An MCM Overhaul.

[Cal]

It is no secret that the opinion towards MCM has been on a downward spiral.

I would like to say the public opinion on MCM really started to downturn around the time Glove publicly announced his quitting the market. Prior to that it seems as though people were expressing that the market seemed to be stagnating and failing. However this did not turn negative until around Glove's exit.

The Causes
MC-Market is a forum of creators, not managed by creators. This discrepancy causes a difference in ideals in how the site should be run. Most people on the site use it as a platform for their services, however when the system is not supportive of that, they will grow angry and eventually, disappear.

Support
In it's current state, MCM will not run itself without human oversight. When the people that moderate and administrate the site are not moderating the platform, then any rules that are in place do not matter. There have been numerous cases of users on MCM such as myself experience ticket wait times of weeks. For a site that is filled to the brim with very competent, high skilled, and well spoken individuals already familiar with the rules and terms of the site, you would expect the platform to have no trouble expanding it's team or replacing those that aren't meeting the demand. These delays on a platform receiving the revenue of MCM and on the scale of MCM are unacceptable.

Scam Reports
I acknowledge that MCM has hired a new scam resolver, however seeing as he hasn't been on since Monday (posting this on Wednesday https://gyazo.com/a8a78bb311a2d07a4d6c75af20d8f601) and his counterpart has posted a grand total of twice since last Thursday at the time of writing this. These delays make the single most important principle of any transaction, trust, an unreliable. Scam Reports not only help bring peace of mind to those doing deals, but they allow those who get caught in scams, more often new members (the main source of MCM's revenue[Ads and ranks]) to have a way to fight against those who pull these scams. Scamming is inevitable, but with proper moderation, it can at least null some of the impact of it, impact which is being felt by the community very heavily currently.

Change is overrated
If there is one thing MC-Market administration is really good at, it's maintaining the status quo. Going through the previous 10 announcements, the notable changes to the platform have been (in objective descending order)
1) Various Staff Position Changes
2) A new theme
3) Business accounts
4) Forum reorganization
All of these changes are so minor, that you likely forgot about most of them, and this is where the problem arises. Though staff will be quick to say "we've still been increasing members at X rate." there comes a point where this stagnation of the forum will lead to a less interested and thereby less active userbase. The members in the shoutbox today are not the same members that were in the shoutbox 2 months ago. This is indicative of the nature of MCM, many members fading into obscurity due to it's being unable to retain interest. This is a failure of a system, and it will only be increased with the new problems arising.

The Solution
The major problems with the site are able to be fixed with relative ease. Despite the site administrators best efforts to maintain the status quo, a large change in needed. MC-Market's team needs an overhaul. The root of the overwhelming majority of these issues stem from the moderators and administrators of the site. The staff of MC-Market need new members, with fresh ideas, coming from a more diverse background. MCM needs to hit this growing mob of those growing weary of the failing system head on. Whatever you are trying to do now is not working. An ideological shift is needed, not brothers of current staff with no knowledge of the platform, not chatmods with no real impact on the site, real change is needed, or MC-Market will be facing a mob much bigger than it's current small but loud minority.

Please leave your feedback below.

 

[Justis]

I should have added tempted to the to ignore part. I always hope for a positive change. But every time I see such a long 'passionated' post I dot down a few bullet points I think it will contain. For this one I had:

* Staff is 'hard' to find with the same old excuse.
* Other priorities, thus we cannot do the overhaul.
* No new staff is actually needed.

I could check 2 out of the 3; Some people may appreciate you put such a passionate response but it's always the same old stuff. Just because you work hard does not mean you are getting more done. Because we know all the excuses out of the McM-Staff Textbook


Never knew McM needed people that make ludicrous remarks.

It's not a ludicrous remark, I genuinely would not want anyone on my staff team that would ever intentionally ignore anyone in this community, for any reason.
You corrected yourself and stated that you're only tempted, which is much more understandable.
Temptations are entirely different from actions.

Are you saying you don't do enough for MC-Market because you're an Admin, Resource Moderator AND Scam Resolver. And the reason you are an Admin is because you do A LOT more than anyone else. The reason you're a Scam Resolver is because M6 and Lion aren't doing their jobs like they should.

You are doing more than enough, it's the rest that are not doing enough.

I'm not saying I don't work hard enough, I'm saying I'm not doing enough.
As a wise person once told me, work smarter, not harder.
If I was smarter, I would have come to Mick with the exact people MC-Market's community needs on it's staff team, how to get them on our staff team, and made that happen; instead of needing to write up a long reply explaining why it's so difficult.

Every fault stems from a lack of personal ability and determination.
When recognizing a fault, ones self is the first person that should be to blame, because that is the only person you have complete control of, and is your entire source of change for the world.
Anyone who tells themselves it's too hard, too much, or impossible is cutting themselves short.

 

[Dann]

Are you saying you don't do enough for MC-Market because you're an Admin, Resource Moderator AND Scam Resolver. And the reason you are an Admin is because you do A LOT more than anyone else. The reason you're a Scam Resolver is because M6 and Lion aren't doing their jobs like they should.

You are doing more than enough, it's the rest that are not doing enough.

Honestly this thread is proof of this, I don't see Mick taking charge of Scam reports, nor do I see him doing support requests, this site seems a lot more like a "one man band" than a group of staff working together.

I honestly feel like a cleanout of the team would be something more appropriate, remove the Deadwood then streamline processes such as scam reports and chargebacks, for example - do you yourself really need to spend the time typing "what do you have to say about this scam report" on every thread, or could a add-on to mcm do that for you along with post a message asking the user to respond to the scam report on their profile?

I'm unsure of ideas as I do not know the full picture backend, although I'm sure there are ways to streamline the system and removedead wood from the staff team rather than hiring someone who really doesn't do much, no offense to the chat mods here, but is it really needed to have 3 odd chat mods for a chat that really is moderated by the other staff and other forum members anyways? Or would those 3 chat mods be better off being trained up to do activities such as scam reports or support requests?

 

[Aekalix]

It's not a ludicrous remark, I genuinely would not want anyone on my staff team that would ever intentionally ignore anyone in this community, for any reason.
You corrected yourself and stated that you're only tempted, which is much more understandable.
Temptations are entirely different from actions.


I'm not saying I don't work hard enough, I'm saying I'm not doing enough.
As a wise person once told me, work smarter, not harder.
If I was smarter, I would have come to Mick with the exact people MC-Market's community needs on it's staff team, how to get them on our staff team, and made that happen; instead of needing to write up a long reply explaining why it's so difficult.

Every fault stems from a lack of personal ability and determination.
When recognizing a fault, ones self is the first person that should be to blame, because that is the only person you have complete control of, and is your entire source of change for the world.
Anyone who tells themselves it's too hard, too much, or impossible is cutting themselves short.

Finally someone with self-awareness, but let me tell you this. I have the exact same mentality as you have but sometimes it is not possible to achieve that. You can try incredibly hard but that will only end up in you getting burned out (eventually you can just keep on going through the burn-outs but that is not healthy at all. My GP told me) So, I think you should do an 'M6' or a 'Lion' and just leave for a few days. You'll be more efficient afterward. As much as you care about McM, take care of yourself first.

 

[Callam]

I've been trying to get a site bug fixed for months. I'm unable to sticky a thread that I've had open since May 19, 2016. When I've asked Mick about getting this bug sorted (over the cause of several months), I was just told to make a new thread. I've had a thread open since May 19, 2016 that has a lot of feedback on it etc so I told him that wasn't an option. Other people have also had this issue with their threads (that they also don't want to delete).

I've only just recently started paying for advertising on this site again since I started up a new service.

 

[Fawks]

Mcm might aswell get rid of M6 and the new guy seeing as Justis has moderated more threads than both of them in the last three months in a week

 

[Flipora]

46 agrees no disagrees... take a hint mcm

 

[Marek]

I want Cal 's rich parents to purchase mc-market from thicc micc and then give it to calvin and #makemc-marketgreatagain

 

[Jack]

It is no secret that the opinion towards MCM has been on a downward spiral.

I would like to say the public opinion on MCM really started to downturn around the time Glove publicly announced his quitting the market. Prior to that it seems as though people were expressing that the market seemed to be stagnating and failing. However this did not turn negative until around Glove's exit.

The Causes
MC-Market is a forum of creators, not managed by creators. This discrepancy causes a difference in ideals in how the site should be run. Most people on the site use it as a platform for their services, however when the system is not supportive of that, they will grow angry and eventually, disappear.

Support
In it's current state, MCM will not run itself without human oversight. When the people that moderate and administrate the site are not moderating the platform, then any rules that are in place do not matter. There have been numerous cases of users on MCM such as myself experience ticket wait times of weeks. For a site that is filled to the brim with very competent, high skilled, and well spoken individuals already familiar with the rules and terms of the site, you would expect the platform to have no trouble expanding it's team or replacing those that aren't meeting the demand. These delays on a platform receiving the revenue of MCM and on the scale of MCM are unacceptable.

Scam Reports
I acknowledge that MCM has hired a new scam resolver, however seeing as he hasn't been on since Monday (posting this on Wednesday https://gyazo.com/a8a78bb311a2d07a4d6c75af20d8f601) and his counterpart has posted a grand total of twice since last Thursday at the time of writing this. These delays make the single most important principle of any transaction, trust, an unreliable. Scam Reports not only help bring peace of mind to those doing deals, but they allow those who get caught in scams, more often new members (the main source of MCM's revenue[Ads and ranks]) to have a way to fight against those who pull these scams. Scamming is inevitable, but with proper moderation, it can at least null some of the impact of it, impact which is being felt by the community very heavily currently.

Change is overrated
If there is one thing MC-Market administration is really good at, it's maintaining the status quo. Going through the previous 10 announcements, the notable changes to the platform have been (in objective descending order)
1) Various Staff Position Changes
2) A new theme
3) Business accounts
4) Forum reorganization
All of these changes are so minor, that you likely forgot about most of them, and this is where the problem arises. Though staff will be quick to say "we've still been increasing members at X rate." there comes a point where this stagnation of the forum will lead to a less interested and thereby less active userbase. The members in the shoutbox today are not the same members that were in the shoutbox 2 months ago. This is indicative of the nature of MCM, many members fading into obscurity due to it's being unable to retain interest. This is a failure of a system, and it will only be increased with the new problems arising.

The Solution
The major problems with the site are able to be fixed with relative ease. Despite the site administrators best efforts to maintain the status quo, a large change in needed. MC-Market's team needs an overhaul. The root of the overwhelming majority of these issues stem from the moderators and administrators of the site. The staff of MC-Market need new members, with fresh ideas, coming from a more diverse background. MCM needs to hit this growing mob of those growing weary of the failing system head on. Whatever you are trying to do now is not working. An ideological shift is needed, not brothers of current staff with no knowledge of the platform, not chatmods with no real impact on the site, real change is needed, or MC-Market will be facing a mob much bigger than it's current small but loud minority.

Please leave your feedback below.

Mick needs to "sell" MCM again to someone like Ajdin who is actually competent, cares about the site, and gets things done.
The whole "change is overrated" section is very true. I made a similar point on the last announcement thread and Mick said they were looking into hiring a few new developers. But it's been just under a month since that post and of course nothing has been done about it (from the public's view - who knows what's been happening in that staff Slack).
Also they Tweeted about "updating" the name color system 10 days ago and it's still hasn't been reinstated.
If these behaviors continue then MCM is going to be slowly run into the ground, but Mick doesn't care as long as he's still profiting.

 

[Ally]

I want Cal 's rich parents to purchase mc-market from thicc micc and then give it to calvin and #makemc-marketgreatagain

to someone like Ajdin who is actually competent

 

[Kiri]

It's not a ludicrous remark, I genuinely would not want anyone on my staff team that would ever intentionally ignore anyone in this community, for any reason.
You corrected yourself and stated that you're only tempted, which is much more understandable.
Temptations are entirely different from actions.


I'm not saying I don't work hard enough, I'm saying I'm not doing enough.
As a wise person once told me, work smarter, not harder.
If I was smarter, I would have come to Mick with the exact people MC-Market's community needs on it's staff team, how to get them on our staff team, and made that happen; instead of needing to write up a long reply explaining why it's so difficult.

Every fault stems from a lack of personal ability and determination.
When recognizing a fault, ones self is the first person that should be to blame, because that is the only person you have complete control of, and is your entire source of change for the world.
Anyone who tells themselves it's too hard, too much, or impossible is cutting themselves short.

I do have to say that people make a valid point on saying that an admin shouldn't need to take on so many roles. The different roles are there for a reason and trust me, I know how hard it is to find competent candidates, but it seems unorganized for a single admin to carry so many different roles that other staff should be able to handle without a problem. Now, I'm not saying you should rush your decision based on the community's response because eager does not equal competence, which many people on here seem to not recognize.

In the end, it's only going to make you worn out to do so much work. I personally am like that too with my servers. I know it's hard to find competent people, but you'll never clearly know if they are incompetent or not until you give them a try. You are doing enough, it's just that not everyone is doing enough or can do enough. You quite literally can't do enough, spreading yourself thin with that many different roles in the community.

 

[Ally]

*cough* thebaum64 has been ignoring me since forever, he even went as far as blocking me. That's unacceptable for a staff member.

Better than shit talking you behind your back

 

[Bens]

May I just add, why does Justis have to always respond, fighting the battles?

Mick- can't you pop up and clear this up for yourself, as most of the community believes this is your fault.

 

[Baby]

May I just add, why does Justis have to always respond, fighting the battles?

Mick- can't you pop up and clear this up for yourself, as most of the community believes this is your fault.

You'll know when Mick pops in when this thread is either deleted or denied for no reason or a dumb reason.

 

[Jack]

According to what Bebosny has said he does not want the site back. Maybe Mick should sell it Justis R because he is on here almost 24/7 and he actually cares about the site and the community.

I know, that's why I said "someone like" him. Also not sure what qualifications Justis has to run the site but either way he is very dedicated to MCM and the community.

 

[Cal]

Every member of the current staff team (besides Lion) was selected from active members of the community, creators just like you, just like me. I've halted my development services, the reason I joined this forum, in order to be your admin for the sole purpose of providing you more of my time.

The most competent, professional, and trustworthy individuals from our community of creators are chosen to join the staff team(besides Lion, no offense Lion); and everywhere I turn, I see users calling for their demotion and replacement.
Replacement with whom?

The moment a member of the community becomes a member of the staff team as well, community perspective of that person hits the decline, they become the problem hurting the community which they are quickly no longer considered a part of.
Then it's demote them and replace them with someone better all over again.

The true problem is there's nobody better, not in the long term. Contrary to your implications.
Yes, in the short term adding new staff, more can get done, but at even greater costs as time reveals the flaws with the individuals chosen. Just as it has revealed flaws in every staff member who's had the chance to have the pressure and light shone on them for long enough of a time.
Most of this community is comprised of teenagers, teenagers that hardly know themselves let alone how to perform to the standards that a business of MC-Market's size, complexities, and responsibilities requires and demands. Recognize that there isn't a single person on MC-Market who knows everything about MC-Market.
Anyone who is competent, professional, knowledgable, understanding and patient enough to deal with this community, and has the time to do so, would be far more successful investing their time elsewhere, and they do; because they're wise enough to recognize that fact.

There's no perfect candidates, so we're left with a pool of potential crises instead; and left to try and decide which potential crisis is worth adding to the staff team because if we don't then we're understaffed.

I see people claiming "I could have all the scam reports done in a day", and "If I was on the staff team, support would be under 24 hours every day"; and truly, that is simply a combination of ignorance and arrogance.
I too, want the very best for MC-Market, and I struggle every day to devote 9-12+ hours of that day just sitting at a table with my computer performing needed functions as your staff member. (13h42m total the past 24 hours, just being active on site, no development stuff either)
I won't pretend it isn't insulting to have that time, all of the experience leading up till now, and the genuine devotion I have to this community degraded to such a degree that people would blow off fulfilling the staff role on here to the community's satisfaction as so "easy" and offhand, and the members of our team just as easily replaceable.

The current staff team is completely and utterly imperfect.
This is an indisputable fact.
And we are without a doubt, understaffed.

However, look around you and see all of the "harmless and amazing staff candidates", and realize that your perspective of them will change entirely after they've been given the power to ban you and the people you hate, and what they do with that power, determined by them and their life situations, repeatedly and in a million different ways, over time.

MC-Market is too large and depended on for too much for the staff team to continue to function how it is currently functioning.
Without a doubt. I agree.
However, the same thing applies in reverse.
We are too large and depended on for too much to "make changes" because there are problems.
We must make changes to solve those problems.

There was only one sentence in your entire post where you actually made specific what changes you wanted:


And though I agree that MC-Market's staff team needs changes.
Simply "new members with fresh ideas coming from diverse background", I'm afraid, is not a solution.

The community we have to choose staff from have 100% access to suggestion threads.
Take a look at suggestion threads and all the individuals producing so called "fresh ideas". Is this all that's required to be a staff member?
Take a look at the staff team's current backgrounds, graphics artists/designers, a plugin developer, two setups specialists, a cs:go and texture pack guy, two builders, and Mick, who's dipped his fingers in just about everything.

Fresh ideas is just a throwaway term you included, staff having ideas that are fresh won't solve our problems.
Diversity in the staff team is already present, and this has not resolved our problems.
I've explained above why we don't need new staff, we need more reliable and competent staff, and why it is not as simple as you've repeatedly stated that solving MC-Market's current dilemma is.

MC-Market may be a community of blockgame inclined teenagers, but it should not be run as though it is. We are a business with real, heavy, complex, and consistent responsibilities to our users which only grows as our community does.
The problem of this paradox cannot possibly be overstated.

By absolutely no means am I saying that nothing should be done; because that would be utterly false and I would disagree with such a statement wholeheartedly as well. I too look forward to severe improvements.
What I am doing, is I am informing you of why it hasn't already been done; and why MC-Market's specific situation makes it is so immeasurably difficult to ensure that when these decisions are made, it is done in confidence, and is the correct one.
That is all this reply is intended to do.

This is one long excuse.
There are 100,000 people on this forum and you are saying that there are only 15 people with the leadership skills necessary to properly moderate this forum. I can tell you from my personal experience and basic statistics that that is wrong. Everyone, including yourself has flaws, when hiring, you will never find the perfect candidate. You need to choose who's flaws will cause the least problem and manage them so that they don't take any significant effect on the platform.

However, look around you and see all of the "harmless and amazing staff candidates", and realize that your perspective of them will change entirely after they've been given the power to ban you and the people you hate, and what they do with that power, determined by them and their life situations, repeatedly and in a million different ways, over time.

Every single time I've hired an employee and promoted them to a position of power, their maturity didn't suddenly go out the window, in fact that opposite happens. With proper intensive to maintain their position, I can guarantee you they will choose to keep the intensive you provide.

This video may help materialize your thoughts on the matter. The keys to power must outweigh those trying to corrupt, which should not be difficult to provide considering the scale and complexity of MCM like you said.

 

[Grace.]

In my opinion , it's high time MCM was sold. Mick has been part of MCM for far too long and done far too little. All the staff members of MCM ( other than perhaps justin ) are way too tired of mcm.

Let me give an example - Alot of the minecraft youtubers were dedicated. They uploaded every day. They had aton of views. But they played minecraft for almost a decade. So they've quit.

You get tired & bored when you do something for far too long, and that's exactly whats happened to the MCM staff.

MCM needs new staff members and a new owner who are dedicated to MCM, care about MCM, and are willing to put in the care & effort it needs. And Mick, don't even try to say that you do this already. We all know that you don't. Stop denying it.

Mick, the site has gone to shit. Mick, sell the site to someone who cares. Or - in a day not too far in the future, none of us will be part of MCM anymore.