Question #1: Do you agree with the statement, "toxic behavior has been a serious problem in the atWar community"?
Answers:
Strongly agree - 98
Somewhat agree - 78
Neither agree nor disagree - 42
Somewhat disagree - 27
Strongly disagree - 33
Analysis: 63% of respondents somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that toxic behavior has been a serious problem on atWar. Not a surprise here, that's a pretty compelling "yes" from the community.
Question #2: How has the level of toxic behavior in our community changed in the last 2 months?
Answers:
It's becoming better / Less toxic - 88
About the same - 159
It's becoming worse / More toxic - 26
Analysis: the majority (58%) feel things are about the same, which tells me we have a lot more work to do addressing this problem. However, clearly more people feel it's becoming better than becoming worse (32% vs 10%), so I'm optimistic that we are moving the needle in the right direction.
Question #3: Moderator approval ratings:
Moderator: Acquiesce
score: 3.31 (out of 104 responses)
Moderator: Alexis
score: 3.68 (out of 118 responses)
Moderator: brianwl
score: 4.09 (out of 120 responses)
Moderator: Caulerpa
score: 2.86 (out of 67 responses)
Moderator: Cold Case
score: 2.82 (out of 104 responses)
Moderator: Columna Durruti
score: 3.35 (out of 73 responses)
Moderator: Cthulhu
score: 2.9 (out of 73 responses)
Moderator: Eagle
score: 3.43 (out of 101 responses)
Moderator: Google
score: 3.3 (out of 87 responses)
Moderator: Heat Check
score: 3.82 (out of 100 responses)
Moderator: Lemonade
score: 3.2 (out of 106 responses)
Moderator: Madara
score: 2.91 (out of 64 responses)
Moderator: Meester
score: 2.78 (out of 69 responses)
Moderator: Pulse
score: 2.98 (out of 65 responses)
Moderator: Sascha
score: 3.77 (out of 119 responses)
Moderator: Sid
score: 3.81 (out of 113 responses)
Moderator: Sultan of Swing
score: 3.47 (out of 117 responses)
Moderator: The Tactician
score: 3.72 (out of 98 responses)
Analysis: Moderators were scored on a scale from 0-5. Brianwl is apparently our most loved mod, taking the highest score. 5 of the 6 lowest scores are all inactive mods. However all moderators scored above the mid point of the scale (2.5), indicating that overall our moderator team is more liked than disliked, by the community as a whole.
Additional feedback: Questions 4 and 5 were open ended questions, which I promised to keep confidential. Many good suggestions were made, some of them will be implemented on atWar in the future, a few already have been.
There were some common threads in the feedback received, from which I would like to touch on 2 topics right now:
1) How to contact moderators
One of the most common complaints had to do with difficulties contacting a moderator when needed. Here are a few examples:
Tsiteeri:"it happens frequently that no mod is online and toxics ppl who see it start to spam help chat etc"
Tsiteeri:"there would be times of the day where no mod was active and toxicity was allowed to spread"
Tsiteeri:"And often when a mod is online they are unavailable, even when pmed"
This was surprising to me because it's actually really easy to get help from the mod team, but I think perhaps people don't know the best way to do so: the /report command. From any chat box in the game, just type /report followed by your message, and it will be seen by all moderators currently online. If no moderators are online, it will be saved into a queue and read later by a moderator when one becomes available.
I hear a lot of people complain that basically they pr'd one specific mod and were "ignored", so they got mad and gave up. That's not really fair though, since mods are players too, you could be pr-ing them while they're in the middle of a game and they can't respond immediately. Or the chat window could be scrolling by too fast that they don't see it.
So please, don't cherry pick one specific mod to contact... use /report and whoever is available will help you soon as they can.
2) Inactive moderators
The other common complaint was about our inactive moderators. A lot of people seem to mistakenly believe there is a fixed number of moderator positions. There isn't. Many people ask me to demote the inactive mods so we can "appoint new ones", but there's no reason for this. We can appoint new mods any time we want, and we can appoint as many mods as we want. There is no set limit on the number of mods we can have.
In addition, myself and the mod team are actively watching for new potential moderators. There are a few people we are watching and considering at the moment -- I won't name names -- but the point here is that having a few inactive mods on our list is NOT holding us back from appointing more. We will appoint more moderators when we believe they are ready.
By the way, I am following Amok & Ivan's rule about finding moderators -- people who ask to be mods, probably won't be good mods.
The people we are currently considering for future modships might be surprised to find out they are even on our list, since they haven't asked for it. So, if you want to be a mod, the best way is simply to participate in the community, help others, be mature and respectful toward others. Believe me, if you do those things, sooner or later, you WILL be noticed.
