Hey everyone, looks like this discussion is going in circles a bit, so I’m going to overrule the Poltergeist routine for this thread, and make the call on behalf of the CM and head staff department - before I reveal the decision, there’s a few points I want to mention:
It’s worth noting that adding reactions to messages in the announcements channels was enabled in the past, but due to continuous misuse of it, we disabled it. If we can't trust our entire community to use it properly, then we'll have to take the tools away, unfortunately. As much as I personally dislike the phrase “the few ruin it for the many”, in this case, I think it’s justified.
- This is e.g. why we disallowed typing and reading channels without having linked your Discord account. Players were abusing it, so we changed it.
Another thing I want to quickly mention is that I’m in a server that recently reached 100.000 members. That’s a lot of people, but since the day they reached 5000 members, adding reactions has been disabled in the majority of the channels, and now, it’s disabled in every single channel. It gets abused, is annoying to moderate, and gives up to no gain. Sunnya mentioned other Minecraft communities (that are way bigger than ours, even though our Discord has 6000 active users) doing the same too.
Something that seems to be forgotten is the differences in how many people read the messages sent in the announcements channels, and the rest of the channels. These announcement channels represent the entire server, because the messages sent there are always from staff, and never from players. We mention @Announcements and the other roles continuously there, and hundreds of people have those roles - and there’s still a large number of users that don't have the roles, that only check those channels. It would be a lot worse to have inappropriate emojis there, rather in a channel like #general.
At the moment, only staff are disagreeing with this thread. Maybe in this case, what the community wants should outweigh staff's opinions.
I think you’re misunderstanding a few things by sending this message here:
- You don’t represent the entire community, we’ve had 330.000+ players join the server, and this thread has only received 8 likes. This isn’t “what the community wants”, it’s “what a handful of players from the community wants”. I think making this distinction is important.
- At the end of the day, we see a lot more things than players do, and we have a lot more experience and generally have a good idea of how things will roll out. This is why we are the ones who make the decisions, with your feedback kept in mind. A weird example, but: If the community wanted a thousand gold, would we give it? No, that’s not how it works. We make the decision based on what the community wants, though.
Stop looking into a crystal ball trying to know the future. Player emotes have not yet been enabled, yet you all know that every single troll on the server is waiting specifically on that and how that everyone will forget their manners once such thing is allowed.
We’re not looking into the future, we’re in fact looking at the past - where the amount of users in our Discord was less than what it is now, and yet it was abused frequently there.
Travel issue
Players asking to rever to old travel system. 5 players think it's amazing, most players (21) hate it, yet the feedback to it was Declined. Staff responded that they will look into some viable alternatives, but they didn't discuss it further with the community.
Polls
Players asking for polls, since they feel like the staff doesn't make decisions on behalf on what the community wants. No answer from staff since August until last Saturday, until a player asked if they forgot. Staff asnwered that they didn't forget, but don't yet know how to implement it. Again, not discussing it further with the community.
I don't disagree that we can include the community more in these discussions, and it's something I'll bring up to the team. Thanks for raising this concern.
Okay, that was a lot of text, but let me include some more points real quick:
- A player is generally more likely to scroll far up in announcements to find old announcements, than they are with a channel like #general. This would become an absolute headache for the moderation team, if they routinely had to check all messages in these channels for inappropriate emojis. It's easy to remove, it's annoying to find before a player sees it.
- If I make an announcement about bug fixes, I don't want players to react with eggplants, zany face, vomting face, or any other emojis that don't fit the announcement. It has to fit the announcement, and that is better left for the people who make the announcements.
- It really seems like that to some degree, we all agree that this will literally gain the community up to nothing, and the whole intention behind this is to make the community more involved? There's a million other ways to do that, being able to react with a smiley face is not one of those ways - at least not one that we want to take.
Because of all the points mentioned above, we're unfortunately not going with this idea, and I'll be closing this thread now. If you still disagree with this decision, even with all the points mentioned above, that's fine, you're in right to do so, but unfortunately, we have to protect our players, and we think this is the best way.
I honestly really appreciate that you guys are looking for ways to make the community feel more involved, and that you are all this passionate to get your idea through. It's easy for us to lose our temper about things we're passionate about, and come across in ways that are not so okay. If you want a pro tip, people who come across as calm and explain things in a calm, understanding manner, have a higher chance of getting others to agree with them. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience unfortunately : - )
Best regards,
Deniz