Problem with monetizing with the chicken and the egg scenario

For becoming a staff member in the game.

I don’t know what you mean when you say resume but you could have a game pass to become staff and a vote kick feature

Résumé - Wikipedia Also called an application

Ok sorry I am from England, you could give staff to the first few people on a server for just that visit to get you started

Staff have the power to trap and kill players. Unfortunately, this is not a practical option.

Not even with vote kick or you could not have those permissions on those players

Staff can’t kick, only mods can.

Make script so staff can be vote kicked

That could easily be abused, plus this is no longer even related to my original question. Thanks for your feedback, though.

Why not have a round-based scenario where players are randomly assigned to the position of staff/villager/cursed, and then after a few day/night cycles, the roles are randomly swapped again. As the game currently stands, it doesn’t sound like this would be feasible, but if you are willing to give up some of the staff’s powers in exchange for a game that wouldn’t rely completely on having trusted members of the staff (and even if they do abuse, their roles will switch at some point during the game), then I’d say this is the best bet.

Staff are basically mods - they have the power to ruin the game or make it fun - it would be too risky to give random players the ability to make announcements, stun/kill other players and give them low-level mod tools. I want to keep it not as a round based system, similar to the TSO games. Thanks for the feedback, though! : D

I’m no workforce manager, but from my perspective there’s 2 methods to solve your manpower problem: optimise or expand.

Firstly, optimisation. There’s sure to be more than one way of achieving this, but essentially it involves optimising the role of staff. One way if doing this that’s been previously mentioned is replacing human staff with scripted events and AI to fill their place in the game loop. Alternatively, you could try optimising your hiring process: is there a better way of hiring and screening staff than your current one? Have you considered advertising staff placements within the game itself to attract more of your playerbase towards become staff members? Perhaps you can lower the requirements to become a staff member and instead focus on training staff who might be under the bar as it were?

Secondly, expansion. Like you may have mentioned earlier, if you don’t have enough staff then it makes sense to expand your staff team. In your so called ‘chicken & egg’ paradox, you’re having difficulty attracting staff because of a lack of staff. It’s quite the canundrum. I touched on this a little, but are there steps you can take to advertise the need for staff? When players are on and staff aren’t, is there some sort of notification that explains the need for a staff member and that encourages them to become staff? Can existing staff help advertise in any way? Advertising the game might help by expanding your playerbase, but can you include an advertisement for staff placements as part of the game advertisement? It might attract people purely for the need of staff.

Sadly the most we can do is provide suggestions that may or may not help, it’s your game and only you can decide how you want it to work and what you want to do with it. I don’t think there’s a single magical solution to the underlying issue that staff are required for the game to function, so it’s going to take some time, trial and error. I hope you can solve this issue for your game and playerbase’s sake, let us know how things go! :+1:

And if you do find a magic solution, share for anyone else that might find it useful :wink:

why not create a game script that runs everything instead of a human running commands?

Just Advertise a lot (30K+ per day), and you’ll get loads of staffs and members.
Chicken or egg? You’ll need a farm anyways.

Yes, use AI when you can instead of manpower.

You can still make AI Staff such as Siri with some in-game functions and chatting feature. Would take some time to make, however.

I’ve stated this multiple times already - Scroll up

Can’t do that. If you scroll up, I explain why. If you still don’t understand, try playing a TSO style game such as De Pride Isle Sanatorium, or Red Foxes Grammar School. Thanks for help, though : )

Thanks. I’ll take note! However, staff need to be actual humans, as it isn’t as fun, interactable and it wouldn’t fit in in general. However, thanks for the other ideas you shared as they might prove to be helpful for me! Thank you!!!

Actually you can.
What does De Pride staffs say? Drink the holy water, wash your cursed soul!
You could make a AI NPC do so, and then once you get enough player you can replace them with staffs.
However, you can spend some money on advertising, and hire those who joins and wants to be a staff, for other players, just tell them it’s a showcase game until your staffs are ready.

I can list the reasons why an AI is not ideal again, if you want-

You’ll either use AI or have enough money to get enough real staffs. Now, intellegence or wealth, the only two choice.