Empire Minecraft (community) Staff Appreciation 2016

I wouldn't be saying that meant to be broken part shell. You know due to recent arguments...

And another bump.

Yes guys, sometimes the boys and girls in green do things which you might not like to see happening. You may even feel strongly about it either in favor of the person who got on the bad side of the greenies or in support of the greenies. It's normal. And sometimes sharing a bit of frustration can be a good thing, when done in a respectful way.

But I think that it is also important to realize: even though EMC looks very professional, has a strict staff hierarchy, has strict rules and technical setups to make sure we can play with fun (think the residence protection) and has a set of (IMO) very reasonable rules.... Even with all of that does not make EMC perfect.

If you want to you can find loopholes, you can play the system, try to make the staff look silly by (trying to) play them against each other. Its all doable. And I'm sure it happens as well.

And then it's up to the staff to determine who made that honest mistake, who is playing the system and: who made an honest mistake while it actually looks as if he's playing the system.

The sad thing though: in the end there won't be any winners. Nope, in the end we all lose. Some more than others.

But... Just quoting Krysyy here... If you do think there are issues, if you do think that things are unfair or out of place: just PM her. At the very least they will hear you out and think about what you have to say. I know, I speak from personal experience. Sometimes it may look as if nothing happened with your comments and then suddenly, several months later.. You might notice that they didn't just ignore you but carefully listened and used your suggestions in their own way.

Instead of trying to work against the staff, try working with them sometimes.

Even critical comments can be made in a respectful way, without creating the appearance to be attacking the staff.

Crap happened last night, but I only feel more determined to make this event work.

vote for me since i like pizza

but anyways love your event shell you do come up with original ideas

This is such a good idea, Shel. I always thought staff members should be appreciated and rewarded for their hard work.

small bump. Someone already donated for this (I'll share when I can update the OP without getting ticked off from a weird keyboard), and votes are and still open

BUMP

I'm going to let this run for 1 more week because of my online absence and I'm very determined to see this through and finishing it as it should.

What if we did a staff appreciation day to have an event for all staff? Sort of like celebrating real life Bosses' Day?

my vote submitted. Thank you to all staff and goood luck.

Not to be going off this thread but these two things pointed out at me. Moderators are supposed to help other regular players and make sure that rules are being followed. Sure there is "popularity" points if they are chatty but I think the application should be rated on performance and helpfulness for all moderators. Not this "Favoring" one or the other. It isn't my giveaway so I have no word in changing it so I guess my opinion wont be heard anyway.

Doing their job properly and carrying out tasks is what I judge upon as well as Kryssy.

You put down the wrong SS ww2fan168 You meant B4DMAN5IMON

Ah, thank you for letting it going on for a bit longer, I had completely missed this! (I'd really, really want a news feed including only threads... that'd make it a whole lot easier to not miss important things)
Nice idea, I'll definitely vote! (also: thank you for the "Be as verbose as you want" mention, when I saw I needed to include a reason I was afraid I'd have trouble coming up with really well-thought out sounding reasoning, but luckily that wasn't needed

bump

And a small bump. I updated the end time: this will now officially end upcoming Friday giving players time to vote if they want, without overdoing it too much (I hope).

Edit:

You make an excellent point and I fully agree. The only problem I see is that it would be very hard for us players to determine, especially because I could imagine that plenty of the moderators work happens behind the scenes. So I'd rather leave that choice with the players. I'm sure some will vote based on popularity and overall presence, but I'm also sure that there will also be players who will follow your approach. It's also one of the reasons why I added a field in which players can add some extra motivation.

BUMP.

Only one more day to vote To give you guys a brief preview: over 30 votes have been sent in (last time I checked) which I think is a very solid amount. I haven't read through them all yet (also because of my disconnected status last weeks) but as mentioned in the OP I will give a brief preview of some of the things which have been said about the winning moderators, but without mentioning the source (blatantly copying Krysyy's example from the community appreciation awards).

Some people also made some very solid arguments on how we might be able to improve this a little bit and rest assured that I'm also carefully looking those over. My aim is to hold this event once a year, so I'm definitely looking at those counter arguments to see how we can improve (I'm sure we can come up with something good in a year).

12 more hours to send in your votes, then we will finally get a winner.

Some issues I want to share:

Donations?

A few people donated but I haven't updated the OP. Yes, I did that on purpose. Don't worry: donators won't remain anonymous nor will their donation but I didn't want to put too much attention on items and wealth.

Yes, there "might be" a few extra trinkets to win. But I'd like to keep most attention to the symbolic prize first. Not because that is my idea or anything, but because I want this event to embody our appreciation first and foremost. It is afterall an appreciation event.

So, prizes?

Will be fully announced & shared after the whole thing is over. Adds a bit of a surprise element IMO.

Edit:

Almost forgot! => BUMP!

It's the 27th ik but I just stumbled on this thread...
If your still taking last minute votes-
Seffy (LittleRobotSeffy)
Because she is always brightening up other people's day by being her comedian self and is always willing to help others or check out others creations, etc.

Please use this link:

http://goo.gl/forms/R0mjNOZ2Ql Warning: no longer works since the event is over.

Then select your favorite(s) there and add your motivation.

That way your vote will be counted! And no worries: not last minute here, I'm using local time So there are roughly 9 more hours to go.

u should use EMC time instead. if this is about official EMC stuff (like staff) then u should follow EMC standards i think. so make this EMC time which is easy 4 every1 to understand.

suggestion: end it 5/27/2016 23:59 EMC time ^.^

Why does my alt always end up with the better ideas?

Changed the OP to reflect the new ending date. Approx. 6 more hours to go at the time of writing. It will probably run a little longer because I intend to be asleep when it ends, but tomorrow I will lock things down appropriately, retrieve the final score and finish up on the prizes.

Oh, right, and here's a small bump too

I didn't intend to vote at first, but now I did

And we have a winner!

Actually we have three of them because the results more or less forced my hands a bit so I decided that we'd go with three places. And then the third place tied, I didn't feel like denying someone his appreciation, so all four staff members got included, including a shared 3rd place.

For the record: I didn't vote myself, I planned on doing so but decided against it to prevent bias from slipping in.

#1 Eviltoade

This was plain out bizarre The moment I first went over the results from the Google Forms I already noticed the same name popping up quite a few times, and when I checked a few weeks later it had only become more; then I knew that we already had an unofficial winner. You can see the full results below, it's really hard to miss how well Toade fared.

And here's what some of the community has been saying about him:

#2 JackBiggin

#3 Hashhog

#3 highlancer54

Don't think I did this all by hand!

Congratulations to the four of you!

About that result sheet

I'm a big Excel fan and I think it's a great tool to process information like this. Everything you see above, except for the list of moderators and vote modifiers, is complete controlled by macro's. Because I used this same names list in the Google form I didn't have to worry about CAPS (but there's a macro for that as well). So what this does is count the number of times when the mentioned name appears in a result column on the first sheet ('Nominees 2016'). Because you could nominate 2 moderators we have 2 columns. Then it subtracts votes from the modifier column (manual input, used to correct illegal votes) and finally we have the result.

The '1st', '2nd' and '3rd' is simply another macro which determines the highest, second highest and third highest number. To show off a bit, this is what powered that last column:

Code:

=ALS(G2=GROOTSTE(total_votes;1);"1st";ALS(G2=GROOTSTE(total_votes;2);"2nd";ALS(G2=GROOTSTE(total_votes;3);"3rd"; "")))

As much as I love Excel I never could understand why they had to translate the macro language also, that seems way too stupid to me. I mean: you don't translate Java or C to match other country languages?

Prizes

Each winner will receive a signed book ("SA award 2016") as proof that you have won this years appreciation award. As mentioned in the OP I want this event to embody our appreciation for all the hard work you guys (all of the staff!) have been putting in.

And...

ww2fan168 donated a single chest of iron ingots. I made these into blocks (3 stacks of them) and decided to divide them across all winners. So first and second place win a stack of iron blocks, third place shares it, so both win 32 iron blocks.

And an anonymous player donated 10 diamond blocks, 10 golden blocks and 10 iron blocks. Because it matched diamond, gold and iron supporter so well I decided to divide this also over the 3 places. So the winner gets 10 diamond blocks, 2nd place gets 10 gold blocks and 3rd place shares the price, so both win 5 iron blocks:

The prizes will be mailed to you during the evening (local time, so within a few hours).

But keep in mind: my intent for this competition isn't about winning expensive prizes, but first and foremost to show a little appreciation for all the hard work which the staff is putting into the server. From hosting events to help players settle differences right down to keeping our server safe from players who only wish to cause trouble and abuse things.

And that concludes the first Staff appreciation contest!

Thanks to everyone who voted and helped this event take place. Congratulations to all the winners! And trust me: we'll be back next year for sure!

Also important...

Some players (in this thread but also in PM) have made some very good comments about this event and how we could improve on it. For example by also trying to focus attention on some other areas like staff duties. Some worry (and I can really see their point!) that there is a risk that the current event focuses more on (overall) popularity instead of looking at what the moderator actually does (within his work of being a moderator).

For example: a moderator who keeps an eye out for misbehaving and acts on that is just as important as a moderator who talks to the whole server all the time. However, the latter probably has more chances of being noticed and remembered.

I think those are some really fair points and I'm definitely going to reflect on those and see how I can use those in the event next year. Because, and that's a promise, I definitely plan to repeat this in 2017!

Thanks again for helping and see you all next year!

(or later this evening on smp2 )

Noice congrats you guys you really deserve these for all you do for us!