TOPIC: It’s time for a Community Manager votes.

Hey Whoa,

So if you guys have been living under a rock for all your life, The last vote was probably the 2 cm banned players or Raeker.

We need something with a fresh mindset and is able to take criticism and give what you take and doesn’t shut people down.

As you are all aware, SSRP, Deathrun & BHOP are all declining of players and SSRP is clinging on for its life before Chute closes the door on the two servers.

I have made this post for a OPEN DISCUSSION, to ask what the rest of the community think.

To the Community Team: It’s a discussion, Not a call out or drama, therefor this post is NOT AGAINST TOU.


Boys: I know the stress but keep it PG, I don’t want “you know who” deleting this thread or locking it.

Last open: 07 May 2018, Voting finished: 19 May 2018

Thank you for that information Jasmine.

not really something they need to open when they have stuff that goes on with the staff team and TOU that need to be sorted out still

yeh i think they should, as of late everything seems to be ssrp based with little work (that i can see) going into pointshop so it would really benefit them to have another person to focus on the other servers and the ones in development (minecraft)

/unban all

who

I remember the time in 2016/2017 that there was a strawpoll for the community and were 7 candidates which you could vote for 2 after that there was a livestream where a Dutch CM manager was chosen but now cm banned :/

I would love if this would happen again

DANlEL wrote: Was gonna say it

My post about this topic got removed because it hurted feelings

DANlEL wrote:
This made me chuckle.

it should be me so I can call myself prop hunt owner

Spectrum wrote: I think this is a stupid question if there's gonna be a cm team community vote there should be (as always) an application fase. after the application process the rest of the process should continue as normal like the interviews etc. but instead of the LT voting, the community votes.
Just like how it was with Raeker (the best ex cm).

JoshuaIsGreat wrote:
I agree 100%, I Believe that they should be a application process like always where people attend there interviews and then bring across there ideas. We also should have community members like you and myself and Joiey, to attend the interview as witnesses to see the cm ideas. After the interview process we should have a vote like always and to kick out multiple votes from same IP it should be like 1 per person and disable alts or even hold a community meeting in Discord where the votes could take place.

Why would you vote for a new community manager in a weed-infested garden?

Disclaimer
This post is extremely long and my opinion about the thing as a whole is specified in the last section. Feel free to skip towards that section and leave it at that, but I want to give my views on the process of selecting a Community Manager, what a community manager should be, and I'll give my opinion on the way the vote works as well as suggest a new method of voting. This post is meant as a part of the discussion, and is in no way intended to break TOU. People are free to disagree with my ideas, opinions and methods and are free to state that they are. Discussions about the topic at hand and questions can be kept here, and hate about my opinion can go anywhere but here. All of this is my opinion, and not factually right, though I do my best to remain openminded.


All the correct spelling in the above quote and all the silliness aside there's a couple of things that I think should be addressed, I've specified them below. If you do not wish to see the entire post, just go to the bottom paragraph.

Section 1: What goes into a Community Manager
Community Votes Community votes have always been an interesting subject. Theoretically, the community can vote someone to become a community manager even though they might have absolutely no experience and or are completely unfit for the job. Despite what a lot of people think having to deal with the community as a whole can be a bother sometimes, and the position is ideally filled by someone who has or more of the following traits:

• The ability to stay cool in any situation, no matter the stressfulness.
• A genuine care about the community and all of its components and servers.
• The ability to accept when they are wrong.
• Not be afraid to step up and never back down through intimidation
• The ability to plan far ahead, and keep tracks on analytics.

These skills may appear either a bit over the top to some or out of place to others. But a good community manager represents the community and all the servers that are a part of it. A community member that say: only cares about TTT (just an example I love you TTT people ) will usually not work well, or with a lack of enthusiasm towards the other servers.

They should also be someone who is reasonable and someone that can be argued with. Someone with a super hardheaded mindset might not serve well as a community manager as a large part of your "Job" is to make the changes which you have advertised on your application, something that might in certain scenario's (especially regarding policy changes) require you to convince others of why your method is better, this might be a hard task, and for some people might require a lot of work. In which case you should keep your cool, and be reasonable. You might think that changing a in your way policy might be the better way, but you should be receptive towards letting others convince you that as it currently might stand it would work better.

That's also where looking far ahead will come in. You might want to change a policy, open up a new server, or introduce something new to an existing server. You wanna be able to predict what the response will be, how it packs out, and how well it might do. It is easy to get carried away with things, and a good community manager requires patience, and the ability to figure out how certain parts of the community will react to the changes made. You would not want to for example: introduce a new method of gaining pointshop points, or diamonds which crashes the economies of the other servers. Something like that requires careful planning and lots of predictions about how it will affect all the servers.

Section 2: Voting Methods
To select a community manager we've observed two ways of the vote going down.

Method #1: The Community Vote, everyone can vote once for their preferred candidate and then the most popular ones would come in to become the community managers for the year during which they can fulfil their promises made on their applications. This comes with its own positives and negatives


Method #2: The Community Team Votes. This method was controversial when it was introduced but serves its own purpose. This method has its own negatives and positives just as the previous method does, yet in my opinion, this one is the better way of handling it without completely overhauling the system (I'll provide another system below as a suggestion).


Suggested Vote, the Compromise This method does not exist, however, I feel in my personal opinion that it might serve as a better alternative vs the other methods previously used. This method combines the Community Team's vision of who might be better suited for the job combined with the community's feel on wanting to vote on their own representative. It would work as follows.

Phase 1: applications Each person wanting to run for the position of community manager is required to make an application. This can hold up to the old standards where they make their own template from scratch. From here 1 - 2 weeks pass and then it moves to phase 2.

Phase 2: Elimination. Once phase 1 is complete, the Community Team has an interview with each of the candidates through which they attempt to grasp the candidate's abilities and skills. And they may choose to let a person pass or to eliminate them from the vote. This has to be done for each of the candidates until up to 5 - 10 (depending on the number of candidates that applied) remain. From here it moves to phase 3.

Phase 3: The Vote. Upon concluding phase 2, phase 3 goes into effect. From here on out each of the approved candidates (which there has at least to be 3 or more) is moved on to the voting process. I would suggest that the old process of choosing 1 candidate you like most, would be replaced with assigning each candidate a preference.

Each member gets the ability to assign a number 1 - 5 (for 5 candidates, 1 - 10 for 10 candidates) to each person. 1 being their most preferred, 5 being their least preferred candidate. Once all the votes are cast the weakest candidate is eliminated, the votes from the ones who voted for that candidate (as preference 1) get moved to their next most preferred candidate. Votes are recounted, then the next is eliminated until two people remain. The one with the most votes of which wins.

The winner of the above vote is then promoted to becoming the year's Community Manager. As with the other votes, I'll provide positive and negatives.


Section 3: User Presence
It is important for a Community Manager to be transparent about their plans. Especially since certain parts of their application should call out to players to make the players vote for them. However, I do not think that normal players should be present during the interview process. I think that a candidate must make their intentions and everything else that will be handled during the interview clear in their application. It is part of the job. Things like discussions and alike may be organized by a candidate themselves, this allows them to show initiative and show that they are willing to listen to the community.

Section 4: Where to Vote & Closing Statement
Personally, I believe that the best place to vote is here. Zarp is a large community and each of its branches will lead you back here. Do you need to apply, appeal, introduce yourself? You do it here. This place is the heart of the community, and even though it may appear barren compared to what it used to be it still has its importance

Almost nobody uses Teamspeak, Discord is more flawed when it comes to using alts cause on the forums they can check IP's and figure out who is an alt, something that you cannot do on Discord. The forums are the place to place the community vote, as by far most people will look here. And even if they only check discord it would be natural to make an announcement for the votes in discord, as well as on all the servers.

And Finally... this one took ages to write, its long, bothersome, filled with lots of text perhaps even way over the top for this topic in a simple gaming community. But I think that it's still something that might need to be stated. There's a lot to these things, and quite frankly this process is never going to be easy. Letting the community choose is a recipe for disaster, though I still think that the community should have a say in choosing who will be the community manager(s).

Its something that is practically tradition really, or at least... it should be. Community managers exist (or should exist) to bring to light issues from the community to the community team. They are a bridge that can make changes, much like electing a person for a local town council. They have the power to make things happen and I believe that it is crucial that the one elected to make changes, is chosen by the community and backed up by the community team its a piece of teamwork, something we have to do together. Something that will fail if either the community or the community team distrusts it.

Jordan is right, we've been without a community manager for long enough. But, choosing a Community Manager isn't an easy task. It takes lots of time and effort, it is also time to make choosing a community manager something that is streamlined, with clear policies and no changes to it from year to year that occurs on a set date.

With that... I'mma leave it here, I have plenty of other ideas or alternatives but this post is long enough (and hopefully will not crash the forums.) And I hope its one that you take a read through, despite its length I did my best to make it something in that, hopefully, we can all agree on.

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kemi wrote:
I believe we have just found our new Community Manager

kemi wrote: Damn bro I ain't reading that