Positives the role has:
- CubeCraft Games values the efforts of all team members who help make CubeCraft a better and more welcoming place for everyone.
Rank aside, yes. All efforts to contribute should be valued. But by listing this as a positive for the translator rank, it doesn't quite make sense to say that you "value the efforts of
all team members" seeing that only a few will actually get the role. I don't see this as a pro at all in regards to the rank specifically. That's also because there are easier (and less controversial ways) to reward this.
Positives the role has:
- Giving them what they deserve: Translators do vital work for our international players - work that is pretty expensive in the real world. Our team may be composed of volunteers, but that does not change the amazing quality of translations many of our translation team members provide or the huge effort they put. Of course there is always room for improvement and new members may still not be as experienced, but Translator is for the developed translators of our team.
- Translator is a huge motivation for our team to constantly improve and develop.
To say it's deserved, is not something either of us can prove. At what point is this rank "deserved" by someone? What makes a new rank more appropriately deserved than the usual multiplier, plus, rank rewards that could've been given out? I think those would make a pretty good motivation too.
One could argue that reporting rule breaking is much more time consuming since the work truly never ends, and gathering enough information isn't always easy. There are a fair amount of dedicated players out there with more than a thousand accepted reports, so are they also deserving of a rank from doing voluntary work? They don't get anything at all at the moment, and I honestly think they provide more for the server than translations.
Positives the role has:
An example future opportunity would be Translator staff signing NDAs, like Designers, and helping improve the quality of our Marketplace content.
I can get behind this one, though it's not really that often that there's something released for the market place AFAIK. Though there's probably a backlog of stuff that needs to be done for the market place I assume.
- Translator is a huge motivation for our team to complete big projects quickly and efficiently.
True, but still, what makes it different from the normal rewards (plus subscription, multipliers, etc.)? Motivation can be achieved without this rank too, and it wouldn't require any time being put into making a new rank nor figuring out exactly what the requirements are. All in all it still seems like wasted time to me. People have even done a lot for the server without any kind of promised rewards, so this is kind of overkill.
- Translator is a huge opportunity for our team to attract the attention of awesome people. The introduction of this rank will now mean users who don't use the forums will see this rank in game and be curious what it is, what that person does, and will prompt them to think ‘’Maybe I could do that?’’
Isn't there the occasional broadcasted message on the server that mentions the translations team? If they weren't interested in that before seeing someone with the rank, you can clearly see they're only interested in it for the fancy tag.
What is a stars rewarding system? - People earn an amount of stars for their work. The statistics of people are saved by a Discord bot. Translators of the translation team can use these stars to purchase CubeCraft Games store content.
Okay, this is the first time I've heard about this. This makes no sense anymore. If you were already "giving back" to translators, why need a rank at all? Better translators get more stars, right? That means they already get rewarded more for working harder.
Translator is not only a reward. Translators are staff, they contribute to the server and it's vital work they do for our international players.
It's fine and dandy calling them staff instead of a reward, but the whole "they contribute to the server" thing is not a valid reason in my opinion. So many more people contribute to the server in form of community maps, reports, suggestions, criticism, etc. and none of that is rewarded in the slightest (correct me if I'm wrong, it just seems that way right now & I haven't seen anything about this). What makes translating so special? Why not add a reporter rank, suggester rank, pseudo-builder/community builder rank, etc. All these people contribute to the server as well, and some of these are more important than translating in my opinion.
Translators will continue receiving stars on top of their rank. All staff receive a salary/small rewards for their work apart from all the cool perks they get on our CubeCraft Games platforms. CubeCraft tries to give small things back where they can for the hard work of our volunteers.
The stars rewarding system will also not be removed. Not everyone on the team will manage to reach Translator and people need to be able to earn something for their work.
I think I said enough about this in the last paragraph. Tl;dr translators don't need a rank if they're already getting rewarded with this star system. Especially because there's other people who might deserve it more, that are getting nothing at all.
We want to improve the gaming quality of Translators, not ruin it by giving them a rank that attracts a lot of attention. In cases of abuse, staff have easy ways of finding out the real username of the nicked user.
Every staff rank has unlimited friends slots.
No rank would mean no necessity for /nick since there's no flashy rank to be targeted. This is a cheap shot, I know, but I had to say it.
We have not had work for a while, now you introduce a Translator rank?
We are very ready to get back to work with full strength, like never before, because the last few months have been essential for the development of the team.
Our team has expanded a lot and is now highly motivated - nothing can stop a highly motivated team from achieving its goals. We have managers that work in different departments of the team and the work is no longer on a single person’s shoulders, which will significantly improve the management of the team.
In the last few months, I have prepared a string translations system that is expected to provide a huge amount of good quality translations, and it is now ready for release.
Due to the tons of work waiting for us in the future, the tons of work we have done in the past and the huge potential our team has, I consider the introduction of Translator reasonable and essential for the motivation of the team.
Wait so, there's effectively no backlog? Has most of the work already been completed (with the exception of more languages added in the future)?
As for the motivation thing: I've said it before in this post, and I'll say it again: A translator rank is not necessary for motivation. Why?
Translators are already getting rewards it seems & these rewards scale with how much work you do. Translators don't need as much motivation as you think if a rank is what you believe they need. There are tons of people in this community already who have done much more for the server with zero rewards as is, purely for good of the server. The star system seems like plenty of motivation.
What happened with ''Helping is enough reward''?
Hope you understand that the translation team did not introduce this rank. It was our admin team that did. While it may be enough reward for them, we like giving back where we can,
I don't think knowing who came up with it is gonna change our view on this. And by the way you phrased that, I'm a little confused with what you mean with "While it may be enough reward for them, we like giving back where we can". What's enough of a reward for them (who even is them in this part)? The rank or just helping out the server?
The fact that the moderators didn't know about this change before it was introduced to the community kind of gives me the hint that communication within the staff team hasn't improved.
CubeCraft Games values all the efforts of all team members who help make CubeCraft a better and more welcoming place for everyone. We wanted to surprise valued members of the Translations team with news about the rank to thank them for all the effort they've been putting in. Translations are really important for making CubeCraft accessible to those who don't speak English well or prefer to play in their native language.
We really wanted it to be a surprise but the consequence of this is that this caught our staff team offguard as we did not consult or discuss with them prior to announcement.
This was wrong of us and we are sorry, in 2020 we committed to being more transparent and although our hearts were in the right place, the execution was misguided and led to confusion within our volunteer base which should be avoided in the future.
Going forwards we will try to continue being more open about what we are doing. Generally, this has been the case, we just failed a bit on the way to improvement. We really hope you can understand that our Admin Team is still new and mistakes like this are bound to happen. We are thankful to have the support of our staff team and community as we learn and improve
While I don't have anything to say about this since it's already a step in the right direction again, I can't help but wonder if this tag would've gotten implemented if it as discussed with the entire staff team beforehand. Right now, it's probably too late to undo it, but there was a possibility this could've just been a suggestion that got shot down had you guys taken it to the rest of the staff team first. Just some food for thought.
