My biggest problem with the so called ‘Helper wannabes’ are the people who are superficially nice and helpful, are only kind and helpful when they know staff are around, or those who are obsessed with staff.
I’ll start with the last one. I have seen people completely ruin their online friendships just because as soon as a staff member comes along, they drop everything and start to follow them around and start ignoring their actual friends. I had one friend group who had another friend who did this. He was the party leader and would keep dragging them around to follow staff members and joining the games the staff did, only to leave once staff did and bring them along with. It was annoying for both my friends, and the staff (because we do enjoy playing games without getting stalked and targeted :p).
The other two somewhat go together. I’m pretty much always in vanish, and I’ve seen some people be kind of rude and toxic, and as soon as I something in chat, they immediately change tone and start trying to help others and being nice.
I guess what I’m trying to say is people just need to be themselves.
That’s my small rant for that. Now for some of the thread stuff.
I don’t think the application requirements are necessarily that important. From what I have seen, 1000 messages seems to be the average when people become Helper. I think the requirements are mainly there to say ‘you can’t just join the forums and apply while being completely new to everything.’ I wouldn’t be opposed to changing the requirements to something more ambiguous, like ‘Being an active member with a great understanding of the rules.’ Someone mentioned that we could just train applicants on how to recognize rule breakers and then not rely on reports as much. The problem with that is many people can’t tell the difference between a cheater and a skilled player. You have seen how many people call ‘hax!’ for every small thing. I believe a potential staff member already needs a great sense of when someone is cheating and when someone is just really good (the other rules can be taught, but telling cheats from skill is something you gain from learning and fighting, not by watching videos). We can then test your knowledge with videos, but I would not trust someone to handle cheating reports or banning cheaters in game if they did not already know the difference before staff.
