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Comments
I don't think they ever said this had anything to do with test servers or any in-game access at all. It's just a group of people with experience in-game who collect and elevate player feedback and help keep the forum tidy. That's basically it. They're volunteer assistants to the Community Team (a.k.a. Spacecats). And it basically makes sense that this would be the case because the Community Team shrunk from 3 to 1, so Spacecats doesn't have time to do three people's jobs. Hence, looking for volunteer help.
Helping streamline the player feedback and understanding what is truly important from what is just fluff/BS is probably useful (considering this section of the forum alone has many pages of threads per day). But I suspect people shouldn't have over-inflated expectations. This isn't like Hotline BHS or something. As we know, there's only so much the Community Team or even EME themselves can influence the core development of the game in the first place.
If other players here, like me, have been a part of those communities, having that line there is quite important.
This would be...my point exactly. He said I was reading too much into it and nitpicking for pointing out that they are basically looking for bottom tier forum moderators. So, I asked him to show me one sentence that was not about cleaning up forums.
@Juude So, they assumed everybody played a game that had a Player Council(not VGM team, not mod team, not CM team, but specifically "Player Council") and decided to give a disclaimer based on that. Interesting theory, I'm not quite buying it. Although, to be fair, Player Council doesn't sound like forum police. More like forum watchdog. I guess they didn't want people to get their hopes up, thinking they'll have any power besides barking at strangers...
From OP: This is what really matters, I mean it doesn't say you're expected to police the forums...
OK, I don't know how to make the quotes work and I'm too lazy to figure it out but...
7 and 8 both talk about benefiting the community. For example, the answer to 8 could be "I can help EmE find and remove disruptive individuals on the forums and speed up the deleting of unwanted topics/posts". And "disruptive individuals" is a direct quote from OP. Please, explain to me how helping with the removal of disruptive individuals is not a type of policing. I'll admit, it's a very low, bottom tier type of policing but reporting on people does qualify, in my opinion at least.
9 has nothing to do with anything. The answer can literally be a nicely worded "I'd love to get people who disagree with me banned from the forums".
As for the whole 2 sentences you found...they are taken out of a paragraph that starts with "keeping the community healthy and well-organised". You can claim that just because the first sentence of a paragraph is absolutely about the forums, doesn't mean the rest of it is but don't you just love the "from other players" part? Emphasis on "other". As in, they won't be providing feedback and ideas, they'll just be gathering and organising it. If it were me, I'd be looking for people who can come up with good ideas based on their knowledge and experience. Not for people who can dig through the trash on this forum and make it more organised.
The basic truth is, OP is looking for forum moderators. All the duties, expectations and "rewards" are standard for a trial forum moderator. Now, maybe it's poor phrasing but I think it's just a poor idea. An actual "player council", what most people expected(and what you still seem to think this is), would NOT have "time spent moderating the forums"-requirement, its goal would be to help improve the game, not the forums, provide ideas that would improve the game, not gather and organise ideas. There would be no obligation to keep the forums tidy and report disruptive individuals(I know, I keep repeating that but it just touches a nerve).
And I don't have a problem with them looking for volunteer moderators. It's just that... You think the people who could truly help improve the game would wanna clean up trash on the forums? Can you picture Yosha moving topics, for example? You think Yithat would be into editing posts? Can you see any of the top 1% of players being remotely interested in sifting through pages of stupidity on daily basis because they have a time quota to meet?
So what if the answer to 8 could be what you posted... someone answering that won't get them in. Spacecats already stated: Take off your tin foil hat and read OP message as a whole, all the answers to your concerns are there...
But besides that... if all they said was "we're looking for the best players to give us their ideas of how to improve the game", tons of people would apply and it'd be no different than what the forum already is. If they pitch it as a committee with responsibilities and expectations, it focuses it more on people who are willing to serve, not just wanting to be listened to. Not everyone will be the right fit to participate on a volunteer committee.
I don't know where anyone got the idea that this would be like a "Board of Directors", because it's really not. If people think EME or BHS is going to take "direction" from players... I suspect they'll be gravely disappointed.
I think the whole discussion really comes down to the idea of "directors" and what "directly influencing" means. You can't really "direct" anything if you don't have all the facts and don't have any measure of accountability to the results. At the end of the day, someone at EME has to sign off and commit to every decision, and they're not going to just to do something only because players -- even the Player Council -- recommend it (presuming they even have the ability, of course). So the responsibility of the Player Council is, at best, to advocate -- to try to present the good ideas and in-view pitfalls and convince the people at EME that it's worth looking at. Then it's up to EME to both a) listen and b) do something. I don't consider that "directing", but you can call it "directly influencing" to the extent that it hopefully pushes some issues to the forefront and makes them a bit more visible.
Mostly, I just hope people have realistic expectations going into this (both the people who are chosen, and the rest of the community who will hold the chosen people "responsible"). The "job description" is pretty clear that this is an advisory role that assists in collecting/escalating feedback and dealing with minor forum moderation issues. But the Player Council isn't responsible for "delivering results" or "making material improvements to the game". That responsibility remains entirely with EME and whether they listen to and act on the escalated feedback. If the player council does their job as described but nothing changes in-game, that's entirely on EME.
I don't think any of the people who would be chosen would be that under-qualified based on what's on the application. But anyway, if this is really the main concern, there's more than one way to deal with it.
The Player Council, as it's explained currently, appears to be there to triage feedback, elevate the good/important stuff, and help keep the forum clean. The expectation appears to be that the people selected would be experienced enough to truly know the good from the bad; of course they would surely have opinions of their own too, based on their expertise. (I wasn't trying to imply they would only provide dumb summaries, because that would add no value to anyone.) But if the concern is that people who are "the true experts" won't apply or be selected because they don't want the forum responsibilities and all they want to do is give their opinions about things, you could consider these people "Subject Matter Experts". You could easily identify additional people who are recognized subject matter experts who can give advice and opinions, but wouldn't have all the normal responsibilities of being a council member.
Personally, I tend to think these people stick out enough already, and anyone who is qualified for the council will already know to take their feedback seriously and elevate it wherever it gets posted or stated. But even aside that, there could be specific ways to ensure those people aren't left out. The last thing the forum needs is for whoever all is chosen to be chastised and chased out because they're not deemed to be "expert enough" to do the job, even if the "true experts" didn't apply because they didn't want to do the work.
It seems to me that the way the forum community accepts the council is pretty vital to its success, so this is why these are the things I am most worried about, even if it's not the direct point you're making. They represent, in my view, the underlying risk that threatens to undermine the group's efforts. Hence my interest in analyzing the perceived risk at the design phase and proposing a design change.
Even if they didn't have that habit to begin with, they'd develop it in order to survive. But it's still better to try to proactively address the actionable criticisms first so that the people crying "n00b" don't have as much of a leg to stand on.
Of course, even a poor premise can be improved greatly by good follow-through. The individual people involved will only gain respect based on their actions, and most people won't hold them responsible for EME's potential failures to improve the game or act on feedback. But I think there's a high potential for resentment if the community feels that the Player Council isn't escalating the truly-important feedback, or doesn't have the skill/expertise/qualifications to discern what really matters. So if anything can be done now to change the design to ensure those voices are adequately represented, I think it will save everyone some potential grief down the road.
Anyway, good discussion, but my meandering is partly because I'm tired... so for now, good night.
Okay, edit... This goes back to what I was saying earlier; the decisions are going to be made entirely by EME and BHS. Your process makes perfect sense for a group of decision-makers, but EME won't expect the players to be able to see things from every angle anyway, nor trust the community to do so. The arguably-most-important angles to EME/BHS are completely invisible to us: acquisition cost, retention rates, ARPU, ARPPU, personnel/budget constraints, development long-term plans, and so on.
But anyway, even this aside, I didn't mean literally that you'd only bring them in one by one and disconnected from everything else, just that you'd consult the experts as needed. You could bring in all the experts to consult on something even if they're not involved with other day-to-day things like forum management.
Now I'm off...
Final Edit: Apparently "t aint" (as in contaminate or pollute) is also a bad word! Who knew!
The concern that was raised was that the emphasis on being on the forum may turn away qualified top experts, and that the emphasis seems to be more on forum management than providing game-related feedback. But, in order to be fully-involved in the process the way you describe, they would have to be fairly-heavily involved on the forum as the primary communication tool for the discussion and evaluation of ideas among the council anyway. Whether they spend time moderating the rest of the forum is somewhat immaterial as long as someone on the council helps do the input filtering.
So... maybe the entire problem is only what we already agree upon: "the initial objective is already poorly-defined and poorly-understood." If you're doing step 1, little things like editing/moving threads and reporting disruptive posters would happen as a matter of course anyway, and wouldn't be a giant to-do. So it seems possible to achieve what you're describing within the framework of what's there, and I think it would meet everyone's objectives (including EME's). The biggest problem would simply be that the emphasis in the opening post is out of balance.
(FWIW, it seems fine to me if all the experts are full members of the council and always involved, but the concern seems to be that they won't want to apply or won't be approved because of how it's being framed now. If Spacecats thinks helping moderate the forum is a significant part of the work to be done, the question is whether people will still be accepted even if they don't really want to do much of that part of the job.)