Hi all, the HL staff got together and talked about the responses left so far. We wanted to thank you for your feedback, and remind those who want to comment in a less public setting that the survey has an open response portion at the end. That survey won't open for a little bit, but something to keep in mind.
Chhaam... is there really no clear vision from the people in leadership roles who have been in positions of power for years?
Turnover and lack of interest are both major parts to this. Ideally, we would be able to afford putting 1-2 people per division as needed, with HA being responsible for seeing that the tasks delegated are being performed adequately and according to the overall mission. With the turnover/interest issue, this responsibility has shifted with more of the formerly delegated tasks flowing up towards HAs. I hate the super corporate lingo of "vision", but the staff at the HA level do all agree with each other on what needs to be done in order for the league to function and improve. The focus right now is more on the function part for HL, though, since HAs are handling some of the tasks that are slipping through due to the staffing issue. The reasoning for the issue gets explained further down in my response to Kat's post.
NoNoeWayI think RGL should start utilizing their own Discord and TFTV more if that's the case. While a stream is better professionally, it's not necessary for the size of our community for mass engagement. Answer questions publicly and then they spread.
We want to do all of the above! The main hold back we have on doing more on discord/TFTV is a mix of ping-fatigue and audience. With discord, it's fairly easy for us to implement since HL has historically revolved around discord. TFTV is a new thing for us, since there's a pretty established audience of mostly 6s players, and in the past we've been told that TFTV doesn't care much for HL, let alone NA HL. Disregarding that, we agree that it's a good, public platform for players and staff to converse and get a good understanding of what's going on, coming up, or other questions that need answering.
PTSunnyyYour low number of volunteers comes from lack of faith in leadership. Nobody wants to volunteer under the current head of HL, sorry to be so blunt, but myself along many others refuse to work under Jercer. Not only that but RGL in the past has black listed players from admin team for personal reasons, that has been confirmed by ex-admins (and current ones).
I understand not liking someone based on personal experiences with them, or seeing an action that you don't agree with and vocalizing that. I do want to contextualize, though, that HA's are not the micromanager types and aren't hovering over the shoulders of the regular division staff. Under the 5 different HA's I've worked under at this point, I can confidently say that my interaction with them was minimal. Not to say they didn't check in, make sure things were going okay, asking for opinions/help, but they weren't always in my DMs asking about why a decision was made, why I did something the way I did, etc. I understand that Jercer gets a bad rep for decisions made, but a lot of the time those decisions weren't even made by her. They were made by other staff, and communicated by her so that the admin making the decision doesn't take the hit. Both Jercer and consta are/were very adamant about making sure that the division staff are able to make decisions for themselves, especially since HAs aren't able to keep up with every division's details at any point in time.
As for the "staff blacklist" that players talk about - though it does technically exist, it's a lot smaller than people think. We have recruitment standards that we uphold, one of them being having a clean discipline history in terms of interactions with other players. It's hard to put trust in someone who themselves cannot overcome their personal urge to type slurs at someone else, especially in the relatively short time frame RGL has existed. Otherwise, there's a very select few who are not allowed to return to staff due to their actions while on staff or shortly after leaving staff. They have nothing in their discipline history about these actions, but if someone has done something that would warrant removal, we generally don't let them return.
Katryna... In essence, why is it that RGL is not a league people want to stand behind?
These are great introspective questions that we went over in a meeting with HL staff. I think a lot of these boiled down to most information being passed down experientially, and not having enough time to learn when being new.
When I started on staff (summer of 2020ish) under Klowwd, a lot of what I learned was from how they handled tickets. Aside from that, I had to learn the entire website interface (scheduling, team placements, etc) myself because those weren't really taught to me outside of a super brief rundown. That's not to throw the blame onto Klowwd (or William Automatic, HA at the time), but the system I learned through was okay because there were so many people around that were able to help. Now that the staff has thinned out, that help isn't there, and that puts new staff in a spot where they have nothing to push off from. I've been put in this position to fix that issue, and have documentation tasks so that new staff (and old staff) are able to have something of a quick reference of anything they need. Having a place to easily look back at decisions from the past, their outcomes, and their contexts is something that we need in order to fix the issue of inconsistent decisions.
As for the sandbagging and clarity issues you've brought forward, I believe both will also be helped with that documentation. Having a reference of what players need to know at what time, as well as an easy to access record of previous decisions made on team skill levels will alleviate that pinch point to a degree. It won't solve the issue by itself, and it won't be an instant fix, but it's something that will be useful to have for admins to keep ourselves consistent.