Should Armageddon Staff be given Avatars?

Nyr played. Heh.

I've been told by staff that staff:

1) Get max karma and anything they want to play is approved.

2) They can have multiple alts. There might be some bullshit fine text here, about how it has to be to further an RPT or such, but they can additionally also stat those 'alts' however they want. And in fact, some of the longest running and most well known 'staff alts' were essentially one of these.

I personally think that storytellers spend more time fucking around on staff channel or with their alts, than actually telling stories.

RathustraToday at 12:02 PM
I mean, I'm not going to mince words: Why would I be accountable to players?

You can't trust anyone with this attitude to not abuse their staff level in favor of their PC.

I've been thinking about this question a bit, and I think it's worth discussing the train of thought that leads to questions like the poll question getting asked. There's an issue of to what extent incentives should be provided to people who volunteer to staff a game. And it's a good issue to discuss in a general context for all kinds of MUDs, not just Armageddon. Since most MUDs do not pay their staff with money, and it's generally accepted that labor should be rewarded with some kind of payment, it's understandable that some games would lean towards providing special perks to their staff that no player can attain without becoming a staff member themselves.

But are those perks themselves fair to the players who have no chance of receiving such perks unless they join staff? And is it possible that such perks can be a driving factor toward deciding whether to apply for staff?

In my experience interviewing prospective staff members for Armageddon, we ran into applicants and newly-hired staff that could fairly be described in one of three ways:
1) Selfless. The staff who are just there to help the game be better and more fun. They enjoy the perks of being staff but tend to work more than they play. These staff tend to stick around quite a bit once hired.
2) Selfish. The staff who are willing to work to at least appear to work, but are mostly around because of the perks. They tend to play more than they work. Sometimes they don't even pass probation because they joined thinking they'd get their karma and alts right away, as opposed to 3 months after joining.
3) Malicious. The staff who are there to mess with other players. These types of staff are pretty rare, but they come up from time to time. In my experience they either removed themselves or got removed as soon as they're discovered.

Going back to MUDs in general, I think you're never going to get rid of the malicious type. You're presenting power to people, and some people are going to take that and run with it. Luckily they're rare and noticeable enough when they do pop up, so they're nothing to worry about, really. But you can get rid of the selfish type by removing perks. Then the vast majority of people who apply to staff on your MUD will be of the selfless type: the people who see having the opportunity to staff the game as its own reward.

But to make that dynamic work - where staff, among other things, are restricted from doing anything more than a player can do with their single PC - staffing does have to be rewarding in its own right. That means trusting storytellers that they know enough about Armageddon to run their own plots without a stifling amount of administrative approval requirements. There should be administrative oversight to make sure storytellers aren't running plots in a malicious way - to kill a specific character, for example. Loosening bureaucratic restrictions to make the storytelling experience more than than a liaison role between players and admins with some building and animating powers, would not only make the storytelling experience more valuable, but it's something individual Admins of Armageddon can do on their own with their own clan groups.

Now, with all of that laid out, we can go back to the question at hand. So far I've argued that staff should not be given anything more than a typical player would get. But there's an option in the poll that takes it a step farther, and suggests staff should only play NPCs. And I think, for Armageddon and many other roleplaying games, that this is the right answer. Why? Because I think staff benefit from being able to play PCs in ways even they don't realize. Staff can try as much as they'd like to shield themselves from information that would hurt their IC experience, but they will inevitably get exposed to it in a request or on the IDB (the Immortal Discussion Board). Depending on what kind of character they play and who they work for, they can confer massive advantages or disadvantages to players without that player even realizing. And any antagonistic plotting on a staff PC's behalf will always present a conflict of interest between that staff member and another.

The best staff members are going to be the ones that don't need maximum karma and staff alts to stick around. They're going to be the ones who are willing to sacrifice some of their agency as a player to make the game better for every player. And if they want to enjoy the fruits of their labor, they can do it after they've spent some time on staff. I'm not even against rewarding staff for staffing after the fact, for example, by awarding karma to their player account per the karma guidelines - just make it clear in the karma guidelines that staffing is considered a contribution to the game.

They definitely shouldn’t be allowed to impose caps on classes and then have 2/3 of those cap slots filled with their own avatars.

That is about as bogus as it gets.

There is already a huge incentive for joining staff. You get the following:
-The capability to see everything ongoing in the game at once.
-The capability (albeit with red tape) to run plots and provide fun and entertainment to hundreds of players via echoes, animations and bringing the world to life in ways that players cannot (because they don't have staff commands)
-The capability to play an NPC leader in any clan in the game. Or to have an NPC lackey on hand and jump in and ride along with the Byn or something if they are short handed. I've had this happen with Krrx in the past. He had a desert-elf NPC Trooper that he would animate if the contract we were doing required some extra muscle or the play times weren't lining up.
-A note on Krrx.. he animated a ton of the NPCs in the Byn at the time. It was fucking awesome.

As if all of this weren't enough you also get your ego stroked big time by the sycophantic player base of Armageddon. Never does it fail, especially in the Arm discord and GDB. I'm all for giving out kudos and props to staff but do it in private where it belongs, and doing it blindly and ignoring any faults and having no criticism is a recipe for disaster. You start to believe that you yourself are infallible when you have 20-30 of the most well known players praising you for your greatness. This has been going on for years. People would look upon staff at the APMs at Dragoncon like they were the second coming of christ. I never understood that but I'm sure someone with a psych background could explain. Maybe mehtastic

Vex, Kronibas has a wealth of experience with staff abuse.