Today I saw a player, who I guess I considered a friend as far the game goes, say something which wound me up a bit.
"mikes a nob tbh", "never makes the game fair imo"
I see these kinds of comments a lot and to be honest, they do annoy me given the amount of effort I go through to make sure that the game IS kept fair. I can handle the rubbish people come out with when they get banned, I can handle the silly "your Mum" comments from younger players when they want to have a pop at the admin. People saying that I don't do a good enough job at running the game fairly, that I don't take cheating seriously enough etc get to me though - I guess you could say it upsets me.
The above comment arose today in the chat of a family. It's not as though I go specifically snooping in certain family's chat rooms but the admin chat function shows the main chat in addition to every family chat - all together on one screen. This is purely to help enforce the rules but if you see a comment like this scroll down your screen from somebody who is otherwise cool with you, I think any person would be a bit annoyed. It's not like this admin family chat thing is a secret, the huge majority of players are aware that admins can view family chat - so hardly an invasion on privacy if there's no privacy in the first place, at least from admins.
Now this wasn't just a random comment, it was related to blackjack tables. Normally at the start of each round families are limited to one table each for the first 48 hours or so to give every family an opportunity to take one - if they want to setup and take one. This round I did unfortunately mess up a bit, I didn't make the update to enforce this start of round procedure. One family had already picked up two, players noted this in chat and I quickly made the updated. At this point another member of the same family unknowingly tried to pick up a third and it worked, which it shouldn't have. The boss of the family then alerted me to this and the update was fixed.
At this point I have a decision to make, do I:
- Take Blackjack tables from people who have spent money to innocently pick them up (this restriction isn't worded anywhere, it's not set in stone, it's just something I do), possibly even used credits to travel and pick them up etc. I doubt it. This is asking for trouble, the number of possibilities in loss for the family just because I made a mistake wouldn't make it fair on them. Why should they suffer for my mistake? They're the innocent ones here.
- Just remove the restriction to allow anybody to pick up three or more tables? Possibly but is this going to keep the game fair and as even a playing field as possible? No because this first family who has setup then has the ability to take over all tables. These families who have just setup today wouldn't have a chance at getting even one table.
- Let this go as the one reset mistake made (we've had worst in the past, such as starting the round with automatic ranking still in place!) and leave the policy enforced so that there are still 7 tables available for all other families to at least get one table - or more considering they can kill to take over. Bingo, this is what I went for. It was my mistake innocent people shouldn't suffer but every family should still have a chance to pick up a table.
- There is another option which would be to have the restriction set to 3 tables to family - 100% equal opportunities for all... opportunities anyway, considering 3 families would then have 90% of the tables. Again, giving other families 0% chance of at least picking up a table to give it a whirl.
There are a number of points to take from this. Firstly we have people upset that they found the restriction is in place today after setting up a family, that they can only get one table. Well if I decided to just leave the restriction this round, I would put money on most of the tables being taken :) That would mean no tables available for you and there being a monopoly in place. Another point is that this was just a human mistake, by me. To really put things into prospective, what's the risk that all blackjack tables will be taken up whilst the restriction is in place, given that there are low player numbers right now? Probably low because there aren't going to be another 7 families set up to take each table, at least I doubt it. So there will be room for the families to fight for further tables if they wish to. I get why people are a bit annoyed but what was the alternative? Nothing really, in my personal opinion I made the best possible decision. If this was the one mistake for this reset, I'll settle with it.
On a more personal level it annoyed me that somebody's response to this would be that I'm a "nob" and I "never make the game fair". In a perfect world mistakes wouldn't happen at all but unfortunately they do. I wouldn't say that then means I don't run the game fairly. It's almost as though this person thinks that I "forgot" to put the restrictions in place on purpose. I know a lot of what goes on behind the scenes and many browser games the size of Gangster Nation, smaller and larger. You would be surprised how many issues there are with administrators at these other websites.
There are games where the owners of the website will share your character details with their friends, there are games where your messages in chat etc are shared with friends, there are a huge amount of games where there is apparently just no interest or effort at all in stopping people from cheating and the list goes on. I shouldn't really compare to other websites but the point is that Gangster Nation is about as fair as it gets for browser gaming. In fact, it's even more fair than the huge browser games with millions of players in my opinion - due to the fact that they have huge amounts of players, they tend to have a smaller admin to player ratio, making it more difficult to put manual checking in place as well as automatic checking (for cheats etc).
I put a huge effort into making this game fair and hopefully most players see this, it's unfortunate that others have a different view and don't see the bigger picture. There have been a small amount of issues over the years and most of the issues with keeping the game fair were related to volunteer administrators many years ago. In recent years the only issues have been the odd mistakes.
Sometimes I just feel like saying "lets see you do a better job then" - I think most people would struggle with that and I also think most people don't realise the amount of time I spent managing the website daily (keeping it fair), not just developing it. More than the amount of hours it pays me, that's for sure!
This post has been bashed out to put my thoughts onto "paper", I've probably missed a lot of points out but at least it's free from my head now. I'm going to move on and forget about this particular issue and hopefully when the restriction on blackjack is removed tonight other people will move on.
Update: I think another issue is that people see me and the first family to pick blackjack tables up as being on side with eachother or something. If this silly thought is just left to one side for a moment you may see that from my position I have to keep everybody happy. Too many people worry about keeping themselves happy, that's fine, but I have to make sure it's as fair as possible for all. Unfortunately it looks as though whatever I do, somebody is unhappy. Put yourselves in the shoes of the other family for a moment, how would you like having your tables stripped from you after you completely innocently picked them up? Either way it looks like I'm going to annoy people but I'm not going to do wrong by anybody. It's far worse to remove somebody's tables than to put the restriction in place from that point onwards. These decisions I make all depend on the situation at the time. If one family had used credits to travel picking up 10 tables whilst the restriction was in place, then I would work out a solution with them to remove at least 5 of the tables and make things a bit more fair. In this case, it was 3 tables (2 at first), nothing ridiculous and hence the decision I made, was made. Please try to see things from my prospective before talking rubbish about me, thank you :)
Update 2: I didn't go out looking for the quote at the top of this page. I logged on to the admin panel and it just happened to be there in front of me. A shame really, not a good start to your Gangster Nation working day!
Update: I think another issue is that people see me and the first family to pick blackjack tables up as being on side with eachother or something. If this silly thought is just left to one side for a moment you may see that from my position I have to keep everybody happy. Too many people worry about keeping themselves happy, that's fine, but I have to make sure it's as fair as possible for all. Unfortunately it looks as though whatever I do, somebody is unhappy. Put yourselves in the shoes of the other family for a moment, how would you like having your tables stripped from you after you completely innocently picked them up? Either way it looks like I'm going to annoy people but I'm not going to do wrong by anybody. It's far worse to remove somebody's tables than to put the restriction in place from that point onwards. These decisions I make all depend on the situation at the time. If one family had used credits to travel picking up 10 tables whilst the restriction was in place, then I would work out a solution with them to remove at least 5 of the tables and make things a bit more fair. In this case, it was 3 tables (2 at first), nothing ridiculous and hence the decision I made, was made. Please try to see things from my prospective before talking rubbish about me, thank you :)
Update 2: I didn't go out looking for the quote at the top of this page. I logged on to the admin panel and it just happened to be there in front of me. A shame really, not a good start to your Gangster Nation working day!