Forum Can we please get a new supporter? (archived by NightFall)

[The Master]

well i can so alot in english but sorry dont get mimus her post totaly does this mean that we are still left with 1 suporter but then just someone else?

To prevent any further grievances regarding the current support team we chose to reclaim the tasks associated with it. This means that there will be two active (Mimus & Ligustah) supporters again, as was requested by the members.

-- Mimus & Ligustah
[/quote]

aaaah now i get it thanks for further explaining, as in my other posts i just agreed for improvments it has nothing to do with any person what so even, well if you 2 have time for it and so on atleast we got 2 poeple then doing the job, but i have no idea if you and mim are alot active, and i also dont know how active tech was because i dont gone look for it, but that means i also cant say if this is inprovement or not,

[Sn4cky]

I think it's high time for me to post here. I've been away and couldn't join the discussion and it got "solved" already but I promised to tell my thoughts so here comes as promised.

First of all, having more supporters can not be a bad thing ever. That only means tickets get dealt with sooner / faster. I don't expect a supporter to sit on forum all day and refresh page to see if someone has submitted a ticket to deal with it immediately. That is why having more supporters is better.

Secondly, I have seen that the first arguments were about Chris not submitting tickets but messaging supporters in-game. You say it's why you implemented the system. It's really good but supporters are supporters everywhere. I am a server supreme but if someone messages me on facebook that they have a problem, I solve them even though I am not on the server where I am supreme. The point I am trying to make here is that the ticket system should not be the only way to contact a supporter because let's admit that there are faster ways sometimes.

Let's see what else is there...

The loudest group is not necessarily the biggest. Indeed it is not necessarily the biggest but I ask, where are the others then? :P The people who wanted to join the discussion already joined it and I consider others to be ignorant about this. That means they don't care whether the forum gets a new supporter or not so why consider them in this? They refrain to give their voices so whether they are a bigger group or not, they do not care. That leaves us with this group which cares about this matter

But wait, there's more...

iTim being inactive over a month is entirely unrelated. Let's take a look at that from another angle. iTim was appointed as a supporter which is a highly respected role in TWC at least I think we can say that since not many people get to be supporters. It takes a lot to fulfill the requirements to be appointed as a supporter and I think it should be handled like that. How does that look like when there is an inactive supporter and nobody does anything. I am not trying to say that you should have appointed a new one because it is indeed not the same thing. However I strongly think that taking action in situations like this is important. I thought being a supporter or being in a high role in TWC is not something that is permanent, but the past experiences show that it's really not the case (let me not mention examples...). I think most people were disturbed by the fact that nobody took action.

no proof for Snackys ticket-matter

I can not let this line go by me without responding If you ask the people who actually got to know me you can find out that if I say something nobody doubts it. It's not because they fear me but because I don't have to make up lies. Too bad the only ones being able to see proof didn't take the time to get it but claim that I am lying One effective way of getting evidence is checking my tickets and checking when were the things done what I requested. It's a lot of time so I can understand why was calling me a liar easier

Moving on...

Yelling a name in the void. I would like to point out that they all yelled the same name in the void isn't it interesting? Why did they yell my name in the so called void? Why not any other of our "active" members? I'd rather not comment this any further

Still going...

"Snacky is very active, very helpfull and he is very polite aswell" -> "No decision without a reason, and no reason without someone writing in down in here right?" What exactly do you consider acceptable reasons? Even if the listed reasons are not acceptable you still can't argue with the fact that everyone is stating, that the more the better. It's more effective that way.

Last bits...

Talking about democracy and stuff. Democracy is about getting things done based on opinions of others. Here it seems like there are some special someones whose opinions matter more and it's of course fine no democracy is perfect Another thing is about the part where you said supporters are to support MST and they are not supposed to be in a good relation with members. While it's true that indeed supporters support the MST, it's silly to say that they don't need to have a good connection with members. Supporters help the MST dealing with the members' problems. Therefore the supporters need to be in a beetter connection with members if we actually want members to turn to them with trust when they have a problem! Supporters are here for the members not the MST.

I think that's all that's been on my mind ever since this started. I'm sorry for this late reply I don't wish to start another discussion about it nor do I want to offend anyone with the words I've said This is my opinion on the matter.

Greetings, $n4cky!

[Ligustah]

First of all, having more supporters can not be a bad thing ever. That only means tickets get dealt with sooner / faster. I don't expect a supporter to sit on forum all day and refresh page to see if someone has submitted a ticket to deal with it immediately. That is why having more supporters is better.

I can't think of any supporter task that absolutely has to be completed in less than 24h (just for your information, the tickets I've worked on this week were usually not older than ~4h).

Secondly, I have seen that the first arguments were about Chris not submitting tickets but messaging supporters in-game. You say it's why you implemented the system. It's really good but supporters are supporters everywhere. I am a server supreme but if someone messages me on facebook that they have a problem, I solve them even though I am not on the server where I am supreme. The point I am trying to make here is that the ticket system should not be the only way to contact a supporter because let's admit that there are faster ways sometimes.

I talked about this earlier in this thread, but there is definitely a point where too many people assigned to the same role start to become a problem. Just imagine having 5 server supremes, just so they could get stuff done faster. I don't think that'd end well. Please also see my earlier answers for an example of when this becomes bad, especially regarding people, who bypass the ticket system to get help faster (which again, I cannot see a single reason for).

The loudest group is not necessarily the biggest. Indeed it is not necessarily the biggest but I ask, where are the others then? :P The people who wanted to join the discussion already joined it and I consider others to be ignorant about this. That means they don't care whether the forum gets a new supporter or not so why consider them in this? They refrain to give their voices so whether they are a bigger group or not, they do not care. That leaves us with this group which cares about this matter

That is exactly the point. The quiet majority doesn't care. You may call them ignorant, I call them content.
In Germany, for example, we have this group of people, who claim to be patriots trying to defend the country from "intruders" (i.e. immigrants). They are a very loud group, yet nobody cares about them, because they are only a tiny fraction of the whole population. Nobody will pass a law or do any action supporting them, just because the majority of the Germans do not explicitly/loudly oppose them.

iTim being inactive over a month is entirely unrelated. Let's take a look at that from another angle. iTim was appointed as a supporter which is a highly respected role in TWC at least I think we can say that since not many people get to be supporters. It takes a lot to fulfill the requirements to be appointed as a supporter and I think it should be handled like that. How does that look like when there is an inactive supporter and nobody does anything. I am not trying to say that you should have appointed a new one because it is indeed not the same thing. However I strongly think that taking action in situations like this is important. I thought being a supporter or being in a high role in TWC is not something that is permanent, but the past experiences show that it's really not the case (let me not mention examples...). I think most people were disturbed by the fact that nobody took action.

The fact that the supporter role is rather exclusive doesn't make it any more important or respected than other tasks within the clan, in my opinion. We simply don't see the need for more supporters, even more so now that we actually do the support work ourselves again and get a very good insight into the amount of tickets and the time they live before being closed.
As for iTim, I'd like to mention that he was not entirely inactive. He still worked on tickets every now and then, just by far not as many as Tech did. Also I cannot see how anyone would think bad about someone being inactive, or the fact that that person is not removed. Especially, and I cannot stress this enough, when there was no actual delay for the vast majority of the tickets that were submitted.
As for me, I didn't get to hear anything about this alleged disturbance among the members. It is true that we sometimes take a very long time to remove people from certain positions and replace them by someone else. There are various reasons for that - one undoubtably being that we sometimes miss things like these. I still cannot see how this caused any damage in this situation, though.

I can not let this line go by me without responding If you ask the people who actually got to know me you can find out that if I say something nobody doubts it. It's not because they fear me but because I don't have to make up lies. Too bad the only ones being able to see proof didn't take the time to get it but claim that I am lying One effective way of getting evidence is checking my tickets and checking when were the things done what I requested. It's a lot of time so I can understand why was calling me a liar easier

I'm surprised to see you picking up this one. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see anything remotely close to us calling you a liar, correct me if I am wrong. Despite what I personally think about the intentions of that paragraph, and the fact that I usually don't care about statements like those, I feel I need to correct you on this one.

First of all, it was Chris (if I am not mistaken) who kept saying that your tickets were delayed. And we never called him a liar for it either. We only stated that we will not make any decisions based on hearsay, just like we expect anyone else in the clan to get his facts straight before making a decision about anything. For your convenience, this is the post I am referring to: http://board.twcclan.org/thread-5744-pos...#pid112704
Also, unlike what you imply, we've taken quite a bit of time in the past for similar discussions, looking up stuff from logs or searching through old posts. When there is a hard decision at stake, we make sure that it's based on information that is correct. In this case, however, we did not sit down and invest time to look through all the old tickets (even though we did check quite a few of them) for two very simple reasons.
1. Chris (I'm just naming him now, because he was the one starting the initial discussion, but it certainly applies to other members as well) never bothered to address all the points we made in our posts. I don't know if anyone even bothered reading them, even though it already took quite a bit of time to write down all those things. We didn't feel like we had any sort of obligation to invest more time into this, when on the other side people weren't willing to do the same.
2. Even if what Chris said was correct (and again, I'm only referring to his words, not yours) it wouldn't have changed the decision we made. If anything, I would have shown to us that iTims inactivity was indeed hurting the support ticket queue.

Yelling a name in the void. I would like to point out that they all yelled the same name in the void isn't it interesting? Why did they yell my name in the so called void? Why not any other of our "active" members? I'd rather not comment this any further

I can certainly comment on this. We wouldn't have chosen you for supporter either way, because you are involved with quite a few of other roles already.

Talking about democracy and stuff. Democracy is about getting things done based on opinions of others. Here it seems like there are some special someones whose opinions matter more and it's of course fine no democracy is perfect Another thing is about the part where you said supporters are to support MST and they are not supposed to be in a good relation with members. While it's true that indeed supporters support the MST, it's silly to say that they don't need to have a good connection with members. Supporters help the MST dealing with the members' problems. Therefore the supporters need to be in a beetter connection with members if we actually want members to turn to them with trust when they have a problem! Supporters are here for the members not the MST.

Let me start off with this probably unpopular, but very true statement: Legally the clan belongs to me. I am the one who is liable for problems or possible violations and I can get into real life trouble for certain things, if those are not done properly. That is why I feel my vote should weigh more than that of others when it comes to decisions like these.

(EDIT: I deliberately did not mention the fact that we also pay quite a bit of money to keep this clan running, because I don't think that it matters for our decision making. Just making sure nobody thinks that it plays any role in this)

To address your actual point, though. I cannot see how any forum related problem requires "trust" towards the person solving it. If natural language processing was at a decently high level this thing could just as well be run by a computer. The process is like this:
1. Member submits ticket
2. Supporter checks ticket for plausibility
3. Supporter solves ticket

At no point during this process any sort of personal interaction is required, so I really cannot understand your argument. For all the tickets that I worked on this week, I don't think anyone cared that I was the one solving them. And if it wasn't for me making a short remark, they probably wouldn't know either. Supporters were a way for us to delegate some of the forum work, so it would be done faster and we had more time for other things. If the MSTs think that they are not needed, it's on us to decide whether to keep them.
That is why we kept asking for actual proof of the inefficiency of the former support team. It's really not like we don't care about the members' opinion, but it's hard to make decisions based on information that is either incorrect or unreliable.

Right now we are two supporters, as was requested by this suggestion thread. If at any point we or the members feel that we are being too slow with tickets or generally overwhelmed by their volume we will look into appointing supporters to help us again. I like to think that we made it very obvious in the past that we are not particularly keen on forcing unpopular decisions on the members, and even though I'll spare out the details I can tell you that we paid a very high price for establishing more democracy within TWC.

I hope I could address all your concerns. If not, I'm here for further discussion (be it this thread, pm or steam).

-- Ligustah + Mimus

[Sn4cky]

Yes, this is more than enough, we certainly have differing opinions but I can't say you are wrong Thank you for answering my thoughts, I don't wish to restart this discussion as it is solved already.

Greetings, $n4cky!