Post by briar on May 19, 2022 15:05:07 GMT
(This is not an official suggestion as of yet, just wanted to see what opinions the server/staff as a whole have on this topic and share my own opinions)
The helper rank was initially added to assist the server when staff was not online. Looking back at the Discord #news logs, it seems staff intended for this to be a gateway into staffing for trusted players in addition to the obvious server upkeep. I believe this was not the correct way to go about the helper role, and in this thread I'll attempt to argue for the merits of reinstating the role.
Since the dissolution of the helper rank on the 23rd of April 2022, I have seen an extremely noticeable increase of afk players floating outside of bounds with a 0ms ping winning rounds because no staff are available, or staff is busy on map build. In many cases there is at least one mod available to login and kick the player, but it's frustrating when there is no available staff to have a round last 2-3 minutes after final reachable human was killed. This can also kill the server as frustrated zombies leave because they are impatient.
While I have seen discussion of a vote kick feature in IRC, this could be exploited more than helper rank could. I think the helper rank would be easier to implement as it was already in place previously, whereas a vote kick would be built from the ground up (I have no knowledge of coding so I also am unsure if it would even be possible)
Personally, I believe there should be at least 4 helpers added. These ideally would be very active players who usually log in at different times during the day, and in different timezones. _GN8_ and Flekzz, the previous 2 helpers, are some of the most active players on the server currently and almost every time I've seen a case where an out-of-bounds player should be kicked, one of them had been online. This would also assist with hacking and spam/hate speech in the chat, a recent issue that came up. Staff handled this well by the by except for humans being infected by hackers, I felt burned that I died several times to a hacker because staff were just on IRC, not actively playing, so took extra time to freeze hackers. If helper role was implemented and given to extremely active players, cases like this may be easier avoided.
I don't wish to insult staff, you all work very hard to make this server a great place to be! I just think the process for becoming staff doesn't really take into account how active/inactive the player is, which is fine, but the helper rank would ideally be based around the idea of how active the potential helper is and what time(s) they tend to play the game. This is why I believe it should be a separate rank not conflated with staff at all.
I have to go to work so that's all for now, but what do y'all think? Despite having been on the server since 2016 I've only been an active participant, chatting and trying to improve my skills since like November 2021, so I'd consider myself relatively new. Would love to hear opinions from players who have been active longer before I officially submit a suggestion to re-add helper rank.