute.

The important thing to say is, this is already how it works on every HL2RP server ever. The primary rebel group will end up being important to events and lore for story reasons, and will events catered to them as a vehicle for development. So the system we have now already alienates new players as they are significantly less impactful than the primary groups, but by forming their own group and getting a GM (which shouldn't be a difficult process) they can go in the same direction and have equal influence (barring the resource gap, which is unavoidable) far earlier than normal. Every HL2RP server I've ever been on has eventually had a dominant group which is where the crux of rebel rp develops from and events focus around, allowing all other groups to get representation can avoid that and bring some diversity instead. You don't need to be the biggest boys on the block to get a GM to build a custom, catered event with you - you just need a group of people and to make something of yourself.

 

[TheDeNuke]

Personally, I feel that the rarest trait for a ET/GM member is "understanding consequences ICly and OOCly".

What may seem like a fun event idea could just as well be a complete disaster ICly which often leads to OOC consequences as well due to the players being annoyed. We don't just need GM's that are not just biased and high quality. We need GM's that understand the broad strokes of what they are doing.

 

[Rabid]

You don't need to be the biggest boys on the block to get a GM to build a custom, catered event with you - you just need a group of people and to make something of yourself.

The biggest concern of this method is you still have the potential for serious bias and abuse.

It is far easier to bury abuse in events than it is to do it openly on the main server, and more than that it is far easier to bury abuse when you have the excuse of keeping a smaller group relevant to the wider server.

If the main group is rocking, say, MP7's is anyone going to dig all that deeply when someone does an event of a smaller group investigating an abandoned Combine outpost where they have a cool adventure and walk away with an MP7, some pistols and ammo as a reward? Probably not, and that's the real double-edged sword because while it may seem fair at first it is very, very easy to push this smaller group far beyond what they should be.

That goes for 'officiated' groups too. They can very easily spiral out of control into unfair territory.

 

[Sagsworth]

The biggest concern of this method is you still have the potential for serious bias and abuse.

It is far easier to bury abuse in events than it is to do it openly on the main server, and more than that it is far easier to bury abuse when you have the excuse of keeping a smaller group relevant to the wider server.

If the main group is rocking, say, MP7's is anyone going to dig all that deeply when someone does an event of a smaller group investigating an abandoned Combine outpost where they have a cool adventure and walk away with an MP7, some pistols and ammo as a reward? Probably not, and that's the real double-edged sword because while it may seem fair at first it is very, very easy to push this smaller group far beyond what they should be.

That goes for 'officiated' groups too. They can very easily spiral out of control into unfair territory.

There is always the potential for serious bias and abuse, in fact, there already has been serious bias and abuse - because events have been disproportionately marketed towards groups like the Duchy who received multiple extract concoctions which are exceptionally rare and powerful items on the server, as well as actual guns while everyone else is rocking up with melees or if they're lucky pipe weapons. You can't avoid the potential for abuse, but if a group has a person who writes their events you can very easily trace the cause and deal with it. And on top of that, every group now has fair access to this by signing up so you don't have a situation like exists now where one group gets all the events because they're set up in the central location, and all the other groups are sidetracked and get nothing. As a rep of a group which has received zero events and zero rewards from GMs or admins, it's kind of funny that you'd suggest that this system would be unbalanced when the current state of affairs is far worse.

All of the things you are mentioning here are flaws with the GM system as is, and there is always the potential for abuse - having everything on the record and traceable to a single point doesn't increase the likelihood of abuse, it helps you watch to make sure that doesn't happen. And on the way, you can end up having multiple in-depth storylines reflected on the server through events which otherwise would be difficult or impossible.

I also think that the GM lead should have to authorise any event where high tier shit like weapons are being distributed, and it should be clear how many are available and how many end up being given during the event.