GT Staff Feedback

[Janp]

I think we should also have this one to reflect on how well we did this year, what we planned to do x what we really did, what we can do better next time and so on. You probably know the drill by now.

I will put my opinion here and in public feedback later today.

 

[Flowerchild]

Okay. I actually feel really positive about this year's GT and I think most of our members do too, so while I'm going to bring up negative things, please don't take it the wrong way.

First of all, we need a bigger team and more collaboration next year. Many of us (including me) dropped off the map for various reasons during parts of the GT, and gimmepie was the only person who was consistently working at it for the entire event and planning phase before it. Those kinds of setbacks will always happen, but a bigger team will give us more of a safety net so it doesn't just come down to one person. We had 4 people with the GT manager role this year and a handful of others helping out on-and-off, it would be nice to see more like 8 of the former next year.

Also, the pings. I'm sorry, but the pings were absurd, and I know for a fact that they caused several people (including Riki, myself to some extent, and several members) to not want to participate much of the time because of the absurdly high volume of notifications. We absolutely need to get a handle on those next year. In my opinion the announcements channel is very prominent and it's not hard to see announcements in there, not every single one, or even most of them, needs to also be a ping. The only things I'd say would be worth pinging are a) a realtime event (CAH/Jackbox) is starting right now or b) the requirements for an event that a lot of people signed up for has changed and people need to be aware. Other things are not critical and people should be able to easily see them just by looking at the announcements channel.

Though we do have an alternative to being sparing with pings, and it's something that Discord already does, though it would be more work for us. For events that involve lots of pings, we could make specific roles and assign them to people who want to play or sign up for the event. For example, "@[VG Trivia Players] Four hours left for today's questions!", et cetera. We could have Tapu be able to add or remove people from these roles easily.

Okay, enough about pings. On to the teams and the village thing. I liked the teams, and it's not hard to make any divide competitive, but not gonna lie, I think we as a management team cared way more about the village building mechanic than the players did. Maybe if we'd leaned more into the AC theme it would be different, but pretty much the only time I saw it brought up was us asking for building placements. Players are more interested in the points and the actual events than any kind of meta-contest we put on top imo, so I don't think we should spend so much time on that next year. I'd much rather put our efforts into things like coming up with more events, expanding the lore and artwork of the teams and building a short quiz for team placement.

That's all I can think of right now. Might post more later.

 

[tokyodrift]

i just want to say that the amount of pings made me not participate to the point where i wanted to leave the server to stop getting them. however, i do think you all did a great job this year!

 

[budube]

I personally didn't have a problem with the pings as in I wasn't annoyed by them, but I still found them excesive. I literally woke up to 5 pings and all of them were GT related.

I don't know if it's possible for GT Hosts or somebody else to encourage multiplayer events? For example, Picture Phone was actually one of my favorite events this GT, but sadly there wasn't as much activity as I would've like to because apparently not too many people were interested. Same thing goes to mafia, there was only one session.

Other than that, Daks pretty much said everything.

 

[Tsutarja]

I will agree that the VG Trivia and VGM Trivia pings were a bit much and that the answers could have been posted to the forums instead of in discord. Pings on discord should really be reserved for events happening in real-time, and maybe only one ping per event that's firing up, unless nobody shows within...say, 15-20 minutes, then you could send out another one.

However, I will say that a lot of things worked out this year, and I can say that this was probably one of the best GTs I have ever been involved in. This year proved that we can host the event smoothly in a category on the main discord server instead of having to make a separate discord server for activities. The two-team format worked out great as well and I think it was definitely a fair balance. Maybe next year, we should focus more on just earning points and integrate them into a goal that could somehow be automatically achieved instead of having a team gather around to make a decision, which one couldn't care less on (like where to put a building on a map).

 

[Janp]

Firstly, I would like to say that this was one of the best GT when it comes to planning and execution. So following stuff is mostly nitpicking of what I noticed this year. I also don't want to name anyone, since I'm also guilty of few things I mention below.

I really hate approach of some people at the start of the planning phase. A lot of discussion was held on Discord, but nothing was recorded in the threads for the rest of us to see, so nothing was really resolved in the end, because it got lost on Discord. This also meant that threads were mostly dead.

Both me and Tyler put a lot of emphasis on a google spreadsheet, where we also could record what we have done/what needs to be done. Some people only found out about it halfway through the planning phase. Which was something that really surprised me.

And finally, there were some people that planned GT with more features than SwSh on day 1 of planning, but in the end didn't help with anything around GT at all. I think those people could easily be on team, because they clearly were interested in GT.

As Daks mentioned, there were only few people on team and most of them must have drop out of planning at some point because this year sucks. Because of that gp had to decide/do most things on his own and basically carried the whole planning at one point.

Pings were also mentioned here. I don't think there were more pings than other years. The difference from last years were they were on main server and concentrated in one channel. Last years, Trivia and other big events had their own channels you could put on ignore.

Overall, I think we are slowly getting a grip on how modern GT could looks like. Using colour's plan from last year proved to work well, so I think we could use it again next year.

 

[gimmepie]

Okay, here we go.

There was a lot that was good about this year in that the GT itself was fun, there's been very few complaints, the two weeks of the actual GT went smoothly with few hiccups for the most part and Dakota's point tracking addition to the forum was a god send.

We also got off to a really good start, keeping ourselves on track with our timeline and having generally good activity. Then, one after another, everyone who was meant to be working on the GT disappeared. Some people took DLoA's, others took shorter leaves they never really came back from and some people just stopped doing GT stuff. I don't think it's wrong for me to say that if I hadn't picked up all the slack in the last month leading up to GT, and if Dakota hadn't stepped in to help out with the things I couldn't do, GT wouldn't have run anywhere near as smoothly as it did and could even have been pushed back or cancelled.

The thing is though, people are saying that a bigger team would have fixed that problem, and I don't really agree. Too many cooks in the kitchen early on would just make the early planning a nightmare. We originally had a team of Janp as lead, me, Angie, Chura, Zach, HeroLinik with other staffers coming in and out to offer thoughts sometimes. Six people, puls additional support, should absolutely have been enough to avoid people dipping out being a problem. Angie and Chura had to take DLoAs, I can't really fault them for real life happening. Although, Chura tried to get more involved after and it was like... almost nobody made any effort to help get her up to speed? Everyone else kind of just... stopped contributing unless I dumped a million pings on them to get their attention to the point that I just gave up and mostly just did things myself or with Dakota's help after she stepped in.

I don't think the problem was with the size of the GT team. I think the problem is that people did not take the responsibility seriously enough, or were not nearly as invested in the actual preparation and running of the event as they were in the fun stuff like deciding a theme. Or maybe, that people did not look at possible scheduling conflicts before taking the job, at a stretch.

Things got better again once the GT actually started, especially because the moderoids were a big help with stuff on the Discord itself and blessedly the EOs were on-the-ball this year. So I don't have any huge complaints about that, in fact, I think this year the GT itself went much smoother than last year. But the leadup was much more stressful than it needed to be and I personally don't think the problem was the size of the team but with the team's investment.

 

[colours]

from the outside looking in perspective. i am not going to comment on the events in particular, nor what transpired in the channels or anything like that for obvious reasons (that being i wasn't around for that/my involvement in this GT was super minimal):

1. anyone who signed on to be a gt manager as per this thread should accept the responsibility that comes with that. i'd like to make it very clear that this isn't directed towards any one person in particular, but moreso addressing daniel's point that there may be those who don't take the responsibility seriously enough. if you really feel as if you cannot carry the weight of the GT, bluntly speaking, you probably shouldn't sign up to to be a gt manager.

2. i think in the future we should avoid doing themes where the actual backbone of the themes have to lie within one or two people. i've noticed in the gt channel that when dakota couldn't get mapping done (this is NOT to make you feel bad daks, jsyk), daniel had to find someone else which eventually turned out to be inky (if i'm correct on that). i don't think there's anything wrong per se with being ambitious, but i think if we're going to plan out a gt theme in the future, it should at the very least be accessible enough so that other people can easily pick up the slack if one person drops out. in general i don't think we should do artsy stuff in the future. might be just me unless we have the manpower for that sorta thing.

3. i'm happy the strict scheduling method managed to work out, so there's that!

 

[Janp]

I have few things to propose for the next year:

1. Make Management Tent/GT channel visible only to GT staff - I think this channel should be only visible to people actually working on GT, because last and this year, there were some people just dropping by and chit-chating in this channel, without actually helping with GT.
2. More GT roles - Not in the sense of more GT roles on Discord, I think one role there is enough, but I think we could divide organizers into more groups. There should be the core group, that will decide/vote on everything around GT like theme, number of teams, point system, approving events and so on. Then there should be graphic group. This group would take care of making graphics, CSS, come up with team names and logos, make promo graphic for social media and expand the theme altogether. They wouldn't have to care about anything from the core group, unless they want to or feel like they have something to add. Final group I was thinking about is PR group. This group will take care of writing and publishing various threads to the public like GT announcement, EO hiring thread, GT start thread, as well as take care of posting about GT on social media. Then there should be at least one admin and probably dev to help us with anything we need.
   
   I also see no problem with one person being on more teams and even have more teams.
3. Sign up - This year, there were lot of people saying something like: "I might help," "I could do something if you need," and a lot of similar phrases. But then did nothing. And because of that, we didn't really know who activally works on GT in the end. So I propose a simple sign up phase. Something like: "I will help with GT and will join X (and Y) group." Forming it like this will give you access to GT channel and Management Tent and you'll be expected to activally work on GT.

My perfect idea for the next year is (using stuff I proposed above): We build a team in Staff Hub. We then move to Management Tent and come up with a theme in a week or so. From that moment, core group can work on points, number of teams and other stuff. Graphic group can start working on needed graphic and when they have number of teams, work on them. And PR team can start working on threads to publish and when they have graphic for social media, post them.

I know it's a lot stricker and organized than the last two years, but a recurring theme from last two GT is: Do something in May, then be silent until the half of July and then rush everything in a week. I think we're better than that.

What do you think about it?

 

[Flowerchild]

Honestly, I disagree with all of that. Sorry.

The problem with the GT's management is not that it's too informal, it's that people with the GT Manager roles (except GP) don't hold up their end of the bargain. Not to call people out, but that's me, Zach, and you who didn't take this as seriously as we should have during the event and the days leading up to it. Being around only for the initial planning and post-GT musings isn't helpful.

The GT isn't, in itself, a ton of work to set up. That's not to say I don't also want a bigger team, as I said in my post, but we really gain nothing by over-organizing ourselves when all we really need to do is not flake on responsibilities during the event. There isn't anything wrong with the organizational system of the GT team right now, and I don't see a reason to go overboard with it.

Also, I see no reason to make the manager sections private. Staff should be allowed to drop off ideas and suggestions without committing to a management role, and the amount of off-topic chatter was quite minimal and harmed nothing tbh.

I would like someone to do graphics next year though.

 

[gimmepie]

Dakota pretty much summed up my thoughts there.