GM's not doing their jobs

[valentineaaron]

I can understand the GM team being low on people.  I can understand they have a million things to do.  But last time I checked GM was short for Game Master.  They have a help team to answer questions from players to give them time to do other things.  Plus they also have the bug tracker to fix issues in the games.  That should give them more time to be in the game as the Game Master and facilitate RP and make the game better for ALL players.  The problem is they aren't.  The don't RP guards, they don't investigate crimes, they don't RP creatures much anymore, they don't hold trials, the don't interact much with players.  I have had a petition that has been open for 4 days now.  It is a petition about a large attack that happened in the middle of town which the gaurds should be very concerned with.  But not only will no GM roleplay  a guard, they can't even answer the petitions anymore. 

Again I can understand if they are busy.  I know the game is undergoing massive changes right now.  But if anyone wants to know why so few players want to bother with this game anymore.  Or why RP is so bad with it I would look to the ones who are supposed to be controlling the game.

[Sarva]

There are several jobs that the GMs are responsible for. The primary function of the GMs is to take care of what we call moderation issues. These issues include such things as.

Ensure that the Player code of Conduct and game rules are enforced and take appropriate action against players that disregard these rules.
Assist in keeping the player free from unwanted harassment.
Assist in reporting bugs found in the game.
Assist in providing feedback for new game functions or modifications to existing functions to the development team.
Relocate players who are stuck in the game geography due to a bug with that portion of the game world.
Assist in other problems that are not otherwise covered by the Game FAQ
Assist with the /help channel.
Checking for frequently hit bugs, errors, or misleading game functions.
Testing reported Quest bugs and fixed quests.

Note most of the time it is GMs that are answering questions in the help channel or watching the answers being provided by players to make sure that proper answers are being given.

The secondary role of the GMs is to try and facilitate role play between players. We do this mainly through the conducting of events and  impersonations of NPCs.  We do also occasionally run guard characters. We don't bring guards into game at the request of players. We also don't get involved with player RPs. We don't have the ability to get involved with every player RP that players might want us to so to avoid the look of favoritism we don't get involved with player RPs. In all my time involved with Planeshift I have seen two trials. One was part of a GM run event and the other one was a pretty unique situation. To do a trial properly takes a min of 5 GMs and most of the time we don't have that amount of GMs available. This is why when the guards do take someone in it is the guards that decide on what punishment, if any will be accessed.

In most cases where a character should be going into jail there should be agreement between the players involved that someone is going to jail. In most cases we can quickly run a guard to accept the character into the jail but we don't have the time to go chasing characters around who should be in jail but who don't allow themselves to be brought in by player characters.

The bottom line is that if we start to get involved in some player RPs then a lot more people will want GM involvement in their RPs and pretty soon we would be spending all of our time involved with player RPs and not have the time to do the other parts of our jobs.

As for your petition I was hoping that another GM could catch you when you were in game to talk the situation over but unfortunately that hasn't happened as quickly as it should have.

[weltall]

  Plus they also have the bug tracker to fix issues in the games. 

that's not part of gm duties. development is done by developers. In some cases they could help with understanding them yet.

[valentineaaron]

Okay Sarva let's start with just one of those.  Ensure player code of conduct is upheld, that is fine but not much of a game if you aren't helping players play.  Assist in keeping away unwanted harrasment, nice but should be secondary again.  Assist in reporting bugs, that is what players are supposed to do on the bugtracker so again not a main responsiblity of the GM's.  Assist in providing feedback for new things in the game, well nothing new has really been added and also that is for gametesters not GM's.  Assist in other problems players have?, that is for the help channel and there are plenty of players who can help which leads to your next one about assisting in the help channel.  Checking for frequent bugs and issues, players do that and report them to the bugtracker, not a job of the GM's.  Testing reported bugs and issues should be the job of the testers not the GM's. 

Sarva I see absolutely nothing in there about being a Game Master.  You are supposed to be helping with the Role Play and environment of the game.  Not working the technical stuff.  That is for testers, and the devs to do.  The GM's used to RP guards, organize events, player creatures as well as npcs and all around add a much richer game experience for everyone.  Since that is not in your list obviously you don't do it anymore which is just sad.  It is one reason why the game suffers at times.  The GM team should refocus itself on RP items in the game and making a richer, more interesting environment for all involved.  The list you gave should all be secondary and if you don't have time it should be those things that suffer.

[Sarva]

Valentineaaron - I'm sorry that the duties of the GMs doesn't fit into your expectations of what GMs should be doing. Remember this is a game that is being developed by a small group of people and many of the people on the team wear multi hats and do jobs outside of their primary duties. The duties for GMs that I outlined were established a long time before I became a GM so there hasn't been any kind of recent change in the duties of the GMs.

Yeah it wold be nice if ther ewere always players available to answer questions in the help channel so GMs didn't have to but the reality is that I've seen lots of times when I was the only advisor available in the help channel and if I didn't answer the question the person needing help wouldn't get any help. It would be nice if we had an extensive team of testers so that GMs wouldn't have to spend time testing things but the fact is there isn't a large gorup of testers available so GMs fill in when needed as best we can.

We still do events and NPC impersonations. Looking back over our records in the last month I see the GMs have doen the following events.

Oct 22nd - Merry Trader
Oct 23rd - Merry Trader
Hydlaa hair saloon
Nov 5th  - Now you see him now you don't
Nov 6th  - Riddle Race
Nov 12th - Oja House auction
It isn't listed in the events completed records but we also did a Terrorize the Wilderness event but only a couple of players were involved and that was around the 10th of Oct.

IN addition to the above I know I have done a couple of guard patrols in the last month and have done a number of NPC impersonations. NPC impersonations are mainly having an NPC makes some comments when a group of players are around and not really an extended thing.

We are trying to get more events done but especially this time of the year with many people doing family events for the holidays it can be harder to get enough people on at the same time to run many of our events.

[LigH]

  I missed another Hair Salon! 

[Dau]

Out of curiosity, has PS ever considered having a specialized RP team?   I've seen this done on other roleplay games, where a small group of people are made into kind of sub-staffers with the sole duty of planning and running events and other staff-driven RP opportunities.   

While I don't think GMs should be dropping their less visible but more important duties for event running (and thank you guys for all your hard work!), events are nice, it would be definitely be fun to see more of them.

[Rigwyn]

You know, as far as events go, players are able to do a lot more than GM's can since they are not bound to the same restrictions. While a player cannot make special items or play as creatures, these things are not needed to make a good, enjoyable event or story. When I played in '09 I remember Tadano Hitoshi - aka Jarexia ran a lot of nice events. They are documented under "In game roleplay events." Other players like Duraza and Jacula did the same and quite well. Jacula's events were very open and often involved many players. People would just join it at random.

When GM's do run events, they need to pre-plan them and have them approved before they can execute them. This takes away from the natural, spontaneous feel occurs in good player led events and stories. Also, GM's are not allowed to casually role play while on as a GM, so when they do run events, their characters tend to spring up out of nowhere. As a player, you have the advantage of being able to slowly role play a character into existence and get them connected with everyone before starting your event. This makes the event or story much more personal and believable.

As a player you can still add in your own props. Tadano was always using quest items as props and integrating bits of information from quests in his stories. We sometimes used books as part of these events. When an item was not available to us, we would just take a book and change its title to match the item. Everyone knew to treat it as if it was that item.

As for playing guards, players should just gather together in character and form a lynch mob if needed. Grab them torches and pitch forks and take the matter into your own hands. It would really suck if the GM guards extinguished each and every conflict - preventing any climax from possibly from occurring. If you have a need for extra guards, then perhaps ask some characters to help out in that respect. Hell, the bad guys work together, why shouldn't the good guys follow suit and do the same? There may even be an IC market for personal and business security guards.

*cough cough*  The Outlaws do offer protection *cough* *cough*

Whisper Bless!

[weltall]

Not really rigwyn there is a big amount of pre-approved events and anyway I didn't see an high % per year of request for event approval since a while. And Dau gm are supposed to do that.

[Aramara Meibi]

There may even be an IC market for personal and business security guards.

There's also the Bounty Hunters Guild. I'll give you three guesse what they do. I will speak from a recent experience, one of my characters was rounded up, tied up and brought to the guards. I was completely willing to let her be arrested and thrown in jail, but there was no GM online at the time, and so the RP kinda hit a brick wall. Luckily some concerned citizen set my character free, and I also RPd it that since my character has been a longtime student of the very guard she was taken to, and has paid handsomely for those lessons, that that guard was willing to let her transgressions slide. Maybe a bit godmodding on my part, but if the NPC is just basically a statue and the RP had to go SOMEWHERE, that seemed to be the only option. Plus I thought it added some humor to the situation, as my character arrogantly assumed the guards were that corrupt. I agree, I and I'm sure all those involved with the RP would have been deeply disappointed if there was a GM online, and they refused to take my character in, even if I was willing to have her face the consequences. I mean, seriously, all she did was kill some people, what's the big deal? Who hasn't?

[Sen]

The op is possibly used to game masters in other games. But, the role of game masters in PS is a bit different of game masters in e.g. tabletop games. In PS, the game master isn't leading the whole roleplay(s), organize or reglement player actions or surroundings as main task.
In PS, it's the task of players to do these things. The game master in PS mostly steps in if something is going amiss to take a correcting influence in a roleplay or, more often, OOC problems between players. Sometimes, game masters have the time and manpower to run events themselves though. When there are more game masters available, this will probably become more frequent again.
Overall, game master is not really a central role in respect of roleplay in PS.

[Gilrond]

Sarva: Can you please list all such events on the calendar or post it on the forum or something? I just noticed this thread, and realized that I haven't even heard about most of these events until now except may be one of them (last haircut event which I witnessed), and obviously I know about those listed on the calendar. May be they tend to be during the time when I'm not on, but without prior announcement it's not even remotely possible to plan to be present. I'd expect this to be not above usual GMs responsibilities to announce events in advance, so users can plan their time if they wish to participate (the exception of course can be some very spontaneously developed event, like impersonating mad ulbers and so on. But something like riddles and etc. can be well planned in advance).

[Sarva]

For most of the events Gilrond we can't post them in advance since we don't know when we wil have the GMs available to do events.GMs don't have regular shifts and when a GM is online is subject to things like work or family obligations. Most of the time events happen when we have a few GMs available and someone says " Hey let's do an event". Even when we do have scheduled events sometimes we are lucky to pull them off if people who said they can be online ot help out have a sudden change of plans and can't make it.

[valentineaaron]

My issue is not with the GM's having jobs they need to do.  My issue is with the structure of the game.  I understand players doing the RP and I have enjoyed that quite a bit.  My issue is that GMs could make the RP so much richer and more interesting if they were more involved in the day to day lives of Yliakum.  I know there are not many of you now which makes it difficult but there are also few players right now as well.  There are some things in the game that players just can't do and limitations of RP that could be overcome with someone there who can manipulate the actual game itself.  If the GM's done have time for that because they are doing other things then maybe another department needs to be created for a group who focuses exclusively not Role Play in the game.  As stated above, there have been a number of times where things have happened where either the guards should get involved or RP could be improved by someone controlling the game. 

Take Roled's wedding as an example.  To be honest it was an RP disaster because the attackers gamed the system.  Well a GM could have stopped it and helped create a better RP environment for the attack to take place.  In my opinion it is one of the biggest issues in the game right now.

[Eonwind]

For most of the events Gilrond we can't post them in advance since we don't know when we wil have the GMs available to do events.GMs don't have regular shifts and when a GM is online is subject to things like work or family obligations. Most of the time events happen when we have a few GMs available and someone says " Hey let's do an event". Even when we do have scheduled events sometimes we are lucky to pull them off if people who said they can be online ot help out have a sudden change of plans and can't make it.

I have an idea that may interest someone: what if the event would be organized by a group of players? May be one or two guilds may meet OOC and prepare an event for all the community?
Of course GM's assistance would be required since the storyboard should be approved and the player cannot use NPC which may be necessary to foster the plot. The advantage would be that not everything would be on GM's shoulder in preparing the event, while letting many players in the event (and sharing the responsbility in its preparation).
I posted something similar here: http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=40452.0

What about you GM's  would you support this?