OH, ON SECOND THOUGHT JUST BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND [Author: wirehead]
Jinx, who is too stoned out of his mind to update his own page, writes in:
I thought I was the only asshole who was up all night lately. Nice to know fellow insomniacs reign around the country.
Been gutsy shit you posted lately. I’m sure you’ve been shit on by all the people who love counselors, volunteer programs, gms or whatever. You are on the money though, its sad how many people refuse to see anything because they would rather not believe people they trust could do such things.
Anyway, on your proposal, it just won’t work. You can’t have volunteers running around with ANY sort of special ability. You would never be able to screen them out well enough to keep out the bad apples. With all the corruption that has gone on, the entire volunteer program needs to go bye-bye. All of it. Seers, Counselors, companions, etc. There is no other way to do it.
Furthermore, GMs are no longer allowed to play UO. If they wish to work for OSI they cannot play the game. Period. In addition, they are not to scoialize in any manner with any players. All their duties in game are to be handled the same way any customer support staff handles a call. They will not talk to players except about game issues. If I call up a tech support rep at Dell, we don’t discuss what each of us is wearing or if we want to get together sometime. Its got to be no different in game. There has to be no friendships or socializing. None.
Unfair you say? Perhaps blessed buildings wouldnt exist? Problems running quests? Too fucking bad. We tried it that way already and it didn’t work. While we are at, please spare me the “there is no proof” nonsense. The whole Darwin fiasco proved this stuff can happen. People are kidding themselves if they think these types of sexual hijinks haven’t happened. The internet is the perfect medium for this. Without making too much of a generalization, many lonely or less-social people spend many hours online. Sound like those counselors who play 80 hrs a week and have phone sex with gms? Yep. Because of this temptation and (unproven, but still they happened) the fact that many GMs are young men who (yep) also played UO or spent alot of their time online you HAVE to eliminate as much of the opprtunity as possible. The only way to do this, is to stop all volunteer programs and limit all GM communication to in-game only.
As much as I would love to see this happen, its just not going to. Despite what you hear, its much cheaper and easier for OSI to have scads of volunteers to do much of their support work. Since they refuse to lose the whole program, the next best thing to do is slice it up. EVERYONE who is a counselor reapplies for a job. There are no more shard leaders or senior counselors. Everyone is just a counselor. They lose all powers except teleportation. No more jailings. No more squelching. No Tele-storms. You are there to answer questions and instruct players. No socializing in IRC. If you want to have a free account, you work for it. As a matter of fact, no more IRC. We have an in-game chat and it must be used. Eliminate as much of the “elitism” as possible. Eliminate as much “specialness” as possible.
There are no seers. None. Either make a real quest engine or hire 3 IGMS for each shard. They have a quota of events to run each month. They remain in character and have NO socialization outside the game or out of character. IGMs cannot play UO outside the workplace either.
The entire point of this scpiel is to stop the diaster that has reigned over this game for two years. All you people who wnat to tell me how wonderful the counselor program has been can blow me, because if it worked the way it was meant to WE WOULDNT HAVE THESE PROBLEMS. The counselor program was meant to help people not meant to be a way for people to further their own ends. Believe whatever you want to believe, but open your eyes enough to see it isn’t working. We’ve closed our eyes to so much OSI bullshit for so long we should be ashamed of ourselves. Here’s your chance to right whats been wrong. Don’t be quiet on these issues anymore.
Damn that got long…I’m drowning in pain medicine so Im too out of it to update the site. Those are my thoughts, take them as you will. Keep the fires burning Lum.
-Jinx@home, nearly unconcious.