Why: More and more recently people have been pinging ALL of the staff teams in discord with game-related questions, or other questions related to PMU in general that don’t exactly require a staff exclusively to answer, of which, not all of them appreciate. However, I know a lot of people who wouldn’t mind answering these simple questions voluntarily and being pinged instead. What: Just an additional role that people can ping for questions that can be answered by veteran players or experienced players willing to tolerate “ping spams”. How: Players maybe send in a request and why they think they could do it? Similar to the spriter application maybe.
Putting it in the game itself doesn’t matter as much as discord, where I feel there is a bigger need, but I thought I’d suggest it anyway.
A ‘‘helper’’ role for experienced players to help out with game questions would be cool, it would certainly take some load off Staff in the discord. The bar to get the role shouldn’t be high and should be fairly effortless, I’d say if you have 500+ hours in game and a good track record you could get it assigned or something like that, to prevent unnecessary administrative stuff. Good suggestion!
That would help overall, specifically in the game, but that won’t address the main problem I am addressing, if you add more staff and someone @staffteam, you’ll still have a lot of them upset with the ping, if not more of them. This could be avoided when it comes to asking simple questions that a lot players could answer, but new players don’t know who to turn to so they ask staff.
Honestly this would be even worse if Reena and a few other users didn’t go out of their way to instruct new players in the game.
My comment was meant generally for the Discord, not really in game. I think having a Discord role for players that want to answer general questions about the game via pings/separate channel is pretty good. I’m not sure about adding more roles in game, I don’t really see the use for that, since you can’t be role pinged in game lol.
Truthfully I don’t see the need for a specific discord role. Instead, I like the idea of having a channel in the discord for new users to ask questions. Perhaps the general tab could be refashioned into becoming a new user question tab? If that isn’t super active then I think your suggestion of a “helper” role could be the next step - perhaps as an opt-in.
In terms of in-game, the idea of having certain users marked as helpers and such could be neat, but it could also be very confusing to players who request staff and can confuse the helpers for staff. However, you’re totally right that new users are often left directionless and typically need a “more experienced” user to come and show them the ropes, but I think that’s something that is better fixed by a more comprehensive new game FAQ that can teach mechanics without coming across as annoying (like the Buneary). I think Syni posted a thread about that though so I won’t go into details about that here.
I really like that idea Turt, and I greatly appreciate you sharing it, that would honestly go better probably than roles, even if that is done first just to see if the helper roll is still even need, because that could also just fix the problem itself.