For a while now, and it seems like it coincides with Guard leaving, there’s been very few ISD keeping tabs on the rookie channel. It’s full of trolls, clowns and attention whores drowning out the newbies and actual questions and nothing is being done against it.
There are some folks who put in active effort to help newbies to try and make EVE a better and more populated game, some of us have been doing this for years. But it seems like CCP doesn’t care enough about new influx of players to try and manage the channels a bit. Granted we’ve had an increase in GM’s showing up, but they’re only around for a bit and can’t make up for the time and effort ISD used to put in (and even that wasn’t exactly up to par).
I don’t know about other folks but I’m getting to a point where it’s simply not worth the effort and annoyance any more. So just a simple question: when and how is CCP going to care about the influx of possible new customers by helping and policing the official newbie channels?
Still I think that the ISD concept needs changing, as said there’s a whole bunch of people who devote their time to helping newbies while at the same time playing the game. I don’t know how it is for others but when I want to chill (and thus not PVP) I log in my PVE alt, do my PVE while at the same time helping in Rookie. I’m sure others do something similar.
The result is that an ISD isn’t technically needed to answer questions as generally we can take care of that just fine. So ISD logs in, see channel is taken care of and logs off to play his actual character, and rightly so. But that means there’s no one around to take care of the unwanted or unwilling.
I don’t need blue (teal) or green next, I don’t need a title but I do want to help out, but not at the expense of not being able to play myself. I had a chat with some green ISD (forgot his name, sorry) about a form of ISD Light, only to be logged in in case of trouble but it seems this is not possible.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the ISD’s. I can fully understand why they’re not willing to give up their own play time. It’s a problem for CCP to solve and I’m not sure “moar ISD volunteers” is the only or even best answer, because they will get weary and tired as well.
There is and shall be a disconnect between an ISD and his player character. This is to reduce any possible mixups or mistakes that could translate between Characters if an ISD was to have his player character online at the same time.
I’m ISD Athechu one of the Team Leads for ISD STAR who help watch over the Rookie Help Channel and other channels. I’ll try to answer some of these questions as best as I can. Due to NDA I cannot disclose or provide all of the information you might seek.
Plenty of people do this. You’re more then welcome to do this.
I want to say that I’ve been an ISD for over 8 years at this point have risen the “ranks” from being a “Rookie” to Member to Senior Member to Lead. I haven’t really had a problem with the balance between playing EVE and doing my ISD duties.
Some of us choose to take on extra duties (such as mentoring or becoming leads to assist leading teams) which can take some extra time. I’ll say that the amount of time we ask of our volunteers (ISD STAR, other teams might have different requirements) is not that much honestly. We do make it known during the application process how much we expect people to dedicate and it’s at that point you can choose if you wish to continue or not.
This being said I have personally taken a large amount of time to go through applications myself.
A long time a go in a far away galaxy this might have been possible. But if you look at some of the early history of EVE you’ll notice that sadly some people abuse privileges which is why this cannot happen.
Why would CCP spend money on it? It’s the chat channel meant to help new players learn the game. What’s better than for new players to see constant trolling and arguing? Is that not EVE??
NEC at least is having a recruitment freeze, said @CCP_Delegate_Zero in an interview some weeks back. (I’m uncertain if that was about ISD in general or just NEC, but I guess the removal of NEC and STAR buttons answers that. :P)
I have to say I for one am a little unhappy with the way volunteering is handled currently.
ISD really needs some kind of “volunteer light” cadre that will allow e.g. players moderating of one channel or subforum, or fixing obvious typos and bugs in lore / ingame item descriptions, without having to jump through the hoops of the full volunteer process and NDAs.
The way where if someone abuses some system the whole system is scrapped and opacity of the procedures increased (instead of scrapping the abuser and increasing transparency to protect against further infractions) has lead to a bureaucratic monstrosity that stands in the way of individual players helping with little things.
That and the Rattlesnake incident (or was it a Scorpion).
