Talked a bit about this and other issues here.

Spent a lot of time answering questions in that thread, so it might be worth giving Dread's posts and my posts there a read. We tried our best to cover any issues people brought up with the staff team.

Because they only hire good GPs like Soren, Raina, Andromeda, Yuri, etc. I've filled out that joke of an application in the past, as have many others who can actually help the game.

I also have zero interest in being staff now that I've committed to leading a guild. Playing the game is a whole lot more fun than picking up the slack of people who can't do simple tasks properly.

get the **** outta here with that, that is bull**** and you know it.

You hired soren, yuri, raina (who were all abusive and stupid) and allowed them to continue on as staff, they literally gave event hats to people for free and abused their warp tools to benefit themselves and others. I was told to "kill self" from yuri on multiple occasions and soren warped me away from sards multiple times. Raina gave multiple people event hats and gave people access to her staff account.

Not saying Leah has made these mistakes at all, that'd be stupid for me to say. But I'm saying the amount of weird and untimely mistakes she's made in the past 3 months is hard to ignore and using the excuse "it wont happen again" everytime is insane.

Can you at least change the application and consider hiring people with actual experience with in game mechanics and gameplay. Why hire a gp who has little no experience when you can hire somebody with little to no experience who has tower knowledge, game mechanic knowledge and the general "known" rules down pat.

Andromeda recently allowed dark to access her staff account and **** around on it and I'm sure that is a means to fire somebody and ban the player who used her staff account (no idea if shes been punished but it gives a random person access to admin tools because of the staff accounts permissions.)

Why can you not change it around? is it out of your hands?

That is true, Dark has had personal issues with certain people these days and those persons are suddenly banned. And Andromeda suddenly were online and offline at the same time.

And Jarace when you were pmed me about this and nobody had any intention to annoy you with the pm, then you blocked the person.

Just saying, for an admin with good reputation and actively replying that was a bit careless :/

Whelp. That's enough to know there's obviously no talking to you.

I think you took what I said the wrong way, to say dark is using andromeda to ban people is stupid. All I'm saying is she actively allowed him to use her staff account and as far as I know hasn't been punished for it.

Considering you only named about four of the probably hundred or more people that have been Graal Police, I'd say we're doing pretty alright.

Let's take a look at the fates of the people you have very justified complaints about. We can both agree that some of the things they did were not acceptable:
Soren: fired, Yuri: fired. Raina: long gone. Seems like they were all caught and dealt with?

Andromeda did not allow Dark to access her account. It was something I looked into and the results were conclusive that this was not the case. It's just as ridiculous as people who claim they were banned for calling a staff member "hawt" in pms once, probably more so.

The application itself is simply to introduce the applicant to us. There is much more to the process, and we do take a look at them in more detail if the application proves they can speak English and act like an adult.

I could easily tell you why we aren't hiring a specific person, but I won't because then I would be just as bad as the people above. And we don't hire people with "no game experience". You see one or two you don't like and assume that is the case for all of them - which simply isn't true.

As I said in the other posts, the application may not be perfect, but I feel it does a decent job at what I need it to do.

I can understand some of your concerns, but I wish people would take more time to understand that not everything posted here by players is credible - most of it isn't.

I haven't been GPA for too long so I can't vouch for the decisions of past ones. I promise you that I am working to resolve many of the concerns that I see and agree are reasonable. You will see evidence of this in coming days and months.

I only block people who are spamming me or swearing at me, and even then I usually just ignore it.

Problem with Darkk though is he is constantly telling people Andromeda will do stuff for him, and uses her name to threaten people, so you can't be too sure what is truthful and what's not.

I would still look into it though because a player who Darkk was having problems with, Darkk somehow had his private messages and were showing them around to make fun of him (and the receiving person too).

I understand that hacking and cheating occurs all around and I don't think they are saying it doesn't but rather spar is just their main focus so you often hear them voice it more than other aspects and because right now towering is dead-content so less people there to be complaining about hackers (which will be a thing come NGS for sure).

Cheating in spar is something that is really common now and that is why people react like this, it's just completely ruining the fun for them and this isn't the first time the streak has been lost to a hacker which really sucks to the people who achieved it beforehand.

I understand completely where you are coming from on the staff end but you also have to understand where people are coming from on the player end, especially those who have been involved with competitive aspects for years. It may seem like they are over voicing them selves and being condescending but it's kind of hard not to be when something you've spent so long doing is being ruined by cheaters with no real fix at the current time.

Think Jarace is doing a really good job with how he handles situations and conducts him self so having him as GPA is a good step going into the future.

Another good step would be people like Red properly voicing their opinions, it's good to have discussions about this stuff but not gunna get anywhere going the Red route (he updated his post, progress!!!)

Thanks for the shoutout Red! But I'd have to say the current GP team isn't bad. What's destroying their reputation is the lack of being online during the most traffic. It'd be nice if they were able to access their admin accounts via iDev, probably would make it easier for them to be online. Other than that, some aren't good at their jobs, some exceed expectations.



In addition to the hackers, it sucks but GP's have no rule over them. Unless Dusty can whip out an auto-bot to ban these idiots, they'll just keep coming back. It's like a damn plague.

My two cents.

It's terrible. You tell me what's more important as a first hurdle: getting cookie-cutter answers out of players with some weird personality test, or putting them in situations that they'll actually be in as a GP and seeing how they'd handle it with no training or experience. You know you can gauge how well someone's English and maturity level is with the latter too, right?

It's so easy to BS through that application and it's setting you up to hire people who seem "nice" rather than people who can do the job properly. These are the types of questions you can Google to get good answers to. You can't do that with questions that are specific to Graal or being GP.

I personally have no problems with the current application, I've had my share of times filling it out with no complaints.

But I do agree that Ol'West's application is fantastic, it mixes both personal and realistic scenarios and questions perfectly and can easily distinguish the personal questions that the current app looks for, as well as some realistic scenario questions.

At any rate; Dark shouldn't be telling people that anymore.

I totally get the concerns and that is why I'm trying to address many of them. I was a player for roughly 4 years before I became staff, so I can identify with them on a lot of issues. People who cheat and such at towers or spar make the game very frustrating to play. Unfortunately, I can't change the core game mechanics to make these things impossible. I'm going to do what I can do by hiring and training GPs who will catch these things as quickly as possible.




Is the last question on the application a better example of something you would like to see? It's something we could definitely consider adding more of, but I can't directly influence it so it might take a while to change.

어딜가나 병림픽은 존재하는군 peace

Being an admin has to come from the heart. To be a great GP, it has to come from within oneself. Sadly, can't trust anyone nowadays. Anyone can give a great answer. Play the right cards and you will get hired. There is no way of really telling how a person truly is or will be. There are no lie detectors you can hook up to a person online.

Furthermore, higher up staff can't always be there to monitor new hires or they are just not on at the same times. Monitoring staff is asking quite a lot for someone to do and not many will have time for that sort of thing. Unfortunately, GPs can get away with abusing powers in that way. Thus, hiring is not an easy task. I agree with much of what Coco has stated. I think hiring should come from the company itself. No more of this hire volunteers.

Insight from a retired staff.

The application is but a fraction of the hiring process. Is it flawed? Absolutely. Under the pretext that the majority on the forums are either late teens, young adults or full fledged adults, the application is NOT the section preventing you from becoming a GP.

For some, it is your ban history. You cannot change what has been logged on your account. All you can do is wait months/year without being warned/banned.

For others, it is your comportment. How do you behave on Graal/ other mediums on a daily basis. Are you confrontational? What vocabulary do you frequently use. You may not be reset for it in game, but frequent use of "ffs" or "stfu" doesn't reflect very good. Keep in mind your activity is monitored, more so if you happen to check all the boxes in your application. Are you a cooperative person? You may write so in the application, but perhaps take a look at how many people you have blocked. Plenty may be justified but if you happen to be that person who blocks others for mildly being annoying, once again it doesn't reflect that well.

Another aspect is who do you hang out around Graal? Jarace earlier addressed what appeared to be an issue with Andromeda being close to a player not viewed particularly favourable. This is an example of players not trusting staff because of their social circle. How often do your friends mention that they have been wrongfully banned or rightfully banned. You might be spick and span, yet suspicion can justifiably arise from the logs of your friends. Can you take action and ban your friends. Many turn a blind eye to that.

I believe a comment was mentioned either in this topic or an earlier one about that the issue with Classic's staff is that they seek players who have an image of a GP, instead of hiring those who can get the job done properly. I agree with that, but not in same way as the author of the comment. The current team is full of capable individuals, they just don't have the image of it. Are there ****pumps in there? Likely and I trust that they will be weeded out once they show their colour, especially with the current GPAs.

Now I might not have the same graal background as them as I've been in three successful tower guilds, I've actively sparred for a year back when, etc. To some, they believe that is what constitutes a good GP. A Jack of All trades. However, there is some pedestal being created here that they should all should be like that. I disagree. From 2013 to when I retired, I've had a pleasure to staff with capable members from all backgrounds. Take current staff Za Ichi, very different graal playstyle, but from what I've seen, he's just as those capable of those with sparrer/pk/bk histories. GPs like him put in 1.5 to 3 times as many hours I could ever have weekly, yet hardly get recognized as they don't fall in the "image" of the model GP. Take your time and pm them. More often than not they will provide an answer to your question. The only time I suggest not to, and many players do it, is submit their question following an event. Rarely you will get a response.

To conclude, for those applying or have applied, the hiring process goes beyond your ban history and your application. Now I'm not saying throw away your friends for another social group or change your lifestyle. Just be aware that more often than not, you aren't held back because of your application. While it's easy to point at its flaws as to why it is preventing potentially great candidates, it likely the other factors holding you back. Hiring these members with shady attitudes will just perpetuate the cycle. They can be good but to the players, rarely noticed. Most will assume he's just another horrible staff.

Toonslab barely has any influence in what happens to the server(s) besides anything money related so it would be kind of stupid for unix/PWAs to deal with the hiring when he/they probably don't even know what's going on in the server(s) half the time.

From a player's perspective it's very frustrating. While I fully understand that hackers will continually come online no matter what you do, that doesn't take away from the frustration. In spar it should be even easier, since you have to have 24 hours to even queue. It should not be possible midday for players to streak 90 wins while obviously cheating. I understand that you guys have to fill out timezones, but shouldn't the times with the most players online receive additional attention?

Frankly I've found that my areas of gameplay(PK, towering) have been fairly well patrolled... Or the cheaters have just lost interest since players aren't doing towering as much anymore. When the NGS comes out I fully expect towers to become a hacker-haven unless something changes(Jarace has said that changes are coming, I just hope that they DO improve things).

I think being a GP requires quite a bit; the requirements eliminate a lot of players who would be more than happy to help... I would love to be a GP, but I'm realistic in the fact that I do not have the time like others do. I spend a lot of time studying. But if I was given the powers a GP had I would be more than happy to have people kik me when a hacker was streaking or someone was blocking the stairs(with god mode) and I could quickly log on and handle it.

I realize that you guys need to have GP's who have shifts and log on certain hours, so what I stated is largely unrealistic. However, the requirements of the job(the amount of hours, that is) scares off a lot of the older and more mature players you(seemingly?) would want to have... I personally can't think of a great solution at the moment, it's a complex problem considering how quickly and drastically things can go wrong.

Very true and I agree with you. There are times when a GP is online by themselves and they get multiple messages from players about a possible hacker. It is within these situations that GPs are required to make tough decisions. You cant believe what the players are saying and decisions are solely on you. Once you do make a decision, players than spam you saying how terrible of a GP you are and you shouldnt have banned so and so. It ends up being a no win situation.

It's also for that purpose admins have to remain hidden. Explains why there is no list of current staff. Sadly, players can add admins and are on player friends list and they cannot get away. The pressure is at times unbearable.

I still get nightmares. You have no idea.

I don’t know where this wildly inaccurate rumor that I let Dark access my account came from, but during my time as staff, I never once gave another person access to my account, much less someone whom I’ve never even met face-to-face. Contrary to this supposed popular belief, I did not abuse my powers for Dark. Even if he did threaten people by saying I would ban them, he didn’t address these threats to me, nor would I have ever followed through with a request of that severity if he had.

Hire Kosiris, he will do a better job than 99% of the GPs that currently do nothing but idle.

You can't expect us to be satisfied with the same answer every single time this happens: "we just aren't active enough! It's not our fault!!"

hire kosiris, sugar, bryan, zicknex, the roller, beg td to rejoin, beg fulgore to rejoin, <- best gp team you will acquire.

While you're at it, please bring the staff list back, thanks.

They got rid of the staff list because if an admin retired or was fired, someone had to go back and update it. It would've gotten to a point where new admins were coming in and out all the time, and it had to constantly be changed.

It's extremely helpful don't get me wrong, but it would be a massive pain to constantly update so I doubt it's coming back.

yeah, major pain to do something i literally already do on the private part of my guild's website just so they have access to GPs since reporting is actually useless

woe is me, my heavy workload

It's possible to fetch from serverops. It was probably done automatically.

Go eat beaver tails!

By all means, apply, if you get a position then fantastic! You seem happy enough to constantly update it anyways.

P.S It's a really helpful and beneficial tool to know who the admins are these days, and if you're annoyed that they got rid of something from the kiosk that you apparently are already doing privately on your website, why keep it private and complain that they aren't doing what you already are? Why not make it public so people can view your site and see all the staff members?

Perhaps, I remember seeing a post from Dusty that said why they stopped it. I don't think it said anything about them using an automatic updater. don't know what happened to the post though.

My guesses are that the public sign just made Admins getting spammed for every little sh*t and it'd only take Admins longer.

I will never understand why noob with 2000afk hours do get Admin when there so many more active experienced players that could get the job done, might as well just hire a few PKers / Sparrers that only get the option to warn players, I don't see how this could effect any player, there enough mature people that'd do this job better than most in the GP Team

Fulgore being GP (again) would be best option IMO out of that group (maybe Kosiris too but I don't know him well), but I actually know a few that would also do well, there are many many people who don't post on this forum. Being GP especially in a server consisting of thousands of players is tough and if you are concentrating on one aspect of the game (or 2-3). The amount of turnaround (GPs coming and going) for a task like that is substantial and managing a team like that (with turnaround) is near fulltime job. Saying someone is not bias is a ridiculous statement and should never be considered because that is a completely unique position and this is a game involving people paying real money and not free. That never will end well.

But fact is it's all volunteer work and it's absolutely unrealistic to expect 100% of the time an admin should be on to take care of these issues at all times. Hacking has been part of graal forever and expecting a full team to be on 24/7 to monitor all aspects of graal (spar is the minority) is just dumb. The only realistic solution is some automation involved which in graals current state sounds impossible. Since I've been back I have encountered this a bunch (people hacking) and obviously recently it has escalated but ultimately an admin can't do **** because the hacker in question can just log in to another account.

I would recommend more requirements to spar in BA than just bash admins who get paid NOTHING if automation isn't realistic. This would limit hackers from just jumping on another account instantly (if they have a back up alt) and require them to do more than just idle for 24 hours to disrupt sparring easily.

If the game is going to continue to use volunteers you can always expect this but if you want pretty consistent results that arent bias (and 95% of people have bias) then automation would help with that for more definitive proof of a hacker (especially speed hackers). An 'eye' test will not work for this, eye tests only work for obvious hackers but people who toggle is completely yolo. But involving spar I would question how much revenue/priority that would be vs the rest of the server.

Until Graal actually pays people real money, this issue will keep going on and on and on and this argument will just repeat over and over and over.

Back to the title of the thread there's been an increase of hackers all over the server especially forts, MoD, Deadwood and Swamp tower have all recently had someone who is running super fast, someone who has infinite health and someone who will lose health down to 1.5 and then health will automatically go back up to 3 and someone that's walking all over trees and buildings. I've reported all of these people and asked for a cookie too and again these people are still roaming for hours afterwards.

If new staff members can't or won't be recruited then give certain players higher priority reports that alert staff and can upload images of certain individuals doing a certain act and maybe the ability to upload a 15 second video for visual proof somebody is speed hacking or has infinite health with their profile/name exposed. If that's not possible then GPs should send and receive emails/PMS more actively by working with the playerbase (PK/SPAR/OVERWORLD/HACK and GLITCHTESTERS)to get these issues sorted to prevent it from becoming a bigger issue in the future.

This?
That's the worst question on the application to me. What's it good for? There are two honest answers:

1. I'd wonder why in the hell Jarace or Dread hired them.
2. I'd shut up and continue to do my job because I don't have any power to change that and it isn't my job.

But that's not what you're looking for, you guys are looking for one of the cheesy answers that you can find on any of these websites:
http://puu.sh/u7fTs/e0dcd8df7e.png

I'm just failing to see the point, and it's really not that surprising that people who could be good GPs, like David or Kosiris, have their applications ignored when they apply if this is the first step of the process.


I already have one staff member who strangely reads through my PMs and warns/bans me for non-offensive things that I say to friends. I don't need there to be more people like that just because I try to force them to do what they already should be.

i can confirm that revealing staff members = extremely annoying. you get a fistful of "admin?" PMs along with "can u help me?". lucky for devs we couldn't even help if we wanted to, but i feel so bad for the GPs that would have to follow up every idiot who doesnt even think to state their problem in the first two PMs (yea two, its actually usually "admin?" followed by "can u help me?" once you acknowledge them)

when GPs got the regions locked down they do a decent job considering the number of reports that get flooded in, people just dont know because theyve never worked on iclassic

I'll apply whenever they broadcast another message since I haven't been banned in quite a while. But don't count on me getting hired either.

Here's the link: gp.graalonlineclassic.com

While we're on the topic: I think I have NEVER (not even an exaggeration) seen Electron online? I feel like he comes on for 10 minutes every other day or something??

Like I mentioned on my previous post, unless Developers can implement a system that can automatically disconnect players when they are (speed hacking, infinite health hack, bypassing restricted areas, and purposely lag blocking), we're going to keep having hackers. You can ban them sure, but they'll just get on a new account and do it again.

For example: There's a player named NPC that's outside of the Arena everyday ranting about how admins are and I quote, "3astards/Dum/WH0R3Z/etc", gets banned, gets on a new account and repeats the process. I've seen him already with a flag from the US, UK, and India.

Only Developers can halt the issue but that isn't their priority at the moment.

If you're telling me that Kosiris isn't qualified to police this game and Electron is, I have to question your judgement and knowledge of the candidates and this game in general.

Well, nobody said it did. People are just saying it's helpful if you are an active member of the competitive side of the game. You're better equipped to see what is hacking vs what is delay or lag. Either way, I think "being around a while" should count for something. It shows that you care about the game.


lol

again, nobody said that it does

This is just silly. People always talk about people hacking at towers and swamp. It's never "just the battle arena" that gets complaints. We need GPs that monitor all areas of GAMEPLAY. That's where the hacking happens. It's just funny to me that so many admins idle in the battle arena lobby or outside of battle arena... It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you're going to sit and idle tabbed out of graal, you might as well do it inside the spar arena. That way there's at least a CHANCE you catch someone hacking when you tab back in for 30 seconds or whatever..

Coco doesn't have anything to say about who gets hired as a GP. That's not her job or responsibility. Blaming this all on her just looks sad.

And yes, GPs are monitoring all areas of Graal and its gameplay.
I'll probably just stop here though, it doesn't really matter what any of us explains.

never blamed her personally

good try though

I feel like part of the disconnect lies in the type of rule-breaking that goes on. In non-competetive aspects of the game, hacking mostly consists of blatantly fast people, running through walls, etc. This is easy to catch and ban. In more competitive aspects, people realize they'll get banned if it's obvious (sometimes) so many will make it more subtle, such as barely speeding, or toggling speed or godmode. Understandably, this makes it harder for staff to judge the scenario, but it's also the reason why having staff that are familiar with these areas of the game is a good idea. Sure it isn't technically neccesary, but it would certainly help. This is especially true if you hire someone who really cares about that aspect of the game, and making it a better environment.

Someone who loves towering, for example, and has done so for a long time, will be more adept at recognizing what's cheating and what isn't in a towering scenario, and they also have the investment in the area that prompts them to actively patrol it. Now nobody is saying staff should constantly be on the prowl only at these areas, but again, having people who care about these areas would help prevent things like a godmode hacker streaking for an hour.

I don't really see how this could possibly be a bad thing.

I seriously think we kinda overreacted tho, yes that what happend showed that we Defiantly need GPs that are into competitive aspects of the game but I've to be honest all the speed hackers etc that I seen got banned pretty fast, IMO the GP team is pretty good right now, but with competitive Admins the team would be at its best, really hope they'll think about it and actually hire more expierenced players

Hire Aguzo.

Anyone interested should apply and see if they qualify. No one is just gonna get hired.

Also, throwing out names doesn't make someone more qualified.

How did this thread go from talking about hackers in BA to who they should hire as an admin and why some of them are "useless"?

Oh wait, everyones salty...

I'm just goin along with the trend.. Idk Aguzo.

He's one of my closest friends, he spends hours online maybe you just don't happen to be on at the same time.

you're lying, idk. I always look at his profile cause I want to laugh sometimes and the closest I've seen him to being online was like... 4 hours ago

Speaking of hackers, theres one having bomb explosions wherever he goes(and some weird new player saying "ADMIN Client Server SYNC-SHH-FTP/Apache 2.2.48(Linux-Ubuntu))

That's NPC. That troll has nothing better to do

I know it was a troll, but it seemed odd.

Fair enough.