What to do when your fellow players have gone AWOL? What to do when admins go AWOL?

[Inalitalllane]

Dear Althanas,
It has come to my attention that on two separate occasions, RPers have joined our open threads and have actively participated only to completely abandon the thread by the time of their next turn.
Furthermore, I have noticed active participants in our threads posting elsewhere and totally neglecting our threads by choice without any contact.
Lastly, I am also aware that the administration has not responded when it comes to "grading our thread" and much-needed experience has been pending for several characters for several weeks, if not months.

Examples:
Land of Landing (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22925-Land-of-Landing-%28open%29&highlight=landing)

Failure to have active participants respond despite private messaging and e-mail contact OOCly.
Failure to have a moderator reply to request for grading.
Failure to even be acknowledged via any means of contact from said moderator and participants.

Respite From Tourism (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23127-Respite-from-Tourism)

*Failure to have a participant respond in PM to multiple messages sent by multiple players.
*Failure to have a partipant respond via E-mail*


To be quite frank, this is getting old. I have a small group of friends whom I wish to role play with and I wish to actively become involved with the Althanas Community by bringing in more friends, but there is no point in Role Playing without any interaction whatsoever.

What should I/other participants do in this situation?

Thank you,
~Indi

[The International]

Oh boy can I understand this issue. When I was on Althanas for the first time it was in the middle of the holiday season. It took more than a month for my first battle to get judged and another two or three weeks for me to earn my exp. I came to learn that Althanas - in order to provide quality - moves at a slower pace than most rp sites. That's no excuse though. We should at least let you know when it's going to take a while for your content to get reviewed. I'm just going to warn you, Ina, a lot of naysayers just smelled blood and they're on their way to strike with negative rants and snide remarks, so get ready for a clusterf**k.

I'll first address what we don't have direct power over and that's our retention rate for new players. Many of the new people that you see joining and registering a character from day to day don't make it to level 1. There are many reasons for this, but once they make it to level 1 they're far more likely to stay for years. My suggestion to you and all the new players is that you don't start slow or small with one or two quests. Jump in head first and don't put all your eggs into one basket. If there are some particularly important threads that you need to make sure get through to the end, put up a recruitment thread, make sure you state that it's not first come first serve, and take the members who have a history of dependability. As for the players who have abandoned your quest, write them out! Judges will understand and you won't loose points on your score for this unless the player leaves at a very critical time in the storyline. It seems you're still at the beginning of the story in Respite From Tourism, so its good that said player left so early.

As for Land of Landing, we've got a judging backlog due to two recent resignations and several mods are on leave. This happens every now and then as real life sneaks up on staff members so a small few are left to do a workload that is disproportionately large. For that all I can say is those of us who are left are on the job. Speaking only for myself I have been simplemindedly working on the Althanas Wiki these past few days and I've lost sight of my primary obligation... you. Hopefully I'll be able to rectify that.

[Silence Sei]

As far as the moderator contact thing, I'll reply in the best way I know how.

The reason you have yet to be contacted is because there are several threads pending judgement before yours. We are currently only staffed with three judges at the moment, so getting to your thread might take a bit longer than usual. Please bear with us.

Secondly, while we used to send a PM to the thread participants letting them know that we're the judge of their thread, and roughly how long it will take to judge, the short handed staff at the moment doesn't allow for such things. We're pretty stretched thin at the moment, but we are trying.

If you're ever curious about the status of your thread judging wise, feel free to either PM me, or IM me (AIM = ashtonwise), and I will give you a quick little rundown on how many threads are left to do before yours (we work on a first come first serve submission basis).

I apologize for the delay, and hope that you can be patient until we get some new staffers, or we get to your thread.

If a person seems to cut off all contact with you when you request that they get stuff done, it is not uncommon that you write the character out of the story through some means. This is under the impression that your thread has something you really need to get done for your character. I have done this several times before. Just make sure to state that you tried multiple times to contact the participant to no avail. We will try to judge accordingly.

I hope that helps.

[Inalitalllane]

I really appreciate both of your answers. They've been so helpful and clear and have really helped us alleviate a lot of our frustration. We've all been moderators in our little group, so we understand that it's a rough gig. Knowing that the judges are going through some real rough times is understandable.

Again, thank you so much for your response.

[Saxon]

I'm just going to warn you, Ina, a lot of naysayers just smelled blood and they're on their way to strike with negative rants and snide remarks, so get ready for a clusterf**k.

I think you're expecting a little too much. Hardly dick for activity as it is, and now you expect trolls to keep the status quo? We had a meeting. 3.0 sucks. Change it back.

i love you,

Saxon

[C. H. Ashpool]

... Hard... dick ... trolls ... sucks ... back.

i love you,

Saxon

(sorry Saxon, I had to.)

I really don't have much to add, though as a judge back in antiquity, I can agree that an objective look at someone's creativity isn't easy. Especially given that it's usually a thankless task and rarely did I find myself so full-of-beans that I woke up and was eager to go a-judgin'.