The Difficulty of Finding a Good Staff and the Flaw of RPG "Services"

It seems that it's nearly impossible to actually find a good staff these days. On phi, we have three administrators at the time of this post; unfortunately, personal issues make me the only member of the administrative team that still can regularly check in for the time being. So, with that in mind, we have—on more than one occasion—conducted staff searches on the various RPG "services" out there.

Let me tell you, the fact that they claim to be a service is a lie. They're nothing but vomitous self-promotion schemes. Given our success with them, they should, in fact, be thanking us for the service of adding posts to their forums. There is no other gain from them.

This happens to be the fifth time we've attempted to use them, for various incarnations of UH and IO. We've tried a variety of approaches, appealing to a variety of senses. This particularly time, I attempted to intellectually rationalize with them. Previously, we've attempted to appeal to them with grandeur, hook them with psychological conditioning, or entice them with possibilities of high positions at an established RPG.

And do you know how many functional staff members with a pulse we've gotten out of it? Zero.

That's right. The damn "service" is so unproductive that we've gotten zero worthwhile leads. Sure, we've had applicants. We've even had more than a handful of them actually make it to the site and register. But none of them do anything worth a damn before they disappear. It seems that whoever frequents those forums looking for "work" are in actuality, allergic to actually… you know… working.

I swear it's the culture of RPGs these days. Everyone expects RPGs to last a week or two at the most. It seems that creating an RPG is the fashionable thing to do, and if they can't have things exactly how they imagine them, on demand, they jump ship without a reasonable care for whatever they leave behind. And worse of all, not only do they only seek control, they are also completely unwilling to work for it.

The nature of today's RPGs means that it doesn't matter if the administrator is entirely inadequate, because the RPG isn't expected to have a long shelf life. These fly-by-night RPGs are so permeating and prevalent that the mindset is drilled into many of these communities, including those with RPG "services," such as "graphic communities" (a rant about that later). The nature of the game isn't to produce the best story or realm anymore, but to entirely create funky twists on previously done tales. The recycling certainly gets old.

Pitiful. Dreadful. Absolutely despicable. Seems like the entire genre jumped the shark.

We'll try to be different on phi, because while we have roleplaying "services," we also have very integrated and very immersive roleplaying realms built in, so people are not simply here to sell to the highest bidder or to pimp their own projects. It really is quite a shame when the RPG services are no longer about helping the respective RPG or to even discuss issues related to them intellectually; it's all about self-promotion and they know it and embrace it. It is not, was not, and never will be about the advancement of RPGs and genuine RPG discussion. Simply because it is used primarily for a platform for advertising. The insightful RPers often avoid it altogether.

And I'm personally tired of it.