Amsel_ wrote:I don't agree with having a separate volunteer team to manage these reports. When you make anonymous reports there's a certain amount of trust you have to have. If I had to reveal my first name while providing evidence; it would look extremely bad if a moderator were to go telling people my name. Accountability for judges is important. I don't think you can trust people who were only chosen because they were popular. If a member of the ESOC team does something unethical; his status is at risk. If moderators are users who have been selected for their administrative abilities then it only makes sense to have them be in charge of reviewing reports. If ESOC is to implement reports then it is essential that the people handling those reports are trustworthy and able to be held accountable. Furthermore, the mods will be the ones administering punishments. This already necessitates their involvement in the process, and requires a complete review of the report. Because of this, having a volunteer team would not save time, and would, in fact, only make the process more bureaucratic and inefficient. It would allow for more possible bias, yet provides no tangible benefit.
Okay I tell you the reason I had when I proposed a team besides the staff. The staff does a plenty of work, maintains the forums, checks the posting standards on the forums, maintains the patch, maintains the stream quality, checks on the tournament quality, makes sure tourneys don't take long, uploading the recs/videos on yt, schedules casters, schedules players, makes new maps, makes sure there's less idle time between two tourneys. And in the process, the staff exposes itself to a lot of criticism. Couple of days back someone criticised Rikikipu for his maps and claimed it was because of Riki that his team lost. Almost round the clock, the community team takes the heat for biased moderation, banning people for no reason and stuff. Media team sometime takes the blame for some games not being played at all (reason can be anything from bad timing of tourney to not making efficient brackets).
In short the staff has been taking the blame for anything that happens in the community, being a former member of ESOC Staff I realize the importance of maintaining a good image before the entire community a little bit more than you. While I understand your concern of sharing information with "popular players" of community and responsible staff members, I'd assure this qualities- "popularity" and "responsibility" are not mutually exclusive. All of these staff members were once ordinary but now they wear colors doesn't mean other regular users are not responsible. I suggested the names because I believe they have the knowledge to find anything which is beyond the possibility of happening in the game because they have experience of so many years that they can be sure.
We certainly wouldn't want scenarios where Umeu and Lejend are reviewing reports against each other. If 'judges' are picked solely by their popularity then there's going to be a natural bias against unpopular members.
This is one of the reasons why a team is preferred over a single person judging players. Do you think other members of the team will not do anything if they see Umeu blaming Lejend for no reason at all? (First of all, Umeu won't do it at all I know, but lets for the argument's sake suppose he does.) Also in the proposed system they need to give the explanation of all the weird things that they noticed in the game, do you still think your agrument is valid? I think not.
I would suggest having moderators review the reports. If they agree that the person is guilty then a vote/poll can be held with a full briefing of the evidence. The users can vote if they think he is guilty or not. If >60% think he's guilty then he can be punished. Although, if someone cheats during a tournament, or something of the sort, then it's obviously up to the mods' discretion, with no need of a vote.
Do you know why they were chosen as mods? Not because they were good at the game but because of their interaction with the community. This is also a reason why a separate team should be made because the people for this will be chosen on their abilities required for this task.
I think having the community vote on regular cheaters makes sense, since this is more of a community issue rather than an ESOC one. Likewise, ESOC retains its ability to regulate itself.
Okay so now, what happens to the argument of p1 hating p2 so he claims him to be a cheater? You can have multiple polls asking about the credibility of any X player. But a smart person won't believe it until he sees some proofs. So I do not simply believe this quote.
Having the community decide a guilty/not guilty decision would also help clear up many inevitable accusations of moderator bias.
This is far-fetched, I believe you do not have much experience on this forums/in this community but this community has seen what happens when names are not redacted and the accused comes on ESOC just to take the drama on the next level. This doesn't even save the mods, because when the shit hits the fan, mods have to step in and then they take the heat.
PS: I don't know you man, so I do not post it to demean you or anything, just putting arguments so the staff can consider this before they create a system. All these points lead to efficiency of it. Peace.
EDIT: Also another team means a level of heirarchy, if a person is not happy with the result, he can always connect to community team and then community team takes the matter in their hands in SCC so that distributes the workload and brings more robustness in the system.
