Market Discussions

Today, at 1600 EVE time, CCP has announced the details of their volunteer mod program: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3018


All of us remember instances when the community team messed up - bad threads being indiscriminately dumped into MD, posts getting moved back and forth between MD and Sell Orders, outrage about unreasonable locks, edits or warnings and bans, ...
our relation with CCP's moderation team has not always been an easy one.

But consider - so far we had the immense luck to work together with a small team of professionals -
they got to know us after a few weeks, they got a feeling for the spirit of our community after burning their fingers a few times, they have enough other duties taking up the majority of their time, and most importantly for them this is "just" a job, a job that they primarily do because they are paid to do it.

Our friends from CCP's community team may have their moments of occasional foolishness but they usually know what they're doing, they generally don't go on selfish power trips and they never have the time nor the inclination to micromanage our MD.


This all will change once the volunteer program goes into effect.


We will have to deal with a new generation of moderators -- people that have 24 hours per day, seven days per week worth of time to lock, to move, to edit and to delete - ...

They will have no other job duties to fill most of their work day - they will only have an ISD badge and a set of moderation tools.

They won't know salaries, performance reviews or job references, ... they will only know one measure of success:
the number of posts they managed to "moderate" today.

Their motivation is not money, their motivation is power - power over us.


There is only one way to protect our precious community from this menacing threat of incompetence, narcissism and power lust.


Apply to the volunteer moderation program today to serve the people, to serve your people.

Gatans look into the near future:

- X creates a bond in MD forum. He is a new forum mod, but nobody knows that he is! After first 10 hours he is not really happy with the replys in the thread and removes 90% of them, claiming that he removed troll posts, leaving only positve comments.

-Y becomes a new forum mod and makes sure to tell everyone about it in SCC channel and Signatures. After a few weeks of MD policing (with the mod police badge this time!) he starts a 100 billion isk bond. What could go wrong, he is a mod! A few days later forumtears kick in when people realized that they fell for the new ultimate rep grind scam.

I'll vote for you Elise. Move that sh!t to the sell forums!

I think there is a little bit too much concern at this point. I doubt that giving someone a moderator tag is going to lead to something like this. They aren't likely to let someone with an anonymous subscriber history (e.g., has always paid with paypal and plex) take the position and any punishment meted out will almost certainly result in permabans and the like. I guess we'll see though.