Corruption

xG00BERx

I am appalled at how many servers are corrupted and think that they can make excessive amounts of things for their players! I have played OSI all my life up until a point about a couple years ago and never ever seen an issue there, I mainly think this is because it is a job not a game your playing.

In the past month or so I have seen 3 servers be ruined in my opinion do to corruption! I am literally out of servers to play because of this issue.

I understand that Admins should be totally paid for their volunteer work as staff but they already get a ton of things for doing that such as knowing the ins and outs of the server. I agree that if they are playing as a player and staff they should be rewarded in gold, items, etc based off of work 100% but my biggest issue is when they start adding items in that are beyond the borders that any other player can receive. That deters me as well as most other players.

Is power that great? Is having that one item that no one has worth destroying a server?

I will not lie and say I have never made my own player items because I have but I have never once made something that a player could not achieve in game.

I guess I am just dreaming of the day where I can play an OSI Server that is balanced and ran by a staff that knows what they are doing, knows the parameters of UO...

One thing that has been proved to me is:
"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely"

Thanks for your ears! Please let me know about your stand on staff corruption? Do you defend the player with evidence or the staff member? Do you really check the logs of all staff members? I am very interested to see what precautions you take to make sure and admin is not destroying your server. Thank you once again.
 
Reading logs is a must of course, but what other server's do is also their business :) If an item is given to a player which can't be had by any other player, you can bet staff will hear about it. At that time if the owner or admin does not remove the item, then of course they will loose player's.
You need to talk with staff, post staff rules for staff and staff rules for players to read so everyone knows what is expected and not expected.
My experience having good staff would be to only hire from your player base, get to know them, how they act or help or don't help other players or new ones.
Staff should also check out player's to see exactly what items they have/wearing.
Start them as a gm and go from there.
Just my thoughts :)
 
First let me put on my admin hat and and say this: Do not name and shame any shard!

Okay now thats out of the way. Here is my stance on it. It's bad. It's bad for the players and it's bad for the server.

I spend a lot of time working on my shard and if I ever had any staff that would give out items unfairly I would be very upset. If there was proof I would talk to the staff member and try to figure out the best way to go forward. If that means removing the staff member so be it but I think I would first re-train any staff as a warning.

If a player wishes to report any abuse I would prefer the deal with me privately. Posting anything publicly for everyone to see helps no one. It doesn't help the player and it doesn't help the server. Most things can be sorted privately if both parties are mature enough to take care of the problem the right way.

I know UO has a history for 'Drama' But I hope that now the game has matured so much that the majority of the of the playerbase has also matured.

My 2 cents.
 
With your advice Milva I have added a ruleset on my forums for my players and GMs to abide by. I didn't think about doing this until you said as such. This way I can hold all my admins and players accountable.
 
My rule is that staff can not possess any item that is not available to a player. They may give resources to their pc's in reasonable amounts but can not use them for any vendors.

I definitely check logs with any new staff.
 
Would any of you ever ban a player because he now know about the admin and such? Would you ban the player to remove false claims of cheating ever reoccurring?

or perhaps remove him because the adding in was "OK" for GMs to do on your server and someone found out? Would you then remove the player so he did not spread the news?
 
Can't answer that question, because I would never allow myself to be in that position to begin with, this post is beginning to sound a bit "personal".
 
Milva said:
Can't answer that question, because I would never allow myself to be in that position to begin with, this post is beginning to sound a bit "personal".
Click to expand...

Then It looks as if I should just quit replying xD
 
Staffing on a successful freeshard is tough. The admins are taking a huge leap of faith in bringing in a stranger to help. As an Admin, your staff and how they conduct themselves is a direct reflection upon you. You want to surround yourself with trustworthy people with strong morals, people who aren't quick to anger over petty things or who would be tempted to do something out of spite. All it takes is one bad GM to ruin a lot of things for you.

As a rule of thumb, we watch our staff command logs and check them at least once a day. I've placed a lot of trust into my GM's and they wouldn't be in their position if I didn't think they would ever become a threat to the well being of the shard, but it's better to know they aren't handing stuff off to their friends or their alts from their staff character. Power corrupts all and it takes someone with a particularly strong will to not give into the temptation. Some servers forbid their staffers from playing the server as an actual player to avoid the temptation of cheating. I don't think it's a good philosophy. The Dev team and the Admins and the other staff can't push out a good product to the community if they don't know what's broken. You can only truly figure that out if you experience it yourself. We allow our staffers to play normally as long as they keep their staff character and their player characters separate. They agreed to go under a different alias than their normal character and they also agreed not to tell anyone about their staff affiliation under threat of being banned from the server.

I guess what I'm getting at is it's all about who you surround yourself with. You can' do it alone, but you can't have blind faith in any random joe who comes up to you asking to be a Counselor or a GM. Good judgement on an Admin's part keeps a server alive. Bad judgement sees the population drop as something newer and shinier comes to light.
 
xG00BERx said:
Would any of you ever ban a player because he now know about the admin and such? Would you ban the player to remove false claims of cheating ever reoccurring?

or perhaps remove him because the adding in was "OK" for GMs to do on your server and someone found out? Would you then remove the player so he did not spread the news?
Click to expand...
If a player made a big enough noise and it turned out there claims were false I would have no choice but to put a stop to it and any possible future false claims that may come from them. Of course they would have to make a lot of noise for this to happen.

If a player took offense to a rule of the shard and again made such a noise that it hurt the shard I would again have to take action. Be that staff characters having items being allowed or any other rule. You have to remember you are a guest on the server. The admins and staff put a lot of time into it for free and any donations that come in, trust me will never pay for the amount of time spent coding unless the server is super popular which <1% are.
 
I agree that there are many servers that have gone down the wrong path, I think .
That's why I am currently working with a small team of great people to make a new server.
All staff will know the do's and dont's. Admins/Owners should not have to check logs there is always enough going on to fill their time.
My idea would be for staff members to have their own guild if they are going to have players.
It is a great way to test things on a live server after testing as a player on a development backup server.
 
Also, we're all volunteers here. When a server is up and running, for many of us, this is our hobby and not something we do as a full time job. Currently, my server, An Corp, is sitting steady at 1000+ clients logged in at all times. If you factor in the 3 account rule and figure that most players probably have 2 accounts logged in at all times, that's roughly around 500 unique players. You're bound to run into a couple of bad eggs that want to troll and see the server burn. They will tread the line between what's acceptable and what's not.

If they are trying to hold your server hostage or trying to blackmail you, you can't give in to them. If you give them something pretty to shut them up, it won't go unnoticed. You'll end up alienating your remaining population. Trying to appease a couple of toxic players isn't worth it the long run. They'll find something else to screw with you and eventually all of their incessant crying and complaining and accusations will turn people away from your server until there's nothing left. Don't cater to the trolls and don't give them any leeway. Tell them to go to hell and if they continue to persist, ban them. They're not worth your time. Focus on more important stuff. Be ready to handle any backlash that they try and throw at you though. Folks in the UO freeshard community can be very petty and vindictive. You have to stick by your decision and take it on the chin until you're able to make them disappear forever.
 
On our Shard we dont allow interactions through Staff with their Players. Even using Search commands for finding IDOCs or give any resource to a playerchar is an absolute no go! I personal even call the Page-System if i need help instead of using a Staff Character. Corruption is a bit issue on multiple parts. Giving Players better opportunitys destroying the fairness, using Donation funds for not Shard related Work means Player would not donate, they pay persons. I personal wouldnt mind if a player say "here take 20$ buy yourself some beer" but i never would use funds given for the server for any other purpose. The reason is simple, if the funds are not enough i would let the shard alive by own funds. As long as i have persons who donate for website and shard i dont need to use my own. Better seperate Shard Staff activities from personal activities.
 
xG00BERx said:
Would any of you ever ban a player because he now know about the admin and such? Would you ban the player to remove false claims of cheating ever reoccurring?

or perhaps remove him because the adding in was "OK" for GMs to do on your server and someone found out? Would you then remove the player so he did not spread the news?
Click to expand...

If its a rule not to spread informations about relations of staff and they dont follow i would. Being staff is also dangerous.If you play as a strong person, may have good gear and someone find out you have a staff position he may claim the wrong way of your playing and take it as opportunity to destroy a specific trust to the staff members. We must keep them out before an issue occurs
 
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