GM Program Update: New AAR System

[Mavelle]

Hey everyone! It's your friendly neighborhood GMD here. We have decided to move to a new AAR rating scale for a couple reasons.

-Many events will get minimal constructive criticism about how to improve, or even what people enjoyed in said events

-Many people operate on a personal scale different from the one put forth on the AAR template

-The GM Leadership team was not able to get information on whether or not a GM was actually innovating, doing well, entertaining, etc. with those two above reasons.

 

In order to move forward and insure that we're able to help people improve as well as see what people need improving in, we're moving to a new scale.

We have three scales now; on a scale of 1 to 5. They are as follows:

Gameplay: How much you enjoyed the actual meat/play section of the event

Performance: Pretty self explanatory, how well the server performed (We are aware performance is not always a GM problem; as such, we don't have to look at this rating as a general indicator of how good the event was if you're doing other things right!)

Care/Effort: This is how much you put in to the event, whether it be the depth of story, roleplay, building, game design, etc. The whole point of this is that we want to know whether or not someone is merely trying to entertain the server with some low-depth stuff (Which is still okay!) or whether they're doing the thing we really want in the team; pushing the envelope. We want GMs to provide new and interesting experiences for people! Pro-Tip, GM's, some of the best care and effort I've ever seen has been on event server deployments.

 

 

The AAR format will be updated, as well as every link to the google form. The old google form's responses will be locked, so you'll know if you're on the wrong one. 

 

This is super public and we're always open to feedback; please send any concerns or questions you have to any member of GM leadership! The discord and the roster are public for that very reason.

 

This change, along with everything the GM program strives to do, is to ensure that every member of the GM team and the community as a whole can have an equal opportunity to let their specific talents shine. At the end of the day, this system is about your enjoyment- and so is the entire GM team. 

 

I'd also like to put this right here; an enormous shoutout to @Bacta, @Daytona211, @Jovanovic, @Guac, and @Dono- we went through months of debating, changing, compromising, testing, and chiseling this thing down to a fine logical powder. The team wouldn't have had this big step in the right direction without this wonderful team of GMMs. Two of them have resigned recently, but that doesn't mean their legacy in this system won't carry on. 

With high hopes for the great future of gamemastering,

Mavelle

Edited March 27, 2022 by Mavelle

[Turtle]

I helped test it :D

[Aeon]

1/5 Pretty mid

[Ccmonty]

people already dont rate AARs as is and making them put effort into doing is not going to help

[Finn]

4 hours ago, Ccmonty said:

people already dont rate AARs as is and making them put effort into doing is not going to help

[Guac]

4 hours ago, Ccmonty said:

people already dont rate AARs as is and making them put effort into doing is not going to help

quality > quantity. Even if this diminishes the sheer number of rates, I'd rather them be detailed and help the GM than "7/10 it was good"

[Daytona211]

4 hours ago, Ccmonty said:

people already dont rate AARs as is and making them put effort into doing is not going to help

This was why the rating system stayed the way it was for so long as I argued it was a good middle ground for squeezing out the best metrics from the minimal effort on the players part. 

But upon further discussion with the current team we are at a place where we can experiment like this and put our faith that a majority of the players are willing to meet us halfway with this amount of effort. 
If it crashes and burns we can always go back to the drawing board, but we're fairly confident that this system is the path forward even if we need to tweak it a bit to fit the communities needs

[Mavelle]

4 hours ago, Ccmonty said:

people already dont rate AARs as is and making them put effort into doing is not going to help

Day's speaking facts, but even if- there's not actually more effort being put into rating it; maybe a few more key presses? But if I can write this entire response in less than 45 seconds I don't think that's a huge time increase. The system, instead of making players do more work, just gives them more of a clear guideline of how to rate so that everyone can be on the same scale.