Why is that? I understand that it'd be less anonymous at higher levels because of smaller usergroups and because things are more tightly knit, but if all the information is handled by one guy it'd be fairly easy to distribute the results and deliver constructive advice to staff without identities being uncovered.


To the extent that you're defining accountability, yeah, I'd agree that Toribash has a pretty robust system. My version of accountability is a bit broader and includes considering whether staff members neglect to perform some of their responsibilities. It ties in nicely with community and peer evaluations.

I kinda do surveys and research for a living so yeah, I've got couple ideas.
I'll prepare some examples and get back to you, I need an hour or two to write that down.

@ele: Not a bad idea, although I think that staff groups aren't big enough to go for that, I guess there is nothing a good discussion can't handle (although those get a bit heated sometimes) with the current number of people. Still, some form of internal auditing would be worth considering, I have ran into situations with inactive people on various positions, sometimes crucial to the team's well being, multiple times and it really takes a long time for someone to deal with it unless you unleash hell here and there. Lack of general supervison over the teams from some force 'outside' (community manager, perhaps) of them is evident.

I suppose that idea of having Rules subforum is popping up really often and it's amazing it wasn't introduced yet. When I was a Market Squad member, we even did a cleanup to reduce number of Market Rules threads as it's pain to update them all and added links to other rules which may be related to Market usage. However, it still was hard to track them down for regular user - especially that search feature was available only for ToriPrime users (if it still is- come on guys, it's 2016 already, it's not even funny...).

In my opinion having well-tagged Rules board with enabled search option would make tracking rules way easier for both staff members and regular users. After a month or so you get used to going through them, but new users tend not to read them at all, and when they want to find them - it isn't always that easy. Getting them together on one single board can only make life easier for everybody (with person who would take care of it as the only exception as it would be pain-in-backbone to track 'em all)

Note that keeping them as stickies on proper board is still necessary, but they can stay there as "Moved:" threads exactly like on Market subforum.

Most ideas seem pretty good to me. Middlemen looks like something the market needs, it sounds pretty fool proof to me (unless the middlemen are scamming).
Can't say much more about most others, they just look like good ideas.


For the rules board/thread. Aren't you talking about this: http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=323020
I've updated it about 2 months ago as it was completely outdated, liquidoom also made some good changes after that so I guess it's pretty up to date.

The middlemen would recruit from the staff (only or mostly), any fuck ups would be easy to spot.
As for the rules, good job but I still think the board would be better - more visible, easier to find. Some rules thread could be updated or unified as well, creating a board would hopefully come with a quality control about what we should change/improve, how many threads are actually needed.

Oi.

I'm going to respond in regards to the whole content creation idea.
One big problem with Toribash content creation is very simple, small audience. Even if you were to unify content creation by bring in "respected" creators and give them help from the staff, the content creators themselves wont get the thing they want, views and exposure. Toribash has such a small community/playerbase that creating quality content feels quite unrewarding.
For a content creator like me, who likes the game immensly and enjoys talking about/teaching it, to have to spend 10 hours a week on creating content that gets 300 views is simply not worth it.

The other MASSIVE problem (this is the more important one) about creating content promoting Toribash is that there is nothing to promote at this point, Clan league 2016 (the biggest event of the year) is a bit of a let down, half of the clans are inactive, the organizing is just a simple forum thread.
I understand that there are no devs to work on more interesting ways of competition or events in general, but without a way to make TB interesting after 10 years, there is nothing to promote.
Content creation comes from the interesting things about the game itself, and if there is nothing interesting to create content about anymore, you can't force it.
For me to make a podcast about TB would be a "waste of time" because there is nothing much to talk about after a few podcasts. After talking about mods, playstyles and the occasional event, you wont have anything to discuss since almost nothing new happens at this point.

I personally think that the best way to ensure content creation is to let us, the creators, have something to showcase. God damnit if there was a proper competitive scene in the game, (Not some duelers dueling in private for absurd amounts of tc) I would certainly showcase that in a form of a podcast, or maybe some in game analysis, but right now, there isn't anything to showcase.

I will write a responce about the competitive stuff later when I have a bit more time to formulate proper sentences.

Hey!
Good job on compling all of that together Powas.

Honestly these are all great ideas, but you need people who desire to work on them. As Cowmeat said , small audience, but I am 50/50 on that, because you can simply make the audience grow by putting more work into it.

Steam: Obviously great idea to keep thack of the Community Hub, simply because a lot of people post their problems and tips there, so sharing them with the others on the forums would be awesome if it can happen. With that, we might also get some new members which is always great, because without new people, the game will slowly die out.

Toribash Media: Great respect to all the content creators. Honestly if it wasnt them, I think half of the community here whouldnt even know the game. Me personaly, I found the game from Youtube back in 2010, and I was like, oh that seems fun lets try it out! And since then, I am playing every day and still enjoying it alot when you have friends to share your experience with. Feauturing people's work in the Facebook group would be awesome. I can see some videos already being feautured there, but maybe put there also some art or maybe streams.

Organizations: I can see alot of potential here if all the groups manage to host their own events. For example: I was hosting some [TA]Team Aikido events last summer and it turned out great. Nowadays I host [ES] events in-game mostly and the community seems to enjoy alot. Moving back to the Organizations topic, yes I definetly can see the Staff working with some desired Orgs and do amazing work together.

Staff evaluation: In my opinion, it will be great to do these types of surveys once or even twice a year, because that can give alot of feedback to the staff members, by the whole community if they decide to make the survey. It will most likely take them around 5 mins at max to complete the survey, but at the end when "Staff" compile the whole data, the results will be put together and that way, they can see what they need to improve on just continue doing something right.

Duelers board: I can't really say about them, simply because I never duel and I am just not interested in gambling my TC away. All I can say is that the Max Duels per week with a specific acc can or can't be a good idea, because if someone wants to duel with somebody else, they can simply make alts. Even if you they make with IPs, some users use VPNs in their daily lifes, so I dont think this can be monitored really well.

Middleman: Great idea, never have I ever thought of that. Thats awesome to make staff members included in trades, because then the scams will be honestly lowered by atlest 50% in my opinion.

Rules board: Good idea to have the tags, but I also I wanna suggest maybe putting it as a sticky note or something up there (not sure of not included already) to say "Join #Support in the Toribash IRC, if you are not sure about a rule, or you cannot simply find it." That way staff that are active on the IRC can help out immedietly with the answers their are seaking for.

Overall: Great job Powas. If a bunch of people unite and do all of these things said above come true, in my opinion that game will become much better and more played. As for myself, yeah I am willing to help out with anything you need help with. Thanks again for the great suggestions.

Hey, here's what I think;


I have noticed this a lot lately, there is a huge barrier between these two sides; Steam and Forum, players from forum tend to not use steam for any of it's community related affairs and on the same token; players who only use the steam community don't use forum.

Unfortunately since the Steam community has loads of potential for new players to come in and get hooked, there just isn't any "drive" carrying it forward. It's almost as if people might see it once and instantly write it off.

I myself find steam confusing to utilize as I have no idea how it works really but if we had that going in a good direction I would love to participate and further the community strength on that side.

You also have to understand that many gamers don't "care" about forums unless they need something specific from it. And in toribash's case that would come down to the good old "activating/deactivating items and inventory management" (which is already some what split from the forum as it provides little aim towards the community. Clans probably have the biggest impact in getting players onto forum as its the only place to join/create/manage your clan.

Maybe we should be looking into more ways to integrate methods of getting new users across from steam's community towards the forum in a user friendly manner without bombarding them with confusion. A way to link the steam community and forum in such a way that they both carry each other. Because right now, they are very "separate".



This could be a good idea to get players motivated to doing new stuff and feel acknowledged in the community and that is a very good thing. I have noticed over years of making videos, people love being recognized for things they have done and achieved, and I love helping them reach that fulfillment through my videos. If we had more ways to "collect" things to be featured, I believe it would greatly improve the "quality of life" on toribash for most players who love trying new challenges and improving in the various aspects that toribash has to offer. The "media team" as you call it, would then kind of "amplify" those featured things to create excitement and new things to present and motivate more players to do the same.

On the topic of the facebook page; there is a huge audience that is relatively "untapped" on there. I mean having just under 30000 likes, we could definitely utilize that a lot better, there was a stage where I was helping skulfuk in doing so (before i took a break from Tb in April). This ties in directly with what I think about with the featured stuff, it would be amazing to see all kinds of things on the facebook page. Perhaps things like weekly screenshots, videos, art showcases and what not. But there would need to be a person or group to manage and collate all these things from around the community.


In terms of the other topics you mentioned I don't really have any input to add from my side.


For the players, by the players.

@cowmeat: Thanks for the input. I think that to get views and exposure, we first need to create enough of decent content for it to be one of the reasons that people would feel better about actually staying with the community. Toribash was never and probably never will be a major hit with general crowd - ragdolls, turn-based combact and that learning curve are just too different. So yeah, I don't see Toribash videos/podcasts/blog posts getting more than a couple hundreds view, certainly not now. If someone wants to get tons of subs, Toribash isn't the way, however, I think there are enough people who would be willing to do something good in their free time and, certainly, there are people that do good content already (sometimes just a one video here, one tutorial there) that goes unnoticed. Why not try to make it better, even a bit? What if we could hit a steady 1 thousand of views/reads? Or two? Get someone featured via the forum announcement or facebook post, to give him even the slight boost, few hundreds of views instead of just a dozen of them? It's worth a shot in my eyes.
Also, I don't want to force anyone to do anything - follow certain deadlines, keep up producing content when you're clearly out of ideas and so on - the strength of a good media team would be its diversity - you cannot come up with anything good? There are other guys around that will do something. Whole team is lacking ideas? Talk to each other, CnC your work, look through art section, maybe there is something good that was missed and could be featured? Still nothing? Take a break till you come up with something - no 'musts' and 'have tos', just 'may' and 'could' - having a possibility to get something featured is better than having no possibility at all.

As for the lack of changes or content that would allow content creators to be even more creative, I agree, but dev situation and updates is whole another cup of worms. Why not to try to do something with the tools/topics we have right now?

@Trestet: thanks for the support.

@Concon:

Yes, I'm aware, and there is no simple fix for that. We can't force people to go to forums. I think that doing small events there for the steam crowd (it could be started with trivia, even, one that would expect you to look around the forums a bit for the answers), introducing more 'stickies' with different content and have few people actually have an eye on the Hub would allow us to 'save' at least some of those steam-only users - as a good start. There is probably more that needs to be done and there are probably better ideas around, but starting with somethng simple would be a good way out.

I was asked to read through this diligently and give some thoughts;

1) Cowmeat is right on the money. It's really difficult to be a content creator for Toribash. It's really difficult to make it worthwhile, the population is really small and with no developments to talk about, it's just tough. Cow, again, right on the head - Clan League is the biggest event of the year, and despite it being ran better than it ever has before by Reta, and the rules being more fair than ever, is a huge letdown. The 0-0 scorelines are sickening me.

2) What I'd like is an official Toribash blog/updates ran by staff. Good freelance writers that actually give a crap. Talk about the recent texture sets sold, mods being made, events being run, newly invited Staff, clan updates and recruiting, etc.


3) Dueler's Board I think would be great, if only to keep scammers accountable.

4) Rule's Board seems useless atm, we have the need filled.

5) Middleman Initiative seems sketchy, I don't know if the juice is worth the squeeze.

6) Frequent staff evaluation forms wouldn't hurt, but our Complain about staff board seems to be working fundamentally well.

7) I think more people in charge of both Facebook and Steam for text updates really could only work in our interest.