CoMa badidol

Hi,

better late than never I guess

My name is Tobias, I am 28 years old and work for Gameforge, the company that publishes Metin2 in Europe. Besides Metin2 I am Community Manager for 16 other games published by Gameforge such as Bitefight, Gladiatus, Ikariam, Warpfire and many more. As Community Manager I am supervising the team and relaying information about Updates, Features, etc. Also I am the direct interface to Gameforge.

I speak German and English fluently, also some Italian, Spanish, French and little bits of Romanian. If you want to contact me for any reason I'd prefer German or English since my knowledge of other languages would most likely not be sufficient for a fluent conversation though I usually understand you, when you contact me in the languages mentioned above.

Regards,
badidol

Quote from Cadumal

Greetings badidol.
Just a personal question, if you don`t mind my curiosity: Have you played and/or managed Metin2 in other countries? What`s your opinion about the way things are in Metin2.ro?

I have to admit I never had the time to play Metin2 excessively. I played it a while once it became clear I would be the CoMa of Metin2.ro though. My opinion on Metin2.ro is that it's growing quickly and seems to be running quite nicely. I'm quite happy about that and proud of what my team and the community has achieved so far.

Quote from AleXutzZu7

willkommen babidol ich hoffe dass wir uns auf deutsch verstehen können:P

Quite good german

Quote from DiM

maybe you should quit some of those 16 games that you manage cause frankly your performance as a CoMa is almost zero.

Is it? Well, if you think so

Quote from DiM

when an update comes we are not informed in advance regarding the changes that will come.
once the update comes we still don't get a full list of explained changes. speaking of which does anybody knows what the last update brought (except for destroying the archer ninjas and totally screwing perfectly good skill names)

Well, every wednesday - except for today - there is a maintenance. So it should not be news for you that in some maintenances there are updates. Besides every time I myself am informed about an upcoming update I inform you. The minute I know about updates, changelogs and other stuff that might be of interest to you, is exactly the minute I inform you. Sorry that I'm not fast enough to do it in seconds, but honestly, I promise to do my best to improve

Quote from DiM

as a CoMa you also have the responsibility of providing the best cheater detection tools possible for the GMs. i'm sorry but recording a cheater with hypercam can hardly be called a detection tool.

No, I am not. Cheating prevention, Hackshields and any other technical measures of preventing malicious players from illegally altering the game files or executing any procedures that may illegally push them up in scores etc. are NOT my responsibility. That's the developers' responsibility. Also filming cheaters and hackers by using FastCap, Fraps or any other screen recording software can hardly be called "cheat detection", it's just a method of collecting evidence, which by the way we are not even obligated to do. Actually it's just used for GMs to be able to sho me or the admins cases of which they're not sure.

Quote from DiM

oh yeah, and you're the relay between the community and GF. what about the tons of bugs? when will those be fixed? did you transmit them to GF? did they give you an eta? would you be so kind and tell us what they said?

As far as it concerns you I am the Gameforge since as a Community Manager I am an employee of Gameforge and, concerning Metin2.ro, I am the highest possible representative of Gameforge you possibly will ever talk to. Also bugs to not have to be reported to Gameforge by me in order to be fixed. Gameforge does not develop Metin2, we publish it. Fixing bugs, implementing features and so on is part of the responsibility of the developers. We, Gameforge, collect bug reports and forward them to the developers. And if there are ETAs or any new infos about bugs, fixes, etc. I will inform you via news posting, as usual.

Quote from DiM

oh yeah and since your romanian sucks could you at least get one of the people in the romanian staff to translate your texts? especially the announcements because most people here can hardly speak romanian so you can imagine english is truly a foreign language for them.

I fail to see the problem in that one. More or less all of my announcements are translated. Concerning my romanian, I never claimed to be good at it, so where's the point in emphasizing that it "sucks"? oO Unless of course you're not only "not a brown noser" but actually a flamer.

Quote from DiM

PS: sorry i;m not a brown noser as most of the people that posted before me.

I have no problem at all with constructive criticisim as long as you do not violate board rules and what most people might call respectful behavior.

Quote from DiM

you're talking about minutes but frankly several thousands of minutes passed since we had the update that changed the names of the skills and we still did not receive an announcement about that update.
you merely said this:

that's a really long way from the detailed announcement most of us were expecting. where does it say that the rate of fire for archers was changed? where does it say that the values for aura of sword (and others) were modified/corrected? where is the chart with old skill names vs new skill names?
that would have been a proper announcement. most people still don't know exactly what has changed.

That includes me. You know actually everything that I know. Probably more than me, because I do not have the time to play Metin2, I have to work with/in it. So of course there are some things I will never see. Comes with the job. And there were no values and attributes changed, they just show the correct value now, that's all. The damage done, speed inflicted, etc. is still the same. Only the descriptions now show the correct data. So "minor text fixes" pretty much says it all actually. Even I do not have what you wish for. And I can't possibly give you something I don't have.

Quote from DiM

i did not say you have to personally develop cheating detection tools but it is your job to try and obtain those tools from the developer.
for example a tool that auti detects changes of certain variables (movement speed, attack speed). wouldn't it be a whole lot easier if the GM would just enter his control panel hit a few buttons and receive a list of players with abnormal variables?
don't you think that a tool like this would almost reduce to zero the number of cheaters we have?

Of course it would. Will you code it? Because the Koreans won't. I don't like it, but I have to live with it since I can't change it. It's as easy as that. And, as you might know yourself, there's ALWAYS a backdoor. There is no such thing as complete security/bugfreeness/etc. If someone really wants to cheat, he will find a way.

Quote from DiM

i know GF is just a publisher for Ymir and Ymir is responsible for fixing bugs but so far nobody announced when the bugs will be fixed. what did Ymir say? whwn will they fix those bugs? will they ever fix those bugs? Are you constantly pressing them to fix the bugs? Did you ever bring up the point of people quitting the game because of the bugs? Will we ever see an announcement that says the bugs will be fixed in XXX days/months? Because if people see you telling them that at least some of the bugs will be fixed on the date of xx/xx/xx they will know somebody cares about this game and a glimmer of hope will appear. so far the general consensus is that nobody gives a damn and that the bugs will never be fixed. a little bit more communication would probably be just what the community needs.

Some things were fixed today for example. And as soon as I can get a more or less complete list of things that have been fixed I will post it. I can't post what I do not have though. And yes, Gameforge is poking the devs on a regular basis to fix bugs, implement features and do what devs are supposed to do. What else should we do? Go there, hold a gun at their chest and tell them to work faster if they want to live? Because that would actually be the only thing we didn't do yet...

Quote from DiM

no i am not a flamer. the point of saying your romanian sucks was to emphasize the dire need of proper and immediate translation of your announcements.
as you already said not all of them are translated and when they are it is usually comes 1 or more days later.
for example your latest announcement is from yesterday and it's still not translated.
the previous one stood there for a day before the translation was added.
is it that hard to contact another member of the staff to do a translation and then post both of them at the same time? there are 19 people in the staff (except you) and regardless of the time when you want to post that announcement there should be at least one staff member online to help you with the translation.

I didn't say you were. Though looking at the pillory and your profile one might actually think that rules do not mean much to you, to be honest. Nevertheless, as long as you stick to the rules, noone will prevent you from criticizing or saying what you think. That's all I said. If, however, you do break rules, do not expect not to be punished according to the rules.

As for the "there has to be someone" thingy...do not forget that except for me none of them get paid, they're honorary members of the team. They do this in their free time on their own free accord. So you can't honestly expect them to be here 24/7. You're lucky this is a game for Romania, imagine it would be Japan, Indonesia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Hungary, etc. There it's actually hard to find anyone for the teams, not to mention finding someone who speaks english at least good enough for the CoMa to be able to communicate with the team and the users. In cases like these all announcement stay english forever because there simply is NOONE to translate them. Plus of course I have to trust people who translate things that they translate properly and not just invent stuff. So I have to know them better, I have to be able to communicate with them. And as for the moment only the admins MUST speak english. Because I actually WANT the team to be indigenous, I want them to communicate with the users in their own language. So if someone who would make a good teamler doesn't speak english I'm still fine with it. Otherwise, if I wouldn't value that so high, I could have just gotten me some German or English admins instead of looking for Romanians. So after all I guess it's something you can live with if an announcement is not translated at once and takes a day or two

Quote from DiM

1. actually i know most of the visible changes done to the game cause i studied them but i don't know how many people did. as for the value corrections most people have no idea they were just corrections and not modifications, hence the dozens of threads where they complained about the odd values for the skills. an announcement containing detailed info would have prevented those threads and would have prevented tons of people from getting upset. you say you did not have the necessary info and i believe you but for the future you should try and obtain all the info before the update is made. for example the update from yesterday fixed some mission bugs but nobody knew about this until the update was over.

Yep, count me in to that "nobody". Had to find out myself. Only thing I got is something I will post later on today and that won't be much more than 4 or 5 things that have been fixed. So no big changelog again.

Quote from DiM

2. yeah i would code it but i highly doubt the koreans would pay me to do it instead of paying one of their employees. i also doubt they would give me access to the game code (or at least the parts needed for such a cheat detection tool). honestly it sucks that you "have to live with it" but the worst part is that all of us (the players) are forced to "live with it". hopefully some day after tons of requests for such a tool you will get it.

Hope dies last, indeed. Believe it or not, I still hope for this day to come

Quote from DiM

3. constantly nagging them to get off their asses and do something good for the game is your only option but as a CoMa you also get access to "top-secret" info. previews of what will come, eta's of bug-fixes and any other details should be at your finger tips. and once you get that info, sharing it with the community would be a great idea.

I would share such info to an extent I'm allowed to, if I had it. But there are no such things as ETAs or exact previews. You're right, if there were, I would probably be informed about such things. The fact that I am not, tells you that there are no such things. Unfortunately. I've never been hiding information I had so far and I won't start to do so in the near future. So in the moment I have new information you can be sure you will have it too.

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4. lol, my pillory, don't even remind me of those abusive warnings. i sent something like 20 pms and mails to dare2dream in the past couple of months and i didn't get a single explanation for those stupid warnings. i also got my sig and avvy blocked and despite requesting an unblock i still received no answer.

Hmmm, usually people do not get such amounts of warnings and sanctions for no good reason

Quote from DiM

5. yeah i know the staff is not paid and in the best case scenario they only get some dragon coins or something like this. i used to be an admin and know how these things work. what i don't get is why english is not mandatory. normally you should have a chatroom on a popular messaging system (ie Skype) and an internal subforum where you discuss various matters, hold meetings, do some brainstorming ad so on. i'm actually curious how you guys do it if the staff members don't know english. also they do not have to be online 24/7 but at least 1 staff member should be online at any given point of the day. basically at this moment one could simply analyze the schedule of the GMs on his server and plan his cheating program when they're not online. that's bad and unfortunately with just 2 GMs per server it's impossible to demand 24/7 presence from them. but if you have 10 GMs per server then i'm pretty certain at least one of them will be online even at 4am

The problem of getting decent GMs is a difficult one. If you could read the applications...you would facepalm all the time. As I already pointed out in the guide for applications I wrote lately, a lot of applicants just write stuff like (quoted word by word):

- give me gm, i good
- me make good gm, i want be because hate hacker
- i would like to be a gm because i like the game and hate hackers
- please give me a chance i like the game and hackers and cheaters make it bad for all so i want make do something against that
- respect man, give me gm man. i good gm and respect with user. respect man.

and so on....

I guess even those who wrote in Romanian wrote...well...stupid stuff like that. You can't honestly expect me to make people writing stuff like this GMs I expect very little from my teamlers already, but I still expect them to be able to at least write two or three decent sentences without twelve times respect and twentyfour times man in a single sentence There simply are almost no decent applications though there are hundreds of applications every time we open application rounds...

English is not mandatory, yes. Most of the teamlers do speak, however, enough english to at least more or less understand me. Yep, we have team meetings and an internal board and so on. At the moment there's just one teamler not speaking english, the SGM. All the others at least understand me and can tell me what they think and want.

Quote from DiM

1. that's actually sad. you should tell them "hey guys, i'm a CoMa i'm responible for the whole metin2.ro community so cut the crap and give me some info or else people are going to lynch me"

If that would work you would have gotten much more info much faster. You don't honestly think I did not try that one yet?

Quote from DiM

3. hate to repeat myself but this is yet again a sad thing to hear. on other games the staff used to be informed about future updates and work in progress even if some were half a year away from actual implementation. we even got crappy artwork and sketches just to get an idea of what's cooking and the most interesting part was that we actually got to talk to the product manager or the tech supervisor and did some brainstorming about what they had in mind. i doubt any of the GMs here ever talked with the product manager from GF to tell him what they want, to present him new ideas and stuff. you as a CoMa should try to arrange such meetings (assuming GF cares about this game (i highly doubt it))

Product Managers never talk to teams or users. What you're referring to must have been a game designer or developer. Those, by the way, do not decide anything. If Product Management denies an idea, dev and game designer (and CoMa too..) can do nothing against it. Plus you just can't compare Metin2 to any browser game or even any MMOGame we have in our portfolio. Metin2 is....special. And we do care about every single one of our games, that's why we're so unhappy with some external dev studios and their idea of information flow

Quote from DiM

5. the last game where i was an admin we had 2 ways of getting fresh blood in the team:
a. constantly browse forums looking for active smart people and approached them with the proposal to become part of the staff. we managed to find some very good people and they embraced the idea if becoming a GM/ supporter/ mod
b. bring people that have already proven their skills as a GM on another game. many people in the staff where previous members of other communities and they had friends there and so they could recommend X or Y as a potential new member. not knowing the game was just a minor impediment solved in a matter of days. and frankly i'll always choose a noob who's fair, smart, hard working over an expert who doesn't care about the team, is keen on making immoral decisions and is very likely to abuse the powers that come with his position.
so since you're a CoMa for tons of games why don't you take a peek in the other communities and look for new GMs. i left the gladiatus team a long time ago (disappointed with the lack of implication from GF, funny, isn't it?) but i remember there were some very fine guys and gals over there might wanna take a look and convince at least a couple.

Well, of course I would find a lot of decent teamlers in my other teams. The problem is: they're not Romanians. Can you imagine the outrage of most users if I'd get a lot of non romanian teamlers in here? I don't even want to think about it Most of them are pissed off enough by the fact that I as the Community Manager am not Romanian