I think this goes here.
I have a simple question. How do you go about recruiting, training, and setting up rules for your game admins?
I’m working on a large project. If you must know it’s a Warrior Cats roleplay game, and it holds 100 players in one server. It has a lot of rules planned to be in place and from experience on other games I’ve been close to moderators/developed on I’ve really noticed that a lot of people break rules unknowingly or purposely, or just do it to troll. With so many people on each server, this means that I need staff. But I have a problem.
I’m not experienced in gathering moderators, training them, and then making sure they follow their own guidelines. I don’t even know what guidelines to make them follow!
I was wondering if someone could explain to me how it works, and if you need to you can dm me on Discord at Kiramclome#4240.
Edit: I’ve been given a lot of helpful information, thank you!
I believe the best way to go about staff recruitment is by creating an application form and asking your player base to fill one out if they’re interested in applying for a staff position.
You could ask questions about any previous experience, how they would deal with a situation in a given scenario and any other relevant questions. This will give you an idea of what the person is like.
Obviously you would do what @serverIess said. You would start off by applications. You yourself would have to train the first group. After about a month, if you feel comfortable and they feel comfortable, you could promote them to a higher position. In that position, they will be incharge of managing the other staff and training new staff members. Many large groups with moderators will have a sort of ‘Lead Moderator’ role that controls all of the moderators and the application process. As far as guidelines, it is really up to you. General rules I have seen from past & current games I moderate at have the following:
No abuse of permissions.
No use of permissions for personal gain.
Grammar should be used at all times in-game.
Etc.
Usually, staff members are required to be active for a certain amount of time/week. Most groups will have a ‘Weekly Report’ system in which they submit information about the past week. Some groups are lenient on activity and just make sure they are being active, while other groups will make them be active and show it more, such as ban logs, times they must be in-game, etc.
As far as training goes. It isn’t too complicated. This is a basic system I have seen after they have earned a beginner rank (Usually Trainee Moderator or Trial Moderator):
Introduced expectations.
How to use their new permissions.
Requirements & guidelines they are expected to follow.
Practice certain situations and how they should respond.
Usually moderators are placed in a trainee or trial period where their permissions are restricted (not too restricted, just a little) and they are under high supervision my the managers until they feel as if they are comfortable with promoting them to a full moderator position. Usually these terms last from 1 week to 1-2 month(s).
A lot of the times, when people look in on groups and their moderators, they do not think they are held to high standards, however, I would assume based off of past groups, that groups such as Stylis Studios and Ultimate Driving are held to very high standards.
Most popular games do not have moderators patrol the games, but instead handle reports and conflicts after it has occurred and take moderation action later on, as having 24/7 moderators in-game for major games would be impossible.
Honestly, I don’t take applications for my Discord moderators. I ask mature regulars if they would be interested in moderating the server, most are happy to! I show them the basics if they aren’t familiar and that’s that.
I also sometimes go for loyal people. If someone has been with you for a while that helps.
Usually when I hire people to run like roblox groups for me I start everyone that gets recently hired as like Intern and they rank up based off hard work and dedication. I always find that people have more faith in the group/game if the people in charge had to work for the rank instead of given it.
Plus that makes it easier for them to train new members because they had to have started at the bottom and work their way up so they know what the job is and best ways to do it.
While I’m not experienced with game moderators, from experience with other sites and services it’s usually a good idea to have an age limit (obviously 13+ but you’ll probably want older if possible) and make sure the moderators are people who actually play the game/are interested in the greater community. From my experience they’ll perform better if they’re invested.
Otherwise, an application is a good idea, along with asking some basic sanity check questions like “Lets say someone insulted you, what would you do?” and the sort to stop people who clearly are not good fits from ever getting close to being accepted.
As a current Discord moderator for large group of developers, the system we have is through application. They are only open when necessary. Sometime earlier, there was people who was chosen by the staff into the moderation team. They have to pass through the intern phase before promotion to actual staff. Then there are also department heads and admins.
Once I was an intern, we were given instructions and guidelines. How to moderate something according to what infraction were encountered. At least we can ask question to any higher ranks in order to clarify some confusion. The higher ranks also do instruct us to do something sometimes, but other times we were discretely moderating the chats.
The application consists of questions like aforementioned ones. They ask about case-specific scenarios and what their action would be if they saw someone, for instance, spamming excessively.
Based off my experience as a moderator for various groups and games, the process has been similar for all of them.
As other ssuggested, make some sort of application (a google form would do its job, that’s what most of the groups/games I moderate used) asking things such as their username, what got them interested in the staff position, what they would do in a certain situation (e.g. “How would you deal with an user who’s harassing others / spamming the chat / etc ?” or “How would you deal with exploiters?”), maybe ask if they’ve had previous experience as staff for other groups or games as well.
You could also make another form (or have someone to do that) in which you could write all the needed information for the new members, in order for them to know what to do.
That could consist of things such as:
• Do not abuse admin priviledges nor use them to your advantage.
• If you’re in trial and don’t have admin yet, try to gather visual proof (screenshots/videos) of the person breaking the rules, in order for higher ranks to be able to take action against them.
And other things that people listed above and you might find are a good addition for your staff team.
If you have a group, this could be a case too:
• exile players who post scam links (you may have to exile multiple times as bots could rejoin the group)
• delete posts which come up entirely or mostly hashtagged
• delete repetitive posts (e.g. if the person posts the same thing multiple times - could also be in a certain time span -)
The form still wouldn’t be enough to train them, so make sure to promote the first group just once you and them are both comfortable, and make sure they’d be able to help out the newer members as they go.
The most important things to look at are age and maturity. Finding people that are reasonablely responsible with the permission handed to them sometimes can be a pain. I suggest a lengthy set of questions on a form giving possible scenarios, maybe that’ll help.
I suggest you take a look at stuff related to Human Resources as there is a lot of overlap with managing moderators (and any staff for that fact) and HR.
In general you want to ensure you have a clearly defined list of guidelines and what to do in a situation, how long to ban for, etc.
You know your community best, just follow your gut- if in doubt, get a professional to take a look at how you moderate. Appoint experienced mods to lead things; no one person can manage everything themselves.
Before figuring out a process of how to hire moderators, admins, etc, you should consider what you expect them to do. Asking yourself questions like “what do I want moderators to manage?” is essential to figuring this out.
Most communities will use a “trial moderator” process where several people apply to become a moderator and are trained over time. Experience is important for jobs like this considering they will need to analyze and react to different situations accordingly. I recommend appointing 3-4 of your most experienced community members (if applicable) as administrators, and start an application process as soon as possible.
When recruiting moderators and training them, YOU need to know exactly what needs to happen, and what you expect them to do. If it’s simple tasks like banning exploiters and just keeping an idle watch over the game, training would be more focused on trust, rather than specific scenarios (either you’re hacking or you aren’t).
On the other side, if you want your moderators to enforce a wide set of rules and/or use discretion in punishment for those rules, training should be more focused on guidelines and situational awareness. Not saying trust shouldn’t be a factor, but with a lot of rules to enforce, you’ll want your moderators to know HOW you want them enforced, or how much discretion the moderator can give. Can they let someone off with a warning for glitching, or do you expect them to ban every glitcher in sight?
Either way, it’s a complicated issue and all depends on what style of training/recruiting you prefer.
I usually just hire friends, people I trust or regular players that seem mature enough for the job. I give a quick introduction into moderation and show how the moderation system work. I also have a log system for all commands (which they can see but not tamper with or touch). I’ve had zero instances of admin abuse and it works great so far.