Suggestion for the future of ATA's

[Fractale]

I'm just throwing this out there, but would it be at all do-able if staff did more than 1 ATA a week? And instead of holding it religiously in the GCD, maybe Gaia staff can go around hosting the Ask the Admin in different forums, especially since it would do good collecting questions from different communities. This would ease up on any certain community having to "raid" and spam their questions in a different community's ATA, overwhelming both users and staff, and making users feel like they're not getting a word in edgewise. Not only that, but users from different communities coming in and trolling or spamming and filling the ATA on someone else's home forum with more crap and useless conversations than necessary, that aren't asking the Admins anything.

I fully embrace that you're trying to reach out to more users, Gaia, and that users want to be heard. But thy can be heard in their own forum. With their own scheduled ATA. Maybe you can have an AYA in the GCD on Mondays, as usual, but go to the zomg community on Wednesday or Thursday. Or the SF community on Fridays.

Lanzer

Thank you for joining us on this week's ATA everyone! The response is overwhelming and I'm sorry we can't get to all your questions. Please join us again on next week's ATA if we couldn't get to your question day. See you next week!

Quote:

The response is overwhelming

Well, Lanzer, that's what happens when you announce ATA site-wide to anyone with dev alerts turned on, and not break one massive ATA into several smaller ones, in different forum communities rolleyes But don't worry, I was overwhelmed too.

This sums up how I feel about today's ATA.

Corinth Maxwell

Yeata Zi

There are always more AtAs. Be patient--your question will still exist next week.

Sit back and enjoy. You are witnessing a revolution!

cat_stare No, what I'm witnessing is horse****. Some of us have questions that WE'D like to have answered today, too. Did any of you ever take what OTHER people wanted to do with this topic into consideration, or were you all too busy baaaaaaawing over the zOMG announcement? I'm pissed off about development being halted, too, but you don't see ME getting all of my friends & all of their friends to take over a Q & A topic and spam the same complaint over & over. cat_evil

Quote:

cat_stare Thanks to "you-know-who" spamming this particular thread with "you-know-what", nearly EVERYONE'S individual questions are being overlooked or missed. Quite frankly, I was beyond "pissed off" before I was even able to make my first post here. cat_evil cat_stressed cat_evil cat_scream cat_evil

[VlXX]

THIS

[Opera Phantomess]

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade. Masquerade!

To be quite honest, if other users are upset over the fact that Gaia pissed off a whole community within its main community to the point where in order to be heard, that community had to "raid" the AtA to get their point across and the attention their anger would otherwise not get, then I feel sorry for those users for thinking AtA is about them and questions about whether or not certain staff members ate toast for breakfast. I am not saying those were the only questions being asked other than the ones surrounding zOMG! because I saw some nice ones being ignored as well, but one has to understand that to get anything answered on site it would be through a direct way like the AtA or raise a huge stink about it for months and years before a solid answer is given.

The staff should have known a "raid" was going to occur. The fact that the AtA reached twenty-eight pages, most of the questions asked being about the recent nail in the coffin of negligence for zOMG!, should speak volumes to Gaia staff about what should have been done and now what needs to be looked at and changed and done.

Hide your face so the world will never find you.

[pirhan]

Good idea.

I know when the ATA is posted on Facebook, there are quite a few more posts from faces I haven't seen before. I think having something similar to the ATA in other forums would be great at gathering different perspectives, as being in the GCD and non announced it's not something the typical Gaian would find. 3nodding

[Fractale]

Opera Phantomess

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade. Masquerade!

To be quite honest, if other users are upset over the fact that Gaia pissed off a whole community within its main community to the point where in order to be heard, that community had to "raid" the AtA to get their point across and the attention their anger would otherwise not get, then I feel sorry for those users for thinking AtA is about them and questions about whether or not certain staff members ate toast for breakfast. I am not saying those were the only questions being asked other than the ones surrounding zOMG! because I saw some nice ones being ignored as well, but one has to understand that to get anything answered on site it would be through a direct way like the AtA or raise a huge stink about it for months and years before a solid answer is given.

The staff should have known a "raid" was going to occur. The fact that the AtA reached twenty-eight pages, most of the questions asked being about the recent nail in the coffin of negligence for zOMG!, should speak volumes to Gaia staff about what should have been done and now what needs to be looked at and changed and done.

Hide your face so the world will never find you.

I'm not saying zomg's community doesn't have a right to be pissed off and upset and want answers. I'm not saying that at all. But I feel it's incredibly rude, disorderly, and uncivilized to barge into an ATA and raid it with 45029359036590q6bazillion questions on the same issue, and not let anyone else who may be a reg of that forum get a word in, because by the time they hit submit, thinking their post will make it on the first page, a bunch of loud, obnoxious foreign community members pushed the ATA to page 12. It's like an entire neighborhood going around yelling into megaphones and blowing whistles after they barge into congress' offices, and expecting to be taken seriously, and for the people who were there first, presenting their concerns before congress in a more quiet, orderly manner, getting upset about it.

I just would like to see Gaia give more attention to users, not all in one ATA, but in several, collecting different viewpoints, while keeping those loud, pushy users confined to their own forums, so future ATA's will be tamer, without the raids, drum banging, and whistle blowing.

[The Dropkick]

You know, it sucks even more when you really don't care about zOMG.

[Dlin]

The AtA is for all of Gaia. The zomg community is a part of Gaia, and they've had some bad news and are pretty upset. I think, since the AtA happens every week, we can cut them some slack this time out. Complaints about the AtA being blitzed would be a lot more understandable and valid if this happened every single week.

Yes, some questions got overlooked. They can be asked again next week when some of this furor has died down a bit and the zomg community gets the answers they need to hear.

[Fractale]

Dlin

The AtA is for all of Gaia. The zomg community is a part of Gaia, and they've had some bad news and are pretty upset. I think, since the AtA happens every week, we can cut them some slack this time out. Complaints about the AtA being blitzed would be a lot more understandable and valid if this happened every single week.

Yes, some questions got overlooked. They can be asked again next week when some of this furor has died down a bit and the zomg community gets the answers they need to hear.

I know, but more ATA's throughout the week; held in different forums, would 1: prevent one single ATA from being too overwhelming, had they not announced it, and kept it as knowledge to that 1 forum each time. 2: Give the staff a chance to collect data and opinions from ONLY the users from whatever specific forum they've hosted ATA in, if they're dealing with just 1 community, and not several all bouncing questions everywhere. 3: prevent raids

zomg community can complain till they're blue in the face. They can just do it under their own ATA session, and if Gaia gave even half a s**t about hearing that community's voices, they'd set up an ATA there, NOT announce it to the world (like how hey used to not announce GCD's ATA), so only that community can have their problems and concerns addressed, and make them happy. Give everyone their own equal time and attention.

[Almandaragal]

Fractale

I know, but more ATA's throughout the week; held in different forums, would 1: prevent one single ATA from being too overwhelming, had they not announced it, and kept it as knowledge to that 1 forum each time. 2: Give the staff a chance to collect data and opinions from ONLY the users from whatever specific forum they've hosted ATA in, if they're dealing with just 1 community, and not several all bouncing questions everywhere. 3: prevent raids

zomg community can complain till they're blue in the face. They can just do it under their own ATA session, and if Gaia gave even half a s**t about hearing that community's voices, they'd set up an ATA there, NOT announce it to the world (like how hey used to not announce GCD's ATA), so only that community can have their problems and concerns addressed, and make them happy. Give everyone their own equal time and attention.

So in your first post, you complain about how AtA is some sacred GCD thing (it's not, it's for everyone on Gaia who cares to attend, as already noted), then you claim in this post that everyone deserves equal time and attention. Which is it?

Ask the Admin is not your personal playground. It's not GCD's personal playground. There are no regulars for Ask the Admin outside of staff, there should be no prommies. If you don't like that someone other than people who share your arguably elitist opinions came to the event, well, tough cookies for you.

I assume that more than one AtA is not held per week because it's time consuming. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but they are generally held at 5 PM pacific or later. That's go home time for most people, but those that participate are often staying at the office later to be able to do so. I'm pretty sure the staff doesn't have time to be spending multiple hours after work per week doing this when there is already an established day each normal week that doesn't have holidays or big plans messing with them.

Frankly, I LIKE that it was announced via Dev Alert too. It gives more people a chance to know what's going on and when. As said before, this isn't some little GCD exclusive party. Ask the Admin is simply held in GCD because that's where it best fits. Ask the Admin is a community "event" of sorts, so it makes the most sense to hold it in GCD. There is absolutely no need or reason to move it around like some president needing secret decoy travel plans for security.

There are always questions that go unanswered, ignored, unseen, whatever. But these last couple of AtA's have actually had more staff participating, and thus more questions have been answered more thoroughly. I prefer that to just Lanzer fielding about a page worth of questions each Monday, personally.

These "raids" happen occasionally. So what? Sometimes that seems to be the only way for a community to get an issue addressed. As somewhat of an aside I don't think that's the case for the zOMG community, which is far more spoiled and gets far more attention compared to other flash game/broken feature communities, but that's largely irrelevant to the overall issue. Unless, of course, this is just some cover for your feelings regarding this particular AtA being swarmed by zOMG fans.

[dozenrats]

I don't post in ATAs but I love reading them. Today I was hoping for answers to questions about zOMG. I'm sure there were plenty of other lurkers who wanted answers as well.

I did observe other questions being answered.

I see nothing wrong with announcing these site-wide so more people are aware of them and can participate.

[Voat]

Meh IDK about you but I enjoyed all the activity going on biggrin

The ATAs of before that reached only like 3-6 pages was pitiful to watch...but that's my opinion.

I think it's a bit unnecessary to ask for more ATAs...people get their questions addressed sometimes in SF/GCD itself, through regular forum posting and not just in those ATA threads, anyway. ATA isn't just for the GCD, it's for everyone.

It might feel annoying to some to see a thread 'raided' but really, I didn't expect anything less than a raid after such a huge announcement about zOMG - if ATA wasn't flooded with user concerns I'd be pretty surprised. It's not like anyone spammed outside of ATA either.

And no matter how many people attend ATA, Lanzer will always abide by that 1 page rule. First come, first served biggrin So all is good cool

The question re-posting/spamming seemed to be a result of a lack of knowledge about the untold rules in ATA more than out of any form of disrespect to anyone though. The more people attend ATA regularly the more they'll see the error of their ways once they realize spamming gets nowhere. biggrin

[Narumi Misuhara]

It's hard enough for us all to get together for one ATA, I don't see us being able to sustain multiple a week. ATA is in the GCD because ...well ...it's the Gaia Community Discussion forum. Site Feedback, Aquariums, zOMG, these are all Gaia communities so the GCD is the most appropriate place for it.

I can most certainly understand being upset/frustrated after waiting a week to ask something and then not being able too because your question can't even be seen, but what happened today is not the norm and if all else fails you are always welcome to ask your questions via PM.

[Nissa chan]

Uhm... When has Lanzer EVER answered everybody's questions...? All the ATA's I've witnessed, a bare minimum of questions are answered while the majority are ignored. Why don't you demand the developers take more than a measly hour and a half to answer their user's concerns?
It's NOT about "friends" coming in and raiding. a lot of users were separate but had the very same concerns regarding the issue. If we don't speak out, we are not heard. The heads of Gaia tend to ignore anything that is less out and out pandemonium over things, and even then....
They didn't prevent you from getting a word in, unless you tried to post after about 6:30... This wasn't vocal, we all had a chance to post and hopefully get our posts read. I'd like to think they always read all the posts eventually, but just don't get to answering it all. Hopefully they hold certain things under consideration and work on it behind the scenes based on user suggestion. Other time, they just flat out ignore questions they don't want to answer. I've seen it numerous times, especially about issues regarding alchemy and zOMG...
If they held an ATA in each forum, staff would be stretched out, and it's probably more unlikely for users to get their questions answered. But the idea is good in theory... They just don't have the time or patience to devote such attention.
I'm glad they announced it ahead of time. I think it DID help in users getting their thoughts and questions organized prior to the ATA. Otherwise... I'm sure it WOULD have been a bunch of zOMGers going in and just "BAAAAAWing!" We collaborated together and worked on what we were going to ask so as to get our point across more efficiently and effectively, rather than completely tearing the place up with just complaints, and not actual feedback or suggestions.

[MistressMinako]

GCD is Gaia Community Discussion. That doesn't mean AtA belongs to just that forum. AtA is guided by the issues on the site. What's the point of moving it around? You'd just have to wait another week anyway. The zOMG community has been damn forgiving of the staff's actions over the last year or so. We've jumped through their hoops and ponied up just to support our game. No one's demanding GCDers to pay up and fight just to keep from being moved into a subforum.

And when it comes right down to it? I've been a member of Gaia for eight years and a poster in GCD since it opened and I'll damn well do what I need to get my point across.

[Gemenice]

I love how people can always turn what they want into their own way.

First off - the fact that you post 'how are you, Lanzer, what's your favorite color?' Into ATA, doesn't make you regular - it makes you very sad individual and I wonder why did you even come there.

Sure, people have rights for questions like that too, I'm just worried that I don't see you raging over them.

What happened yesterday... I can understand. Unfortunately ATA is always held at the time when it's impossible for me to attend, which is kinda unfair, but I can understand that's it hard to fit the time for everyone.

There were news to zOMG! players. A lot of them came on, cause it's happening RIGHT now. If there is a chance to understand,to do something, it's now. They obviously aren't happy with the way things turned - hell, I'm not myself, but somehow, I think it's selfish of you to come on the forums, where you rage about how unfair it is that your question wasn't answered and that you have to wait, even though you're REGULAR.

ATA - is some way of the admin getting closer to people and getting us at least a bit of view on what's really happening and what's not. It's not your personal place, the fact that people aren't posting every week doesn't mean they are not regular - some actually pay more attention to it than those 'visible' ones, and I'm pretty sure if one of your fav. time passes on this site would be threatened to close up, you'll try to know why as well - especially if it would make MORE money which was spent somewhere else.

So maybe think next time, before going on raging time passing.