Hi everyone,
Just a few weeks ago, dearest lord and savior Fedora “Bub” MasterB98 introduced a competition between departments for how active they could be.
Superficially, this idea was beneficial: it brought a temporary breath of life to a dying game which has been desperately needed over these past few months. However, below the surface, the issues this competition proposes are extensive. This “short” post will go over a few topics about why this implementation was sub par, and how this idea could be expounded upon to make it a more effective activity incentive.
This post will be divided into a few topics:
- The Competition Fosters an Environment of AFK Logging
- The Competition Encourages Unhealthy Digital Activity
- The Competition only Incentivizes a Portion of the Game’s Playerbase
- The Competition’s Regulations are Unenforceable and Non-existent
- How the Competition Could be Better
The Competition Fosters an Environment of AFK Logging
Given the competition is solely about how much time a department can be in game, obviously there are going to be some issues with people taking advantage of the system to benefit their department’s standing in the ranks.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve caught one person AFK farming time for their department without checking into the ERU, making disciplinary action a non-option (for the most part*) and unduly influencing their department’s time. After contacting game leadership about this, I gained some insight into how the system works.
The game itself counts your time regardless of whether you are on team and not moving or on team and not checked into the ERU. In addition, the development team had not implemented a per-person time recorder, which makes enforcement of theoretical rules impossible given there is no accurate log of alleged AFK loggers’ times.
Further, there is still no way to determine whether a high time is naturally occurring (bar it being an absurd time), which furthermore makes enforcement impossible to execute fairly.
The Competition Encourages Unhealthy Digital Activity
This game is mostly occupied by children who are ultimately very easy to coerce into this activity scheme. While I’m not going to talk about the affects of screentime on children (given i am not a doctor and none of you nolifes want to read about it (including me)), it is a well published topic that such digital activity above a certain threshold is unhealthy.
While this certain point is irrelevant in the larger scheme of things (given most of this game’s playerbase is already unhealthy and they do have the free will to simply “fuck off”), it still is substantial for younger members of the community.
The Competition only Incentivizes a Portion of the Game’s Playerbase
Fun fact: this game is composed of more than just legal players. In fact, a much larger portion of the playerbase is not legal (probably, i dont know for sure). By only incentivizing a total of like 100 or 200 people to play, you’re missing out on a LOT of your game’s playerbase!
Ultimately this competition isn’t bad for net activity of the game, however it is bad for the net activity of criminal players. By only incentivizing one side of a very clearly two-sided game, you inadvertently cause a performance benefit to one side over the other (in this case, more cops = more manpower = easier to beat crims = crims get bored of losing and leave the game) ((this whole thing is highly theoretical, kind of a moot point but still worth considering)).
The Competition’s Regulations are Unenforceable and Non-existent
As far as I can tell, game leadership has not posted any rules about this competition. While its pretty clear the only rule should be “don’t AFK log”, no one actually said to not do that. In addition, there is no objective punishment for violating the one rule of the competition.
While I acknowledge that this is not a player-government competition (so the rules dont have to exist to be enforced), there still should be guidance for the people actually running this competition.
When I asked the development team what they would do about the aforementioned AFK logger, they said they were unsure and they had to consult “Bub” (who hilariously said in response “isn’t that against employee policy” - completely ignoring the part that the competition was now unfairly slated to one department) ((bare in mind my quote is not direct, and I’m unaware of further context surrounding the conversation)).
Furthermore, as I touched on previously, the regulations could not be fairly enforced given each player’s individual times are not recorded.
How the Competition Could be Better
1: Track individual players’ times
This makes it easier to enforce regulations against individuals cheating the system to unfairly advantage their department’s standing.
2: Create a set of rules
As far as I understand, there are no rules about this competition. Some must be made to prevent confusion and subjectivity in enforcement of regulations.
3: Expand the competition to include sects of the playerbase OTHER than department employees
Don’t really have to explain that one
Conclusion
Be better. I appreciate the idea, however its execution is (as is the norm from Firestone development) not great!
There are some things that I believe the development team drastically oversighted when creating this competition (ie, the existence of people AFK logging). While this is not bad initially, it must be fixed before another competition ensues.
Thank you for reading my yap fest. Have a good Christmas to those who celebrate and Happy Holidays!!
Sincerely,
Mariah Carey
The Queen of Christmas
