4 replies to this topic

[Rill Soji]

I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking about this. The problem really bothers me that there are a lot of folks who help on the sidelines of our server. They're not necessarily popular, they don't go out of their way to make what they do public, but they contribute so much to this server in their own quiet ways.

I tried to recognize them first with the Helping Hands contest but I wasn't satisfied with it. For one, it was aimed the wrong direction. I tried to get people to post screenshots of themselves being helpful. That's all wrong because the people who help aren't that kind of personality.

So I reworked the contest, hoping to launch it again in January, but this time aimed the right direction. Screenshots of people take of OTHER people helping out. I wanted to reward both the person who captured the moment and the person doing the helping. But it still doesn't feel quite right to me.

Then I decided to bring back the MVP contest. A player of the year award and maybe in the future, pull nominations from the monthly helping hands contest. We couldn't do that for this year but I figured we could still have the MVP contest. That, however, brought me back to the original problem. It's too limited to folks who are well-known and do public things to help the server.

Stay with me for a sec....

I'm a big Zig Ziglar and Dave Ramsey fan. Zig saved my life, Dave saved my marriage. They're both very positive and optimistic and realistic people. One of Zig's segments on an audio book I listen to frequently talks about unsung heroes. The people in life who do small things with big impacts. I've been listening to dave and zig this week (I try to get some of each in every month, great for motivation) and so I guess what he was saying about unsung heroes in our lives kinda mixed with my other ideas in my brain.



So here's what I'm thinking and I'd like to get some feedback. I need someone to bounce this idea off of. Please point out the problems with it and possible solutions if you see any.

I'm thinking of putting up a sticky thread called Unsung Heroes. This post would say something nice and awesome about the people of the server who help who aren't always recognized. Kinda like a salute to them and their good deeds. The post would be locked.

I intend for this thread to be a list of names of the unsung heroes of ehmry bay. To get a person added to the list, you would PM me with the name of the person and a good amount of reason they should be on the list. A paragraph or two required, just like the MVP contest. Then I would add a reply to the main thread with the paragraph quoted. Submitters are anonymous.

I don't necessarily want to have a prize associated with it. It's more like the screenshot thread we had a while back where we could post about people we spotted in game who are on the forums. It's just a way to simply recognize and salute those who have done good. I'm not opposed to prizes though. Or doing something like pulling nominations for the yearly MVP from the unsung heroes list. If there were a lot of nominations then maybe doing it tournament style with the voting. Soandso vs Suchandsuch. Winner moves to the next round. Or everyone gets a small prize and one voted winner gets a big prize. I'm not sure what would work out best.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts if you have some time to think on it. Much appreciated.

[Son Jei]

I helped people when I was still playing , can I have a +1 internet points for good ol Jay?

[RazGerb]

Here is a list of people I made:
Drip Drip
Brownreclusez
Lolitsgoldberry
pinkpuff
Kitsune kane
Tomshadow
cricec
Bram
Draug
Honeys flame
Stormscall
andrewldl
soulless
morpheus treeweiner
drezdan
Idi spirit
maestro
conquerer sozin
Kiki bones
Oozo

It might take a while before I can make a paragraph for each

and yes, I do think it's a good idea for people who aren't as big as goldiy and such.

[FuriousFluffy]

Any recognition given where recognition is due is a good idea. MVP implies a more populated, and well known effect, but there are many who help out a lot as well that are unknown to most, whether it be a 5-10 man group that sticks around capping camps for us all night, or roamers volunteering to go scouting and following the enemy groups around. All of it is quite helpful. PVE wise is an unknown to me as I rarely if ever touch it after I reached 80 .

[Rivjar]

Rill Soji, on 21 December 2013 - 04:39 PM, said:

I intend for this thread to be a list of names of the unsung heroes of ehmry bay. To get a person added to the list, you would PM me with the name of the person and a good amount of reason they should be on the list. A paragraph or two required, just like the MVP contest. Then I would add a reply to the main thread with the paragraph quoted. Submitters are anonymous.

The idea sounds awesome by itself but when I start to think about what people like in this game I can see where this could start to become irrelevant or even controversial. Take someone who ports their guild through JPs for example, definitely a good deed but they aren't as helpful to the server as someone who regularly spends their Friday nights porting for the Obsidian Sanctum(the WvW JP). A controversial example could be a GvG leader, they help Ehmry as a whole by getting our name out as a good GvG server but prior to the addition to the arena a lot of WvWers resented them.

Maybe you could section it off by deed: WvW, GvG, World Bosses, PvP (if there any groups representing ehmry), PvE (for people that do stuff in PvE that isn't world bosses), and General.

As for prizes I think mentioning them is enough. If they are doing something for the server they can get more traffic to them, if they are doing something that's more private they will get recognition (before they would have got nothing).