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TcE-Kryten
Site Admin
Location: england
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Joined: Mar 20, 2007
Posts: 1156
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Ex Mod Open Letter Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 12:09 pm
The following are not the opinions or positions of Novalogic, nor is there any implication that the following are fully-informed opinions. It should not be construed as anything other than observations and predictions that may or may not come to pass.
Were you ever a Moderator?
Yes.
Were you a Game Moderator or forum Moderator?
Both.
Are game mods and forum mods the same guys?
No, I was the only one who double-shifted.
How much time did you do this?
About 3 years.
When did you stop modding?
In 2007. If I see violations now, I’ll report them to an active mod who can investigate.
Which Mods were you?
“Moderator 1” in games, and “NW_Mod1” in forums. I believe someone else is now Game Moderator 1, but I’m not sure.
Did you ever work for Nova?
Paid, no. Volunteer, literally thousands of hours. My wife asked me to calculate once my modding hours, and it came out to something like 5500, and that was while I was still active. I eventually logged far more hours under Mod accounts than under my primary gaming account.
Are you aware that even at minimum wage, that’s over $30,000?
Yes, painfully.
Are you an idiot?
Probably, but it wasn’t about money, or revenge against cheats, or anything like that. It was always about keeping the games fun. My orienting belief about all modding activities was to stay out of the way unless someone was making the game less fun. Even smack-talk has its role, as long as it’s not malicious.
If you spent so much time modding, how come I hardly ever saw Moderator 1 come into my server?
He was there, you just didn’t see him. The Moderator 1 name was mainly used to let players know that we were around keeping an eye on things, and to let players ask questions about things related to Nova.
Spending a lot of time incognito was eye-opening. Some players I respect became rather nasty when playing against unknowns, especially unknowns who were able to beat them. On the other hand, many players you wouldn’t expect went out of their way to help out a player they thought was new to the game (yes, I was often a NEW, but also had several characters at each level of promotion with regular names). In fact I know of one cheat that I banned 5 or 6 times who spent 2 hours with me as a NEW teaching about aiming a mag.
In my opinion, answering questions was an important service Game Mods provided, since players often had trouble getting Nova to answer inquiries. I tried to get an official answer to every question I was asked, but sometimes it wasn’t possible. At one point, Nova hired a person to be “community liaison” (I can’t recall his forum name), and there were a bunch of Q&A threads that he answered, especially in the now-defunct Lounge forum. I thought this was a very good move on Nova’s part, as there was an official answer to many FAQ’s and to specific issues players had. However, this person eventually stopped liaising and was never replaced. If you go look at the stickies in the forums, you can see I tried to make sure that players had access to all the information they needed to keep their accounts in good standing, especially when there was a policy change (e.g. the knife-fight change in LW; I wasn’t a fan of that particular rule change, but I enforced it nonetheless, and tried to explain the logic behind it several times in forum threads).
How can you afford to volunteer all that time?
In my other life, I’m a university professor, so that pays the bills. One of my areas of expertise is criminology/law, so you can kind of see the overlap with modding.
Who are the other Mods?
Sorry, I’m not allowed to discuss that.
Why can’t you tell us who the Mods are?
In some cases, you already know them. Some forum mods use their regular gaming accounts. However, Game Mods are open to backlash, and wouldn’t be able to play a normal game if players knew who they are. I didn’t want my gaming and modding to affect each other, so I chose to use pseudonyms for all modding.
What do Mods see in the games?
They have access to things that other players don’t, that’s all I can say.
Who decided which players got to be Mods?
Nova.
But, the bans of Moderators were always reviewed by Nova employees to make sure they were proper.
Another Mod and I eventually wrote a full manual to use in recruiting and training Game Mods. To my knowledge, it’s still being used.
How many players did you ban?
Over a thousand as a Game Mod, maybe 20 as a forum Mod.
What about players on your squad?
When I started modding, I resigned from my squad to prevent a conflict of interest. That’s why I’ve been solo for so long. Nova didn’t require it, but it just seemed like a good idea to me.
Did you ever ban players you knew?
Yes.
As a forum mod, did you ban people with different political/social beliefs than you?
No, as long as their posts met the requirements of NovaWorld. Remember, all deleted threads and all forum bans were reviewed by Nova employees. Anyway, I have a strong belief that debate is good, not bad, so I’d never ban someone just to prevent them from saying something.
How come my character on the watch/ban/temp-ban list wasn’t unbanned when I asked you about it?
Only Nova can unban. Every player who requested an unban from me had their request forwarded to Nova, but after that it was out of my hands.
Did you EVER cheat?
No. Mods need to know how the cheats work, but we never used them, not even to catch cheats.
Did you have the cheat programs installed on your PC?
No. I’ve seen them in action on other computers though, including some at Nova.
Did Nova write the cheat programs?
No.
Why are you telling us this now?
I’m not embedded in the games anymore, so there’s no backlash. I also think that Nova’s relationship with their customers has changed, and I want the community to know what’s up.
Do you know people at Nova?
Sort of, which is part of why I’m writing this – it’s changed in some very important ways. Mods work very closely with tech support and with the people in charge of Novaworld, so I know them quite well.
So, what’s up with Nova?
Nova was never a big company. Many players envision a corporate giant in skyscraper offices with branches in New York, London, Berlin, Moscow and Tokyo. In fact, the headquarters in Los Angeles (Calabasas, actually) was never larger than one floor of a low-rise office building. The entire tech support department was only 4 guys, and that was for all of Nova’s games. The few branch offices were very small, and they were all dedicated to marketing & sales.
If you want to see what’s changed, try calling tech support (818-878-0325) and see what happens.
Damn.
Yeah. The important part for players is that Nova’s community of players is in jeopardy because of Nova’s changes. I’m talking, of course, about NovaWorld – the stats servers and the forums. Nova today is a smaller company than it was 2 years ago. The result is that many of the things that made Nova games enjoyable no longer receive the resources necessary to keep them viable. I have no reason to believe that the servers/forums will be permanently removed any time soon, but I have strong reasons to believe that they won’t be functioning in any manner that the community is used to. We’ve already seen this with the reduction in the number of servers. More importantly, we’ve seen this in the absolutely horrible state of the forums; the database code doesn’t even work properly, and Nova doesn’t have the resources required to fix it. The forums go up, go down, kick players out, and don’t work properly even when they are up (try using “advanced search” to locate a thread). Some other Moderators seem to have a different orientation toward players than I did, and I don’t believe it improves the morale of the community.
This won’t have as much of an impact on play external to NovaWorld (i.e. public-hosted games), although even the ability to see/join public servers requires NovaWorld to function properly, at least for the older games: No pub servers page = no players joining those servers.
I resigned from modding once it became clear the direction that Nova was moving. I’m willing to volunteer my time to the community as long as Nova was making that effort worthwhile. If the support structure for the community fails, as I believe it is now, then modding becomes moot. The games aren’t as fun, and it has nothing to do with cheaters or trolls. Malaise sets in as even the hardcore players believe that the infrastructure is crumbling, and that pushes players away.
Frankly, I think Nova has shot themselves in the foot. They don’t have the resources to compete with other gaming companies in terms of technology (i.e. gfx engines and so on), but they had an extremely strong and viable niche because of the fanatic community that developed around their games. Their smartest move was to create NovaWorld, which strengthened that niche, and now they’re not supporting it to the same extent as previously. I don’t believe it makes long-term sense, but then I’m not the one signing the paychecks.
If the community survives, it will be a retroactive version (remember df3.net guys?). This was a strong center of activity, but never as strong as NovaWorld, which had the legitimacy associated with the game’s manufacturer. As an aside, the df3.net forums are still up and running, just not very active. http://forums.jolt.co.uk
Is Nova *intentionally* trying to get people to stop playing the older games so they’ll buy new games?
This is one of the great Nova conspiracy theories that’s appeared over and over. The answer is simply: No.
I’ve sort of moved into another community already, but we’ll see. I have no plans to quit Nova permanently, but unfortunately my plans may be irrelevant if the decay continues to the point where there’s nothing left to quit.
UPDATE: Nova appears to have made the decision for me, and has reinstated my forum ban for the original version of this post. I have requested that my playing account be deleted. The irony is that I haven’t been able to keep the forums working long enough to be able to delete the account myself – it keeps crashing or logging me out - which is indicative of the issues I wrote about! |
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Posted:
Fri Oct 03, 2008 4:15 pm
R.I.P Nova |
die |
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