Sunday, March 28th, 2010
Issue: 21   Editor: Mika


Thumbs up for the Staff Aldarion
In my past articles I’ve criticized the staff for the way the game ended up in this round and I still stand by that. However, I’m not a complete jerk who is just whining all the time and I am almost amazed by the way the staff acted this week, so a compliment is in order. But we’re not there yet, this week was just a start.

We finally got the changes promised and as with all changes a lot of people disagreed. I won’t really elaborate on the changes itself but rather on the way how it was implemented. I was pretty annoyed the last few weeks by not seeing any changes and not hearing anything from the staff, particularly the admins. The moderators were around but I hadn’t seen a reply from an admin anywhere on the forums apart from a topic solving the escrow bug. And that is one of the biggest problems this game had: communication with the players.

We, as players, expect admins to communicate with us. The very simple reason for this is that the player wants to know what’s going on as he can’t see behind the scenes. I can imagine the admins don’t really want to do this but the thing is: the admin who did this left. Sabin communicated with the players, he discussed problems, fixed things, went into heavy conversations. He didn’t ignore criticism on the game, he rather tried to solve it, post his own opinion or explain why certain decision were beneficial for the game as a whole.

And that’s the thing, as soon as no-one from the admins is communicating to the players you just get the impression that they don’t care. Their behavior is perceived as lazy, even though the opposite may be true. By not replying to topics a huge gap is created between the admins and the players. An admin must show his presence to avoid this gap being too large. An admin should communicate with the players to show what’s going, to keep in touch with the community. I was surprised this didn’t happen as we all know BSF was away for several months a couple of years ago and he did make an apology for not being online very much. But Sabin became the spokesperson of the Elite Guard so there was no reason for him to show himself on the forums.

I’m not saying that BSF should be the person to do this, but it should at least be one of the admins and since Sabin left, no-one took over that position of someone who is involved with the community. Being online all the time isn’t a solution either, I rather have an admin who spends less time online and more time communicating with the players. However, this week we saw signs of life and I think that’s a great leap in the good direction. When the updates where introduced Nyxxie defended the decisions, went into discussion with people and showed the reasons of the change. I thought that was a good move and an example of how things should be. What’s more, BSF and 5litre made several posts as well in other topics than just these few regarding the changes.

Now, people of the staff, I really hope you continue on this path. Please keep in touch with the people, show them you care, show them you want to make things better. This week was just a start. I must say that I’m pretty happy with the changes, though. Most of my criticism I had regarding the current balance in the game was taken away: crews are way more interesting now that people have to fight to maintain a spot on the statistics, crimes are way more balanced than they were before and the change in OC pay-outs is one I’ve been asking for a long time.

There’s one thing I don’t really get though: people complaining that the old system of crimes should be returned. Most people complaining are the ones that did a hell of a lot of crimes. But let’s not forget, they were the ones benefitting from that situation, they were the ones that got a lot more money from crimes than the casual gamer as they had way more experience and could access more profitable crimes. There’s another thing too, the ‘old’ system shouldn’t have existed in the first place. It was never BSF’s intention to make it so hard that it would take several years non-stop criming before people could get even close to maxing out. Instead of complaining these people should consider themselves lucky to have been able to profit from this ‘mistake’ so long.

People said that a huge amount of players were going to leave because of the updated crimes. Absolutely hideous, the largest part of the players that are no longer playing left because it was too hard to get money, too hard to get a bit of skill in committing a proper crime. Crimes should be beneficial for anyone and the pay-out should certainly not be positively related to the degree of which you are addicted to this game. Hence, I like this update very much. Once again: thumbs up for the staff. I’m just hoping they will continue on this road.