Disclaimer: I know nothing of the way the staff is currently being managed, I only speak for the time I've spent in the team. Most of this is also from my point of view, which can vary from that of others. Plenty of valid arguments can be made against my opinions, feel free to but do not expect me to respond.
Joining the staff team is still kind of clouded in mystery. While there are some commonly known qualities you require there's no public resource with any information on how to get into the staff team or what exactly the purpose of the staff team is. As a result sometimes new staff have wildly different expectations as to what they're meant to do, this doesn't often lead them to quit the team straight away but doesn't exactly set people up for staying long. Even upon joining the team it still takes a while for you to be properly informed of things as policy topics in the staff section were heavily outdated or incorrect.
Decent candidates for staff aren't plentiful. Sometimes people would be picked too early and end up not meeting expectations. We had a few rulebreakers turned staff to basically stop them from breaking rules with varying (and mostly terrible) results. And sometimes people were picked for reasons completely unknown to anyone. Not that any of those stayed long, but in some cases the spot could've gone to someone actually fit for the job. When I joined I was told there were certain standards for staff members, and for the rest of my time in the team I watched those standards be lowered gradually in order to justify getting new members.
As a staff member you're met with a bunch of expectations by the playerbase. These vary from player to player and not living up to them can get you quite a lot of verbal abuse. It's rarely ever justified and is a big factor in why a lot of long time staff members end up resigning. A lot of it is manageable, but if you give away significant amounts of your time to a voluntary job and get a whole bunch of insults lobbed at you on a daily basis that'll do you in mentally. At the time (and perhaps currently) staff policy did not have a way to deal with verbal abuse in a permanent way. So you quite literally had to either break staff policy or deal with verbal abuse from certain players day in day out sometimes.
As Jp mentioned demotions due to power abuse were very rare. It's made very clear from the beginning that it damages the reputation of the team as a whole and results in swift demotion and punishment. Though this punishment was wildly inconsistent, going from short temporary bans to a complete removal from the game. The scale of it usuall wasn't that big, for example a moderator got himself demoted after threatening to ban a player if he didn't give the void set he pked from the moderator's unofficial ironman. Management did do a good job of swiftly dealing with abuse like this. If it involved only the staff member and no one else it could take a while as command logs were not checked often.
If management was around more during my time I feel a lot of staff members, including myself, would've stayed longer. Many people's worst experiences in the team would've been far less of a headache had management been around to guide in real time rather than after the fact. Almost nobody directly quit because of this, but it definitely had a hand in lowering morale all around. It's really easy to make your staff team think you're a hypocrite by letting them face consequences for weeks of unannounced inactivity while management is inactive for weeks at a time themselves.
Promotions were what killed off a couple staff members. Be it other people's or their own. Hell I've gotten salty over both myself. The playerbase at large isn't going to give you any praise for the work you put in. The only place it really comes from is within the team. If it wasn't Jandar's own choice not to become an admin then he's likely felt more blue balled than any of us ever have. I myself have gotten pretty mad over certain promotions, and that can and will make you resign at some point or get you demoted for being too vocal about it. It's childish as hell, but the culture in the team at the time didn't really allow for people to grow out of that.
There was almost no progress towards improving policy. This is likely a more personal gripe. I felt a lot of areas in moderation could be improved upon, most other staff members I've been in the team with didn't or felt their opinion on it didn't matter. In my opinion there was by far not enough discussion about this (mostly due to the aforementioned absent management) and even if multiple staff members agreed to something it rarely ever resulted in something permanent. At some point real world trading was made legal, all previously permanently banned offenders were allowed to appeal and receive an unban and that somehow took multiple weeks, multiple discussions and a multitude of re-offenders to revert.
Without a good staff team the game will lose players that can otherwise be kept. It's not all that factors in the decline but definitely something significant.
I'm also alive btw, unlike the memecenter.
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