being a TA was hilarious because this guy that was on zt had a schitzo meltdown in my dms on like 28 different accounts
part of the uri-nation rateyourmusic
frog up his ass or something
i was a trial gamemaster for approximately two weeks in 2015, a few months before they renamed the position to event squad
gm was extremely demanding because you had to play a jester and a constable while hosting events, splitting your attention between (attempts at) entertaining players, maintaining order and informing the more oblivious participants, cycling between the general chat and whispers from people who wanted to know more about the game or more about your personal life, who knows, it gets lonely out here.
gmtourneys would usually last anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour — though they could last much longer, should the host be a maniac with questionable taste in .tbms — and you had to juggle all of the above throughout the event's entire duration. gmbets were even longer and could potentially reward the sorry host with a case of decap rigging, with ramifications that essentially extended the event's length and would go on to torture the volunteering soul in forum boards and irc channels like #support and #gm for at least a few additional hours. and there were gmhotseats too (i think that's what they were called), where the gm would carry all the responsibilities of hosting while also fighting the shiai-thirsty contestants themself — though they'd normally have one or more co-hosts who would do some solidary jestering and constabling so their fellow staffer could focus on losing in grander style.
and those were only the in-game events. in the forums, gms were encouraged to create the much more complex forum events, from artistic contests to competitive tournaments that lasted several months and opened up more cans of worms in terms of jestering and constabling. granted, these events were designed and moderated by the entire team, so they didn't require as much rapid-fire individual contribution as ingame events did.
but aside of the more creative and fun facets of the job, the other key duties assigned to gamemasters, at the time, were report handling and in-game moderation outside of events, in cases that ranged from minimal teenage unpleasantness to as close as you could get to real world criminal activity within the boundaries of early 2000s software.
though they occasionally had to face the unbelievably nasty underbelly of the mid-2010's toribash community, gms had one last major, pervasive job requirement: they were supposed to be the "smiling face of nabi studios" — a frankly reasonable demand from the higher-ups, given that gms were not only the main connector between regular players and staff in environments (events) that were typically less tense and unbalanced than other places where these two parties would interface (ban appeals, reports, even #support), but also the usual first impression of staff/nabi itself to green little newcomers. sure, that's all true, it just gets hard to be an ever-smiling face when you're regularly dealing with the worst the community has to offer.
i quit gm trialship because, being a 16yo in his third year of high school, i didn't have enough time or privacy to stay in front of the computer uninterruptedly to host events
but then i was a super moderator for over 2 years, amazingly enough, from 2016 to 2018
now it's 2016 and to remedy the clear cut problem of having nabi's smiling faces inevitably become frowning faces, the gamemaster team was transformed into the event squad: a staff group that was primarily responsible for the very taxing event business. all the aforementioned event-unrelated dirty work was appropriately delegated to the super moderators, who already were the frowning faces of nabi.
when i became an smod through a recruitment drive, this revamp project was entering its final stage and, looking back, i don't think the timing was a coincidence. the smod team was in a pretty dire state of inactivity — unlike es, smods were generally older staffers, around the decrepit ages of 20 and 23, which meant more responsibilities outside of a swedish-singaporean indie game's domains — and their workload was about to be intensely increased. i was 17, depressed and in my 8 month long NEET limbo between high school and college, so i had a lot of time to offer.
smods' main burden was to face that one smile-inverting underbelly in its entirety. game reports, forum reports, irc reports, ban appeals. this job is a lot more flexible than hosting: you could solve a batch of forum reports on your phone, at random intervals. it demanded less constant attention than gm work, but was, at risk of sounding dramatic, more mentally exhausting.
fresh faced smods would be easily excitable, very energetic about doing this janitorial work. as time went by, they would be worn out, which is probably why so many smods were so cynical and jaded around the toribash community: because we were constantly engaging with its bizarro side in cases so absurd you'd have to see to believe them. dealing with users such as career scammers, nazis, potential sex pests and unstable children (as an unstable then-child myself) meant the occasional, sometimes recurring, disproportionate backlash: obsessive harassment campaigns, doxxing, racism and other forms of bigotry, etc. it made it a tad difficult to enjoy toribash itself.
but perhaps the more interesting element of smod work was the specialization. the work was flexible enough for us to focus on matters that spoke to us more, such as policy discussion and specialized forum board moderation and overseeing. i did a ton of "investigative" work (:sob:), so i mostly specialized in staff application discussion, usually being pretty decent at evaluating who was actually fit for the roles they applied for.
it brings me no pride to say that, throughout my first year as an smod, i was insanely active; handling over a thousand forum reports while also frequently helping out with the justifiably controversial art board, which we really overmoderated back then, i'll concede. by the second year, college became more and more demanding, and for a while i did fuck-all, mostly voting "no" on applicants that i deemed unworthy (lol), though the jadedness was probably already clouding my judgement by then. i resigned when i realized i was too out of the loop, too busy with school and overwatch, and too dispassionate to contribute. which was a good thing for all possible parties.
i was a wibbles lmod for a few months in 2020. it sucked, but i knew it was going to suck. i essentially just accelerated its demise because it was unsustainable for staff to maintain, as it had become an absolute cesspool. ill say that i enjoyed abusing my inherently unabusable powers by repurposing and derailing the extremely toxic threads.
but to answer the question yes gm was harder
gm was extremely demanding because you had to play a jester and a constable while hosting events, splitting your attention between (attempts at) entertaining players, maintaining order and informing the more oblivious participants, cycling between the general chat and whispers from people who wanted to know more about the game or more about your personal life, who knows, it gets lonely out here.
gmtourneys would usually last anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour — though they could last much longer, should the host be a maniac with questionable taste in .tbms — and you had to juggle all of the above throughout the event's entire duration. gmbets were even longer and could potentially reward the sorry host with a case of decap rigging, with ramifications that essentially extended the event's length and would go on to torture the volunteering soul in forum boards and irc channels like #support and #gm for at least a few additional hours. and there were gmhotseats too (i think that's what they were called), where the gm would carry all the responsibilities of hosting while also fighting the shiai-thirsty contestants themself — though they'd normally have one or more co-hosts who would do some solidary jestering and constabling so their fellow staffer could focus on losing in grander style.
and those were only the in-game events. in the forums, gms were encouraged to create the much more complex forum events, from artistic contests to competitive tournaments that lasted several months and opened up more cans of worms in terms of jestering and constabling. granted, these events were designed and moderated by the entire team, so they didn't require as much rapid-fire individual contribution as ingame events did.
but aside of the more creative and fun facets of the job, the other key duties assigned to gamemasters, at the time, were report handling and in-game moderation outside of events, in cases that ranged from minimal teenage unpleasantness to as close as you could get to real world criminal activity within the boundaries of early 2000s software.
though they occasionally had to face the unbelievably nasty underbelly of the mid-2010's toribash community, gms had one last major, pervasive job requirement: they were supposed to be the "smiling face of nabi studios" — a frankly reasonable demand from the higher-ups, given that gms were not only the main connector between regular players and staff in environments (events) that were typically less tense and unbalanced than other places where these two parties would interface (ban appeals, reports, even #support), but also the usual first impression of staff/nabi itself to green little newcomers. sure, that's all true, it just gets hard to be an ever-smiling face when you're regularly dealing with the worst the community has to offer.
i quit gm trialship because, being a 16yo in his third year of high school, i didn't have enough time or privacy to stay in front of the computer uninterruptedly to host events
but then i was a super moderator for over 2 years, amazingly enough, from 2016 to 2018
now it's 2016 and to remedy the clear cut problem of having nabi's smiling faces inevitably become frowning faces, the gamemaster team was transformed into the event squad: a staff group that was primarily responsible for the very taxing event business. all the aforementioned event-unrelated dirty work was appropriately delegated to the super moderators, who already were the frowning faces of nabi.
when i became an smod through a recruitment drive, this revamp project was entering its final stage and, looking back, i don't think the timing was a coincidence. the smod team was in a pretty dire state of inactivity — unlike es, smods were generally older staffers, around the decrepit ages of 20 and 23, which meant more responsibilities outside of a swedish-singaporean indie game's domains — and their workload was about to be intensely increased. i was 17, depressed and in my 8 month long NEET limbo between high school and college, so i had a lot of time to offer.
smods' main burden was to face that one smile-inverting underbelly in its entirety. game reports, forum reports, irc reports, ban appeals. this job is a lot more flexible than hosting: you could solve a batch of forum reports on your phone, at random intervals. it demanded less constant attention than gm work, but was, at risk of sounding dramatic, more mentally exhausting.
fresh faced smods would be easily excitable, very energetic about doing this janitorial work. as time went by, they would be worn out, which is probably why so many smods were so cynical and jaded around the toribash community: because we were constantly engaging with its bizarro side in cases so absurd you'd have to see to believe them. dealing with users such as career scammers, nazis, potential sex pests and unstable children (as an unstable then-child myself) meant the occasional, sometimes recurring, disproportionate backlash: obsessive harassment campaigns, doxxing, racism and other forms of bigotry, etc. it made it a tad difficult to enjoy toribash itself.
but perhaps the more interesting element of smod work was the specialization. the work was flexible enough for us to focus on matters that spoke to us more, such as policy discussion and specialized forum board moderation and overseeing. i did a ton of "investigative" work (:sob:), so i mostly specialized in staff application discussion, usually being pretty decent at evaluating who was actually fit for the roles they applied for.
it brings me no pride to say that, throughout my first year as an smod, i was insanely active; handling over a thousand forum reports while also frequently helping out with the justifiably controversial art board, which we really overmoderated back then, i'll concede. by the second year, college became more and more demanding, and for a while i did fuck-all, mostly voting "no" on applicants that i deemed unworthy (lol), though the jadedness was probably already clouding my judgement by then. i resigned when i realized i was too out of the loop, too busy with school and overwatch, and too dispassionate to contribute. which was a good thing for all possible parties.
i was a wibbles lmod for a few months in 2020. it sucked, but i knew it was going to suck. i essentially just accelerated its demise because it was unsustainable for staff to maintain, as it had become an absolute cesspool. ill say that i enjoyed abusing my inherently unabusable powers by repurposing and derailing the extremely toxic threads.
but to answer the question yes gm was harder
That was really bad sorry.
Someone tell me why this guy is highly respected by some people ???
Someone tell me why this guy is highly respected by some people ???
) -> smod (?) -> clan admin -> also... help squad... admin... -> died
