Game question: marking staff.

[phil_]

Is it really important that the staff have various colors as opposed to one Staff Color? Good users will learn who is in what position and bad users won't give a crap about different colors and will just nag whoever has funny-colored text. It should probably be divided into Users, NPCs, and Staff.

Oh, and it should just be GMs with a gem. Admins and forum moderators act above and/or outside the game world, and developers should take on a game moderating or forum moderating position if they want to have those duties instead of just being another player, so giving them an in-game indicator seems like it would mess up immersion, if I may use that term.

[bluestarultor]

What the effing-!?

Shiney, please fix this. -_-;



In reply to your... well, it's still technically a reply, it's not in text colors so much as those are the colors used in convenient little tokens on all user pages, which you might recall from the sketch thread. It's information at a glance. My design philosophy is to make things friendly without being patronizing, which is sorely needed in the market from my observation.

Also, I'm doing this as a token-based battle system with generic marker-based characters on the field screens, so immersion just isn't happening. I'm not a good enough artist.

You do have a point, though. "Keep it to who's most obliged to help" seems like a good policy. I can always change it later, too, but I was fishing for opinions to help figure out as much as possible in the planning phases.

[Token]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

What the effing-!?

Shiney, please fix this. -_-;



In reply to your... well, it's still technically a reply, it's not in text colors so much as those are the colors used in convenient little tokens on all user pages, which you might recall from the sketch thread. It's information at a glance. My design philosophy is to make things friendly without being patronizing, which is sorely needed in the market from my observation.

Also, I'm doing this as a token-based battle system with generic marker-based characters on the field screens, so immersion just isn't happening. I'm not a good enough artist.

You do have a point, though. "Keep it to who's most obliged to help" seems like a good policy. I can always change it later, too, but I was fishing for opinions to help figure out as much as possible in the planning phases.

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

In reply to your... well, it's still technically a reply, it's not in text colors so much as those are the colors used in convenient little tokens on all user pages, which you might recall from the sketch thread. It's information at a glance. My design philosophy is to make things friendly without being patronizing, which is sorely needed in the market from my observation.

Also, I'm doing this as a token-based battle system with generic marker-based characters on the field screens, so immersion just isn't happening. I'm not a good enough artist.

You rang/will ring/are ringing?

But yeah, I'm with phil_ on this one. His reasoning is rational.

[bluestarultor]

Okay, so I'm doing a bit of work on my MMO and decided there should be a way to mark staff in the field. I came up with adding a colored ball over their heads. The question is what members of staff I should mark that way. My planned rankings are:

User
Dev
NPC
Mod
GM
Admin


Regular users and NPCs for sure won't be marked with a dot. I want to limit the clutter and keep this helpful. I'm also wary of marking developers (if there are ever any developers aside from me) because they won't really have any power, but it may still be useful if someone has a technical issue or will explain why weird stuff is going on with the account concerning unreleased material and such.

The question really is who other than the GMs to mark with a gem. As things are currently planned, GMs will be pretty much just dedicated to the game, while moderators will have more sway on the forums. GMs obviously get a dot, but moderators and admins are a trickier question. First off, admins get hassled enough just by merit of being admins, so I'm again wary of giving them a gem for fear it may read as a target. Mods, not so much, and if there's an issue, I'm thinking they should have some amount of power to help, even if it's not their main duty.


Opinions?